Word
Gems
What is a
man but the sum of his thoughts?
- Mortimer Adler's
- Syntopicon
Essays
Knowledge:
- Editor's Essay,
Supplemental
- Does Knowledge
Exist?
- Editor's note: the following was written as part of a Master's Degree program.
Skepticism
vs. Common Sense: Does Knowledge Exist?
The title’s question is of the sort that puzzles the “man on the
street.” Doubt the existence of knowledge? Indeed! Yet such query evaporates
before the probing questions of Descartes, Hume, Murphy and others. As I read
Burr/Goldinger, I agreed with each author in his turn. But at the end I found myself
wondering whether the clearest view might be a synthesis of the various opinions. This is
my tentative conclusion:
Descartes’ cogito ergo sum kept me in thrall for some time. It has an
appealing quality, what Einstein might have phrased “beautiful in its
simplicity,” a feature that can beguile one into accepting it as truth, which it may
be. However, at the prompting of subsequent writers in the chapter, I began to have
questions: (1) Descartes believed he had found certitude in his famous maxim -- but would
it be affected by the “brains in vats” puzzle? Descartes might assert that even
if his sensory experiences were the product of electrode stimulation, even if he were
deceived about the nature of life, the experiences themselves, at minimum, offer proof, to
Descartes at least, that he exists. I suppose this much must be granted. But after this
early win, Descartes, it seems to me, begins to lose points. (2) When Descartes states,
“I think therefore I am,” I sense that further enquiry is warranted of
this ontological issue. If Descartes were merely a brain in a vat, and if Descartes were
to be deluded on this point, he might “know” that he exists, but can such
delusion be properly equated with Archimedes’ “point that was firm and
immovable”? Can a man living in the psychological prisonhouse of delusion find
absolute certitude upon which to build his view of life and the world? I have my doubts
about this. But even if we too-generously concede this point to Descartes, something
larger, I think, overshadows it. (3) The whole issue of searching for, as Descartes put
it, “something that is certain,” a basis upon which to build one’s
investigation of life, may be a red herring. Such quest, for our purposes here, may be
irrelevant. Is the search for knowledge something like building a house, a project
requiring first a firm foundation before any other work may be done? The answer could be no.
If so, we will need a new paradigm to guide our thinking. Maybe the notions of
“immovable points” or “foundations” take us down the wrong path. Maybe
the process of questing for knowledge is more akin to the work of a CPA auditor, a Gallup
pollster, a 12-man jury, or even a mathematician closing in on the value of pi.
It seems that Hume and Murphy lead us in this direction. Rather than searching for
“firm foundations,” the search for knowledge may be better served by a process
of representative sampling, of dealing in approximations and averages. For example, a CPA
auditor establishes the “truth” of public company financial statements not by
directly inspecting all accounts receivable, inventory, or fixed assets but by random
sampling analysis; a pollster does not interview every person in America but only a
sufficiently large, representative group; a 12-person jury, in its collective wisdom,
acting as representative of the community, establishes what is “true” in the
courtroom; the value of pi, a non-repeating decimal fraction, can never be
“known” exactly but, by the aid of computer technology, has been calculated to a
value of over 10,000 decimal places. In calculating the circumference of a circle the size
of the “universe with” a radius of “150 sextillion miles,” employing
“a value of pi to [not 10,000 but only] 35 places,” would yield an answer
“off by less than a millionth of an inch” (Asimov 99)!
Given the tenor of Russell’s writings, he may claim vindication in this
millionth of an inch, the skeptic’s lament that precise knowledge about the universe
will always elude us. Too, auditors sometimes fail to spot “books that have been
cooked;” polls may be “phony,” as we are reminded by underdog political
candidates; and juries have been known to “let the crook get off.” But I think
Hume’s “mitigated skepticism” is the wiser course here: “we may doubt
that fire will cause smoke, but our houses will have chimneys.” Despite auditor
failings, GAAP has helped make U.S. financial markets the envy of the world; while not
infallible, Rasmussen polling research enjoys
uncanny success in predicting election results as it conducts nightly “national
telephone surveys of 3,000 Likely Voters [with a] margin of sampling error [of] +/- 1.8
percentage points, [offering] a 95% level of confidence” (Rasmussen 1); and our jury
system, inherited from our big brothers the British, has on balance served the
English-speaking peoples fairly well for nearly a thousand years.
Russell is correct when he posits that “final truth belongs to heaven, not to
this world”; that human sensory perception is no infallible guide; that the
scientific method itself stands condemned as hopelessly inadequate to the task of
discovering absolute “truth.” But, while Skeptics gain points in this debate for
technical accuracy, they lose more than they’ve won in the area of pragmatism. Even
though “final truth” belongs to another world, we can stumble along fairly well
in the present one with approximate truth, “propositions that are only probably
universal” (Paulsen 483); though, as St. Paul said, “we know only in part,”
though mortality shall never know all things, that “part” which we do possess is
a glass half full not half empty. But how can we claim even to know “in part” if
we concede to the Skeptics that sense perception is a hall-of-mirrors? We come to
“know” what little knowledge we do possess by constant testing, evaluating, the
process of verifying what is real by what works. A highly imperfect system, to be sure,
but the old phrase, “passing the test of time,” speaks to the efficacy of the
process. For our purposes in a world this side of heaven, we must not, I think, speak of
knowledge as a fixed quantity, an immovable object, fulcrum point for Archimedes’
lever; rather, for us, knowledge is better viewed as a spectrum, a realm, a vast set of
points, or as Einstein’s one speck of sand from all the beaches in the world.
Having stated my case, I would now like to retreat somewhat and contradict myself.
Though, conceded, much of what we “know” in this world is fragmentary, so
disconnected from the main, we should take care to avoid glorying overmuch even in this,
this little “knowledge” that we do possess, for it is beset by systemic
illusion. I think Russell raises an interesting point: “We start by thinking that a
chair is as it appears to be, and is still there when we are not looking”;
related to this is the old conundrum about whether a falling tree in a forest makes a
sound absent anyone to hear it. It’s these kinds of problems that cause the “man
on the street” to snicker at the mentioning of the word philosophy. But I think these
issues are worthy of discussion and take us a step closer to an understanding of the
nature of things.
To explain myself I’ll borrow Russell’s chair-illustration: we might say
that a particular “chair” is “blue.” What do we mean by this? Russell
has already discussed the aspects of light-waves, bouncing electrons, rods and cones of
eyes. Granted that the chair is just atomic-soup, what else do we mean when we say that
the chair is blue? Are we saying that the tiny molecules and atoms have a blue tint
stamped upon them? Hardly. Therefore, the “blueness” of the chair is not
something intrinsic with the chair itself. What about the chair’s shape and even its
“existence”? Is it “still there when we’re not looking”? Russell,
I think, displays great insight into the epistemological problem of things when he stops
us here. This swirling mass of electrons and protons that would be termed
“chair,” even “blue chair,” by a 170-pound, 2-legged, mammal
carbon-unit, equipped with primitive, limited visual capacities attuned only to a narrow
region of the electro-magnetic spectrum – such entity extends prehensile appendage in
direction of swirling atomic mass in-question and emits a “noise,” another
electron-proton wave-disturbance, which other creatures of the same species, by the aid of
another inadequate sensory-receptor, “hear” as ontological affirmation of said
“blue chair.”
The man says he sees a blue chair! Others hear him say it! Should
we believe him? He walks over to the “chair,” sits himself down in it, thereby
satisfying himself that the “chair” has passed the actual-use verification-test.
It seems that we have on our hands that rarest of animals, an actual example of true, bone
fide knowledge: this-dog-can-hunt, this chair is real.
Before those of this philosophical camp declare unqualified victory, I think a few
more questions should be asked, some of which are the sort of questions Einstein might
have asked: what would the “chair” look like if it were traveling at the speed
of light? How would it appear to (1) someone riding it, traveling at that same speed? (2)
someone viewing it from another frame of reference? We know what a “chair” in a
typical setting looks like to a man, but what does it look like to other animals or
insects, those with different sensory apparatus? If a man were the size of a molecule, an
atomic or sub-atomic particle, would he still be able to recognize anything that resembled
“chairness”?
Though I’ve tried to inject a little light-heartedness into this discussion,
these are serious questions, the kind that helped Albert Einstein break out of old
thought-molds allowing him to better understand the nature of matter and time. In our
little world, this “swirling mass of electrons” might be called a
“chair.” For us, this is “knowledge,” “real” knowledge
– we have an “actual” chair that one can sit in. But, to use
Einstein’s phrase, in another “inertial frame of reference,” the
“chair” would not only cease to be a chair – because “there is no one
in the forest to hear the tree fall,” that is, because there may be no one serving as
witness properly equipped to perceive it as a “chair” – but it would also
cease to be “a swirling mass of electrons.” The “chair,” or the
ontological remains of such as perceived by humans, might just as properly be viewed as a
“swirling mass of sub-atomic particles” – and then, beyond that, probably
devolving into many other systems, many other frames of reference and paradigms waiting to
lend configuration to what we in our little world -- alone -- call a “blue
chair.”
So who is right? Skeptics or empiricists? In the investment world the phrase is
used, “Given enough time, we’ll all be right.” Similarly, we might say:
given the proper frame of reference, the “chair” can be almost anything we want
it to be – everything or nothing – depending on who or what is doing the
observing and the conditions under which the observation is made.
Stated differently, I don’t think that the problem of knowledge may be fitted
neatly into either of the major philosophical camps: “knowledge” is both real
and illusory; knowable and unknowable; common-sensical and other-worldly. Mentioned
before, the good apostle, spokesman of Russell’s “final truth [of] heaven,” may have said it
best: “We don’t see things clearly. We’re squinting in a fog, peering
through a mist. But it won’t be long before the weather clears and the sun shines
bright! We’ll see it all then, see it all as clearly as God sees us” (Peterson
360).
Works Cited
Asimov, Isaac. Asimov
on Numbers. New York: Doubleday, 1977.
Paulsen, Friedrich.
“Introduction to Philosophy.” Philosophy and Contemporary Issues. 7th
ed. Ed.
Burr, John R., and Milton
Goldinger. New Jersey: Prentice, 1996: 480-483.
Peterson, Eugene H. The
Message: The New Testament in Contemporary Language. Colorado
Springs: Navpress, 1993.
Rasmussen
Research .
Portrait of America. http://portraitofamerica.com/html/poll-804.html
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