Before launching into my paper, I think it is necessary to define two terms “truth” and “knowledge” as they are understood in this paper. Truth is the way things are. The universe is comprised of whatever comprises the universe. Currently, I assume that it has any number of stars, atoms, sentient beings and whatever else. This latter statement however, says more about knowledge than truth. My statement about what comprises the universe says more about what I, in my human community, know about the universe. Knowledge is the best current explanation of truth. (Admittedly the term “best” is somewhat arbitrary. That conversation will be bracketed during this paper). In other words, knowledge changes, but truth does not change, except in the sense that things changes through time.
Epistemology Paper from 2006
One might object that knowledge is not knowledge if it is not completely aligned with truth. Certainly this is true if knowledge can be absolute, but then one must ask if human knowledge has ever been absolute. If it has not, as I believe, then it is difficult for one to evaluate knowledge from the perspective of truth. One must have all or at least most of the truth to decide whether or not one’s beliefs are completely congruous with the truth. This God’s eye point of view is currently unavailable. So, for humans, truth cannot evaluate knowledge. Instead, knowledge should be defined as the working body of information and the interpretation thereof that is reaching for truth.
How then does knowledge differ from opinion? Knowledge is the best current explanation of truth. The best explanation is an informed explanation. It is informed with the information that is or has been available to the knower. This is different from opinion, where the knower either does not have access, or chooses not to gather it.
Ideally, human knowledge grows closer to truth over time.
Introduction
Any account of human knowledge
must take humans into account
Discussions about epistemology might begin in any number of places. Whenever humans discuss epistemology, the discussion should almost necessarily begin with humans themselves. The reason for this is that any epistemology humans might construct or employ will, or at least should reflect humanity. It should be useful for humans. In other words, a definition of knowledge should take into account how the knower comes to knowledge. If the epistemology is not concerned with how humans accumulate knowledge, then it is not a human epistemology. If the term “knowledge” cannot apply to the type of knower in question, then the definition of knowledge is unhelpful. In fact, it is probably harmful.
In this paper I attempt to describe a human epistemology. By that, I mean one that seriously considers how humans learn. In the Part One I will discuss the individual aspect of human learning. In Part Two I will discuss the social dimension. In Part Three I will discuss how this understanding of human knowledge should affect intellectual inquiry.
Part One: How Humans Learn
What should probably be most obvious about human learning is that it is acquired through the senses. Healthy humans enter the world equipped with certain senses, including touch, taste, smell, sight, hearing, memory, imagination and logic. The human individual experiences and interprets the world through these senses.
The most primary of these senses, hearing, taste, touch, smell and sight relay the world to the experiencing agent in the form of particulars. Jack sees the round oak kitchen table at Bob’s house on April 26th, 2006. Jill smells the red rose in Grandma Sue’s garden at noon on June 15th 2004. Jack sees a well-dressed man in a restaurant tip his waiter poorly. Jack does not see oppression of the proletariat. Interpretation happens through the accumulation of information through the experience of particulars organized by memory and logic.
Memories of particulars are recorded in the memory. The memories humans acquire are often vague. The memories themselves are rarely experienced as full recapitulations of the original experience. Sally might remember how she felt when Tommy dumped her, but forget how the weather affected her feelings at that time.
Memories are often inaccurate. Last year I took an intelligence test. During the test the interviewer allowed me to skim a picture for several seconds, remembering what I could. Afterwards, the interviewer would ask me to recall what I saw in the picture. I was amazed at the results. Often enough my memory was accurate. However, I both forgot things I would not have expected to forget, and reported the presence of some things that could not be found in the picture. Certainly this is not an uncommon experience. Other inaccuracies are obvious. People misplace dates, people, and the sequence of events frequently in their retelling of past experiences.
Through imagination, memories often combine with one another to form composite memories. In some sense this is a contributing factor in inaccuracies. However, it also suggests something about how the human brain composes particulars from universals. Imagine that you are 10 years old and I have just asked you to draw a picture of a tree. If you are a typical 10 year old, you are not going to draw any particular tree unless specified to do so. Rather, the particular trees you have seen will affect how you draw your tree. Do the trees that surround you typically have needles or leaves, or perhaps fans like the Ginko Biloba? Will you draw a tree that points up like an arrow, or one that has a round bushy top? How much of the trunk appears in your picture? Many of the trees I drew when I was young were barren. I grew up around deciduous Maples in Detroit, where winter lasts from late October through late March, almost half the year. The pictures I drew make sense given my experience with particulars. It would have been strange if I had drawn pictures reflecting Australians plants that I had never seen. That we do not expect people to draw pictures of things that in no way reflect their experience reflects that people learn from particulars.
The same principle applies even to logic and math. Numbers and logic seem to be abstraction on one hand, but real on the other. I argue that they are always abstractions. It is difficult to imagine numbers without things that can be quantified. It is difficult to imagine reasoning without nouns, causes and affects to evaluate. I suggest that the brain experiences causes and affects associated with nouns. It also experiences different quantities of different kind of nouns. This is not to say that humans are not hardwired for numbers or logic. I believe that they are. However, it is also difficult to imagine a person who does not construct numbers or logic out of experience.
In the same way that a being in a two-dimensional universe could not imagine objects in a three dimensional universe, a person who had never experienced any more than one of any particular object would not understand math. So, mathematics is constructed from experience. However, math is not simply socially constructed. Math develops because there are different numbers of things that humans desire to count, add, subtract, multiply and divide.
The same is true for logic. Plenty of logical principles might be true, but the practice of reason requires a reasoning agent. In the case of humans, reason is learned through particulars. It is difficult to imagine a human that reasons completely outside of experience with particulars. Even the law of non-contradiction is about particulars. Statements can only contradict each other when they are contradictory in the particular. For example, God can be God and not God if there are God’s of different universes, or if God is elected into his position and holds it 1492, but not in 1504.
So, logic combines memories of particular objects and events to construct understandings of causation. Humans remember and process that certain events tend to precede and follow each other and eventually construct understandings of cause and affect, or of particular and universal. Interpretations of cause and affect are often inaccurate, and always myopic. Still, the interpretation exists, and serves to help or perhaps hinder the agent attain his or her goals.
Let me give an example. I have seen many couples hold hands. In my experience this has tended to mean, with some exceptions, that the couple shares a romantic relationship. I have come to the belief that humans often hold hands when in romantic relationships. Here I have worked from particulars to a near universal rule. Even where there are exceptions to the rule, these exceptions come from experiences with the particular. If I had no knowledge of people holding hands outside of romantic relationships, I might suppose that whenever humans held hands that there was an absolute causal relationship suggesting a romantic relationship. The principle can work in reverse. The understanding of universals is used to interpret particular occurrences. When I see a couple holding hands, I tend to interpret that they are holding hands because they share a romantic relationship.
So far, this paper has discussed how individual humans learn from sensory perception, memory and reason, all of which are naturally assumed in the healthily developing human being. The underlying assumption has been that human perceive real object and through their faculties come to knowledge of particulars from which knowledge about universals, and ideas concerning causation arise.
Part Two: A Social Dimension of Knowledge
Of course, this is incomplete. Human learning is a social enterprise. Humans experience sense perception as individuals, but those sense perceptions are shared with others in the community surrounding the individual, both through verbal and non-verbal communication. Humans are socialized by their communities to interpret causation based on the interpreted sense perceptions of others, whose interpretation the community, for better or worse has chosen to accept as normative.
Human knowledge is transferred from human to human through language, and imitation. Humans testify to one another in immediate situations through speech. “The British are coming.” They communicate through time. “By the time you get this letter, I will be gone.” Or “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” In ideal situations they share relevant information with those it might concern. In less than ideal situations they may not, or perhaps they share information with those for whom the information is irrelevant.
The social aspect of human knowledge is so pervasive that almost every aspect of what can be called human knowledge is dependant upon social interaction of some kind, even if that interaction is only done through reading and writing. Suppose a paleontologist, Dr. P, has discovered a dinosaur bone in Arizona. Dr. P has first hand knowledge of the bone. However, his knowledge of the bone cannot be considered independent knowledge. Dr. P grew up in a civilization familiar with dinosaur bones. Dr. P went to a school that described dinosaur bones to him. It is probable that he has seen several dinosaur bones, but that still does not make his knowledge independent. It is quite possible that this particular bone could have come from a hippo, or that it could have been explained as a strange geological formation. Of course, the development of paleontology as a science has ruled these possibilities out. Other scientists are quite familiar with hippopotamus bones, and geologists have perhaps proven that bones are not formed through geological events. However, these discoveries were made and confirmed by communities relaying information across space and forward through time. In other words, the opinions that Dr. P has going into the dig are based on the experiences of hundreds and probably thousands of other people who have worked in his field and other fields for the past several decades. Dr. P’s interpretation of the object he discovered is based on a metaphysic constructed from a conversation of similar minds. Once again the dinosaur bone is “real” in the sense that it truly exists, and at this point in time it is probable that Dr. P can identify it as such with a high degree of accuracy along the knowledge continuum, but to say that his knowledge is not social would be silly.
This example serves to demonstrate the important role that testimony has in any epistemology. It is not just that people accept testimony from others when postulating particular theories. Everything that humans in civilization say is shaped by the testimony of others with whom humans share information. Allow me to demonstrate through another example.
My example is the paper I am currently writing. There is little doubt in my mind that a careful and well-read observer will notice that my observations come from many different philosophers. William of Ockham influences my understanding of particulars, while my understanding of truth and the reality of the physical world is possibly closer that of Aristotle. My understanding of human learning is definitely influenced by David Hume’s Standard of Taste. I have not cited these philosophers in this paper, and I will not. I read Hume’s work several years ago. It has since become a part of me. I use his ideas in every day evaluations and decisions. The same is true of Aristotle, Plato, Ockham, Saussure and many writers whose works I have never read.
For example, I am not very familiar with the contents of Adam Smith’s famous work. At the time, I cannot even think of its name. However, there is little doubt in my mind that his understanding of economic progress and my understanding of intellectual progress are at least indirectly related. The same can probably be said about Darwin’s Origin of Species.
I suggest that there is no reason for me to cite these people in this paper. In fact, it would be completely impossible for me to cite all of my influences. I am not even certain how philosophers, let alone all the other people who have influenced me have influenced my thoughts. The perspectives I used to evaluate the information I receive are rarely my own in their entirety. Every line of this paper is a combination of my personal sense experience combined with how I have sensed testimony from others, mixed together, turned upside down, rearranged and puked back up only to be regurgitated again tomorrow. To complicate the matter even more, all these perceptions and understandings of other peoples ideas are somewhat convoluted themselves. I do not quite understand Aristotle, Plato, Ockham, Hume, or for that matter, exactly whatever it was I was thinking yesterday that caused me to write some of the sentences that I wrote earlier on in this paper. By this point it should be obvious that, it is difficult to point to particular instances of ideological formation.
Even where I can, say in the instance of Hume, there exist any number of other experiences from personal sensory experience or related through testimony that allowed Hume’s article to affect me the way that it did. Except when I am relating purely sensory experience, it is truly impossible to separate what is my knowledge and what is someone else’s. Even when I am relating sensory experience, it is difficult to know just how much my description of the experience is colored by socialization. The only way one could know is to stand outside of the socialization process. I am not referring only to a particular socialization process, say one experienced in the Mid-Western United States, but rather socialization processes altogether.
I want to make a brief qualifier here. I am not trying to say that individual humans in isolation do not have knowledge. They do. Human beings isolated from community can and I assume, do have knowledge. They have senses that interpret their environment. They know in particulars.
However, isolation is uncommon for humans. Even if it were not, isolated humans are not the concern of epistemology. It is difficult to imagine a human in isolation developing a well-defined epistemology, since most human civilizations do not make it that far. Even if an isolated individual did, it would not be the concern of academics since there could be no conversation between the academics and the isolated human. Whatever epistemology the academics might have is useless to the isolated human and vice-versa. So a proper epistemology will be primarily concerned with human knowledge as it pertains to humans in society with other humans.
To take the matter even farther, one must only reference the occurrence of language. Clearly humans have a natural faculty for language. Every human civilization known develops language. In fact, it might be said that language is something specific to humanity, at least of the species with which we are currently familiar.
Language brings the dependent nature of knowledge beyond any possibility of it being anything but social. Knowledge is what humans use to transmit ideas from person to person. Language itself is colored. This is not to say that one cannot consider ideas that are not present within the current vocabulary. If that were true inventors would have to create words before inventions, and even then the word itself would be an invention. Nevertheless, language does enable people who are not geniuses to work with ideas that would be difficult for them to fathom otherwise.
Perhaps the best way to communicate this concept is to ask a series of questions. How do you know what blue is? I am not asking about the color spectrum. The color spectrum is truth, at least that is what I presume. I am asking how you know what blue is. If you are like me, you know what blue is because someone told you. Blue is part of our every day language. Blue is simply defined. Again, this is not to say that one would not experience blue without the word. There are several shades of what I call red. I experiences the different shades without having names for them, nevertheless that something has a name is significant.
So much knowledge is shared simply through definition. Love, hate, science, computer, and nearly every word that adds or subtracts clarity, or shades and nuances experience colors the knowledge that humans claim. Simply knowing the definition of base and superstructure gives one a lens by which to understand the world better, or perhaps worse.
This is not to say that reality itself is socially constructed. The world being described is real, and sensory perceptions probably have a larger affect upon knowledge than vocabulary. If this were not the case new inventions would be impossible. Also the impetus for changing vocabulary could not arise. If language is the sole constructor of knowledge how would one ever come to the conclusion that it is probably unwise to call Native Americans Indians. Every system in which language was already present would be a closed culture unless it began borrowing words from another culture. Certainly borrowing happens, but borrowing does not explain inventing, or changing social values. At this point I would like to say much more, but I find more radical ideas about of social construction so incomprehensible that they are hardly worth addressing. The world exists and is described by words. The words certainly color understanding, but crayons and nails are not the same things.
The basic point of this section has been to say that human societies share sense perception. The sharing goes so deep through language and influence that it is difficult to separate ones own interpretations of sense perception from those of others with whom one has come into contact. In the following section I will discuss why, with the spelled out assumptions about knowledge that certain ethics are beneficial for human communities.
Part Three: Social Epistemology Ethics.
At this point let me restate the points. Knowledge is the human societies current best explanation of the way things are, or truth. Knowledge grows out of sensory perception, memory and logic, and is share and interpreted through the testimony of human societies. It is assumed that humans desire better knowledge, or better explanations of their sensory perceptions. This has not been discussed in this paper, but the discussion is almost unnecessary. If humans did not desire more knowledge, intellectual progress would be difficult to explain. Books and newspapers would be difficult to publish.
Since so much of human knowledge is dependent upon shared testimony about sensory perception and the interpretations thereof, virtues related to that testimony are necessary is the better knowledge is to be acquired by society. This almost holds without explanation. Virtues surrounding testimony, and intellectual inquiry like honesty, bravery, fair-mindedness, humility and the like will, over time, lead societies to better knowledge of truth. How could they not? If people lied to each other about their sense perceptions, personal sense perceptions would be given less weight. Comparisons of first person perception would be rendered obsolete. This is true even in the sciences. If people were prone to lying, how would one scientist know that another was testifying accurately about the measured speed of light or the teleportation of light particles unless the scientist verified it herself? How could anyone trust that London existed unless one visited? This is not to say that the testimony of others is always trustworthy, but given the questions just raised, it should be evident that if sense perception is taken seriously, and better knowledge is a goal than honesty among people is a beneficial virtue.
This is not to say that honesty about sense perceptions or interpretations always leads to better knowledge of truth. At times honest knowledge seeking people will come to conclusions that deem phrenology and alchemy as valid truth seeking practices. Honest people will not always testify correctly about the affects of capitalism or socialism. Still, if sense perception is to be taken seriously, one must assume that honest people will testify correctly about these things more frequently than dishonest people. After all, even when a dishonest person observes that phrenology is a farce, it is not likely that the dishonest person will testify about this for the sake of sharing better knowledge with others.
The same can be said about the other virtues mentioned. Consider fair-mindedness. As long as humans do not know all the truth that can be attained in their environment through their gathered sensory perception, times will come when one’s testimony challenges the current knowledge. A society that is not in the habit of practicing fair-mindedness will probably find it difficult to evaluate the new testimony and acquire better knowledge. Incidents surrounding Galileo come to mind. A society that practices fair-mindedness will consider the new testimony. This is true not only of testimony concerning sense perceptions, but also of new interpretions.
So, Given the way human knowledge is acquired, how could a society that desires knowledge not value truth-conducive virtues? Further, how could it not encourage the entire society to practice those virtues?
I could elaborate on several other truth-conducive virtues. I will not. However, interested readers would be advised to pick up a copy of Linda Zagaebski’s Virtues of the Mind, or Fred Aquino’s Communities of Informed Judgment. Of particular value are their lists of truth-conducive virtues, and their arguments for their necessity.
At this point, I would like to suggest further work in applying these ideas to various realms of our civilization, in particular, the realm of public education. Young people who will eventually contribute either to the growth of knowledge or to the reduction of it, should be trained in truth-conducive virtues.
Works Cited
Zagzebski, Linda. Virtues of the Mind: an Inquiry into the Nature of Virtue and the Ethical Foundations of Knowledge. Cambridge University, 1996.
Fred Aquino, Communities of Informed Judgment: Newman’s Illative Sense and Accounts of Rationality. Washington D.C.: The Catholic University of America, 2004.
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