🚀 go-pugleaf

I an interested in the issue being discussed by Richard Carnes, Eric Raymond,
and Gene Ward Smith, namely: what constitutes bona fide knowledge.  I'd like to
present a rather radical approach to the issue as, if you like, a Devil's
Advocate position, though one I currently think is correct.  I'm willing,
however, to be argued out of it.

Knowledge takes on a different appearance when looked at from the viewpoint
that an individual takes at a particular time.  Michael Polanyi *Personal
Knowledge* is a good reference on this point, though my views could be
considered an extrapolation (or a corruption) of his.

At any particular moment, from the viewpoint of an individual, knowledge and
belief (meaning not a weak opinion but a firmly-held conviction) are one and
the same thing.  If I believe something (such as the truth of *this*
philosophical position), I say "I *know* it's true."  In other words, it is
knowledge, to me.  If you agree with my belief, you also call it knowledge,
because then it is a belief of *yours* and therefore knowledge for you.  If
you don't agree or aren't sure, you call it a "belief" of *mine*.  It isn't,
then, a belief of *yours*, in the sense of belief I gave above.  That, in my
view, is what knowledge actually is.

From this point, two further very important questions can be asked:

1.  What criteria do I (or others) commonly use (and what criteria *ought* we
    to use) to decide what to believe and what not to believe?

2.  What kinds of arguments or demonstrations could I adduce to get others to
    agree with my beliefs.

(1) and (2) could be reduced to the single question:

 "What are the criteria that individuals use in fixing belief, and what
criteria *should* they use?"

These criteria can and do vary enormously from person to person.  And for one
person, these criteria vary at different times, depending on the circumstances
or context.  These criteria have nothing to do with what *knowledge* is, from an
individual viewpoint, namely belief or acceptance of ideas as true.  It has a
lot to do with how we *decide* what we know (or believe).

The most common criterion for belief (or knowledge) is authority.  The vast,
vast majority of my beliefs are based on the assertions of others whom I
trust, *especially* those beliefs that are called scientific.  The fact is, I
simply have not had and could not have the time to do all the necessary
experiments myself, so I must rely on authorities (and textbooks, and the
like) to tell me what I should believe.  Now, of course, I assume that if I
*did* have the time to carry out any particular experiment, I would duplicate
the results reported by the authorities.  But this is a mere assumption, based
on acceptance of authority.  I don't think there's anything *wrong* with
believing trusted authorities.  There's a fine art to knowing which
authorities to trust.  But, in point of fact, we do *not* generally engage in
experimentation and observation as the basis of *most* of our beliefs.  And
with many of these beliefs, we never find ourselves in a position to *use*
them in order to determine for ourselves whether they work or not.  In fact,
if we did not absorb beliefs without question as infants and children, we
wouldn't have any kind of world-view at all, not even one from which to
question certain ideas.

It is actually more in our own personal lives than in scientific pursuits that
we use empirical and pragmatic criteria for fixing belief.  In the past, on
several occasions, when I ate a certain kind of ice cream I felt sick, so I
assume that will occur in the future (an empirical criterion).  Or I find that
the assumption that others usually have good intentions is a workable
assumption, in that acting on it leads to good results (a pragmatic
criterion).  And so forth.  Other beliefs I hold because they are elegant or
aesthetic.  A certain chord on a guitar "feels" good, and so I accept it as
the correct chord.  Of two theories that fit the known facts, I would tend to
choose the one that is the most elegant or the simplest.  Some people accept
certain things as true because they find these things comforting, or because
they are novel or bizarre, and they are tired of boringly acceptable ideas.

Now it is a perfectly acceptable activity to advise people as to *how* they
should decide what to think, to believe, about the world.  A follower of
William of Occam would advise a bias towards simplicity; a hippie might say,
"If it feels good, believe it,"  a psychic might advise following intuition, a
theoretical physicist might advise mathematical elegance, a social scientist
might advise attending to statistics, etc..  To me, however, it would seem
wrong to say that just *one* criterion (such as a pragmatic one) will fit all
occasions.  It seems best to say that the criteria for belief should fit the
context to which that belief is appropriate.

To summarize:  As each of us looks at what he knows in his own life, what he
knows at a particular time is coextensive with what he believes at that time.
Thus, for an individual at a particular time, knowledge and belief are
equivalent.  Different methods of assigning belief to various ideas are
appropriate to different situations.  Knowing, and the various criteria we use
for deciding what we know and what we don't know, are two different things.
-- 
"From his own viewpoint, no one ever has false beliefs; he only *had* false
beliefs."

Sarge Gerbode
Institute for Research in Metapsychology
950 Guinda St.
Palo Alto, CA 94301
UUCP:  pyramid!thirdi!sarge