Russian Brain in a Jar
Epistemology is the study of knowledge.
When you don’t think about knowledge, you may believe that you know what it is, but when you start thinking about it, you realize it is more complex than a single believe.
It is common to believe that knowledge is a storage for perceived experiences and ideas. That something gets put in, and then retrieved later. The information gets stored on a hard disk we call memory, and the search engine of the mind works differently within each person. Some even think that education is about sharpening that retrieval of the mind, and about storing as much ideas and information into that mind as possible.
First of all, knowledge is an active agent. It affects everything you do, and it becomes everything you do. The information does not only come from the outside. There are some that are internal, seemingly from birth, for an example the knowledge about needing to feed, and then later on, when learning logic and math, it seems that you discover an internal truth, not receiving external revelations.
We also wonder what memory is. How do you retrieve information stored within memory, and how is it stored, how do you select what to store, and why? Is it true that everything you have observed, and perhaps everything you have perceived, gets stored within that memory, and all you need is a technical skill to retrieve it? How can we tell the difference between a fading memory and an active imagination?
Theory has distinguished between two types of memory: A priori, which is knowledge regardless of experiences, and A posteriori, which is knowledge depending on experiences. When you have established that difference, you may ask yourself, which type of knowledge is more valuable? Some may go to extreme measures and claim that either of those two is valuable and the other has no value, and that is how you start getting furious oppositions, such as between science, which is A posteriori knowledge, and religion, which is perhaps based on A priori knowledge. There are some that believe neither is possible, that there simply is no knowledge. Those people we call sceptics. Then there are those who believe both have value, and that being sensitive to context is important when evaluating those values.
Which authority knows more about the truth to this claim: 1+2 = 3. Would that authority come from inside the person, or from outside? Would a brain in a jar know?
We can say that A priori is first hand knowledge, where the authority is yourself, and A posteriori second-hand knowledge is where the authority is something external. What makes this complicated is that sometimes it is hard to tell the difference between what is internal and what is external. Your organs for retrieving information from the outside, for an example, are they an authority or a connection to external authority? Could you know something if you had no perceiving organs active?
As you can hopefully see by now, or have discovered, that epistemology is a fruitful study, and often confusing, since it is, just like logic, about something we take for granted. We may assume that it all simply is there. But what if that’s not true?
Aren’t you a little curious about knowing if all your knowledge is true knowledge or not, or a set of believes that have resemblance to knowledge, but do in no way represent something known, but merely believed about the world?
Aren’t you a little curious about the relationship between knowing and believing?
Can there be any knowledge without belief? If not, does that believe have to pass through some requirements to become knowledge? Would that knowledge ever become absolute certainty? Can we be certain about anything at all?
As you may see, thinking about knowledge generates challenging questions, better dealt with by dialogue, or at least by thinking, to start with.
Do you know what you know, what you believe, what you don’t know, and what you don’t believe?
Picture: The Personal Webpage of Steve Mahler
