I hate to be a bummer, but nobody knows anything in a meaningful sense, and no, you’re not the exception (I am the only exception). A heuristic I use any time I hold something to be certain is by generalizing the principle underlying the thought, and seeing if it holds up from that perspective. For example, the claim that “Bob is smart because he gets good grades in school.” The question then would be, “Can you imagine a case in which someone is smart without getting good grades OR a case in which someone gets good grades but isn’t smart?” The answer to these questions seems rather intuitive. A surprising amount of our knowledge falls apart from this lens. A reader well-read in philosophy may correctly identify that this process is akin to Descartes’ specific form of rationalism in which beliefs are only trusted if there is no possibility of falsehood.
However, Descartes patches this hole through religion. His senses cannot be fundamentally untrustworthy because obviously God wouldn’t do him like that, and he can use this new tool to produce lots of so-called knowledge. However, I do not find Descartes’ arguments for God compelling, but that is not under the purview of this post. Though I too am a theist, my conception of God is so fundamentally different from Descartes’ that I cannot use it to form objective beliefs outside of qualia (meaning that the only objective truth I can form based off of the Divine is the knowledge of my experience with it).
Because I am not using the tool of God-told-me-so, that leaves very few options for undeniable truth (which can then be used to form knowledge). However, before discussing objective truth (or the lack thereof) further, it’s important to provide a baseline definition of knowledge.
The Justified True Belief theory of knowledge poses that, as you can likely guess from the name, that Knowledge constitutes
- Justified
- True
- Belief
This definition was later expanded by Edmund Gettier to include things that are true only non-incidentally, but that doesn’t considerably improve the definition in my view.
The problem with this definition, to me, is that each piece can be deconstructed so thoroughly as to become useless descriptively (except perhaps the ‘belief’ component which is self-presenting). The nature of justification is something that could be (and to some extent is through certain prominent elements of Analytic Philosophy) it’s own separate degree. Questions of what counts as sufficient justification are on some level cyclical, as the justification used is ultimately evaluated by itself (or by something else, such as intuition, which seems to quite obviously divorce the definition from objectivity).
However, the element which is more problematic to me than justification is the ‘True’ component. The field of epistemology (the study of knowledge) has not, to my knowledge, proposed a significantly powerful rebuttal of skepticism in regards to objective claims about the external world.
The biggest weakness with supposedly objective truths is the incredibly difficult challenge of proving certainty, due to issues associated with the previously established method of testing ideas. For example, I perceive myself as sitting in a chair right now as I am typing this. However, can I imagine a case in which I feel that way and I am, in reality, not sitting in a chair right now? Well, I can come up with a few immediate examples. I could be dreaming, or in a matrix, or otherwise hallucinating. Are these possibilities likely? It certainly wouldn’t appear so, but how could you tell? Have you counted each individual possible universe and tallied up the dreaming ones from the not-dreaming? If you have, then I seed the argument, but I will go on with the assumption you have not. Objective truth, by my estimation and that of those I have researched, requires certainty. Am I certain that I’m sitting in a chair right now, and not dreaming, hallucinating, or in a matrix? Absolutely not.
I don’t dispute the existence of certain indisputable objective truths in the realm of abstract thought and internal experience, but that leaves very few objective truths. For example, could I imagine a world in which a bachelor is not an unmarried man? Not without challenging the assumptions of the question (that my definition of the words used in the sentence are correct) at which point I would fall into a pit of absurdity.
So far, I have addressed the difficulties in obtaining truth (or justifying your beliefs) but not necessarily the nonexistence of truth itself. Apologies to disappoint, but my position is slightly more moderate in this regard: Truth may or may not exist, but the question is irrelevant to answering whether or not you have any knowledge. There is no coherent way to connect justification to belief such that it becomes knowledgeable without running over logical potholes. According to the prevalent view of Truth, the Correspondence view, the truth of a statement is relative to it’s adherence to the goingson of the real world. Arguing whether or not the truth exists, by this definition, is akin to debating the color of a planet from a different dimension. We simply do not have sufficient access to truth as a concept to even begin to conceptualize it, per the JTB view.
So, then, I have little choice but to arrive at the conclusion that knowledge (per my own cooler definition) is ninety-nine percent contextual. In epistemology (the study of knowledge) there is a lot of discussion on epistemic position, meaning the way an individual is situated to gain access to specific knowledge (or perspectives). An obvious example of this would be that a rich individual has more access to better education than poorer individuals. The rich person also has more time (and therefore opportunity) to spend time learning, and the ability to do so in a mindset not constantly considering whether they’ll be able to feed their family in a week.
I would argue that nearly all knowledge is reliant on epistemic position. For example, I have had particular spiritual experiences which have inspired my current religious beliefs, and many others have had their own. What are you going to do, debate them out of their spiritual experience? Try that and tell me how it goes. Per my personal definition, knowledge is ultimately practical. Logic is a way to organize your life and values in a direction that benefit you. It’s best if we stop pretending we have the ‘objectively correct’ answer. You don’t. Neither do I. The only thing we can do is provide progressively more intuitive and useful theories for things.
The main reasoning I use to justify this more personal and practical definition of knowledge is simply that it more closely relates to the application of knowledge in the real world (or what appears to me to be the real world). The standard of knowledge by common ideas of truth oversteps the bounds of what we are currently capable of knowing.
There is an argument as well about whether there is the necessity of knowing that you know (meta-knowledge). For example, someone could have knowledge of the truth of a proposition (as in, they have a justified true belief that a proposition is true) without knowing that it is knowledge. The category of ‘knowledge’ then, in this context, is more of a meta-category we place on beliefs (some are knowledge some are not). However, this raises the question, what is the utility of the term ‘knowledge’ if you can’t know that you have it? If I have no meaningful way to determine whether a belief constitutes knowledge or not (since the process of ascertaining truth is, as previously established, problematic), I fail to see the purpose of the category. If I invented a new category of beliefs, Yapit beliefs, and then said that all Yapit beliefs taste like an orange, that would be an equally bizarre methodology in my view (as both evaluate beliefs on criteria that is inaccessible to the thinker).
A common objection to this theory is that, well, it’s bleak (supposedly) to believe that there is no (or a very small amount of) actual knowledge. This feels very unintuitive to me. The point of logic, in my view, is not to ‘approach absolute knowledge’, whatever that means. The point is to serve the advancement of humans in sharpening their critical thinking and beliefs, to give them better lives. What’s the point in being logically sound if your life is miserable? Logic orbits the human experience in a way that cannot be (and shouldn’t be) detached from the particulars of ensouled human experience. Therefore, knowledge simply cannot be objective, as objectivity implies some level of detached observation which humans do not appear to engage in. Logic is a tool to help us at the end of the day.
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