He claims:
I’m against knowledge. Don’t get me wrong: I’m as keen on the facts as the next person. I’m no friend of fake news. I want truth rather than falsity. It is specifically knowledge I’m against, not true belief. Knowledge asks more of us than true belief, and it isn’t worth it. In reality, the concept of knowledge is a hangover from a stone-age way of thinking that has long outlived its usefulness. We’d be far better off without it.
He points out that we wouldn't convict someone of a crime based solely on statistical evidence that he was 99% likely to have committed the crime, but we will convict someone based on less-reliable eyewitness evidence. So, knowledge doesn't work. He goes on to claim:
Once the notion of belief is to hand, the old notion of knowledge becomes redundant. We modern thinkers can distinguish between three kinds of agents:
and we can anticipate their actions accordingly. Moreover, we can appreciate the practical advantage of true beliefs, and so strive to make sure that our own beliefs are true. The archaic notion of knowledge is not needed for any of these thoughts.
- those whose beliefs are in line with the facts;
- those whose beliefs misrepresent the facts; and
- those who have no opinion;
So, I think he wants to dispense with justification, or at least some kinds of justification. He would argue that statistical justification, without observational justification, is enough, I gather. My question is, though, isn't he just arguing about what should constitute justification?
For example:
We keep favouring weaker direct evidence over good statistics. Our neighbours recommend their washing machine, and this makes us much more confident of the brand’s reliability than reading the carefully researched statistics in Which? magazine. A friend’s mishap makes us feel we need insurance, even though the actuarial figures show the risk is minimal. Time and again, we’re more ready to act on information that fits the archaic stereotype of directly caused knowledge than on good statistics. But it’s all a bad idea.Again, knowledge exists for him, but it's based on a different kind of justification. That seems to undercut his argument.
Well, that's about as far as I'm prepared to go with this. Philosophy is and will remain beyond me unless I find some time to study it seriously.
If you read the whole article and have some thoughts, though, I'd be happy to talk about it in the comments.
15 comments:
I don't think you dropped a link to the article. It's here:
https://aeon.co/essays/knowledge-is-a-stone-age-concept-were-better-off-without-it
Egads. Thanks! Fixed now.
So, it is usually (but not always) true that knowledge asks for more than true belief. According to Aristotle and until the 20th century, it asked for justified true belief, where it is integral to the concept of justification that it must be a justification of the right type. His examples pick out justifications of the wrong type, and aren't that interesting; more interesting are the Gettier cases, in which the justification seems to be the right kind, but you still end up with a true belief that isn't quite knowledge.
The detour into criminal convictions is a red herring. We have never said that you should only convict if you know that a person is guilty; the standard is a lack of rational doubt. So we don't actually even ask for true belief, just belief of a certain strength. An innocent convicted because of a lack of rational doubt may still, truly, be innocent. That's just how the system works. Knowledge isn't necessary; truth isn't, even. Just belief of the right kind.
So what kind of things can you know? He's really interested in facts, but the best cases for knowledge are things like theorems. I can know that X is a theorem of system Y if I grasp system Y correctly, because I can obtain a proof. You can definitely obtain knowledge, then, in mathematics and formal logic.
What about knowledge of practical matters? I seem to know certain things of which I have direct experience; I know my sunglasses are on my face, say. But there are many things I can say that I know that seem like the word 'knowledge' is merely analogical to these other sorts: I know that murder is wrong. How? Well, I can prove it in several ethical systems, so it's like a proof in formal logic. However, unlike the formal system, I can't actually prove that the ethical system really exists to be applied to the practical cases. Euclidean geometry exists to be applied to Euclidean objects, i.e., objects of thought of a certain kind that are created and sustained by the system. The objection (Hume's, by the way) is that the ethical system doesn't share the clear link to the world: the world is, it isn't created or sustained by the system of 'oughts.'
So that kind of knowledge is analogical, but it's still a sort of knowledge. If we both accept ethical system Z, and it is a theorem of Z that murder is wrong, then we can say that we know that murder is wrong. If not, I can still say (correctly) that murder is wrong for those who do accept Z.
His real issue is with cases of facts about which we don't have a possibility of knowledge in any of these systems; and his examples, like the conviction examples, show that he's unaware of his confusion. It may be right that many people would say something to the effect of 'I wouldn't want to convict someone if I didn't know he was guilty.' But that isn't actually how the system works, and that confusion lies behind a big part of the problem he's having.
* If not, I can still say (correctly) that I know that murder is wrong for those who do accept Z.
It sounds like he is ready to submit to a distant authority , and cover his eyes as to direct experience.
The more distant the info, the likely it is to be corrupted. You know your neighbor, and if he is hard on things or a maintenance freak- so you know the failure mode, and the maintenance of his washing machine. Who supplied the statistics? What axe did they have to grind? Was it some eco extremist trying to manipulate us into using a 1/4 cup of water per load? Or a manufacturer paying off consumer reports?
Clemens said it, I think- "there are lies, damned lies, and statistics".
By the way, in spite of his sneering comments about 'stone age' ancestors, this problem of analogical concepts of knowledge has been known since Ancient Greece. Aristotle describes the problem in the Nicomachean Ethics, Book 1:
"Our discussion will be adequate if it has as much clearness as the subject-matter admits of, for precision is not to be sought for alike in all discussions, any more than in all the products of the crafts. Now fine and just actions, which political science investigates, admit of much variety and fluctuation of opinion, so that they may be thought to exist only by convention, and not by nature. And goods also give rise to a similar fluctuation because they bring harm to many people; for before now men have been undone by reason of their wealth, and others by reason of their courage. We must be content, then, in speaking of such subjects and with such premisses to indicate the truth roughly and in outline, and in speaking about things which are only for the most part true and with premisses of the same kind to reach conclusions that are no better. In the same spirit, therefore, should each type of statement be received; for it is the mark of an educated man to look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits; it is evidently equally foolish to accept probable reasoning from a mathematician and to demand from a rhetorician scientific proofs."
We keep favouring weaker direct evidence over good statistics.
So, anybody got some statistics to show which horizon the sun's going to set in tonight? Since I obviously can't trust the direct evidence of having seen it set in the west for the last 50 years of my life.
The detour into criminal convictions is a red herring. We have never said that you should only convict if you know that a person is guilty; the standard is a lack of rational doubt.
So, Grim, how would you answer his prisoner example? We know 99 prisoners are guilty and 1 is innocent, but we don't know which is which and we have no direct evidence. Based on statistics, when any one prisoner comes up for trial, we should convict because there is a 99% chance that each one is guilty. However, we are reluctant to convict any one prisoner because we simply don't have direct evidence that that particular prisoner committed the crime.
How do you think we should solve that dilemma?
To raven & Christopher, to be fair to him, he doesn't talk about what we ourselves see. He is concerned about having to rely on others' observations of events that we cannot check ourselves. E.g., an eyewitness account of an accident or crime. That is why it is weaker, not because it is direct, but because it is someone else's and can't be checked.
My 'Yes But' is that unless you gathered them yourself, they are somebody else's statistics too, and very often somebody else's interpretation of the statistics.
How do you think we should solve that dilemma?
The way we do solve it is to ask if there's a reasonable doubt. So you take each one of them, ask them to account for themselves; they can remain silent or speak. If they speak, you can check their story for plausibility and/or cross-check them against others' stories. If they don't, well, the jury decides whether they believe there is reasonable doubt in each case.
The question the jury is asked to answer is not, "Do you know that X committed crime Y?" It is not even, "Is it true that X committed crime Y?" The question is simply, "Do you have reason to doubt that X committed crime Y?" And if so, we let them go.
Ideally, at least; what we actually do is charge them each with the most severe set of crimes we can associate with the particular action, and then offer to let them plea out of it. Then we claim that it must be true that they're guilty because they confessed to their guilt. So adding the truth condition doesn't actually improve outcomes.
Personally I have no wish to make it easier for the state to convict people than it already is. I like the reasonable doubt standard, and would prefer to stick to it. I'd rather seem stronger limits placed on the government's power to upcharge, to issue multiple charges for a single action, or to seek pleas via deals.
It's a weird example to get exercised about. 100% of these guys are already being punished by imprisonment. If I were to go on a tear about improving justice outcomes, I'd want to focus on the politicians and such who get away scot free (often for far worse). Heck, we do know they are guilty half the time, but they're too powerful to touch. That's the problem I'd like to see dealt with before we worry about adding time to prisoners' sentences for things they do in prison.
Christopher B, that's fair, although it doesn't address the prisoner example in the article.
Grim, yeah, it's a weird example, and my first question was, how is it possible that we know one is innocent and 99 guilty, but we do not know anything else? I guess we could be distant observers that can only make out one unidentifiable individual huddled alone in a corner throughout the whole event and all the rest attacking the guard, and the guard died so he can't testify, and none of the prisoners were bruised or scratched in any way ... but it's weird.
He follows the example thus:
"In both civil and criminal trials, defendants can be found responsible only if the evidence relates specifically to them, and doesn’t just place them in some general category in which guilt is likely.
"It might be intuitive, but this legal ban on statistical evidence is puzzling. Think of a man who is convicted because an eyewitness says she saw him steal a necklace. Nowadays, thankfully, the courts know eyewitness evidence can go wrong, and so they check carefully to make sure it’s reliable. Even so, the courts don’t demand 100 per cent certainty, only that the eyewitness makes doubt unreasonable – which seems to mean something like 95 per cent assurance, whenever the judges can be persuaded to put a number to it.
"So we are often ready to convict on eyewitness testimony, but never on purely statistical evidence. You might well wonder why, if 95-per-cent reliable eyewitnesses are more likely to lead us astray than 99-per-cent reliable statistics."
His answer is that we are stuck on the idea of knowledge. We want to believe we have some knowledge that connects the accused to the crime before we convict, not just a mathematical probability. But his example is designed to show that sometimes the mathematical probability is more certain than the knowledge, so our desire is irrational and we should get over it.
In the mouths of two or more witnesses lies the truth. Triangulation.
How do we know the earth is a globe? Orwell asked that as part of an article in his credulous age.
Epistemology is blocked by the veil. It expressly prevents knowledge. Greeks were just too metaphysical.
In my experience, anyone 100% or even 99% sure of what they saw is probably wrong, and the one who is only 50-75% sure is probably closer to the truth. It indicates a healthy self skepticism and awareness of the flaws of eyewitnesses. I'd be really surprised if there wasn't good research that corroborated this.
That's interesting, douglas. If you find the research, I'd be very interested in reading it.
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