The Metaphysics of Philosophy, Knowledge and Morality Chapter 4

Chapter 4

The paradoxes of knowledge

We make huge efforts to know more when we know we won't ever know all. The more we know, the clearer the limitations of our method of inquiry.

We is really I. We are lots and lots of I's, yet we are compelled to make we-claims. Everything one ever says should in theory remain one's personal view, yet in some mystical way, certain views become authoritative as though whole teams of researchers shared the same brain. For example, if many people conclude that 2+2=4, that's still a minority view and also impossible to prove. Yet it becomes authoritative - for no particular reason if you think about it. There is no way to prove that one object is actually one object and not a unique and unclassifiable bunch of atoms. There is no way to prove that another object is the "same" object as the previous one. Then we actually know that one object and a different object are not two objects, yet we boldly assert that 2 unproved objects plus another 2 unproved objects make 4 proved objects. This is irrational, on reflection we know it to be irrational, and yet it is an authoritative view. You may flunk in maths if you dare to disagree with it. In reality, the number concept is only in our heads, it doesn't have any form of existence in the outside world. Hence it is impossible to prove anything about maths.

Common sense (latin: sensus communis) originally means shared sensory experience, yet it is used to suggest that whoever does not have common sense is irrational or out of their mind. In the original sense, someone who does not share a sensory experience simply perceives the world differently, which is no big deal. Common sense should not be used to denote rational thinking. Rational thinking presupposes shared sensory experience, but is not limited to it, it also refers to the way one processes the sensory information. The problem is, of course, that if the sensory information is not the same, we have no way of assessing if it was processed "rationally" or not.

If Descartes was more or less right, one can only intuit that one thinks and therefore is, which is not a very firm position from the point of view of knowledge. The trouble is that there doesn't seem to be a firmer position than that, so that's as firm as one's knowledge ever gets. Yet we make claims about the world that suggest a lot firmer knowledge than that. We are simply not entitled to make such claims.

It appears that Aristotle was right about the first rules of science: they cannot be proved one at a time, they must be accepted in a package, which is irrational, if you think about it. Plato's critical thinking asserts that anything not proved in itself should be regarded as invalid and should not be accepted. According to Plato, there is no valid scientific knowledge, yet we pretend to have valid scientific knowledge of a lot of things. In reality, we don't have such knowledge of anything.

Take motion, for example: no law of mechanics can be proved in itself. There is no straight line in the world that an object could follow, and we know that. Yet we accept flawed visual demonstration as proof. In order to know the path of an object, we should have a perfect understanding of all other objects in the universe, which we don't have, and yet we claim to know the paths of certain objects in motion.

Induction (generalising from a limited number of cases) is a logical fallacy. Let's say, we have watched a thousand apples fall from the tree. Does it follow that ALL apples fall downwards from the tree, and that no apple will ever fall upwards from a tree? No, it doesn't follow, and we know that. Yet we regard induction as valid in certain cases while we regard it as a stereotype or unjustified bias in other cases.

Can you ever prove that a measurement was accurate? You can't, because "proof" relies on sensory data that we know to be inaccurate. We don't even know if the scale is correct, because we don't check it regularly against the standard. Even if we did and found that ten times out of ten our scale seems to match the standard, that does not prove that it will match an eleventh time - unless we assume that the world does not change. But we know that to be untrue, so we are implicitely aware that no measurement can ever be considered exact. In practice, we approximate and guess a lot. We use sensory data to "verify" measurements and we use measurements to "verify" sensory data, which is circular reasoning, a logical fallacy.

This circular reasoning and uncertainty pervades the universe. If we accept the Big Bang theory, we must also accept that it may have been preceded by other Big Bangs that we cannot know anything about, as all previous data have been destroyed. Also, if our Universe is a self-contained bubble and if there may be other similar bubbles around with their own particular featues and laws, then we can not know anything about them. In fact, our Universe in that case is not actually a Uni...verse, because it's only part of the whole. Yet we seem to be convinced that soon we'll have unlocked virtually all the secrets of the Universe. On reflection, we know this to be very far from the best available information.

Kant intuited that space, time and causality are arbitrary categories in our mind. We are compelled to see the world this way, though reality probably doesn't have such categories. This is confirmed by our latest understanding of the spacetime continuum. Any causality is based on a purely arbitrary slicing of spacetime. Now, if we actually believed that, we could not hold evolution to be plausible, as it relies on a strict interpretation of who begat whom. If it turns out that DNA doesn't have a single evolutionary direction, but children optionally may have preceeded the parents, this will render the data corroborating adaptation as part of the struggle for survival null and void, and the model will collapse. The fact that we believe the evolutionary model to be more than just our arbitrary perception, thinking it is a representation of how things really are, demonstrates that we have a profoundly confused understanding of the implications of our latest knowledge.

Summary: we have no way of knowing anything firmly, yet we behave as though there was a way. This is oddly contradictory. The best we can do is face up to this paradox. It appears that we humans are skilled at putting structure into an essentially unstructured world to change it to our advantage. Everything we pretend to know is all about this skill and not about reality.