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Now that I have established some basic positions on language and reality, I come to the concept of understanding. In today's Philosophy Monday, I start digging into the question of what we humans can understand or know. The technical philosophical term for this type of inquiry is epistemology, the theory of knowledge. In an earlier version, this post was in fact titled "knowledge" but that interferes with my own and different definition of that term, which plays a central role in my book The World After Capital and will also become important later in this series. In this post I will use the words understanding and knowing interchangeably.
If language is messy and reality is messy, what can we know? As it turns out, we can understand some things with nearly completely while others are likely permanently inaccessible. The bulk of our understanding, however, lies between these extremes. The important decisions that we as humans need to make are predominantly in situations of incomplete understanding where a great deal of uncertainty remains. This is exactly why we need philosophy to help guide us.
As with language and reality, I will first consider the extremes, which always exert a profound attraction that is easily misleading. But before that what do I mean when I say "know" throughout this post? To know something is to have formed a language-based understanding of reality. This separates knowing from instinct, which is not language based. It also delineates knowing from pure fiction, which can be completely disconnected from reality.
Let's start by considering understanding that is about as certain as it gets and hence widely shared: we live on an ellipsoid planet that orbits an ellipsoid sun (they are both roughly but not quite spheres). Why can we be pretty certain about this? Because we have excellent explanations that are backed up by a lot of evidence. For example, as far back as ancient Greece, people observed the curvature of the Earth and used the difference between the angle of shadows to come up with an estimate of Earth’s circumference. This approach to understanding aligns with Karl Popper's emphasis on explanatory power and empirical testing as the foundation of scientific understanding.
Attaining near certainty of understanding through science is profoundly attractive. It is so much easier to make decisions when it rests on such understanding. The failure mode here are philosophies that assume we can understand everything. Often people will acknowledge uncertainty but then still believe we can obtain enough understanding to quantify the uncertainty. All of utilitarianism, for example, is built on this dangerous assumption. Given how prevalent such philosophies are, I recognize that I am making a bold claim by calling this dangerous. I plan to expand on this in future posts, but for now I will point to Friedrich Hayek’s speech on the "pretense of knowledge," as well as the work of Nassim Taleb on tail risk and the ruin problem.
Now let's consider an example of understanding that is likely permanently unattainable: what was Cleopatra thinking when she first met Mark Antony? Historical understanding will probably always remain incomplete. The moments have come and gone and a substantial portion of what took place has not been recorded, in particular–at least for now–the mental states of humans. This connects to Thomas Nagel's question "What is it like to be a bat?" highlighting the limitations in our ability to access the minds and experiences of others. As we will see in later posts the incompleteness of historical understanding is highly relevant to difficult moral decisions in the present. There are other examples of potentially hard limits to understanding which have been explored by philosophers, mathematicians and physicists - from Gödel's incompleteness theorems to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle.
The existence of such limits also exerts a profound attraction, this time in the opposite direction. If we apparently can't know some things, maybe we can't really know anything at all - a position that philosopher Peter Unger argued for in his book "Ignorance." Or at least not know things in a way considered meaningful. An example here are philosophies that center on individual viewpoints where the only valid understanding is that of the speaker based on their lived experience. This view of understanding is also deeply problematic as it denies the possibility of any kind of universal moral principles.
My own position is again a middle ground: we can attain a degree of shared but incomplete understanding and thus must make our decisions with unquantifiable uncertainty and misunderstanding remaining. Much of what I will write about in coming posts is what we can do as individuals and societies to improve our understanding, as well as how to make ethical decisions and live a good life given the limitations.
Now you may have noticed that I was careful to qualify the words "certain" and "limit" in the earlier paragraphs. This was quite intentional as I am trying to avoid the mistake of certainty in either direction. Words such as "always" and "never" are dangerous as they lead us towards extremes from which it is hard to navigate back towards a middle ground even as new information arises. A crucial role of philosophy is to help individuals and societies improve knowledge over time which requires staying away from extremes (I am using "knowledge" here on purpose even though I haven't really introduced the term yet and won't do so for some time).
Another pattern for Philosophy Mondays should now be becoming clear also. I am embarking on a breadth-first exploration of ideas, leaving out a great deal of detail. I have chosen this approach because one of my major misgivings with a lot of philosophical writing is that it produces in readers a "can't see the forest for the trees" effect. My approach aligns with Wilfrid Sellars's goal of achieving a “synoptic vision,” a coherent understanding of everything together. In this, I am deeply inspired by E.O. Wilson’s book “Consilience,” which also calls for a unification of knowledge.
Illustration by Claude Sonnet 3.5 based on this post.
Now that I have established some basic positions on language and reality, I come to the concept of understanding. In today's Philosophy Monday, I start digging into the question of what we humans can understand or know. The technical philosophical term for this type of inquiry is epistemology, the theory of knowledge. In an earlier version, this post was in fact titled "knowledge" but that interferes with my own and different definition of that term, which plays a central role in my book The World After Capital and will also become important later in this series. In this post I will use the words understanding and knowing interchangeably.
If language is messy and reality is messy, what can we know? As it turns out, we can understand some things with nearly completely while others are likely permanently inaccessible. The bulk of our understanding, however, lies between these extremes. The important decisions that we as humans need to make are predominantly in situations of incomplete understanding where a great deal of uncertainty remains. This is exactly why we need philosophy to help guide us.
As with language and reality, I will first consider the extremes, which always exert a profound attraction that is easily misleading. But before that what do I mean when I say "know" throughout this post? To know something is to have formed a language-based understanding of reality. This separates knowing from instinct, which is not language based. It also delineates knowing from pure fiction, which can be completely disconnected from reality.
Let's start by considering understanding that is about as certain as it gets and hence widely shared: we live on an ellipsoid planet that orbits an ellipsoid sun (they are both roughly but not quite spheres). Why can we be pretty certain about this? Because we have excellent explanations that are backed up by a lot of evidence. For example, as far back as ancient Greece, people observed the curvature of the Earth and used the difference between the angle of shadows to come up with an estimate of Earth’s circumference. This approach to understanding aligns with Karl Popper's emphasis on explanatory power and empirical testing as the foundation of scientific understanding.
Attaining near certainty of understanding through science is profoundly attractive. It is so much easier to make decisions when it rests on such understanding. The failure mode here are philosophies that assume we can understand everything. Often people will acknowledge uncertainty but then still believe we can obtain enough understanding to quantify the uncertainty. All of utilitarianism, for example, is built on this dangerous assumption. Given how prevalent such philosophies are, I recognize that I am making a bold claim by calling this dangerous. I plan to expand on this in future posts, but for now I will point to Friedrich Hayek’s speech on the "pretense of knowledge," as well as the work of Nassim Taleb on tail risk and the ruin problem.
Now let's consider an example of understanding that is likely permanently unattainable: what was Cleopatra thinking when she first met Mark Antony? Historical understanding will probably always remain incomplete. The moments have come and gone and a substantial portion of what took place has not been recorded, in particular–at least for now–the mental states of humans. This connects to Thomas Nagel's question "What is it like to be a bat?" highlighting the limitations in our ability to access the minds and experiences of others. As we will see in later posts the incompleteness of historical understanding is highly relevant to difficult moral decisions in the present. There are other examples of potentially hard limits to understanding which have been explored by philosophers, mathematicians and physicists - from Gödel's incompleteness theorems to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle.
The existence of such limits also exerts a profound attraction, this time in the opposite direction. If we apparently can't know some things, maybe we can't really know anything at all - a position that philosopher Peter Unger argued for in his book "Ignorance." Or at least not know things in a way considered meaningful. An example here are philosophies that center on individual viewpoints where the only valid understanding is that of the speaker based on their lived experience. This view of understanding is also deeply problematic as it denies the possibility of any kind of universal moral principles.
My own position is again a middle ground: we can attain a degree of shared but incomplete understanding and thus must make our decisions with unquantifiable uncertainty and misunderstanding remaining. Much of what I will write about in coming posts is what we can do as individuals and societies to improve our understanding, as well as how to make ethical decisions and live a good life given the limitations.
Now you may have noticed that I was careful to qualify the words "certain" and "limit" in the earlier paragraphs. This was quite intentional as I am trying to avoid the mistake of certainty in either direction. Words such as "always" and "never" are dangerous as they lead us towards extremes from which it is hard to navigate back towards a middle ground even as new information arises. A crucial role of philosophy is to help individuals and societies improve knowledge over time which requires staying away from extremes (I am using "knowledge" here on purpose even though I haven't really introduced the term yet and won't do so for some time).
Another pattern for Philosophy Mondays should now be becoming clear also. I am embarking on a breadth-first exploration of ideas, leaving out a great deal of detail. I have chosen this approach because one of my major misgivings with a lot of philosophical writing is that it produces in readers a "can't see the forest for the trees" effect. My approach aligns with Wilfrid Sellars's goal of achieving a “synoptic vision,” a coherent understanding of everything together. In this, I am deeply inspired by E.O. Wilson’s book “Consilience,” which also calls for a unification of knowledge.
Illustration by Claude Sonnet 3.5 based on this post.
1 comment
I largely agree with your opinions on epistemology, so I will instead argue for 2 additional, and perhaps more controversial, points. Below, I am defining knowledge to be "a collection of true propositions." 1. Knowledge is discrete 2. Knowledge is consensual Let's take (1). I argue that you can't find a true statement (of knowledge) that does not compile down into true or false. Something either is the case, or it isn't the case. The entire point of language is to delineate. The fact that knowledge always compiles down to a discrete is useful from a practical point of view ("should we do it? or not?"), but can be problematic from a truth perspective. Obviously, the world is complex, so summarizing it into "this theory" or "that theory", or "this true statement" or "that true statement" always runs the risk of being lossy. I believe this is simply due to the nature of language - that all true statements must compile to a discrete - and therefore language can never capture the complexity of underlying reality. Much disagreement in the world simply occurs because people summarize reality in slightly different ways (essentially a different encoding algorithm), all versions of which can be "true" (whatever that means) in their own way. Moving onto (2). Most of what we believe to be true ("objectively", or invariant from all perspectives) is really just shorthand for saying "that's what other people/perspectives believe". In other words, truth equals consensus. It is that simple. I argue you'll never find a false statement that has all possible perspectives believing it to be true. That includes the perspective of science, the perspective of your friend, the perspective of your own observations, the perspective of future observers - if they all agree, then it's true. Obviously it is important we reconcile with "reality" (i.e. future/past observations), but much of truth-seeking is simply getting people to agree on their observations and their language. Reality exists - no doubt about that - but finding "true statements about reality" is much more of a problem in social construction, and therefore opens "truth" up to all sorts of social, political and language games.