Meeting on knowledge

I just came back from our Wednesday Ideas Cafe meeting where we discussed "knowledge" this evening.

I started off with Bertrand Russell's quote on why knowledge is so difficult to pin down because it is based on belief, fact, and the agreement between the two which is all difficult to define and pin down.

I also mentioned that we quite often use information and life experience without realizing and told everyone about the colored candy example. Say you walked into a room and there is a clear glass jar with candy of different colors. You pick a black one and it tasted like liquorice. What would another black color candy taste like?

The answer is that we don't know.  For to foretell the taste of another candy based on tasting one prior involve predicting the future.  At the very least we need a rule saying that the taste of the candy is directly related to the color of the candy AND that this rule will carry on into the future.

Shula pointed out that this is about induction and not the theory of knowledge.  She mentioned that the famous philosopher David Hume was despairing that we cannot be sure of anything in the future and that our confidence in things continuing as they are have no basis. 

However, Shula continue to relate that Hume then went down to the public house to have a few beers with his friends and all is well with the world when he came back to open his books again.

This showed that we are living in the grey area (yet again!!!) where we are never on solid ground and that true solid philosophical rational ground is perhaps not achievable in our everyday world.

Mike thought that some of these rigorous philosophical arguments actually take away the benefit and confidence from our everyday experience.  While we were not told of a rule that relate the taste of the colored candy in the example to the color of the candy,  our other life experience would tell us that this is a reasonable rule to use.  Practicality over rigor.

For me, the issue is being aware of these hidden assumptions we make, our thought process in coming to "know" something and where our confidence come from.  This is so that we will know when the foundation of "knowing" have been compromised and when we should question our "knowledge".

My theory is that we observe the world and we hypothesize theories in order to explain what is happening.  We then compare our observations against how the theories predict upcoming events.  Our confidence gradually builds with observations that confirm our theories and at some point, we pass a confidence level when we "know" how things are.

Dan said that he tries not ever to be in the position of "knowing" as that is when learning stops. He is therefore always open to new observations but that also mean that he is always unsure and in a state of flux.

Robert and Ricki both mentioned that they seem to know everything as a teenager but the more knowledge they accumulate, the more they realize there is so much more to know that they felt they know less and less of the world as they get older.

There was talk of data, information, knowledge, and wisdom.  What I found revealing is that data is just observations.  Information is extracting common threads and patterns out of data over time, geography, sample population, or some other space. This extraction process inevitably involve some organization of data to conform to a theory or hypothesis.  Therefore some subjective interpretation is involved.

Pulling information to form knowledge involves some internalization of the information for us to be even more confident that we "understand" a phenomenon. More hypothesis testing and more subjective interpretation.

Defining wisdom is a completely different topic but I would venture to say that it is another step of pulling patterns out of knowledge, therefore involving even more subjectivity and interpretation.

From solid and impartial data, we add subjectivity, interpretation, hypothesis, and fuzzy boundaries along the way to information, knowledge, and wisdom.

We also discussed that there is no firm basis for us to predict that the sun will come over the horizon tomorrow just because it always did, or that we will have gravity tomorrow, just as we always have.  But it seem pointless to worry about it.

Does it show that philosophy is too ivory tower like? or that we need studies like philosophy to show what we assume unknowingly ?

And to think that we get most of our "knowledge" from "trusted" sources or defer to authorities. We don't even get to observe most of the things that we get informed by the media.

Do we really "know" much at all?