Sources of Knowledge
Epistemic
Awareness:
Epistemology
is the branch of philosophy defined as “the study of human knowledge.” Like
epistemology TOK involves questioning our sources and the nature and accuracy of
our knowledge in the hope that we will develop a more informed understanding of
what we know and don't know. That is, enabling us to become more epistemically
aware.
It is
important because accurate knowledge of our two worlds - the real world and the
inner world - correctly informs us of the conditions we must cope with. To know
facts is to survive; not to know, or to assess one's environment wrongly, is to
lose the fight for survival.
We face two
serious epistemological problems.
1. How
can we determine which facts are true? As human
beings living in the 21st Century we are surrounded by a wealth of
information but not all of it is trustworthy, so we must find a way to double
check fact-claims. We must learn somehow to screen out the fictions but let in
the facts. On what criteria can we decide what are facts and what are false
claims?
2. How
can we determine which facts are important? However, it
is not enough to simply determine which facts are true, we must also consider
which facts are useful. A correct catalogue of the size and shape of every
blade of grass on my lawn may well be factually true but it will not be as
useful as knowing that my lawn is on fire and about to engulf my house. Given
the overwhelming number of facts available to us, what criteria can we use for
deciding what is more important, what less?
Almost
everything that we know originates from four basic sources:
·
Senses (possibly the most important)
·
Authority (knowledge from other sources, hopefully
experts)
·
Reason
·
Intuition
The Senses
Information
from the senses is called empirical knowledge and empiricists
believe that the fundamental source of all knowledge is our senses. Our senses
are exploratory organs; we use them all to become acquainted with the world we
live in. We learn that candy is sweet, and so are sugar, jam, and maple syrup.
Lemons are not, and onions are not. The sun is bright and blinding. Glowing
coals in the fireplace are beautiful if you don't touch them. Sounds soothe,
warn, or frighten us. Through millions of single sense-events we build a fabric
of empirical information which helps us interpret, survive in, and control the
world about us.
We have a
number of different kinds of senses:
·
The objective senses that tell us
about the world: sight, sound, smell, touch and taste
·
The visceral senses, in our mouths
and gut that give us the sense of stomach ache
·
The proprioceptive senses, in our
muscles that tell us if our fist is clenched or not
·
The balance senses, mostly in our
ears that tell us if we are … um … balanced
However, our
senses present us with a serious credibility problem. Before we start the TOK
course most of us are naïve realists people who simply accept
what their senses are telling them as the truth … but is there any way we can
actually be sure about this? Can we really trust what our senses seem to tell
us?
Unfortunately
the answer must be a reluctant no. Our senses do not give us a "true
picture" of the real world; they give us useful picture – a picture that
is designed to help us move around, survive in and take advantage of our world.
To take a simple example: if you think about it we know that the chairs we sit
on are not actually not solid: they are made of atoms which are actually more
space than anything else. Yet our senses tell us that they are solid.
Why? Because in terms of day to day survival there is no point knowing about
atoms: you need to know that a chair will hold you up if you sit on it and that
a rock will hurt if it falls on you: a sensitive awareness of the arrangement
of the sub-atomic particles of a boulder as it plummets towards you will not do
your survival chances any good.
Authority:
Other people
are continual sources of information. Such information, however, is always
second-hand knowledge - or third-, fourth-, or nth-hand knowledge. It is all
"hearsay." The farther it is removed from our own personal
experience, the more caution we must exercise before accepting a fact-claim.
All of our
historical knowledge is acquired in this way as is most of our knowledge of the
sciences. We can't experience the past or personally repeat every experiment,
so we must trust the specialists and accept, though not blindly, the discoveries
they record for us. They key thing with knowledge from authority is that it can
be double-checked and the work of scientists and historians is continually
being ‘double checked’ as other workers in the same field (even sometimes us in
our classrooms) repeat their experiments or investigations. A healthy cynicism
of sources, the development of the skills required to check facts and an
awareness of which sources are more or less reliable is a good way to ensure
that the knowledge we receive from authority is as good as it can be.
Reason:
Reasoning
might be defined as the process of using known facts to arrive at new facts. In
this way Reason can help us arrive at new facts or new knowledge BUT only as
long as the original facts we put into the process are correct and the process
itself is reliable.
Imagine you
are travelling in
Reasoning
generally comes in two forms: deduction and induction.
Deduction is the kind of reasoning usually used in Maths and is the more
certain of the two as it involves ‘drawing out’ valid conclusions from
previously known facts – e.g. All cats are animals, Jack is a cat, so Jack is
an animal. Induction, on the other hand, is usually used in Science and is less
certain as it involves jumping from some things you have observed to making
universal statements about all things – e.g. I drop this pencil and it falls,
so it is likely all dropped pencils (and indeed things) will fall.
Notice that both forms are usually dependent on sensation to give us the
initial facts or ideas in the first place.
The problem
with reasoning is that deduction (the most certain form of reasoning) can never
teach us anything new because all the information is there in the facts at the
start, while induction (the thing that can give us what seems like new
knowledge) can’t ever give us anything certain, only things that are likely
to be the case.
Intuition:
Although the
word intuition has connotations of the mystical or unscientific, when carefully
defined it can be considered a source of knowledge. Intuition refers to
insights or bits of knowledge which suddenly ‘pop’ into consciousness as our
deeper subconscious chugs away working on data that we have collected earlier.
We have all probably had the experience where the answer to a question we were
previously thinking about but have currently forgotten has suddenly popped into
our minds for no reason. This is intuition and, as such, like reason, it too is
dependent on our senses to provide the raw material on which the subconscious
works.
Sometimes
intuition seems to be a ‘feeling’. We often say something like "I have the
feeling he's not telling the truth," without being sure of why. The psychologist
Jung suggested that actually this is actually a form of unconscious reasoning
where your subconscious picks up on the tell-tale signs of lying (sweating,
nervous movements, etc) that are too subtle for your conscious mind to notice
and processes them resulting in the ‘feeling’ that this person is
untrustworthy.
The problem
with intuition however, is that most of our intuitions are wrong and they need
careful double checking before they are trusted.
Other
Sources:
·
Faith often accompanied by
supernatural revelation;
·
Instinct;
·
Racial Memory / the Collective
Unconscious – another idea of Jung’s, that we have cultural memories that we
can all inherit and share without actually experiencing the thing that caused
the memory in the first place;
·
Extrasensory Perception;
·
Anamnesis ("recollection")
or the remembrance of things from a past life;
·
Spiritualism and the Occult, such as
Ouija boards, tarot cards, etc.