The following was
written for Professor Shea’s The Public Life of History course at Salem
State University.
It was written in September of 2013 and attempts to organize some of the ideas
I’ve been wrestling with regarding knowledge, truth, and history.
Imperfect Knowledge
and the Feeling of Certainty
I believe we have an innate abhorrence of contradiction
combined with an inability to attain a state of perfect knowledge. The
consequence is a constant striving—beneficial evolutionarily, but confusing for
us as individuals.
What I mean by perfect knowledge is a state of consciousness
of the full panoply of irrefutable propositions about the universe and beyond.
The fact that we can never attain such a state means that every proposition of
which we are conscious, even if it inspires the feeling of certainty, is
contingent.
Not even “hard” science purports to know the truth. Science
produces models that yield accurate predictions. Refined models yield more
accurate predictions, but all of the models are contingent or tentative. New
evidence may appear and lead to new models. Yes, science is cumulative, which
makes us feel like we are getting somewhere, but consider what it also means:
its truths are never final. Its state of knowledge is imperfect.
There are two things we can mean by truth and knowledge. We
can mean propositions that cannot be refuted and we can also mean propositions
that we cannot refute but which technically could be refuted. The first type
has to do with the “thing-in-itself”—what is actually true about the objective reality outside of us that we are
constantly striving to unmask.
The second has to do with what we believe to be true. Five
or six billion people throughout the world believe in god or gods. What does
this mean? This means that they consider it impossible to present evidence that
refutes the truth of the proposition that god or gods exist. They of course do
not accede to evidence that purports to refute this proposition; they deny the
interpretation of the evidence, the credibility of the source, etc.
The difference is between what could be refuted if we had
attained a state of consciousness of all irrefutable propositions about the
universe (perfect knowledge) and what cannot be refuted because of our
inability to attain such a state.
I believe the first type of knowledge is impossible—that actual knowledge is impossible. I
therefore interpret the common uses of words such as knowledge and truth in
conformity with the second type. I believe a proposition is a truth if it
relieves our anxiety about contradictions. Its purpose is never actually to
understand the “thing-in-itself,” but to allow us to momentarily imagine that
we do, bringing relief and a reprieve from intellectual strife.
A Pragmatic
Objectivity
We have limited sensory and cognitive abilities. Yes, we
invent tools to compensate, but the frontier of our ignorance is infinite. A
sliver of the forest has been felled; infinity to go. This is simply to restate
the point that we have imperfect knowledge. The imperfect state of our
knowledge means that we can never know everything about a phenomenon we are
studying.
We only ask questions that are of interest to us. The sources
of our curiosity lie deep in some inaccessible psychology. What matters here is
that not all questions are of equal interest to us and not all answers are
equally as appealing.
What does objectivity mean in this context, hobbled as we
are by crude sensory and cognitive abilities and motivated as we are by
mysterious impulses bequeathed by their (albeit perhaps distant) relationship
to survival of our genetic information?
As I said, I believe we abhor contradiction. In societies
that have absorbed the Enlightenment dedication to testing propositions against
the available evidence, narratives that do not diligently strive to conform to
the available evidence are quickly revealed to contain propositions that are
refuted by the available evidence. (This is in contrast to the
pre-Enlightenment world where, for instance, Aristotle’s easily refutable
proposition that heavier objects fall more quickly than lighter objects went
unchallenged for about two thousand years.) Thus, we live in a society where a
failure to diligently conform a historical narrative to the available evidence
causes one to appear deceitful or lazy—to receive negative feedback from other
people. Additionally, the author may experience the anxiety of cognitive
dissonance if the evidence presented against them is persuasive even to them.
Einstein resisted the paradigm of an expanding universe even
as the scientific community accepted it. Was his resistance the consequence of
a failure to be objective?
We cannot know whether or not someone approached a question
objectively. We do not have the capacity to quantify Einstein’s commitment to
logic, willingness to revise and discard propositions, or the intensity of his
emotional attachment to a steady-state theory. Similarly, a community that
accepts that the Earth is warming and that human activity is contributing to
this warming does not have the capacity to quantify and weigh the commitment to
logic, willingness to revise and discard propositions, or intensity of
emotional attachment to certain propositions of conservative politicians or
energy industry officials.
What is considered a powerful refutation is subjective, and
therefore what is objective is subjective; meaning different communities share
different assumptions and therefore not all propositions will be critically
evaluated by a given community. A theological work which assumes an omniscient
deity would be perfectly objective within a community of fellow believers.
I do not believe in truth, knowledge, or objectivity in an
absolute sense. Regarding truth and knowledge this is because of our imperfect
state of knowledge. Regarding objectivity this is because of our imperfect
state of knowledge combined with the mysterious nature of our motivations.
However, just as I imbued truth and knowledge with meanings that allow me to
continue to communicate, I believe objectivity can be ascribed a useful
meaning.
I would define objectivity as: a commitment to logic and a
willingness to revise or discard propositions that can be refuted. What is not
included in this definition is any illusion that we have somehow stepped
outside of our limited sensory and cognitive abilities, our arbitrary selection
of questions to seek answers to, or the presumptions of our social milieu. To
the extent that objectivity is defined as an ability to do these things—the
capacity for a “God’s eye view”—objectivity is impossible.
People desire narratives that answer questions about who
they are and where they come from. We live in a perpetual state of imperfect
knowledge, but just as we abhor contradiction, we abhor ignorance of the
answers to questions that we feel are important, though what questions are
important to us is determined by an inaccessible psychology—I do not believe we
ultimately know why a question is important to us, though a desire to answer it
may have been evolutionarily advantageous even if we could never answer it.
This being our condition, we posit scientific models and
historical narratives that, though our models and narratives be idealized and
tentative, bring us a fleeting sense of satisfaction that we have answered a
significant question with a proposition that is irrefutable. The state of
knowledge in any endeavor—regardless of the tensility of the science—is a
snapshot of a given society at a given time, reflecting among other things
which questions that society happens to consider interesting and which they
fail to ask. The consequence is that knowledge is simply a body of propositions
that an individual or a group feel it not possible to refute. As to whether or
not they can be refuted, we cannot know—we cannot only feel like we know.
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