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Editorial
How Do You Know?
by Rick Lewis
“A little learning is a dangerous thing;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring”
Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism, 1709.(In Ancient Greek myth, the Pierian Spring was a sacred spring near Mount Olympus, named after the daughters of King Pierus. It was supposed to be a literal fountain of knowledge.)
It’s a truly fundamental question, and the quintessence of a questioning attitude towards the world. The high priest, imbued with authority by his social status and towering purple headdress, looms over the child and tells her that the Universe was sneezed into existence by the Great Histamine Beast of Traal, and the child asks “How do you know?” She doesn’t deny his claims or make any counter-assertions, she just asks because she wants to understand. Yet the question she timidly asks is perhaps the most subversive imaginable.
In celebration of this question, the theme of this issue is ‘Sources of Knowledge’. (Yes, sorry about that pun on the front cover.) The philosophy of knowledge is a vast subject, known as epistemology, and spills over into the philosophy of science too. Our contributors explore just a few of the lively ongoing controversies in this area and introduce a handful of the thinkers who in the twentieth century transformed the debates about what and how we can know things.
What is it to know something, anyway? Plato, and pretty much everyone after him for thousands of years, held a nice simple straightforward view about this. They said that knowledge is ‘justified true belief’. If you hold some belief about the world that is, as it happens, true and furthermore you hold that true belief not as a result of luck or coincidence or tradition but because of hard evidence, then you can be said to know it. Common sense, right? A rare case of a philosophical claim with a consensus behind it. Well, in 1963 a small child called Edmund Gettier – okay, he was 36, but bear with me here – a small child called Edmund Gettier stared down the high priests of this belief. In a short paper that shook the academic philosophy world he put forward some compelling examples of people holding justified true beliefs in circumstances where nonetheless nobody could really say they knew. Maya Koka will tell you more about all this in her article, and even extend Gettier’s work a little. The following piece by Peter Keeble talks about Gettier too, to introduce a concept he calls the method of exception.
The articles that follow discuss scientific knowledge, its status and how to acquire more of it. Brian King gets that party popping with his piece about Karl Popper, perhaps the only twentieth century philosopher whose name is known to a majority of scientists. Popper proposed a simple test called falsification for distinguishing science and meaningful enquiry in general from pseudoscience, bullshit and waffle. What was it? Did it work? You’ll just have to read the article to find out.
After Popper, various people including his own students pointed out that falsification is all very well, but that it isn’t how most scientific research is actually done, either today or in the past. So they started tweaking his theory in various ways to make it describe the actual history of science. One of them was Thomas Kuhn, who plays a central part in Shirkoohi’s article about the objectivity of science. As if the status of science (in a world pretty much ruled by it) wasn’t a big question already, it leads straight on to others: What does it even mean to know something objectively rather than subjectively? Can we know anything subjectively or merely feel it? We’ve left these tangled questions unanswered as an exercise for the reader.
So how do contemporary philosophers wrestle with practical questions of knowledge and its limits in an age of fake news and subjectivist post-truth rhetoric? We are delighted to include an interview with famous epistemologist Prof Susan Haack, who looks in particular at court cases to explore ideas about certainty and the limits of the knowable.
Our current scientific knowledge is limited in all sorts of ways, but are there any limits in principle to human knowledge? In mathematics, Gödel’s famous Incompleteness Theorems demonstrate that there must be. McGranahan’s article unpacks this for us as he asks, as we all always should: What Would Wittgenstein Do?
In WW2 Kurt Gödel, a refugee from the Nazis, applied for US citizenship. There is a funny story about Gödel’s naturalisation hearing. His close friend Albert Einstein went along too, hoping to support his eccentric-genius buddy and keep him out of trouble. The judge, to put the nervous Gödel at ease, remarked that he must be relieved to finally be in a land where democracy was secure. Before Einstein could shut him up, Gödel blurted out that on the contrary, he’d been closely reading the US Constitution and had spotted a loophole by which it could be legally turned into a dictatorship… I make no point by telling this story, except that it shows Gödel’s unfailing grasp of one vital condition for expanding knowledge: never take anything for granted.