CHAPTER 8

Knowledge and Reality

There are a wealth of different philosophical issues having to do with what’s real and how (and whether) we can know about it. Many of these questions appear in the other chapters—questions of knowledge and reality are at the base of most of the questions in this book. In this chapter, though, we look at questions having to do specifically with what knowledge is, and how it connects us or fails to connect us with reality outside of the mind.

If you have some philosophical training, you may be disappointed that we’re passing over some major issues. Some topics within questions of knowledge and reality, though very important within academic philosophy today, are too technical and deeply embedded with the history and context of scholarly argumentation to present well in a short, concise form. It’s also difficult to ask interesting questions about those topics, especially for readers who might not have much background. So I’ve left out some worthy topics, to be sure, but this selection will give you a good sense of how philosophers talk about these issues, and should provide a good basis for some interesting conversations!

The Stuff of Stuff

There’s a bunch of stuff everywhere, right? What’s it made of? And what is that stuff made of? Is there some basic stuff that all other stuff is made of? If so, what’s it made of?

Some stuff sometimes becomes other stuff—like how ice melts. When stuff becomes other stuff, is it still the same stuff? If it is, then why isn’t it the same anymore? If it isn’t, then what happened—did some stuff get added or taken away from the other stuff?

All this stuff got here from somewhere—presumably from other stuff, because stuff doesn’t just show up; stuff is made out of stuff. How did all this different stuff end up being so different? Is all this stuff really different stuff? Mustn’t it be that all this different stuff is really the same, because it’s all made out of the same stuff?

The Philosophy

Have you ever noticed how if you keep saying the same word over and over again, it starts to seem really weird? “Is that how that word is spelled?” “What does that word mean exactly?” This is what’s called semantic saturation, and the same thing happens when you think about an idea for long enough. “Stuff” is a weird word, but it’s not nearly as weird as stuff itself is, when you think about it long enough.

The ancient Greek philosopher Thales (c. 624–c. 546 B.C.E.) is often called the first philosopher in the entire European tradition, and his main idea was that everything is made out of water. Now you’re probably thinking, Water? Actually, it’s not nearly as stupid as it sounds. Things undergo change, so there must be some underlying thing that things are made from that is the thing that undergoes the change. Things don’t just appear and disappear. As to what that underlying thing is, water is actually a pretty good candidate. We can see how water changes into ice or into steam. Water is taken up by plants, and becomes their leaves and fruit, and it replenishes our bodies as well.

Other philosophers around the same time—often called “the Presocratics” because they were mostly working before Socrates was around—had different theories. Anaximander (c. 610–c. 546 B.C.E.) said the stuff was undefined, but became different stuff through heat, cold, moisture, and dryness. Pythagoras (c. 570–c. 495 B.C.E.) thought the basis of the world was mathematical. Heraclitus (c. 535–c. 475 B.C.E.) said everything was fire, but he might have meant that metaphorically—fire is a process, not a thing, and he said that the only constant unchanging thing in the world was change itself. Parmenides (c. 515–c. 450 B.C.E.) went the other direction and said change is an illusion and there is only a single unchanging thing. Democritus (c. 460–c. 370 B.C.E.) even claimed that the world was really made of tiny indivisible things (the Greek word is atom) that combine in different forms to make things. Crazy, right?

The Problem of Induction

How does gravity work? Don’t use technical terms to fill in the gaps—try to really explain it.

We all know that gravity works, at least. Could mass start to repel itself instead of attracting itself, as of tomorrow? Is there anything any less likely about repelling than attracting, or anything about “mass” that makes it make more sense somehow that it would attract other mass rather than repel it?

Why couldn’t the laws of nature change suddenly? Is there a law of nature that the laws of nature can’t change? Why can’t that law change? Is there a law that the law that the laws of nature can’t change can’t change?

The Philosophy

These are questions that Scottish philosopher David Hume brought up in what has come to be known as his “problem of induction.” Induction—the process by which we use particular instances to demonstrate a general rule—seemed to him to be suspicious in a very basic way. How many cases are enough to establish that things will always and necessarily work a certain way? Assume some number of cases, n, is enough. What did the nth case have that the n-1 case didn’t? Wouldn’t we, instead, need an infinite number of cases to show that it will always and necessarily work out that way?

Worse yet, the very idea of using different cases (for example, that you drop stuff and it falls) to establish a “law” (e.g., gravity) is dependent on the idea that nature is consistent—that the future will be like the past. If the future isn’t like the past, then past evidence doesn’t have any predictive value at all. But what evidence do we have that the future will be like the past? The only evidence is that in the past the future has always been like the past, so it seems like in the future the future will also be like the past. But this is question-begging circular reasoning—the only evidence we have depends on simply assuming what it is supposed to be evidence for!

And we also have no recourse to just seeing these connections between events. There’s nothing “drowninglike” about water—the only way to find out that it can’t be breathed is the hard way. Same thing with the coldness of ice, or the saltiness of salt, or the “fallingness” of things heavier than air. If these causal structures had a logical basis, then we could know that they will always and necessarily be that way, but because we only find out these connections through experience, we can only make claims about them through inductive reasoning. Which, according to the arguments we just went through, seems arbitrary and unjustified. So about knowledge and certainty about nature and cause and effect?—forget it.

Everything You Believe about the World Is Wrong

Imagine anything—a stick, maybe. It has a length. Imagine cutting it in half. Now again. Now again. And so on. Can you keep dividing it in half infinitely? If so, doesn’t that mean it isn’t made of anything?

Okay, so that’s a problem, right? There must be a point when you can’t divide it in half anymore. That indivisible thing: does it have length? If it does, then you can divide it in half, right? But if it doesn’t, then it’s not a thing, right? What’s going on?

Okay, how about this: Does the universe have a beginning? If so, something must have started it, so you’re not at the beginning yet. But then what started the starting? And what started that? On the other hand, if it doesn’t have a beginning, how can it exist? A series of events can’t have started without having a start, right? Right?

The Philosophy

Immanuel Kant, inspired by the deeply troubling problems about knowledge brought up by David Hume, wrote his monumental Critique of Pure Reason, in which he tried to show what kinds of things are within the realm of human knowledge, and what kinds of things aren’t. To get at this, he first identified the structures that allow us to think and perceive things at all—including forms of the senses (space and time) and categories of the understanding (including “substance” and “cause”). These structures make experience possible, and so there is literally no possible way we can know if they’re true—if we saw something that didn’t exist in space, we’d either experience it as if it did, or we wouldn’t experience it at all, because the ideas of “seeing” and “thing” only make sense at all in the form of space.

And consider this: How did you learn that space and time are empty and infinite, that the first has three dimensions and the second has only one? There’s no way you could have learned that; you’ve never had an experience of just space, or empty time. These are structures that make experience possible, not things outside of the mind.

That’s why when we ask about the beginning of time or what things are made of, we get into problems like the ones in the questions you just answered. Reason tells us that the universe must have a beginning, but that it also can’t possibly have one (because what happened before then?), and that things must be made of stuff, but that all stuff can be divided (and then it’s not made of anything in the end!). The problem here is that we’re using structures of human understanding (space, time, substance, causality) and we’re pretending that they’re really real, not just for human experience, but in reality.

So, we can’t show that these things are real because if they were false, we’d never know. And if we assume they’re real, we run into serious logical contradictions. So the conclusion should be this: Whatever is real, it’s not anything like what makes sense to us.

Agrippa’s Trilemma

Assume for a moment that you know something. Anything at all. If you know it to be true, there must be some reason why. But you have to know that reason too, so there must be a reason you know that reason to be true. And so on. Can’t we just keep asking “But why?” over and over again?

Is it possible that there are some things that we know, but which we don’t need to give reasons for? Some things that are self-justifying?

If there aren’t some self-justifying “foundational” things that we know, can we really know anything? We can’t just keep giving reasons infinitely—there has to be some sort of basis, right?

The Philosophy

This argument has been around since the ancient Greeks, and is sometimes called “Agrippa’s Trilemma.” Put most directly, it goes like this:

Premise 1: You know something.

Premise 2: Knowledge requires justification.

Premise 3: Nothing can be its own justification.

Conclusion: Knowledge requires an infinite series of justifications, which is impossible, and contradicts the first premise.

So, either we accept the conclusion that knowledge is impossible and deny the first premise, or we deny the second premise by claiming that some forms of knowledge don’t require reasons at all, or we deny the third premise and say that some forms of knowledge can be evidence for themselves.

Philosophers have pursued all three options. The first is the position of the skeptic. The second is the position of “foundationalism,” which claims that some things can be “the end of the line” in reason giving. Usually, the foundations given are sense data, but Descartes tried the foundation of self-knowledge. “I exist” doesn’t need a justification, in his view, because as soon as we doubt it, we find that we are there, doing the doubting! But getting from “I think, therefore I am” to any knowledge about anything else is, well, hard to argue convincingly. The third option is “coherentism,” which is the view that there are no foundational beliefs, and no ends to the process of giving reasons, but that it’s okay for reason giving to be circular. On this view, the coherence of a big set of beliefs gives all of them a collective justification. So you might not be able to prove that you’re not asleep and dreaming right now, but the coherence of the different views that support that idea gives you reason enough to say you know you’re awake.

Justified True Belief

A commonsense definition of “knowledge” is that it is a belief that is justified and true. Does this make sense? Can you think of things rightly called “knowledge” that are false or unjustified?

Imagine that you see what appears to be a sheep in a field, and claim to know that there is a sheep in the field. Now, it turns out that what you saw was a dog in a sheep outfit, but that there is a sheep in the field; it’s on the other side of a hill, where you can’t see it. Your belief was justified, and true, but would you call it knowledge?

The Philosophy

Problems like this are called “Gettier cases,” after Edmund Gettier’s (1927–) 1963 article, “Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?” Gettier’s original cases seem a little silly to me, although they do effectively demonstrate a problem. In one of them, we imagine that Smith has good reason to believe that Jones owns a Ford, and so Smith claims to know that “either Jones owns a Ford, or Brown is in Barcelona,” while having no idea where Brown is. Now, even though Smith was justified in thinking that Jones owns a Ford, this happens to be wrong. But as it happens, Brown is in Barcelona, although Smith had no reason to think so. And so Smith’s claim is justified, and is true, but we’re not likely to say that he knew it. The sheep example in Question 2 is from Roderick Chisholm (1916–1999) and works basically the same way.

Philosophers have responded to the Gettier problem in a great number of different ways. Maybe we need to say that the justification of a belief needs to be connected in some way with its truth—for example, the justification of these beliefs (looking at the dressed-up dog, or having reason to believe Jones owns a Ford) is there, but it’s disconnected from the fact of the matter that makes the belief true (the hidden sheep over the hill, or Brown’s whereabouts).

We might say instead that in addition to the truth of the thing we claim to know, the evidence that forms the basis of justification must itself be true. A valuable kind of question might be this: If the thing that we claim to know were false, would that affect our belief in it? In these cases, if the sheep were in the woods or if Brown were in Boston, the justification would still be there, and the belief as well, but the belief would be false—so this shows that the justification of the belief isn’t “hooked up” properly with the facts that make the belief true.

The Ethics of Belief

Imagine a ship owner who hasn’t taken the boat into dry dock for maintenance for some time. He worries whether the ship is in good condition but convinces himself to have faith. He rents the ship to some emigrants; it sinks and kills those aboard. Is the ship owner right to have an untroubled conscience, because he firmly believed (without sufficient evidence) that the ship was safe?

What do you have faith in? Could any of these elements of your beliefs bring harm to others, or diminish their rights and freedoms? For example: that God doesn’t equally respect gay marriage, or that abortion is permissible because the fetus isn’t a person, or that abortion is immoral because the fetus is a person, or that assisted suicide is always wrong. How can you be responsible in acting on these beliefs?

The Philosophy

The case of the ship owner comes from English philosopher W. K. Clifford (1845–1879), who used it as the starting point of his famous essay, “The Ethics of Belief.” Clifford argued that it is always wrong to hold beliefs in the absence of sufficient evidence in their favor; similarly, it is always wrong to ignore evidence that goes against our beliefs. We can’t just have faith in things, because our beliefs begin to affect others as soon as we act on them, and therefore we have a responsibility to those around us to form our beliefs in a responsible manner and to maintain their justification by calling them into question whenever we have reason to.

This process—epistemic responsibility—is pretty difficult. Like the ship owner, we are too easily seduced by self-interest into disregarding “inconvenient truths.” What’s more, we often fail to notice evidence contrary to our beliefs because of confirmation bias, which makes us focus instead on the evidence that fits with what we already believe.

Here’s an example that shows how easily our attention brings us to bad beliefs. Imagine you’ve got 100 employees, and ten of them are stealing from your business. You give them all a polygraph test, which is 90 percent accurate. How likely are you to correctly identify the thieves? Stop reading here, think about it for a minute, and settle on an answer.

Okay, you’re back. You said 90 percent likely, right? Chances are you did. That’s because you were focused on the ten thieves, and you forgot about the ninety innocents. If the test is 90 percent accurate, you’ll correctly identify nine of the thieves. But the test is also wrong 10 percent of the time, so you’ll falsely accuse nine of the ninety innocents. So the test will identify eighteen people as guilty, with only a 50 percent rate of correct identification.

This is but one example of how quickly things like focus, self-interest, and confirmation bias can make epistemic responsibility difficult. Within the realm of religious belief, where contrary evidence can’t be found at all, the problem of responsibility in acting on your beliefs seems even more difficult—at least in those cases where your beliefs may bring harm to others.

Bullshit, and the Bullshitting Bullshitters That Bullshit

Harry Frankfurt (1929–), a contemporary American philosopher, claims that “One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows this.” How would you characterize bullshitting—how is it, for example, different from lying?

Arguably, the two domains where bullshit is most prevalent are in marketing and in politics (which seem to have more and more in common). What effect does the mountain of bullshit in marketing have on our economy?

What about the mountain of bullshit in our politics—what effect does this have on our democracy?

The Philosophy

Frankfurt explored the phenomenon of bullshit in an essay, appropriately titled “On Bullshit,” which has since been published as a little stand-alone book. He’s obviously quite right to identify bullshit as a significant aspect of our society, worthy of careful consideration, although there are perhaps some obvious reasons why the topic hadn’t been written about too much before he took it up.

In Frankfurt’s analysis, bullshit is characterized by a lack of concern for the truth. In lies, there is a matter of fact that the liar is concerned with, even if that concern is limited to covering it up. The bullshitter, by contrast, is not concerned with covering over the truth about some matter of fact; rather, he wants to cover over the truth about his own intention in speaking. The bullshitter may in fact say things that are true, but he doesn’t say them because he cares about whether they are true or false. For example, Frankfurt considers a politician giving a Fourth of July speech. He may say a lot of nice things about liberty and founding principles and whatever, some of which may be true, or even insightful, but the speaker’s concern is not with history or political philosophy—the speaker’s concern is that he is viewed as someone who cares about all that stuff. To give an example from advertising, consider the claims “100% Natural” or “Contains a clinically tested ingredient.” Both may be true, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t bullshit.

We see this pretty clearly in student writing. Surely you’ve written some bullshit at some point. Student bullshitting consists largely of vague claims that could well be true, but which are directed at taking up space and sounding on topic rather than actually providing information or analysis. Information and analysis, after all, can be identified as wrong, which will lose points on the assignment. Student bullshitting seeks to finish out the assignment while providing as little to grasp onto as possible … not unlike much political rhetoric.