What is knowledge?

Knowledge is everywhere. You probably know what you ate for your most recent meal, your birthday, who the Prime Minister is, and what the square root of 4 is. We talk about knowing things and not knowing things all the time. The verb ‘to know’ is one of the ten most common verbs used in English, as well as in many other languages. In fact, all of the world’s 6000+ languages has an equivalent of the word ‘know’, which is true of fewer than 100 words. (Even the words ‘eat’ and ‘drink’ aren’t universal across human languages; some Aboriginal Australian languages use a single word, meaning ‘ingest’, to describe both eating and drinking.)

Image above: Prof. Amia Srinivasan who studies the theory and philosophy of knowledge (known as 'epistemology').

At the same time, it is hard to say exactly what knowledge is. Just because something is a fact isn’t to say that it’s knowledge. Imagine that you flip a coin and immediately cover it with your hand so that neither you nor anyone else can see it. Has it landed heads or tails? There’s a fact of the matter about which one it is, heads or tails, and yet no one knows it. (Unless, that is, there is an all-knowing God who knows all the facts. But let’s ignore that possibility for the moment.) Now imagine that you really want the coin to come up heads...perhaps you win £10 if it does. On the basis of wishful thinking, you come to believe that the coin really is heads. And let’s suppose that (even though you can’t see the coin) it, in fact, has come up heads. Do you know that the coin has come up heads? Presumably not. After all, just because you believe something and it happens to be true doesn’t mean you know it. Only after you lift your hand and look at the coin do you know that it’s heads.

To know something, in other words, involves not just believing something that is true, but having reason or justification for your belief. For example, physically seeing that the coin is heads. 

Justifying your beliefs

But what counts as a good reason for a belief? Think about all the things you take yourself to know, for example, what you ate for your most recent meal, your birthday, who the Prime Minister is, or what the square root of 4 is. Why do you believe these things?

In the case of your most recent meal, you probably remember eating it. Maybe you can see it in your mind’s eye in front of you, or recall the taste on your tongue? Memory also probably plays a role in your belief about the identity of the Prime Minister: at some point, you learned who the current Prime Minister is, allowing you to now recall their name. But what if your memory is playing tricks on you? Now take your birthday: you believe that you were born on some particular day because you were told you were. But why should you believe the testimony of other people? What if they were lying to you, or they misremembered? And how about the square root of 4? It certainly seems obvious to you, once you learn what ‘square root’ means, that the answer is 2. After all, 2 times 2 is 4! But why does that feeling of obviousness show you that the answer is true? Has anything ever seemed obvious to you and then turned out to be false? When you are a small child, did it not seem obvious to you that the sun went around the earth?

Scepticism

Some philosophers, called ‘sceptics’, think that it’s impossible to know anything at all. Why might that be? Take the flipped coin. Imagine you’re looking at it, sitting in the palm of your hand. If you know anything, you surely know that there is a coin in front of you. After all, there it is, sitting in your hand. You can see it and feel it; if you drop it you can hear it, and if you bring it to your nose you can smell it. And yet, isn’t it possible that you aren’t actually in a human body, seeing, feeling and hearing but actually just a brain, sitting in a vat of chemicals, being stimulated by a team of rogue scientists so that it just seems like you are in a body, holding a coin? What if right now you’re not really in a human body, reading this on your computer, but inside a computer simulation, being tricked into thinking that you are reading something on a computer?

If it’s possible that you are in these sceptical scenarios (if you can’t rule out that you’re a brain in a vat, or in a computer simulation) then how can you know that the coin you see really is a coin, or that you have hands at all?

Moral Disagreement

Even if you’re not a sceptic, you might still think that there are at least some truths that we cannot know: the truths of morality. Why is this? Well, it seems that there is deep disagreement, across cultures and history, about many moral questions: for example, whether slavery, homosexuality or abortion is wrong. People’s beliefs about these questions seem largely determined by their particular historical or cultural circumstances. If so, then what makes your moral beliefs any more justified than the beliefs of people in different times and places? 

Destructive knowledge

Can knowing something ever stop you from knowing other things?

Suppose that there is no God, and that you came to know this. But suppose also that, once you come to know there is no God, you become depressed, and lose your interest in learning new things. In this way, your coming to know one new thing (that there is no God) stops you from coming to know other new things. In this way, some knowledge can actually destroy other knowledge!

Here is another example. Suppose you learn that girls perform worse than boys on a particular maths test. On the basis of this knowledge, you conclude falsely that girls are worse than boys at math. In fact, the reason that girls do worse on the maths test is because they (falsely) think of themselves as ‘bad at math’. This is a real psychological phenomenon called ‘stereotype threat’. Here, an item of knowledge (that girls perform worse on a particular math test) leads to a false belief (that girls are worse at boys than math), which in turn helps (via ‘stereotype threat’) to make the first fact true.

In these two cases, knowledge appears to harm you as a knower, leading you to be more ignorant than you would otherwise be. But in both cases, knowledge also appears to be harmful in another way. In the first case, you stop believing in God, which make you depressed and, in turn, less able to take pleasure in life, to pursue your projects, and have meaningful relationships. Here, knowledge is dangerous for your wellbeing. In the second case, a little bit of knowledge not only leads you to a false belief (that girls are intrinsically bad at maths) but moreover a false belief that contributes to a systematic harm faced by girls. Because so many people falsely think that girls are bad at maths, some girls perform badly at maths. This is a case of a bit of knowledge leading to a form of troubling social inequality. It is often said that ‘knowledge is power’, but it is important to remember that power can be used for good or ill.

What do you think?

Why are knowledge and power connected?

Well, in most situations, in order to have power over someone or the power to do something, you either have to know something about the person or thing that you're trying to influence. Likewise, if you already have power, one of the ways of being recognised as more knowledgeable than others is if what you say seems more valid.

When it comes to the environment there are many disagreeing opinions and voices. The Internet has brought an explosion of knowledge sources, but who do we believe and why? According to Dr Constance McDermott from the Environmental Change Institute (University of Oxford), the answer varies depending on who we are, what the context is, and who the knowledge comes from.

Indigenous knowledge or scientific knowledge

We’re used to considering rainforest loss as a ‘global problem’ that affects us all. But can our knowledge and understanding of how to deal with the crisis be any match for the experience and knowledge of the people who live in the middle of it?

Dr McDermott explains that within the international environmental community, there is “an increasing division in ways of thinking about knowledge that is scientific, and indigenous knowledge. Indigenous knowledge is often either ignored or used to serve other interests.”

What do we mean by these different types of knowledge?

Indigenous knowledge can be understood as ‘the accumulated experience, wisdom and know-how unique to nations, societies, and or communities of people, living in specific ecosystems’ (source). Indigenous knowledge is based on relationships between humans, non-humans and the environment and is validated through ‘subjective’ experience, stories, songs, ceremonies, dreams, and observations (source).

Scientific knowledge, on the other hand, is often described as ‘objective’, based on what can be observed directly by sight, sound, smell or touch, and is validated using universal measurements.

The problem is that scientific knowledge does not hold the same level of importance with everyone and scientists often disagree with each other.

Plus, it’s not as straightforward, accurate or fair to say that one type of knowledge (i.e. scientific vs indigenous) has more worth than the other. In fact, Dr McDermott argues that policies and strategies to protect the environment can never fully be based on science as they must also be based on a certain set of values, although which values are more important is hotly debated.

An example of how both knowledge sources can inform each other can be found in the words of Raoni Metuktire who is an environmentalist and chief of the indigenous Brazilian Kayapó people. Below he describes the impact that deforestation, mining and agriculture are having on people living in the Amazon:

'We call on you to stop what you are doing, to stop the destruction, to stop your attack on the spirits of the Earth. When you cut down the trees you assault the spirits of our ancestors. When you dig for minerals you impale the heart of the Earth. And when you pour poisons on the land and into the rivers – chemicals from agriculture and mercury from gold mines – you weaken the spirits, the plants, the animals and the land itself. When you weaken the land like that, it starts to die. If the land dies, if our Earth dies, then none of us will be able to live, and we too will all die’ (source).

In the points that he makes, Metuktire, arguably, demonstrates how indigenous and scientific knowledge are not independent of each other; there are several areas of overlap. What do you think?

Image credit: Raoni Metuktire via Valter Campanato/ABr CC BY 3.0 br

So why isn’t indigenous knowledge drawn upon more by those in power?

To answer this question, we have to think about who is setting the agenda and who holds power. This could be government representatives, environmental groups, or academics. They will have their own ideas of what sorts of knowledge they find useful to their cause. This is assuming they all have a particular agenda, and one key problem is that this agenda may not always be agreed upon by everyone.

Dr McDermott points out that “if you're trying to act on a global or national scale, the types of knowledge you can use are different to the types of knowledge that are useful at a local level. So regardless of your agenda -- whether you're working for an environmental charity or a big oil company -- if you want to have control over situations in a distant location like the Amazon, you're going to favour more formal [scientific] systems of knowledge and standardisation of laws.”

Another problem is that rainforest management schemes are often informal, or part of a traditional system. For instance, as Dr McDermott explains, “a logger who lives close to the forest, probably has a lot of knowledge about what it takes to protect and maintain their livelihood. The way they use the forest may be perfectly sustainable”. This means that they have learned to work in a way that causes little or no damage to the local environment. Their logging activities might be less intensive or self-sufficient, which means that they are able to provide enough to take care of the local community without the need for help from elsewhere. “But if these activities don’t follow internationally set standards, their knowledge is de-legitimised and becomes invisible to the climate activist based in the UK or beyond.” This is because it’s likely that the climate activists’ agenda is to create change at the global or national level.

The power of money

An idea that is sometimes put forward, is that problems in tropical countries are often caused by poverty. According to this line of thinking, poorer people don't have many options and so this can lead to actions/activities which destroy the resources that are available to them. But McDermott says that in reality, it's the interests of wealthy corporations and governments which are driving changes in land use across the world, and not the behaviours of individuals. “Increasingly, the main motivation behind deforestation globally is the increased demand for specific products (e.g. palm oil, cocoa) and need for commercial agriculture, not local farmers who don't understand the value of the forest.”

So how can we shift the balance between knowledge and power to solve issues like deforestation and climate change at the global level?

Dr McDermott suggests: “Question everything but also do your best to try to understand everything. Do your best to understand the full picture and pay attention to where power is…We need to be willing to accept that what people think is sustainable will be different in different places. You can't have a one size fits all system and then say you're going to involve local people once the decisions have already been made.” 

Dr McDermott and her colleagues are currently developing an app which can trace the origins of products and aims to help consumers make more informed and ethical choices. To learn more about Dr McDermott’s research, take a look at the video below:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6dUzKrcrk4

So what do you think... does knowledge give a person power, and can this combination of power and knowledge ever be dangerous?