"Knowledge"

[Beet]

What is knowledge? How does one "know" the "truth"? In my opinion there is no such thing as knowledge, there is only thought. And the essence of thought is that it is an action. What is commonly labelled as knowledge is merely thought that meets with success. Whereas philosophy is merely the attempt to construct a series of thoughts that meet with success, meaning that it is repeated in form by many people. It is just like the way we all grab ahold of door handles and turn them the same way to open doors, only the form is neural; it is a similar operation of the brain cells. Well?

[compson III]

No objective knowledge?  Works with me...I don't think you can get any better than Popper's skeptical empiricism. 

What about mathematics, logic, even metaphysics?  These things have more particularity to them than we admit.  The modern Western understanding of the world (sequential, Humean causality) is as old as Thomas Aquinas's misunderstandings of Aristotle, but no older.  The more speculative style is what we share with the Classical civilization, but the beauty of the Classical speculation far exceeded anything the subsequent West ever conjured up.  For all of the aesthetic value of that approach, it did not yield the "progress" that the Western approach did.

No doubt, humans have a generative faculty for mathematical thinking, just as they have a generative faculty of language.  But like language, it is flexible enough to adjust to its surroundings.  It does not flow from some Platonic world of forms.  It flows pragmatically from the activities of counting and measuring.

[John Dibble]

I would categorize "knowledge" as a subset of "belief". In particular, knowledge constitutes strong beliefs that we think are backed by evidence such that we find it unlikely that the belief could ever be found to be untrue. However, many people have held such strong beliefs only to have them shown to be false. Knowledge just tends to be more useful when it actually happens to be true or at least close enough to true, so as people act on beliefs that seem to have benefits they will come to believe that knowledge it true.

[anvi]

Aligning the concept of knowledge with success in carrying out one's intended aims is a fairly standard move of American pragmatist thought, to be sure.  That general conception of knowledge as beefs that happen to be conducive to successful action can even be found in some schools of classical Indian and Chinese thought too.  I find this an appealing way to think about what we call knowledge.

But I still have some lingering realist sympathies, and believe that, if we see or hear or touch something that, given the dispositions of our body and brain, exhibits certain features, and if the thing in question actually has those features as it's constituted, we can still fairly say we "know" it to that degree, even if not in any "ultimate" sense.  Our airplanes, for example, wouldn't fly at all had we not correctly understood the behavior of certain physical forces and the capacities of certain material things. 

[Beet]

No objective knowledge?  Works with me...I don't think you can get any better than Popper's skeptical empiricism.

Care to elaborate? 

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I believe mathematics is entirely a construct of the mind.

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Similarly, logic is the same as mathematics.

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I subscribe to the Kantian notion that we can never really observe the "noumena", so all speculation about the metaphysical world is "phenomena" and thus not knowledge. But I go even further than Kant in that I question whether the noumena can even be coherently or meaningfully defined.

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But what is the meaning of "knowing" a something? What does it mean to say that something actually has certain features? All it really means is that we are confident that it actually has those features (a successful thought). There is not a single modern man on earth who knows how a jumbo jet works, from the aerodynamics to the seat belts (rather there are many different people who work on many different parts that are brought together through social organization- an even greater miracle). The ultimate truths about the physical laws in which the jet operates could be Newtonian laws, the Theory of Relativity, or something else altogether. The important thing is not that we understand the physical forces that drive the jet, but that the jet flies, or more precisely, that we all believe that it does.

[DemPGH]

Truth exists, and it can either be ascertained or interpreted.

Mathematics, IMO, is not constructed nearly as much as it is discerned. You have to discern mathematics, physics, etc. if you're to understand very much at all about the world, the cosmos, and the universe.

But I'm nearly as realist as you can get - meaning that matter exists and is neither reducible in some spiritual sense nor dependent upon an agent to perceive it. E.G., if a tree falls and no one hears it, does it make noise? Absolutely. Which can be demonstrated.

No objective knowledge?  Works with me...I don't think you can get any better than Popper's skeptical empiricism. 

What about mathematics, logic, even metaphysics?  These things have more particularity to them than we admit.  The modern Western understanding of the world (sequential, Humean causality) is as old as Thomas Aquinas's misunderstandings of Aristotle, but no older. 

Ehh, I don't know. Depends upon how you define western understanding of the world.

The atomists of ancient Greece were a step or two away from the scientific method as we understand it (Newtonian / Baconian). Had civilization followed in their footsteps we could have had machinery by the Dark Ages, probably. I mean, people like Aristarchus ascertained what Galileo ascertained and others like Heron had built a very rudimentary engine (may have been someone else, but I think it was Heron).

[anvi]

Mere confidence isn't knowing.  Large numbers of people have very high degrees of confidence in things that are false, and many people have very little confidence in things that can be easily demonstrated.  In addition, the fact that people working on many different parts of a plane can assemble them in such a way that enables it to fly does not itself account for the capacity of the plane to fly once finished.  The parts have to be constructed and put together in a certain way so that they fulfill certain functions in concert, and their design can't just be arbitrary with regard to the function they will fulfill.  What does it mean to know that a thing has certain features?  I know fire has the properties that enable it to burn my bodily tissue.  I find no problem in claiming that such a judgment constitutes knowledge. 

[Beet]

Except there are people who walk on burning charcoals and come through fine. There are amateurs on YouTube who you see lighting themselves on fire and not getting burned in the least. Have they "demonstrated" that you are false? No, they have merely created new thoughts, which perhaps contradicted old ones. So now you have to either qualify your statement or clarify a definition of "fire" to exclude those non obvious exceptions. But even if, and here is the key- no evidence was brought up to contradict your statement, it would still not constitute final knowledge because our very concepts of "fire" and "burning" are understood differently. A scientist will think of fire in terms of chemical processes, whereas your average person on the street will likely think of it as a red flame. A burn survivor will have very vivid impressions of burning and its aftermath, whereas an average person will have only a vague premonition of extreme pain; a child may not associate fire with burning at all. None of these people have a complete understanding of "fire" and it's properties, and the very creation of the concept itself is a product of the human mind.

[barfbag]

Knowledge is a collection of our sense perceptions accumulated over time and stored in our memory. This plays a part in our ability to manage our lives through problem solving.

[anvi]

Merely saying the knowledge is a creation of the human mind does not preclude the possibility that some awarenesses and concepts can grasp, from the human perspective, actual states of affairs in the world.  It's also a nifty skeptical move to demand that "final knowledge" or "complete understanding" are necessary conditions for making any knowledge claim, and thus setting the bar of knowledge so high that no candidate claim could clear it.  But it's not clear to me why we have to set the bar so high in the first place.  Why not say that there are degrees of knowledge, limits to knowledge (both consistent with the Kantian position you seem to like above, Beet) and that knowledge claims are fallible depending on what we may discover in the future (consistent with a pragmatist stance)?  As noted, I'd be ok with settling in the end for a pragmatist conception of knowledge that identifies it with beliefs that lead to successful activity in the pursuits we choose.  But I still have a strong suspicion that at least some of our practical successes are due the fact that our actions in fact work in our natural circumstances, not merely because we believe they work.  Planes fly through the air because they actually can fly, not merely because the mechanics, pilots, passengers and air traffic controllers believe they can fly.  In like manner, I'm inclined to the view that at least some instances of our cognition can be viably claimed to be knowing ones, limited as these may "ultimately" be, rather than to one holding that no instances of our cognition can be viably claimed to be knowing ones at all.

[DemPGH]

Actually, to answer the original question, knowledge is essentially two things: 1) a body of information that we have been able to discern resulting from 2) our method of arriving at that body of information. I'm a follower of Francis Bacon at his core (Carl Sagan as well), to be truthful. Knowledge must be revisable so as to weed out the errors and poor thinking of the past.

Except there are people who walk on burning charcoals and come through fine.

There is a science to "fire walking," and in fact you can take courses on it. It has a lot to do with the conduction of heat not being quick enough to burn you instantly in many materials plus keeping your feet moving!

In fact:

http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/channel/videos/the-science-of-firewalking/

That's a REALLY interesting video.

There are amateurs on YouTube who you see lighting themselves on fire and not getting burned in the least. Have they "demonstrated" that you are false? No, they have merely created new thoughts, which perhaps contradicted old ones.

There are more hoaxes, paranormal shenanigans, and magic tricks on YouTube than you could wade through. A person setting himself on fire and not burning did not create a new thought, IMO, but rather performed a new trick. Or maybe an old trick.

A side note, have you ever seen the floating light bulb magic trick? Now that's impressive and it's done in person by a master magician (with, of course, a carefully hidden assistant ).

. . . But I still have a strong suspicion that at least some of our practical successes are due the fact that our actions in fact work in our natural circumstances, not merely because we believe they work.  Planes fly through the air because they actually can fly, not merely because the mechanics, pilots, passengers and air traffic controllers believe they can fly.  In like manner, I'm inclined to the view that at least some instances of our cognition can be viably claimed to be knowing ones, limited as these may "ultimately" be, rather than to one holding that no instances of our cognition can be viably claimed to be knowing ones at all.

A good point, sir. Indeed, these are why there are experiments conducted all the time which do not yield positive results. The single best way to demonstrate that something works or does not work is to do it in a controlled environment, and often those positive results leave one nonplussed, as in they were not expected. Those moments are famously called "Aha moments"!

[Beet]

Merely saying the knowledge is a creation of the human mind does not preclude the possibility that some awarenesses and concepts can grasp, from the human perspective, actual states of affairs in the world.  It's also a nifty skeptical move to demand that "final knowledge" or "complete understanding" are necessary conditions for making any knowledge claim, and thus setting the bar of knowledge so high that no candidate claim could clear it.

Yes, well that's just it. There is a kind of knowledge, you agree, that no candidate could claim to clear, and hence which does not exist by definition. All I'm saying is that this is not just a kind of knowledge, but inherent within the nature of "knowledge." This is not to say that the word 'knowledge' has no utility value for communication; certainly it does. But 'knowledge' inherently claims finality, and no such finality is possible, or even conceivable. Hence we should turn our focus to the methodological production of thought, rather than an attempt to acquire knowledge.

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Well that is not knowledge, those are only tentative claims, and assumptions, however reasonable, however probable, are not knowing.

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Well we risk then getting into a matter of semantics here. At the most fundamental level, my point is that the very statement "a plane flies through the air" is a product of the human mind, and not a product of nature. "Plane" and "fly" and "air" are concepts that we created through thought. Hence to say that we "know" that it happened is merely a self-referential statement relating concepts that our minds themselves created in the first place. It is a successful thought. But there are no planes flying through the air in nature (ontologically, for instance, there is no 'form' called the plane) there are only things happening.

Whether one accepts the above argument or not, you must still accept that we cannot know that planes actually fly through the air because all of life may be an optical illusion, or an incepted memory.

DemPGH, you seem to think I believe in magic. On the contrary, I am not against science, rather I think my system helps to explain science. The scientific method, for instance, is a good example of my argument. It makes no direct claims of knowledge, unlike other world-systems, instead it is a rule-based pattern of procedural thought (a method) that aims to generate other successful thoughts and quickly eliminate unsuccessful thoughts. It appears that the long-term history of academic learning, particularly in the West, has tended to veer away from final claims of knowledge and towards methodological thinking.

[compson III]

No objective knowledge?  Works with me...I don't think you can get any better than Popper's skeptical empiricism. 

What about mathematics, logic, even metaphysics?  These things have more particularity to them than we admit.  The modern Western understanding of the world (sequential, Humean causality) is as old as Thomas Aquinas's misunderstandings of Aristotle, but no older. 

Ehh, I don't know. Depends upon how you define western understanding of the world.

The atomists of ancient Greece were a step or two away from the scientific method as we understand it (Newtonian / Baconian). Had civilization followed in their footsteps we could have had machinery by the Dark Ages, probably. I mean, people like Aristarchus ascertained what Galileo ascertained and others like Heron had built a very rudimentary engine (may have been someone else, but I think it was Heron).

A step or two?

Let us look at the Western spirit:

"All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event—in the living act, the undoubted deed—there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there's naught beyond. But 'tis enough. He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him. Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I'd strike the sun if it insulted me. For could the sun do that, then could I do the other; since there is ever a sort of fair play herein, jealousy presiding over all creations. But not my master, man, is even that fair play. Who's over me? Truth hath no confines."

And you will not find something farther away from the Classicals.

[compson III]

Mere confidence isn't knowing.  Large numbers of people have very high degrees of confidence in things that are false, and many people have very little confidence in things that can be easily demonstrated.  In addition, the fact that people working on many different parts of a plane can assemble them in such a way that enables it to fly does not itself account for the capacity of the plane to fly once finished.  The parts have to be constructed and put together in a certain way so that they fulfill certain functions in concert, and their design can't just be arbitrary with regard to the function they will fulfill.  What does it mean to know that a thing has certain features?  I know fire has the properties that enable it to burn my bodily tissue.  I find no problem in claiming that such a judgment constitutes knowledge. 

The problem with that statement is the word "properties."  No, you know that fire or heat burns you.  But you don't know that it has properties, and you don't know the nature of these properties.  That is why induction isn't sufficient for knowledge.

The people building the airplane do not have to recourse to knowledge.  They can use trial and error.

[compson III]

Merely saying the knowledge is a creation of the human mind does not preclude the possibility that some awarenesses and concepts can grasp, from the human perspective, actual states of affairs in the world.  It's also a nifty skeptical move to demand that "final knowledge" or "complete understanding" are necessary conditions for making any knowledge claim, and thus setting the bar of knowledge so high that no candidate claim could clear it.  But it's not clear to me why we have to set the bar so high in the first place.  Why not say that there are degrees of knowledge, limits to knowledge (both consistent with the Kantian position you seem to like above, Beet) and that knowledge claims are fallible depending on what we may discover in the future (consistent with a pragmatist stance)?  As noted, I'd be ok with settling in the end for a pragmatist conception of knowledge that identifies it with beliefs that lead to successful activity in the pursuits we choose.  But I still have a strong suspicion that at least some of our practical successes are due the fact that our actions in fact work in our natural circumstances, not merely because we believe they work.  Planes fly through the air because they actually can fly, not merely because the mechanics, pilots, passengers and air traffic controllers believe they can fly.  In like manner, I'm inclined to the view that at least some instances of our cognition can be viably claimed to be knowing ones, limited as these may "ultimately" be, rather than to one holding that no instances of our cognition can be viably claimed to be knowing ones at all.

You've identified that life has rules, indeed.  This means that life isn't like a dream, yes.  But disproving solipsism doesn't rule out any other sort of idealism.

[anvi]

Semantics are important in philosophical discussions.  If the term "knowledge" necessarily implies completeness and finality, then I would agree that it cannot be had by limited beings like us.  I see no reason, however, why it cannot admit of more limited senses.  Its etymology is rooted in words like "acknowledgment" and "familiarity."  And, once again, the fact that the mind deals in concepts that are the products of its own activity does not preclude the possibility that some of those concepts can grasp things about the natural order accurately.  And neither does the suggestion that all of our experience may be an illusion.  But I've said my piece on the matter.  The skepticism train has other places to go, and I'm not getting on that train, so it shouldn't wait for me. 

Idealism, on the other hand, is another thread.     
   

[The Mikado]

To think one can truly know something is arrogance.  You can't even fully know yourself, how can you expect to know anything that exists outside of you?  One must make do with glimpses of understanding.

[afleitch]

To think one can truly know something is arrogance.  You can't even fully know yourself, how can you expect to know anything that exists outside of you?  One must make do with glimpses of understanding.

While I agree with you that all knowledge is human perception filtered through and processed by human faculties I don’t think you can simply state that you can’t truly ‘know’ anything and to claim so is therefore arrogant. It is not ‘arrogant’ to claim that hydrogen and oxygen can combine to form water. Materially that is what water is. It is also entirely reasonable and without any shred of arrogance to claim to ‘truly know’ that you need to drink that water to live. If you think knowledge is  always so loose woven, then test that out for yourself

[compson III]

To think one can truly know something is arrogance.  You can't even fully know yourself, how can you expect to know anything that exists outside of you?  One must make do with glimpses of understanding.

It is not ‘arrogant’ to claim that hydrogen and oxygen can combine to form water. Materially that is what water is.

This is mereology...for a given system which is continuous (even though it may have finite bounds) I can construct an infinite number of part-whole relationships (A+B=C).  If one's goal is even merely categorization, the project is hopeless.  One is always infinitely far away from creating a complete taxonomy of the universe.  The pure knowledge Hydrogen plus Oxygen equals Water is useless in itself...there must be some other phenomenological property that makes it salient to our lives.