Here I am trying to consider the nature of knowledge (thinking about thinking) and in doing so I discuss the limitations and meaning of discussing such matters (talk about talking about it). So it's no wonder that I often trip over the shoestrings these thoughts hang from. A considerable source of difficulty (SOD)* is that I can say but one thing at a time, but each idea that I want to express has other thoughts branching from it, and those tangents have tangents with tangents. To try to write the one thought without giving attention to its florescence is like stripping a beautiful plant to its trunk so that it can be fit through a trunk-sized hole (not to overstate the appeal of my ramblings by using words such as beautiful).

So, on the nature of knowledge:
"Know" is a word which, for my tastes, is used entirely too casually by most people. It can mean to be familiar with, and in that sense I don't object to its daily use. However in the sense, "to apprehend clearly and with certainty" the word has almost no place in any quotidian experience except to mention its absence. In this sense, to know implies not just an acquaintance with fact or truth, but also the existence of "facts" or "truths".** What does it take to be acquainted with unquestionable truth?*** Here faith or mysticism and science or logic seem to diverge. Faith and mysticism seek to behold truth while science seeks to know truth. I would argue that this is a fool's errand, or at least one for Xeno's Achiles****. Since to know requires the removal of all doubt one must discard any assumptions(, for the veracity of these assumptions can always serve as a source of doubt. Even the exhaustive empericist would be forced to admit that at the base of his or her epistemological scaffolding lays the Principle of Induction (PoI). The PoI is a principle that we use so often most of us don't even consider it. Basically, the PoI states that if something has happened a certain way many times before then it will happen that same way the next time. To borrow an example from David Foster Wallace*****, you exercise the PoI every time you get out of bed. You assume that the floor will be there to hold you up, but how do you know that it will? Simply because it has every other time you've stepped out of bed. Is this an unquestionably valid assumption? Is it inconceivable that your floor has rotted and will give way under your feet, or that your bed has been secretly moved to a precipice, or that a knowledge gnome who seeks to undercut the PoI has secretly cut a hole in your floor while you slept? It may be a safe assumption, but it is not an unquestionable one. It's an assumption that most of us make not just daily, but with nearly every decision we make. Doubting this assumption can literally drive you crazy (see the quote on paranoia from a few days back), so I don’t recommend doing so. However, if absolute certainty is what you seek, doubt it you must.

This is why to seek to know, in it's truest sense, is a fool's errand, it can never be done unequivocally.

But for the sake of discussion, let's assume that my dog Carl produced a simple, eloquent, assumptionless and irrefutable proof of the PoI. We now have firm ground to start with, but if we intend to use observation and deduction to proceed, we must consider both of these activities******.



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*I intend to use S.O.D. repeatedly here, for these sources of difficulty can be rather demonstrative of other philosophies and the one that I am trying to understand/develop here, so please keep the acronym SOD in mind.

**I must table this question for later. To discuss it here would be to derail the post before it got anywhere. Nonetheless, it is a very interesting question indeed.

*** "[U]nquestionable" it must be, or else it is not "known".

**** Zeno's paradoxes are well-known to most middle schoolers, even if not by name. "In a race, the quickest runner [Achilles] can never overtake the slowest [the tortoise], since the pursuer must first reach the point whence the pursued started, so that the slower must always hold a lead." (Aristotle) Zeno was a Greek who confounded many of the basic concepts of the time such as motion. His paradoxes characteristically involved infinities or their converse, infinitesimals, and in discussing epistemology I often find myself in my own race with the tortoise of expression or clarity - it seems that each step towards my goal introduces another step to be taken. Some consider paradoxes to be a product of the assumptions we make or the meanings we affix to concepts that would be better served to be discussed with meaningless formalism (purely syntactical). I disagree. I think paradoxes arise by asking senseless questions that only appear sensible because of unrecognized assumptions or false syllogisms. For more on this see my yet-unwritten post on "Reality" and its own SODs (I guess that the plural of SOD should be SsOD, eh?).

*****
1-RIP
2-A DFW footnote, how appropriate.
3-This example is borrowed from DFW's Everything and More, a book on infinity, which is fantastic, but also difficult, and is the book that started me down the path that led to this blog. Really, you should probably just read that book and its suggested readings instead of this blog, as most of what's here is a dumbing-down of what's there.

******w/r/t Observation we will need to consider Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle (another S.O.D.) and this certainly deserves more than a footnote, so stay tuned. Deduction, well I may get to that next, or not, but if I wait until I’ve tackled deduction to post this then you’ll all have stopped checking back by the time I do…so once again, stay tuned.