Donald Rumsfeld
Introduction
Enormous amounts of human endeavour are aimed at the getting of knowledge. Academics, scientists, educationalists and students are all interested in knowledge for its own sake. Businesses and governments are interested in knowledge for what it might do for them or allow them to do. Everyday people in their everyday lives want knowledge – be it expertise, sporting facts or gossip – both for its own sake and for what it can do for them.
But what constitutes knowledge? Many people may claim to have knowledge, but the claim (belief) alone is insufficient to constitute knowledge. For instance, many people claim to have knowledge about what influences their behaviour. Many would be willing to claim that advertising has no effect on their purchasing patterns. Many people (even the same ones!) would be willing to claim that subliminal advertisements in cinemas (presentations of ads so brief that they are not perceived consciously) can affect purchasing patterns – perhaps not their own so that they are consistent with their first belief!
I doubt that people have very complete knowledge about what influences their behaviour. And I doubt that the provision of ‘justification’ separates knowledge from non-knowledge. A woman says that she generally has no awareness of an ad when making a purchase, and justifies her claim by saying that if an ad has come to mind at the time of purchase, she explicitly refuses to buy the advertised brand. She also believes that subliminal ads have an influence on people, and as justification, points to a newspaper article from the late 1950s reporting that subliminal ads affected purchasing patterns.
My view is that the woman’s justifications add nothing to establishing whether she has knowledge or not. I believe that this woman is affected by advertising – without her awareness. I also believe that people are little affected by subliminally-presented stimuli. Determining whether she or I have knowledge can only be established if we ‘know’ the truth. The provision of justification does nothing to change the truth value of the claim. Plato’s definition that knowledge is ‘justified true belief’ is widely held today. I however, wonder whether the proposition that the true belief be justified is justified.
How does justification support true belief ?
Justification is, in my view, an attempt to show that truth and belief are aligned by simultaneously ‘proving’ the truth and bolstering the belief.
Justification serves first as a bootstrapping argument in support of the truth of a proposition. Whether a proposition such as ‘advertising has no effect on me’ is true is difficult to establish independently. We become more confident about the truth only through the passage of time and more specifically, through accumulated evidence. The evidence gathered increases our confidence of the claim of the truth value of the proposition, but does not prove it. The problem is that of induction where a number of instances may increase our confidence that some proposition is true, but they cannot prove irrefutably the truth of the proposition.
As a corollary to the role of justification as a proxy for truth, justification serves as a means of emphasizing our belief. A justification is however, just another belief, a belief about a belief. A justification, like the belief in a proposition, is a value-judgment, it is subjective and personal. Adding a belief about what justifies the first belief leads us to an infinite regress. Better to simply accept that the first belief is a direct personal experience, and cannot be questioned.
The insufficiency of justification
The Internet Encyclopaedia of Philosophy states that: “Not all true beliefs constitute knowledge; only true beliefs arrived at in the right way constitute knowledge.”[1] The assertion begs the question as to what is the ‘right way’? Arguing that only certain methods (as argued in reliabilism[2]) give us knowledge has a long history – with repeated failures. For instance, Galileo’s effort to show heliocentrism was denied as the telescope was dismissed as an unacceptable method of demonstrating his claims. However, as Arthur C. Clarke said, “Any advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
Introspection is a method that is generally dismissed in psychology today – even while William James’ highly regarded contributions to the field were typically based on this approach. In the study of customer psychology today, there are two approaches to generating knowledge known as quantitative and qualitative. Quantitative research typically relies on complex statistical analyses about which many will argue or even reject as akin to “lies.” Qualitative research is rejected by many as lacking in rigour, validity and reliability.
If someone states their belief and justifies it based on voices or a vision, many would be prone to dismiss any claim for that proposition being knowledge. People arguing on the basis of a hunch or intuition might be similarly dismissed. However, there are parts of accepted knowledge today which appear to have come from essentially these types of sources. The chemist Kekulé claims that he realized that the benzene molecule was a closed-ring structure after seeing a snake swallowing its own tail during a daydream[3].
The field of psychology suggests that the explanations that people give for their behaviour are often constructed after the fact and only on questioning[4]. That is, justification follows belief, and is constructed in the way of backward reasoning[5] and / or self interest[6]. We humans dedicate a lot of energy to explaining tragedies such as air disasters (e.g., Challenger), mass murderers (e.g., the Virginia Tech massacre in 2007), and terrorism (e.g., 9-11). While post-event justifications may comfort humans, the ability of these justifications to establish knowledge appears to be dubious.
Another example of backward reasoning is argument by vindication. People may argue from subsequent evidence that their belief served them appropriately, and is therefore vindicated. However, if a person carries an umbrella every day, one day they will be vindicated for doing so. This reasoning puts me in mind of the bumper sticker, “Just ‘cos you’re paranoid doesn’t mean that people aren’t out to get you.”
Justification in rhetoric
While the justification does not add to knowledge, it certainly helps in the communication of knowledge. For example, essays with strong reasons are far more compelling than those with poor reasons. However, powerful rhetoric does not constitute truth. Marketing communications and advertising are designed to persuade people, and provide justification for people to do so. The question of whether the belief is correctly aligned with truth is not important to rhetoric – something useful for the gullible to bear in mind.
Justification and meta-knowledge
If knowledge is based on only two conditions, truth and belief, can we know anything or are we left with the morass suggested by Donald Rumsfeld’s quote at the beginning of this essay? Justification appears to help resolve the problem of meta-knowledge. Justification increases our confidence that our belief is aligned with the truth by providing justification. It does not give us knowledge as noted earlier; but it makes us feel more comfortable that we know what we think we know.
Like truth on which it depends, knowledge is unknowable in an absolute sense. However, we are generally confident that we have ‘knowledge’, and accept that knowledge will be revised from time to time. Happily and encouragingly, the knowledge we operate on appears to work for us most of the time, much like the problem of induction is not a major concern for the pragmatist.
How do we live with the idea that knowledge is unknowable? In much the same way that we are unable to comprehend infinity.
My views are to some extent in accord with those of Feyeraband[7]. In a sense, I see that the development of knowledge is an ongoing movement of belief towards truth – whether the justifications are good or not. People once justified the existence of the earth and life on one or more gods; some still do. Others (e.g., Richard Dawkins, Douglas Adams (of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy fame, etc.) prefer to rely on a theory derived from the notion of evolution. Given the objective of philosophy is often to elevate ‘reason’ to a supreme place, it is not surprising perhaps that justification should count as important in the definition of knowledge. However, as stated by Feyerabrand in the last chapter of Against Method (1975), “Praise of argument takes it for granted that the artifices of Reason give better results than the unchecked play of our emotions.”
In practical terms, I believe that we must accept the ‘truth’ of some proposition on a perpetual conditional basis. That is, we accept the truth for the moment, but we may have to revise this in light of disconfirming evidence (as proposed by Popper). Therefore, while we can talk of the ‘truth’ of a proposition, it would appear to me that the truth of any proposition is unknowable and cannot be independently established. Nevertheless, it does seem appropriate to me that knowledge is defined as those beliefs which are true – regardless of the justification given.
[2] Prof. Alvin Goldman, See Alvin Goldman "justification, epistemic" The Oxford Companion to Philosophy.
http://www.oxfordreference.com/views/ENTRY.html?subview=Main&entry=t116.e1304
[3] http://www.chemsoc.org/timeline/pages/1864_benzene.html & http://www.brilliantdreams.com/product/famous-dreams.htm
[4] For example, there is an extensive and sometimes horrifying literature on the construction of memories - see
[5] A recent article in the NY Times suggests that Kekulé’s account of developing the benzene ring through a dream is a fiction created by Kekulé and others. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=940DE4DF113BF935A2575BC0A96E948260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=1
[6] Clifford, William K., The Ethics of Belief, originally published in Contemporary Review, 1877, now available on the internet : http://www.infidels.org/library/historical/w_k_clifford/ethics_of_belief.html
[7] http://www.cavehill.uwi.edu/bnccde/ph29a/feyerabe.htm,
