Chapter Two; Page 11

Classy Connections

What is “knowledge?” The word, in most languages, refers to a large, amorphous concept of great importance. We conduct virtually all aspects of our lives in accordance with what we call our knowledge, so what is it, where does it come from, and how reliable can we expect it to be? This matter is going to take some sorting out.

“Knowledge about knowledge” is one whole branch of philosophy called epistemology or knowledge theory. Ferocious debates have raged in this realm, some spanning centuries. The philosophy of the 20th century placed great emphasis on the role of language in the formation of knowledge, as we shall examine later, and this cleared away some of the confusion that had plagued previous discussions of knowledge. Then language analysis entered a stage of tedious decadence as it went too far, becoming a plague itself.

Where do we start? Well, we can use some basic ideas to begin to formulate an operational definition. The 20th century philosophers agreed that rational knowledge can be reduced to linguistic statements or propositions. Subject/predicate structure, grammar, and syntax all can influence our statements in crucial, technical ways, so that language can skew the form and format of knowledge. In order to deal with the substance of our problems about knowledge, we will confine this inquiry to the Indo-European languages that spawned Western philosophy. Western philosophy was phrased in Greek and Latin, and later French, English, German, and to some extent, Russian. As a practical matter, modern philosophy that is now most influential is either written in English or translated into English. (We are excluding from our discussion any type of motor skill “knowledge,” such as athletic ability, learned or innate. If there is a verbal component to this capability, that part might be included as linguistic knowledge.)

So if knowledge is reduced to statements and propositions, what form might these take? Suppose that all knowledge was phrased in singular statements, that is, statements about individual objects and events, without much connection among them. The plural form of most nouns would be eliminated; so that, for instance, we would not talk about glass jars but would refer only to this jar or that jar as singular, stand-alone phenomena. Every object or event would have to be remembered and cataloged as a separate item in our knowledge system, so the need for memory capacity would be enormous, and indeed would exceed the organic memory each of us possesses, by powers of ten. If we had to cope with reality, that is, everything we might encounter in our environment, by means of a knowledge system limited to singular statements, we would always fail miserably. We might readily argue that any animal that was restricted to this type of behavior would have a tough time in life, but this point is not crucial to our needs.

Whether it is normal animal behavior or only normal human behavior, we have a natural, automatic tendency to group singular experiences (represented by statements) into classes along the basis of some common features. Words like “all,” “most,” “some,” “none,” “always,” “never,” etc., come into our language to help organize the singular statements into a knowledge system of categories and classes. By doing this we save ourselves a great deal of memory effort. Once connections among singular statements are established, it is no longer necessary, for example, to refer to each tree of the thousands of trees in that patch of landscape over yonder as an individual…now we can refer to the “forest.” We do this with numbers and with words. “This forest is composed of about 2000 trees.” If we want to deal with each tree individually, we can, but for many purposes the connecting classifier “forest” is all we need. Similarly, by using classes and connections we can make simplifying statements about all the glass jars in the pantry with a connecting classifier when we caution, “Watch out! Those jars will break when they hit the floor.” It is no longer necessary to make a singular statement for each jar interacting with each floor. Connecting and classifying definitely saves us some time and lots of memory.

So, in a most important sense, knowledge is defined as the ability to connect singular statements into classes. These classes might be formed by positive and inclusive statements, as in the old saw, “All swans are white,” or “The natural color of every swan is white,” or negative and exclusive statements, like, “No swans are blue,” or “You will never find a naturally blue swan.” All of these statements create classes and group our experiences, and if these statements prove to be accurate (two are not; black swans exist) and correspond with all or even most (high probability) of our future experiences with swans, we have created a powerful device for understanding swan color with just a few words. The amount of memory needed to relate to swan color has been vastly reduced, compared with the huge number of singular statements that would be needed to speak of the color of each and every individual swan.

The formation of knowledge is the formation of classes. Once we understand this, it is easy enough to see the troubles that lie ahead. Consider Class A. Who’s in? Who’s out? What’s in? What’s excluded? Under what circumstances can we group these events together? When does this class fall apart? Are there exceptions to this class rule? Etc. We have saved ourselves enormous effort and memory capacity by forming classes, but the hard work has just begun, because now we have to try to classify all reality.

One conclusion seems pretty clear at the outset. Singular statements, also called “atomic statements,” might be quite important in everyday life, but they are generally without any philosophic importance and are commonly referred to as trivial statements. In this sense epistemological philosophy can be identified as a study of the process of judging classes that come about from grouping singular statements. You might tell me, “My roommate’s name is Brenda Smith.” That singular statement might be very important to the taxman, to the college registrar, and to Brenda herself, but there is no philosophy to consider here. Philosophically speaking, who cares? On the other hand, if you say, “All the roommates named Brenda have criminal tendencies and cannot be trusted,” you have created a class or two, and now it is the function of philosophic knowledge theory to offer criteria to use in judging how well the classes you have created correspond to reality.

The bigger and more momentous the class you might try to create, the more it impacts philosophy and our other rational enterprise, science. When we have moved completely away from singular statements, and the classes of objects share properties to form classes of events, knowledge begins to be expressed as theories. The statement “All electrons carry a single negative charge,” is a real mouthful. What’s an electron? What is a negative charge? How do they carry the charge? No exceptions to the rule? Etc. And the problems get worse, especially with statements about entities and events much smaller, much larger and much more complex than the normal scale of human perception.

An important footnote. In their zeal to create “verifiable” statements, Wittgenstein, Schlick and other positivists sought to reduce knowledge to singular, “atomic” statements whenever possible. These are verifiable, whereas most universal statements are not. It is easy to see how they thus escaped many philosophic difficulties, but only by dismembering rational knowledge and philosophy in the process. Wittgenstein ultimately did an about-face in his life. He grew very disturbed in relation to his early work, repudiated the positivists and most philosophy, and by the end of his life had sought wordless refuge in a kind of mysticism (Monk 1990). (As the philosophic alliances of the 20th century shifted and sorted themselves out, Bertrand Russell, with whom Wittgenstein had been closely connected in his early career, snubbed him rather unjustly in 1945. In Russell’s publication of The History of Western Philosophy that year, Wittgenstein’s name does not appear, not even in the index.)

As we discuss how knowledge is formed and evaluated in the chapters ahead, we can use this basic realization as a starting point…knowledge formation begins by connecting singular statements into classes. Relationships emerge, and the relatively trivial singular statements connect to develop much more important statements about these classes and connections that have labor and memory saving capability. The positivists were right to consider the formation of universal statements (classes) to be tricky business, but still, the extent to which an organism can do this is the extent to which that organism can be said to form, have and store knowledge beyond the simple and the trivial.