What does it mean to "know" something? It sounds like a simple question until you really think about it.
If a friend told you she had solved a math problem that only a handful of people in the world could solve, and you weren't one of them, would you know if her solution was correct? If a psychic medium accurately described an event from your childhood after telling you she was communicating with your deceased grandmother, would you know whether she was telling the truth? You read a news report about a man that was shot and killed by a police officer after an altercation. The officer alleges that the man threatened to shoot him as he reached into his jacket pocket, however, the man was unarmed and there were no other eyewitnesses: could you ever know what really happened?
COVID Earthquake Source: Lisa A. Cottone / Mind Cube 3D The study of knowledge has a big fancy name: epistemology. It's a word that few people know, but more people are learning by the day. Why? Because the COVID-19 earthquake exposed a fault line just below the surface of our reality, revealing much of our "knowledge" to be a socially constructed illusion. Don't believe me? Consider the following example:
You want to visit your mother, whom you haven't seen in months, but you worry about a persistent cough you've had for two weeks. So you get the COVID-19 nasal swab test and your results come back negative. Great! You can now feel safe knowing that you don't have the virus and you can visit your mother... or so you think.
After telling your mother the good news she forwards you an article about how the COVID-19 nasal swab test has a high rate of false negatives. Just to add more confusion, you get a follow-up call from the doctor you saw at the walk-in clinic and he tells you that while your test results are negative, he still believes that your symptoms are consistent with COVID-19.
Bewildered, you turn on the TV and your favorite cable news channel is reporting that several states recently changed the criteria for what counts as a valid COVID-19 test, allegedly, to lower the number of "infected cases" so people feel safe to go outside again and bolster the economy. But then a friend sends you a link to the popular "Plandemic" video on YouTube, which suggests that doctors are being encouraged to overdiagnose COVID-19 because their facilities are getting government kickbacks for each COVID-19 case they treat.
Eggs Source: CongerDesign / Pixabay What are the facts? What do you know?
Each day presents us with a buffet of decisions we need to make about things that, if we are honest with ourselves, we don't actually know about. Even a simple question like, "Is it healthy to eat an egg every day?" can send you down a rabbit hole for weeks.
Sure, we can search the internet for information to help us answer these questions, but information, itself, is not knowledge. Information is just a collection of data, and data can be gathered in ways that are either valid or invalid; reliable or unreliable; honest, or fraudulent. And if you don't have expertise in a particular subject (like biomedical research) or have firsthand experience with something reported in the news, how much can you really know about the information underlying your decisions?
In the absence of knowledge, people rely on something else that is usually relegated to the realm of religion: faith. Knowledge and faith go hand-in-hand because when we don't know about something directly, we accept as knowledge the information we get from individuals and institutions that we have faith in. But what if those individuals and institutions have made mistakes in the past, or worse, have been accused of corruption?
THE BASICSToday we are mired in a crisis of faith because so many of our heroes, and virtually all of our institutions (e.g., government, journalism, science, and religion), have not only made significant mistakes but also have a history of scandals, whittling away at our faith in them. As a result, we are left not only to doubt the most prominent heroes and institutions of our culture but the existence of facts and knowledge itself. In short, we have been pushed off a cliff and into an epistemological freefall.
Debates about epistemology are not new. Our teachers and textbooks tell us that philosophers have argued for centuries about what it means to know something and what makes knowledge distinct from belief. But the COVID-19 pandemic, which has emerged at a time of ubiquitous media, and in a world awash in conspiracy theories, has made these debates much more consequential as we struggle to make each life-and-death decision that confronts us.
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How Political Partisanship Can Be Deadly Getting back to the F-word, faith as a common practice is crucial for the advancement of our civilization because in our short lifetimes the amount of knowledge we can acquire from direct, personal experience is small and limited. In this way, faith is essential for us to lead healthy, functional lives. When an individual is completely devoid of faith, the resulting condition is one of paralyzing paranoia. On the other hand, we must recognize that faith and belief are not the same as knowledge; and if we are honest with ourselves, we must concede that most of the things we think we know are really just beliefs, bolstered by the information given to us by the people and institutions we have faith in.
Socrates Source: C Messier / Wikimedia Commons As I conclude the first part of this series, I must confess, there isn't a day that goes by that I don't find myself empathizing with the sentiment behind the famous saying attributed to Socrates: "I know that I know nothing." As such, it came as no surprise that there is a longstanding debate among Plato scholars about whether Socrates actually said this. Of course, since I acquired these "facts" from an article on Wikipedia, I can't claim to know any of this to be true.
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I invite you to read Part 2 of my What Do You Know? series, which focuses on the benefits and limitations of a scientific approach to acquiring knowledge.