How You Know, by Mel Acheson

[dream_weaver]

How You Know
by Mel Acheson
 
Another epistemological tour de force.
 
Mel opens his article with the fact that people do not pay much attention to “how” they know; they just start arguing about “what” they know. While building your life on a solid foundation of knowledge can provide a certain sense of security, Mr. Acheson sets course for more uncharted waters.
 
To him, the idea of “how” is disconcerting. Thinking about thinking undermined what he was looking for; a cognitive rock to stand on. His search for the “how” apparently left him with a floating feeling.
 
Is there much wonder in this floating sensation? If one’s metaphor for knowledge is buoyancy, are the abstractions from which it has been constructed from, simply floating? Continuing the metaphor, the cognitive boat can take you to new and exciting places, yet in the history of seamanship, navigating strange uncharted waters have also ended in peril.
 
For most folk building a life or a career, the “how” doesn’t seem to matter. In the sense that a carpenter doesn’t have to know how hammers are made in order to drive nails. This is true. The hammer manufacturers concern themselves with "how" hammers are made, and the carpenter purchases his tools based on Consumer’s Report recommendations or by the word of mouth reputations gathered from his peers.
 
Nor, according to Mr. Acheson, do scientists need to know how knowledge is made in order to build theories — after all, carpenters do not claim to be building Ultimate Truth.
 
Here’s the nitty-gritty.
 

The “how” has two parts, roughly corresponding to “production” and “marketing”. Individuals are constantly thinking up new ideas, exploring new things and looking at old things in new ways, testing the ideas and the observations against each other, judging how much sense it all makes. Then populations of individuals “buy” some of these ideas and pass up others. The ideas that most individuals “buy” become “accepted theories” and constitute knowledge.

 

The Ultimate Truth, according to this way of looking at it, is little more than a popularity contest. Apparently, a form of consensus is the “how” by which truth is determined.  
 

Disciplines can “relate” to each other, but one can’t “dictate” to another. “Reasonableness” is the relationship of a theory to the evidence it seeks to explain, not its subservience to physics.

 
Miss Rand cogently states in Galt’s Speech: 

 
"If I were to speak your kind of language, I would say that man's only moral commandment is: Thou shalt think. But a 'moral commandment' is a contradiction in terms. The moral is the chosen, not the forced; the understood, not the obeyed. The moral is the rational, and reason accepts no commandments.

 
Epistemology is the science devoted to the discovery of the proper methods of acquiring and validating knowledge. As such, it does not “dictate” or “command”, rather it identifies the fact that if knowledge is the goal, the “how” is achieved by following proper methods of acquiring and validating, delimited as:

 
the fundamental concept of method, the one on which all the others depend, is logic. The distinguishing characteristic of logic (the art of non-contradictory identification) indicates the nature of the actions (actions of consciousness required to achieve a correct identification) and their goal (knowledge)—while omitting the length, complexity or specific steps of the process of logical inference, as well as the nature of the particular cognitive problem involved in any given instance of using logic.

 
In the following paragraph, Mr. Acheson continues with:

 
The second interesting consequence concerns the many efforts to justify knowledge by starting with some simple element and building up all the rest. The brain works in just the opposite way: It starts with everything and narrows its focus to some simple thing. This has its usefulness, but along the way a lot gets discarded. When the process is reversed, what was discarded is likely to be ignored. The result is a picture of the universe that’s simplistic, reductive, incognizant.

 
Proper concept formation seeks to identify the essential characteristic(s). Rather than discarding anything, the process of integration with the rest of our knowledge requires that it be done so without contradiction. The result is a grasp of existence that is holistic, non-contradictory, fully cognizant with regard to all relevant, and essential facts.
 
In his closing remarks, Mr. Acheston informs his readers that the mechanism of knowledge can never satisfy the craving to justify or to establish the content of scientific knowledge on some absolute truth — it just doesn’t work that way.
 
Is he paying attention to “how” he knows, or just out “selling” an “accepted theory” based on “what” he knows? The destination of your chosen “cognitive boat” could very well depend on this.

Edited August 2, 2015 by dream_weaver

[jacassidy2]

Great analysis, thanks. Your take on this information is an additional reason in support of the view that understanding concept formation is critical to so many philosophical investigations.  Think about the history of western philosophy - an earlier explanation of concept formation would have pre-empted so many attempts to find an answer to replace religious mysticism.  So many thinkers were looking for a false aspect to human cognition - omniscience and infallibility.  In their absence, they could only see subjectivism and skepticism because they had no system to explain the nature of concepts.

[dream_weaver]

Think about the history of western philosophy - an earlier explanation of concept formation would have pre-empted so many attempts to find an answer to replace religious mysticism.

Aristotle has some passages, that when viewed in the hind-sight of Rand's explanation has a glimmering of similarity. Aristotle rose while the general culture was beginning its decline philosophically. Could his insights and contributions have been discovered under different conditions? Could Rand have made her observations about altruism and discovered egoism if examples of it were not abundantly available?

 

Obviously if history had unfolded in another way, things would be different. To understand in what ways it would differ would require that false aspect of human cognition—omniscience.

 

Thank you for your appreciation of my critique.