WHAT IS KNOWLEDGE?

This is a short statement of my current thinking about this issue, and is subject to change without notice. Please feel free to share your input.

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What is knowledge? Anyone? I didn’t think so.

Knowledge is one of those concepts that is both intuitively obvious and hopelessly baffling. Thanks to an assault by modern philosophy, anyone who ventures to say he knows something is quickly beaten down as hopelessly naive. Even many Objectivists are not clear on the concept; they accept modern philosophy’s definition of knowledge as, “Justified true belief.” I am convinced that definition is false.

To my knowledge, there is no official Objectivist position regarding this question; but I do, of course, have my own views on the matter. As I will explain, I do not think knowledge is a species of belief. Rather, knowledge is a species of awareness. To understand why, let’s start by examining the concept “belief.”

Roughly, a belief is a proposition or idea someone thinks is true. But we aren’t born with propositions or ideas; how, then, do we arrive at them? In a word: conceptualization.

Our first concepts are formed directly from percepts, based on observed similarities and differences among concretes. Under normal circumstances, the process of forming these first concepts is automatic and infallible. Once we form a sufficient number of lower-level concepts, we start to organize them into our first propositions, i.e., statements about reality. Usually these are simple self-evidencies, such as “There’s Mommy.” At each step, from the perceptual level, where our knowledge is only implicit, to the beginnings of the conceptual level, and then our first propositions, what we have is knowledge: unquestionable, self-evident knowledge.

At this level, we have no concept of true and false. There’s simply stuff we know, and stuff we don’t. Only when we start to make higher-level generalizations do we discover that our mental contents are not automatically correct; only then can we learn to distinguish between true and false ideas. But when we first learn to distinguish between the true and the false, we do so only in regard to our own mental contents. It doesn't yet occur to us that our parents aren't omniscient.

But then we discover that some questions aren't settled (i.e., that people disagree about certain ideas). Some of these disagreements, we notice, are based on a particular individual’s ignorance. For example, Dad says to Mom, “It’s Thursday; why didn’t you buy groceries?” and Mom says to Dad, “It’s the first of the month; I had to take Johnny to the doctor.” “Oh, that’s right,” Dad says, “I forgot.”

Other disagreements, however, are different. They are expressive of human ignorance, or more precisely, people accepting ideas about which man is ignorant. It’s not that anyone lacks any specific piece of information – everyone lacks the information necessary to reach a conclusion, and yet accepts and expresses an idea as to what conclusion is true. This is where we finally get the concept of belief.

Usually the first units of the concept “belief” are people of different religions. “Danny wonders how come we don’t go to Church,” we ask our Jewish parents. “Because,” Mom says, “Danny’s family is Christian, so they go to Church, whereas we’re Jewish and go to temple. Danny’s family believes that Jesus was the son of God. We do not.” Even then, we’re still not clear on the concept “belief.” That will usually come the next day when we tell Danny that Jesus wasn’t the son of God, and Danny’s parents explain to us that people believe different things, and neither is “right” or “wrong.”

And thus we get to what a belief is. A belief, in my view, is an idea accepted on faith. It is an idea on which people disagree with one another, not because one person claims to have evidence the other lacks, but because evidence is either unavailable or superfluous. In a world where no one accepted ideas on faith, I do not think the concept “belief" would arise (or, at least, it wouldn't be used with regards to ideas).

I do not, therefore, think that knowledge is a species of belief. A belief takes the same form as knowledge (it is expressed as a proposition), but it is different in kind: a belief is to knowledge as having sex with a hooker is to sleeping with one’s spouse. It may look the same from a distance, but in fact it's fundamentally different.

The genus of “belief,” then, is “idea.” The differentia is “faith.” A belief is an idea accepted on faith.

Knowledge, on the other hand, is a species of awareness. It is a particular kind of awareness: awareness that something is, or awareness of why it is. Knowledge, in other words, is awareness of identity or causality. To be clear, I'm not talking specifically about the concepts of identity and causality. Rather, I'm saying knowledge consists of awareness of specific identities and specific causal connections.

Let’s pause on this concept of “awareness.” Awareness, in my view, is an axiomatic concept; basically, it’s a restatement of “consciousness.” Because it is axiomatic, we cannot define “awareness” but we can identify forms of awareness: thinking, remembering, perceiving, etc. Each of those forms of awareness has some content, it’s awareness of something. The content of awareness comprises the units of the concept “knowledge.” To be clear: our knowledge isn't "knowledge of our awareness," but knowledge of things, things that comprise the content of our awareness. [There's much more to be said on these points, particularly regarding the distinction between conceptual awareness and perceptual awareness.]

So knowledge is awareness of reality. On the conceptual level, that awareness is not automatic, as it is on the perceptual level. You have to reach it by means of a certain method. That method, logic (in the Objectivist sense of the word), yields contextual knowledge. So long as you adhere to the method, what you have is knowledge.

But you aren't infallible - you can make mistakes. A mistake, or an error, is a deviation from the correct method. The only way to correct that error is to remain committed to the correct method, and so long as you do that you are justified in claiming that what you have is knowledge.

Now, someone might say to you, "Ah, but you just admitted that you can err, that you can deviate from the correct method. So how can you say that what you have is knowledge, when you may have deviated from the correct method?" The answer to that is: the burden of proof principle. Unless he can point to your error, he has no basis to claim you made one. He has no basis to claim you *may* have made one. He has no basis to claim it is possible you made one.

Omniscience cannot be the standard of knowledge. A fact inherent in man's consciousness cannot be used to undermine it.

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UPDATE: Many thanks to Ken for directing my attention towards this essay, which makes the same point I make above. I'll have more to say on all these matters soon.

Ayn Rand on Love

"Love is a response to values. It is with a person's sense of life that one falls in love - with that essential sum, that fundamental stand or way of facing existence, which is the essence of a personality. One falls in love with the embodiment of the values that formed a person's character, which are reflected in his widest goals or smallest gestures, which create the style of his soul - the individual style of a unique, unrepeatable, irreplaceable consciousness. It is one's own sense of life that acts as the selector, and responds to what it recognizes as one's own basic values in the person of another. It is not a matter of professed convictions (though these are not irrelevant); it is a matter of much more profound, conscious and subconscious harmony" (Romantic Manifesto 32).

"The actual emotion would be experienced precisely as an extreme awareness of the other person, which is the essence of falling in love. The conclusion conveys just that: 'and the sight was its own meaning and purpose, with no further end to reach.' This is the extreme state of being in love, where the issue is not sex, or any purpose, but (to put it colloquially) only the awareness that the loved one exists - which then fills the whole world" (The Art of Fiction 97).

"The most exclusive form - romantic love - is not an issue of competition. If two men are in love with the same woman, what she feels for either of them is not determined by what she feels for the other and is not taken away from him. If she chooses one of them, the 'loser' could not have had what the 'winner' has earned" (Virtue of Selfishness 55).

"To say 'I love you' one must first know how to say the 'I'" (Somewhere in The Fountainhead).

Precise language and Philosophy

From an email I wrote to a friend, which may or may not be of general interest.

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Most people do not speak or write with much precision, even those who see the value of it and would honestly like to. One of the reasons that's so is because they do not understand what precision means. And that's because they don't understand what words are.

Words are symbols – visual-auditory concretes we use to retain concepts. Concepts are mental existents that mean the concretes they subsume. For example, "cat" is a word that denotes our concept [cat] which means all the actual cats that have existed, that exist, and that will exist.

What, then, are definitions? In essence, they are short hand tags we use to keep our concepts distinct from each other, enabling us to identify the units of our concepts. A definition is made of two elements: a genus and a differentia. The genus relates the concept to the other concepts most closely associated with it; the differentia names the fundamental distinguishing characteristic, i.e., the characteristic that most distinguishes the units of the concept from other similar units.

What are some implications of the above? First, precision means using words that denote exactly the concretes -- the things in reality -- you intend to refer to. If your concepts are not tied to concretes, a definition isn't going to help you. A definition is only as good as the concepts that make it up.

But there's more. Let's say that your concepts are generally reality based, then while reading Ayn Rand, you encounter a new term, say, "reason." "Reason," she writes, "is the faculty that identifies and integrates the material provided by man's senses." Even if you understand every word in that definition, you do not yet understand what reason is. In order to fully grasp that definition, you yourself need to retrace the process Rand went through to form it: You must understand of the nature of perception; the nature of concept formation; the principles of logic, including reduction and integration. You need to know what reason is being distinguished from, namely emotions, and what they are. Reason must stand in your mind, not as a word defined by other words, but a thing in reality. The words (or, more exactly, the concepts denoted by the words) are merely your way of isolating that thing for individualized study.

To reach this level of clarity, your knowledge must be hierarchically organized. You need to identify your fundamentals, and be able to trace all later knowledge back to those fundamentals. I'm speaking here, not just of validating your knowledge, but of validating your concepts (see Rand's discussion of how to do this in her non-fiction writing lectures).

To make matters worse, thanks to modern philosophy, modern education ... hell ... modern everything, anyone attempting to do this from scratch is going to run into cases where he can't tie some of his concepts to reality. That's because they aren't based on reality. Concepts like "God," and anti-concepts such as "tolerance," and "extremism," will cloud up his mental processes. Legitimate words with non-objective connotations, such as "selfishness" and "capitalism" will trip him up as well.

The point is this: the clarification of one's language has to take place as one learns Objectivism - it can't precede that process. In many ways, that makes spreading Objectivism easier, because as you press someone to clarify his terms, assuming he's honest, he will naturally find himself more in line with reality and therefore more in line with the philosophy that corresponds to reality.

CHEWING OBJECTIVISM

"Chewing" was Ayn Rand's term for the process of taking an abstract idea and breaking it down, i.e., identifying its meaning, validation, implications, suppositions - its relationship to reality. An example would be something like what I did below on the human need for moral principles (although a full chewing would require much more work).

In any case, I've decided that my new project will be using this blog to chew various issues in Objectivism. The end result will be, I hope, a rich online resource for various Objectivist ideas. Of course, to see the ideas in their full glory, meaning, and percision, there is only one place to go: Ayn Rand's own works. To see the ideas in their full hierarchical context, there is only one place to go: Leonard Peikoff's book, Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand.

Here are some of the ideas I'm interested in chewing:

-Life as the standard of value
-The virtues of justice, honesty, integrity
-The initiation of force as evil
-Individual rights
-Why one must never sanction evil
-Certainty as contextual
-Altruism as the morality of death
-The moral basis for egoism
-Emotions as responses to value judgments
-The principle that the interests of rational men don't conflict

If I missed anything you think would be worth chewing, let me know.

WHY ACT ON PRINCIPLE?

What the heck is it about Objectivists that makes us so daft? How can we demand adherence to principles and at the same time uphold egoism? Can’t we see that sometimes it is in our interest to violate our principles?

This question comes up, in one form or another, all the time. Why, proponents of the anti-principle view wonder, shouldn’t an egoist, say, rob a helpless old lady if the monetary reward is huge and there is little chance of getting caught?

Why indeed. The answer, to put it simply, is man’s need for principles. But of course that’s hardly simple. Very few people today take moral principles seriously. On the contrary, “No one is perfect,” is considered self-evident; it is said, not in shame, but with a hint of pride, even superiority, as if the highest moral virtue was to claim that virtue is impossible.

Objectivism disagrees with that view. It upholds the principle of being principled, of pursuing one’s own moral perfection. The issue isn’t about achieving some angelic state. Rather, it’s about achieving within one’s own soul and with one’s own character that state that results in success, happiness, self-confidence, self-esteem: the maintenance of one’s life.

A man who lives by principles is like a law of nature. Like an apple that falls to the ground every time it is dropped, he conforms to reality one hundred percent. Such an achievement is not an indulgence, but a requirement of life.

What I want to do is discuss in depth man’s need for moral principles, taking a careful look at how the principle that man should be principled can be justified and how it is to be applied. At the end, we should be able to see clearly why questions like the ones above are not difficult to answer – on the contrary, we will wonder how people can ask such questions.

I’ll be taking for granted the basis of the Objectivist ethics. I will be assuming we’ve discussed and proven Rand’s derivation of ought from is, value from life. Our question will be: given that life is the standard of morality, and the furtherance of one’s own life is the goal, what specifically must we do to achieve that goal?

One further word. A significant portion of this post is taken from my lengthy response to a critique of the Objectivist ethics by John Ku, so if you read that and digested it completely, feel free to skip this.

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How do we determine what is to our interest? What does “self-interest” mean? The answer is not self-evident. Right now, the fact I am typing on my computer is self-evident – the fact that doing so furthers my interests is not.

The first thing to be said about our interests is that we don’t pursue them automatically. From the drug addict who wastes away over the course of years, to the man whose death comes immediately though suicide, human beings have the capacity to act self-destructively. To achieve our interests, we have to identify those interests and choose to act in their favor.

To accomplish this, we can’t act on the range of the moment. Our interests have to be defined long range. Even a relatively simple task like baking a cake cannot be performed without long-range attention. We have to buy the cake’s ingredients, follow the recipe, etc. We could not throw random ingredients together in the hopes an edible product would turn out.

The need to act long-range becomes even more urgent as the end we are attempting to achieve becomes more expansive, more fundamental, and more complicated. Life is the ultimate end, the most fundamental goal we can choose to pursue. How long-range must we act, then, to pursue life?

Writes Ayn Rand:

Man cannot survive, like an animal, by acting on the range of the moment. An animal’s life consists of a series of separate cycles, repeated over and over again, such as the cycle of breeding its young, or of storing food for the winter; an animal’s consciousness cannot integrate its entire lifespan; it can carry just so far, then the animal has to begin the cycle all over again, with no connection to the past. Man’s life is a continuous whole: for good or evil, every day, year and decade of his life holds the sum of all the days behind him. He can alter his choices, he is free to change the direction of his course, he is even free, in many cases, to atone for the consequences of his past – but he is not free to escape them, nor to live his life with impunity on the range of the moment, like an animal, or a playboy or a thug. If he is to succeed at the task of survival, if his actions are not to be aimed at his own destruction, man has to choose his course, his actions, his goals, his values in the context and terms of a lifetime (VOS 26).

That is what it means to live man qua man – it means to act in such a way as to promote our long-term survival, in terms of our total lifespan. If we accepted a billion dollars for allowing the military to use us for target practice next week, no one would say our interests were served because today we are a billion dollars richer. Our interests are determined in the context of a lifetime.

In a lot of ways, that’s obvious, but what’s less obvious is how we can discharge such a massive responsibility. Every day we make hundreds, perhaps thousands of choices, from what to wear, to what to eat, with whom to sleep, etc. How could we ever hope to identify the consequences of each of those choices – not only today’s consequences, but also the direct and indirect consequences each of those choices will have on our entire lifespan?

The answer, in a word, is: principles. “A principle,” says Rand, “is ‘a fundamental, primary, or general truth, on which other truths depend’” (CUI 144). Moral principles are fundamental conceptual integrations that identify life-promoting courses of action. Moral principles will not tell us whether to wear a coat in the winter, or whether to eat fewer carbohydrates, or whether to read lengthy blog entries. Rather, they will identify the basic framework within which we will make our own choices, in the service of our own life and happiness.

Notice that moral principles are not merely means of pursuing our interests – they are the only way we can determine our interests. Without principles, there is no way to determine whether a given action benefits our life or harms it.

While it is outside the scope of this essay to discuss which moral principles Objectivism endorses, I must at least mention that Objectivism recognizes rationality as the fundamental virtue. Our means of survival is our mind; rationality is the virtue of using our mind, of reaching conclusions by reason, and acting on the basis of those conclusions. But rationality is an extremely broad abstraction. In order to be of real practical value, it needs to be broken down into derivative virtues. Objectivism recognizes six primary derivative virtues: independence, integrity, honesty, justice, productiveness, and pride.

So we need moral principles because we have no other means of determining our long-range interests. But why, one still may wonder, do we have to adhere to principles all the time? Can’t we make exceptions once in a while? To put it another way: must we always pursue our self-interest? Can’t we pursue self-destruction some of the time? No one states the question in this form, of course. No one asks, “Can I jump from the Brooklyn Bridge once in a while?” Or, “Can’t I cut my head off sometimes?” Or, “Why can’t I occasionally drink poison?” In such cases, the destructive results are too clear.

Our needs vary in urgency. Our need for food is not as urgent as our need for water. Our need for water is not as urgent as our need for air. It does not follow, however, that because we might live if we do not eat today, we do not have to eat in order to live. Nor does it follow that we are better off if we do not eat today, even if we happen to remain alive. In the same way, the fact we are not struck dead by a bolt of lightening for telling a lie, does not destroy the fact that honesty is a need of human survival, and it does not destroy the fact that we are worse off when we are dishonest then when we are honest. Long range needs are as real as our more urgent ones, and just as vital.

Life cannot benefit from anti-life action, and we cannot survive through anti-life means. It’s true, a single moral breach may not necessarily result in automatic death, and moral action does not guarantee continued life. But in neither case does this disprove the necessity of moral consistency. Since we are not omniscient, adhering to life-promoting principles does not guarantee we will survive – it merely gives us the best chance. To get that best chance, our commitment must be to walking the path of rationality, to identifying to the best of our ability which actions our principles demand of us in a particular case – not to taking any random path on the premise that since we aren’t infallible, reason is impotent and no choice is better than any other.

To make this point fully clear, imagine you are playing blackjack. It is in your interest to stay if you have twenty, even if the next card in the deck is an ace. Why? Because you don’t know the next card is an ace. To win at blackjack requires, more than anything, that you act rationally. Sure, if you hit on twenty, you might get lucky and get an ace, but that doesn’t make hitting on twenty a good decision.

In this sense, life is like blackjack – you cannot think in terms of any one hand, or even any one session. What matters is how much money you come away with at the end of the year. And the only way to come away with money is play well (to make good decisions based on principles) – not to try to beat the odds. Or, dropping the analogy, a good decision is one made on principle, whether or not you could have “escaped the consequences” of violating the principle, and whether or not, through unforeseen circumstances, following that principle led to harm.

What, specifically, is involved in violating our moral principles? One of the facts proponents of the anti-principled viewpoint evade is that violating a principle is not like walking down a path, taking a detour, and rejoining the path a couple miles later. To violate a principle is to stop, turn around, and march in the other direction – it is to embrace the opposite principle.

Writes Leonard Peikoff:

The power of the good is enormous, but depends on its consistency. That is why the good as to be an issue of “all or nothing,” “black or white,” and why evil has to be partial, occasional, “gray.” Observe that a “liar” in common parlance is not a man who always, conscientiously, tells falsehoods; there is not such creature; for the term to apply to a person, a few whoppers on his part is enough. Just as a “hypocrite” is a not a man who scrupulously betrays every idea he holds. Just as a “burglar” is not a man who steals every item of property he sees. Just as a person is a “killer” if he respects human life 99.9 per cent of the time and hires himself out to the Mafia as an executioner only now and then.

To be evil “only sometimes” is to be evil. To be good is to be good all of the time, i.e., as a matter of consistent, unbreached principle (OPAR 266).

Even if we can “get away” with violating a principle on a given occasion, any supposed gain that results is not truly a gain. No particular value can be as important as our ongoing ability to create, achieve, protect, defend, and enjoy our values. When we violate our principles, however, that is exactly what we’re sacrificing. We stop following the path of life, and start heading down the path of death. To violate our principles is no more in our interest than is cutting off our head to cure a headache.

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We’ve seen in abstract terms why we must act on principle. Let us now concretize that understanding with an example.

Two kids, Cindy and Billy, take a test. Cindy studies hard and learns the material. Billy doesn’t study, and on the day of the exam, decides to cheat. Did Billy benefit from dishonesty (a major virtue in Objectivism)?

Cindy does not have to worry that the “A” will be taken from her. She is able to take pride in her achievement, knowing she earned the “A”. When her teacher and parents congratulate her for her success, she will not feel like a fraud. She will have gained a sense of the efficacy of her own mind, looking forward to tackling new and more difficult problems. When the next test or the next course comes, she will have the requisite knowledge needed to succeed once again. Her conviction that effort is the means to achievement will be reinforced, and her knowledge of what kind of effort is required (i.e., how to study) will be clear. She will be able to apply the knowledge she gained in studying for the test to her life and perhaps her future career. All her energy is directed towards the furtherance of her life. Achieving this particular value has better enabled her to achieve future values.

What about Billy? For one, had he been caught, he would have failed the class and perhaps gotten kicked out of school. But even having “gotten away with it”, Billy will know he did not earn his grade and thus will not experience the sense of pride that comes only from achievement. Instead, he will feel like a fraud. He will also be unprepared for the next test. But that’s okay, he says to himself, he’ll simply cheat again. He thereby puts himself on a course at odds with reality, having to rely on his teacher’s ignorance, on her inability to monitor for cheating, on his ability to lie, cheat, and deceive. His focus is no longer on expanding his knowledge and thus his ability to deal with reality. Instead, he is focused on his ability to deceive people, and must expend considerable effort to do so, effort that will not aid his life, but will drain the resources he needs to pursue his values and sustain his life.

Even if he gets away with it during this one class, he will not be able to take another course in the subject. He will not be able to apply what he should have learned but didn’t to his life. Furthermore, how will he convince himself to stand by his principles in other aspects of his life? After all, if he got away with it once, why not again?

The best Billy can hope for is to re-establish his principles and refuse to deviate from them in the future. But even if he does this, he has already paid a price well in excess to whatever the unearned “A” was worth. He must start his pursuit of life anew, uncertain of his ability to stay committed to the principles he knows he must embrace. He must reacquire the knowledge he missed during the first test, while struggling to keep up with the new material he has to learn. He must begin the slow process of earning a sense of self-esteem.

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Principled action is like earning compound interest on an investment, where every gain makes possible ever-greater future gains. Unprincipled action, on the other hand, is like trying to make a living by playing roulette, where short-term success is a threat because it puts us on a course that must end in long-term failure. In fact, a more apt analogy for unprincipled living would be: playing Russian roulette.