Member-only story
The Nature of Knowledge
Part 5 of ‘Surrender to the Mystery: On Knowing and the Power of Not Knowing.’
What is Knowledge?
Our relationship to words is the result of our relationship to the concepts they represent.
One result of this is that many people use the same words, but mean different things by them, which results in miscommunication and disconnection.
Relatively few people delve deeply into the concepts behind their words and so they have only a shallow understanding of the words they use.
When most people say they ‘know’ something, they are unaware of the fact that they are misusing the word and that they actually don’t know the thing they think they know.
Most people confuse knowledge with belief.
As someone who dearly wished to answer the big questions, knowing what it means ‘to know’, or ‘knowing how I can know I know’, or understanding ‘what actually can be known’ were all important questions for me.
Unfortunately they are not easily answered.
For that reason an entire branch of philosophy, Epistemology, is devoted to these basic questions.
As with most philosophical questions, there are no definitive answers, only different perspectives and millennia of debate.
After immersing myself in the subject, what I came to believe is, at the very least, ‘knowledge’ requires both truth and properly motivated certainty.
You can’t really be said to ‘know’ something that isn’t true. That’s clearly belief, or opinion, not knowledge.
Yet, if you aren’t sure that you know the truth of something that you believe then, even if it is a truthful belief, it would be hard to say that you really ‘know’ that thing, or how could you doubt it?
If you know something you should have a deep confidence in the truth of the thing you feel is true.
You should also have very good reason to feel certain of the truth of your belief, as the connection between the truth and your reason for being certain of that truth is critical, if it is to count as knowledge.
