How We Know What We Know

Where to start a series of articles about one of the most basic questions ever? This question is actually a juxtaposition of two different questions. On the one hand it could refer to the sort of show you might see on a documentary channel like Discovery. “How do we know that the Earth is round?” “How do we know that dinosaurs once roamed the planet?” “How do we know that when the refrigerator door is closed the light goes off?” That is a very practical kind of question inviting all manner of authoritative commentary bolstered by all sorts of evidence, all photogenic and shot in HD, of course.

But there is a second suite of issues to which the question might refer. When I was an undergraduate at Rice University in the 1970’s I became intrigued with epistemology, the branch of philosophy that concerns itself with the nature of knowledge. It is a fascinating topic. I took several classes, read books ranging from Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason,” to Kuhn’s “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,” to Pirsig’s “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” and I thought. The time was well spent but in the end two things bothered me: (1) After a few thousand years the philosophical community has yet to even reach a consensus on what knowledge is, much less on how to obtain it; and (2) There is often a huge gap between philosophers’ arguments and the answers to practical questions like, “Is it really a good idea to get on this airplane?”

Over the years that followed I earned a PhD in Space Physics and Astronomy, then went on to have an exciting and successful career as an astrophysicist working as part of teams responsible for the Hubble Space Telescope.  Along the way, though, I kept returning to that same question. “How do we know what we know?” But now my perspectives were rooted in hard experience and the question had changed to one of immediate and practical importance. “What is the best way to approach knowledge when that knowledge has real consequences?” It turns out that when posed in that fashion the question has real answers.

Here are a few things that I know:

1. There are questions about which our opinions simply do not matter. There is a world out there that exists independently of what we think is true. That world is sublimely indifferent to our opinions, our wishful thinking, or how loudly we shout at the audiences of cable news channels. You would think that this would go without saying, but it doesn’t.
2. Since the world doesn’t arrange itself to match our ideas it is up to us to arrange our ideas to better match the world. (Again, you would think this would be apparent.)
3. There are some practical rules for arriving at knowledge that work wildly better than others.
4. Most of the time people don’t apply those rules. In fact, people’s brains are programmed not to apply those rules. As a result a great deal of what people claim to “know” is, quite simply, wrong.
5. Point 4 is a damned shame because all of this matters and it matters a lot! Whether acting as individuals, corporations, governments, or anything in between, our biggest blunders are usually caused by confusing what is we think is true with what really is true.
6. In today’s world where things are changing at an ever-faster pace and the stakes always seem to be high those blunders increasingly bring with them a price that is higher than we can really afford to pay.

How We Know What We Know ^ A Personal Journey  © Dr. Jeff Hester
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