How do we know the things that we know?
In this article I propose a radical hypothesis:
A significant and fundamental component of any individual person’s understanding and knowledge of reality is derived from the uncritical acceptance of the truth of what other people have said to that person.
Your initial reaction to this hypothesis might be something like: “I listen to things that other people say, but I don’t believe something is true just because someone said it.”
But I will caveat this hypothesis by stating that this process of uncritical acceptance mostly occurs at an early age, and most likely occurs simultaneously with the process of learning to speak and understand your native language. For you, the reader, it occurred a long time ago, and you no longer remember what it was like to transition from not knowing the things that people know based on what other people tell them, to knowing those things.
Three Ways of Acquiring Knowledge
There are three basic ways that we can acquire knowledge:
Instinctive knowledge, which is genetically determined
Learning from experience and observation
Things that other people tell us
The first two items are relevant not just to humans but to other animal species.
It is the third item that can only apply to people - as far as we know the communicative abilities of other species do not include any ability to make arbitrary assertions about the nature of reality.
Most of us would admit that some of the things we know (or think we know) about reality are derived from what others have told us, and not very much from our own experience. But at the same time we believe that our acquisition of knowledge is always constrained by our own critical evaluation of whatever assertions other people make.
My primary thesis here is that a significant portion of what we learn from what other people tell us cannot be subject to critical evaluation, because the knowledge required to do that critical evaluation cannot itself be derived from items 1 and 2.
That is, there are things we need to know in order to critically evaluate the content of what other people say, and these can only be acquired from listening to and believing things that other people have said.
It follows that the ability to critically evaluate the content of other people’s speech has to be initially bootstrapped, and this bootstrapping includes a process of listening to what other people say and uncritically accepting the truth of what they say.
In most cases the people saying these things that we accept uncritically will be our own parents and other close relatives. This doesn’t eliminate the risk that some of what we learn this way is completely false, but it does at least mean that the process of acquiring this type of knowledge depends on other individuals who to a large extent have a common interest in our survival and success in life.
Cause and Effect: the Long Term and the Short Term
The basic job of knowledge and understanding is to help us make the best decisions. The basic question, for any decision, is if I decide to do this or that, what will happen?
This is a question of cause and effect. Our actions are the cause, the consequences of our actions are the effect.
Relationships between cause and effect can be roughly divided into short and long-term. The distinction between the two is both fuzzy and arbitrary, but we can categorise them as follows:
Short-term cause and effect relationships can be learned by direct observation.
Long-term cause and effect relationships can only be “learned” by inter-generational processes.
When we look at the list of three methods of acquiring knowledge, we can see that:
Genetically-determined instincts are “learned” by a process of natural selection, which occurs over generations. For example, we don’t have to directly observe that failing to eat will cause us to starve to death - natural selection has done the learning for us, and the result is the evolution of hunger, which directly tells us when we need to eat.
The individual can learn short-term cause and effect relationships by direct experience and observations. It is also possible to observe and experience things which provide information about long-term cause and effect relationships. However this requires an ability to interpret direct observations in a manner that allows the individual to link causes and effects separated by long time periods, and the ability to do the required interpretation can itself only be acquired by a long-term “learning” process, ie instinct derived from natural selection, or, verbally acquired knowledge.
If each generation verbally passes on its understanding of reality and long-term cause and effect relationships to the next generation, natural selection will ultimately determine which theories of reality survive and prosper.
To put it another way, the proof that your instincts tell the truth is that you inherited your genes from your parents, who necessarily had to survive and prosper enough to have and raise you as a child. And the proof that your verbally acquired theory of reality is true is the same - you acquired it from your parents, who necessarily had to survive and prosper to have and raise you as a child.