by Jerry Nilson (Published in Lyceum, vol. 3 no. 4, Dec. 1998)
What is knowledge? This is perhaps the single most important question for the study of philosophy. Many philosophers have since the ancient Greece proposed answers to this question. Plato thought that knowledge is found in the perfect forms (or ideas) and that what we gain from our study of reality is only a vague shadow of these perfect forms. The forms are innate and we can come to know of them by “remembering” them when we see something in reality resembling them. For Aristotle, the forms are not innate, but instead we gain our knowledge by looking at reality we find the forms embedded in the objects of our awareness. We only need to perceive these objects attentively and then we could gain true knowledge of that type of thing we are perceiving. After Christianity’s battle against reality through the dark ages, the philosophers of the renaissance was rather skeptical of gaining knowledge from reality. Renaissance philosophers revolted against the mediaeval idea that God was the true source of knowledge, but in turning away from the mind of God they did not turn to reality but rather to their own minds. Descartes thought that he could only be truly certain of knowing that he himself was conscious and then proceeded from there to discover knowledge of other things. Then came the german philosopher Immanuel Kant and proclaimed that we cannot really know anything for sure and thus deepened the skepticism even more than Hume and earlier thinkers of the renaissance. The renaissance of reason was slowly dying and today only so-called “right-wing extremists and religious fanatics” has any interest in reason among philosophers. The mainstream philosophers of today do not think that man can really gain any true knowledge of anything. Instead, they think, we have to begin with what people in general believe and see if we can put forward some criteria for establishing a superior form of belief that we may allow ourselves to call “knowledge”.
Of course, modern philosophers have not agreed upon what is to be regarded as “knowledge”, but one common idea of how to define “knowledge” is that “knowledge is justified true belief”. Then they quarrel about what these defining terms are meant to mean and whether the definition is sufficient or whether there needs to be another qualifier of the belief than “justified”, etc. The arguments from modern philosophers around these issues are however not something that we need to go into here, since I am instead going to show how futile and wrongheaded their whole attempt is in defining “knowledge” the way they are going about it. It might be obvious to the reader, from my short history sketch, that these modern philosophers are not really talking about knowledge as Objectivists would do. Their starting point is not reality but rather the beliefs of some men. I here want to show just how illogical this definition of “knowledge as justified true belief” really is.
First I want to remind you that Ayn Rand defined “knowledge” as “a mental grasp of a fact(s) of reality, reached either by perceptual observation or by a process of reason based on perceptual observation.”
The modern definition of knowledge takes “belief” to be the general category of which knowledge is a subcategory. The Oxford English Dictionary defines “belief” as “mental acceptance of a proposition, statement, or fact, as true, on the ground of authority or evidence.”
Either you believe in what you know is true or you believe in what you don’t know is true. In the first case “belief” is a redundancy saying that you hold what you know is true as true. In the second case “belief” means that you hold what you don’t know is true as true. If you know what is true, you also regard it as true unless you wish to evade that knowledge. There is simply no point in using the word “belief” in this situation. Also, and more importantly, by saying you believe something which you in fact know, you are casting doubt as to whether you really know this, since believing something is understood as leaving open whether one knows the thing one believes in. Thus, I suggest we use the concept “belief” only in the second sense described here. “Belief is accepting something as true without knowing it is true (on the ground of authority or evidence).”
Understanding “belief” in this way, does it mean that one cannot believe in something rationally? You might believe that environmentalists are wrong in supposing that the “green house effect” will have disastrous consequences for men on earth unless new government regulation of carbon dioxide emissions are imposed soon. It is difficult to really know that this belief of yours is true, but you still have some good evidence in favor of your belief: you know of the natural fluctuations in temperature over the centuries and know they do not correlate well to carbon dioxide contents in the air (and certainly not due to the activities of men), and so on. However, you should keep in mind that it is actually the evidence that makes your belief seemingly rational. While you may know the evidence in question, you don’t know that your conclusion is true. Therefore I say it is wrong to believe in the conclusion you ought not to treat what you do not know is true as if it in fact is true! You ought to believe only that which you know and in which case you don’t have to talk about your “beliefs”.
However, if you make fully clear what you are saying, you might want to say that you believe in something despite not knowing it is true. What has to be clear is that what you really believe in is the evidence. Because of your knowledge about factors pointing in the direction of the truth of something, you might regard that something as possibly or probably true. You could thus also explain that what you believe in is that something is possibly or probably the case, but that you are not certain this is the case and that you therefore do not regard it as being true.
This discussion about “belief” clarifies that the only type of belief that might qualify as knowledge is knowledge. The modern definition is thus hopelessly circular as it assumes knowledge about the thing to be defined, i.e. “knowledge”. “Belief” cannot help us define “knowledge”. Knowing what belief is, we see that it is often what one possess instead of knowledge as we say “I don’t know that x is true, but I really believe so.” To define “knowledge” in terms of “belief” is a sure way of undermining all knowledge, since skepticism is taken as starting-point. If we start out with no knowledge and only beliefs, we will not arrive at knowledge by making our beliefs more consistent. A certain de luxe version of nothing still adds up to nothing; a non-arbitrary belief is still only a belief. One cannot reach knowledge by starting with the beliefs that people hold. Knowledge comes from reality.
The modern philosophers focus their attention on the “what” of knowledge. The propositions, facts, claims has to be true and one has to be justified in accepting them. But the “how” of knowledge for them is only a matter of acceptance, even though it has to be justified. There is nothing to grasp, nothing to gain, nothing to discover, nothing to identify, nothing to integrate, nothing to understand there’s nothing but passive acceptance! Knowledge for them is simply justified acceptance of truths as true. Truth is not a product of any action on the part of man it is not a recognition of reality (as Rand said), but simply a condition of facts or propositions they have by and of themselves. What justifies the acceptance of propositions are not explained and left open to all interpretations as if it is not essential to the definition. If the “truths” has anything to do with reality is also left open. Reality is actually optional for the modern philosophers it has no bearing on anything important in epistemology as this is not a science dealing with reality to begin with. Knowledge is a human creation, just like rules for justification and theories in how to determine the “truth” of some proposition. Facts are, according to their view, statements or claims (often about a supposed reality) and are thus not true only by virtue of being facts that is why they add that the facts believed in should also be true. But, truth has also nothing to do with reality on their view. In fact, knowledge has nothing to do with reality on their view. Propositions without reference to reality are in truth their only starting point. The primacy of consciousness is evident in their theory. They may start with the beliefs of people in general to determine which candidates there are for true propositions that could justifiably be accepted as true, or they may single out their own beliefs as the best candidates.
It does not matter, as I said, what type of belief one holds (unless it is knowledge). There are, however, more errors in the modern definition of “knowledge”. A belief in what you do not know cannot be justified at all. If you are justified in holding something as true, then it is because you have adhered to the methods of logic in differentiating and integrating the information provided to you by your senses and in your higher level abstractions.
Nor could a belief in what you do not know be true. Truth is a recognition of reality. If you have reached a belief that does not correspond to reality in a fully proper way through your own thinking, then what you have is neither true nor knowledge. If your belief doesn’t constitute a recognition of reality in anyway, then it is arbitrary and completely unfounded it is pure “faith” (blind belief). This is what modern philosophers start with the arbitrary, any belief. Then they try to pick out the most unreasonable beliefs by adding qualifiers and thus narrow the range of beliefs that they will accept under the name of “knowledge”. By adding these qualifiers they still don’t have a clue to what knowledge really is. They only know some features of what is often regarded as knowledge by people. In this way they avoid looking at reality. They can’t understand that knowledge is not merely a mental acceptance of some proposition, but that it involves and presupposes actively grasping something about reality through the use of ones senses and mind. They avoid to see the inductive nature of knowledge. They think you might have a true belief about something without having any knowledge about it. They leave open whether reality is important for a belief to be justified and insinuates that one could possess knowledge without having any contact with reality. Modern philosophers leave their definition of knowledge open to encompass any types of bromides, feelings or speculations. And this is the dead end of the Kantian subjectivism. Only Objectivism could bring adherence to reality back to philosophy now.
Jerry Nilson