What we know

How do we know anything we know.

Do you actually know what you think you know or are you relying on what someone else knows about the subject? Do we have to be there to actually know something?

You could take this skepticism a bit further along couldn't you? Will the sun come up tomorrow? If you say yes and your criteria for knowing something is that you are there and experience it yourself, then how could you say that it will? You aren't there in the future right now to be able to make that statement are you? And if you say that the past is the key and that you were there for past incidences of the sun coming up, how is it that past incidences of a thing happening necessarily means that the thing will happen again? If a chicken is fed every day at a chicken farm, wouldn't his expectation be that the very next day he will be fed again? That day just might be the dressing out the meat day--the kill it for food day. This is the induction problem that Hume identified.

This is a problem not only for history but also for just about every piece of knowledge that we say we know. Was the atom split? Do you really know? Have you ever seen one split? How could you tell if an atom is split even if you were there to experience it? And if you see the mushroom cloud from an atomic explosion, an explosion, by the way,which not many have seen in person, can you be sure that it is because of the splitting of the atom? Aren't you taking people's word for that? The same thing can be said about: anatomy. How many have ever seen a human heart in person--pictures don't count because they can be falsified; geography--how do you know that there is such a thing as a France or a Russia?; the birth of babies you haven't seen yourself; illness--"That cold is caused by a virus" says the doctor. How do you know? Have you ever seen a virus? Does a microscope count? Isn't there an assumption that the microscope actually lets you see microscopically small things? Do you know that is true? And even if you have seen a virus--how do you know that the cold is caused by that virus or a virus?;political history--how do you know that George Washington defeated the British, that there was a Revolutionary War in the first place, or that there was even a "British" or a George Washington? His home is there with his pictures in it but how do you know that it was really his home? or how do you know there was a Constitutional Convention or that there was even a signing of the Declaration of Independence at all? If we have a document does that prove that it was in fact signed as is purported to have happened?; psychology--"The brain is the seat of the mind." Have you ever seen a brain, in person that is?--pictures can be falsified and if you see a brain without having seen it in relation to a person, that is, having been exposed from a cutting into the skull, how do you know that it in fact comes from the skull?; love--how do you know that your husband or wife loves you? You can't get into their minds can you to know?; or any other thing that we do not know from firsthand experience, which is about everything we know.

The point is that we have to rely on others, and to some extent on the honesty of others for the very knowledge that we have. If we had to rely on firsthand experience for our knowledge, that knowledge would be very limited.

This means that all of the information that you have learned in school has been information that you yourselves have not verified or experienced firsthand. All of it. (If you say, "the same thing happened to me at work that I learned about in class" is that the same thing as being able to generalize about it? The knowledge you have learned is generalized and generalizable to most other situations. If you weren't there for these other situations then you can't say firsthand.)

What does this mean? Does it mean that we should discount everything we know that we have not experienced? No, but it might mean that we should not treat everything we know as the once-and-for-all truth. We should test what we know as we go along. If it keeps happening, or recurring then we can be more confident that it is the case. Or if it keeps showing up we can be more confident.