The final in a series of posts of notes from a book by a college professor of mine at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. I took the class “General Semantics” from Kenneth G. Johnson in the early 1980s, and found it to be the most enlightening class I ever took. I hope you get something out of it, too.
XXV.
It is useful to talk about several kinds of “knowledge.”
Knowledge1: What you know from experience. Strictly speaking, all of this knowledge is out of date. Much of it probably is still useful, but you can’t be certain of this. All of our knowledge has a probability attached to it. Much of this first-hand knowledge is either ignored as unimportant or dismissed as obvious. If you are certain, you do not need faith; if you are not certain, all you have is faith.
Knowledge2: What you know about (from reading, listening, etc.). Much of your knowledge falls into this category. At best, this kind of knowledge is an abstraction of someone else’s abstraction of an event. Such knowledge sometimes comes to us in some fashion as this: a report about statements about generalizations from inferences about events, etc. Strictly speaking, this information is also out of date.
Knowledge3: What you know you don’t know: You perhaps know that you do not know how to read Sanskrit or make an atomic bomb. To be conscious that you are ignorant is a great step toward knowledge.
Knowledge4: What you don’t know that you don’t know. To be ignorant of your ignorance is a serious problem. Before it was proved that the earth was round, people “knew” that it was flat. Before bacteria were discovered, people acted is if they “knew” there were no bacteria. Some areas of thought are closed to us because we have not developed language to represent them. For example, the invention of “zero” spurred the development of mathematics. What action will someone take if on meeting a stranger, his language is limited to terms for “friend” and “enemy?”
Knowledge5: What you “know” is not so. “What ails most people is not that they are ignorant, but that they know too much that isn’t so.”
Knowledge6: What nobody knows now. What new knowledge will come out of a more powerful telescope or microscope or closer relationships with each other?
Knowledge7: What you believe with such conviction that you feel you “know.” For example, “I know he will show up soon.” or “I know she is not be capable of such an act.” Knowing in this sense is personal, unique, not publicly demonstrable, therefore not subject to scientific analysis. Every man, whether religiously inclined or not, has his own ultimate presuppositions (which sometimes change over time). For him, they are true. Such presuppositions — whether they are called ideologies, philosophies, notions or hunches about life — exert creative pressure upon all of his conduct. It is important to be aware of the personal nature of this kind of “knowledge.” One can’t “prove” it in a scientific sense, nor can a person insist that others believe as they believe. Many arguments result because the word “know” has so many different meanings. Perhaps if we recognize that all evaluations, inferences, generalizations, etc., are actually “beliefs,” we would be more willing to use that term.
