How do we know?

I learned today about a theory that Angela Merkel and Barack Obama (and Theresa May?) are actually direct descendents of Adolf Hitler. And Hitler was a Rothschild. Anyway, it makes me laugh and also makes me want to just collapse here in my chair, wishing for an asteroid to come wipe us out of existence.

For me, one thing this reflects is the death of epistemology in our culture, which is a recurring theme in my journal and borderline obsession of mine. People can’t tolerate uncertainty, but neither do they know when or why to feel certain about things. They are not humble about what they know and don’t know. They are not earnest in their quest for more knowledge.

A scholar named John Vervaeke has posited a framework to describe knowledge or knowing, in which he argues there are four types of knowledge, four ways to know something:

1. Procedural Knowing – to know how to enact a procedure, perhaps as a consequence of having practiced it. Riding a bike or baking bread are examples.

2. Perspectival Knowing – to know based on one’s place in the world, one’s point of view. Someone “knows” what it’s like to be trans, to be a Spanish-speaking immigrant in America, etc.

3. Propositional Knowing – to know information, logic, or facts via language. Mediated knowledge

4. Participatory Knowing – to know something somatically, a deep intuitive knowing. Being in a flow state is a manifestation of this.

As a culture, we spend a lot of time arguing in the realm of propositional knowing, but this is the weakest and most abstract kind of knowing. Ironically, it’s also the only form of knowledge we can share (it’s “shared-ness” is its form). But it’s mediated, so it’s knowing by proxy. Almost by definition, we can’t have certainty with propositional knowing. Only degrees of confidence, which is a direct function of our proximity to the events or circumstances in question. Here is a framework describing common levels of proximity:

1. Direct experience (I experience a wildfire or hurricane, or I conduct experiments first hand)

2. First-hand accounts (I watch or listen to someone’s account of their experience of a wildfire, or I read scientific papers by scientists describing their own experiments and findings)

3. Meta and Mediated accounts (I read a summary of findings gathered from a plurality of scientific papers, or I read or watch a news report on a wildfire, or a lay person’s summary of scientific findings), which will be biased or skewed because of any of:

   • The ‘reporter’s’ capacity/opportunity to understand the subject matter is limited

   • Our own capacity to understand the subject matter is limited

   • The information given/available to the ‘reporter’ was intentionally filtered or tweaked to control what the reporter might report

   • The information given/available to the ‘reporter’ was limited or incomplete because of time or space constraints

   • The reporter has edited the information to fit within time/space constraints

   • Commercial imperatives: the information is packaged and edited to maximize attention and clicks

   • Etc (there are many more reasons)

4. Response to mediated accounts (I read an op-ed or blogger’s response to a news story about an event)

5. Secondary responses (responses to the responses), e.g…

   • Opinion and commentary on information in levels 3-4 (I read a Facebook post referencing a mediated account or a politician’s take on a news story)

   • Meta commentary on the commentary of levels 3-5 (I read a comment or other reference to a Facebook post referencing a mediated account...)

Of the above, all but the first relates to propositional knowledge. And it’s clear that we as a culture spend a ton of time at level 5, the furthest removed from first-hand knowledge of something. So it’s useful to consider how far removed from an event or circumstance the thing is that we’re reacting to or sharing. None of this, by the way, considers the notion of propaganda, which falls into a different (though related) category.

With propositional knowing, it’s also useful to think about what it would take for a thing to be true. Propositional knowing is mediated, so we should ask ourselves whether the ‘medium’ is being truthful – meaning, is the person telling the truth honestly and completely, as they understand it? Also, is it objectively true? Mostly we don’t know, so there are other tests and heuristics we can apply, which I’ll get to in a minute. Finally, is it representative? Is the person cherry picking information, intentionally or not, such that we have an incomplete picture. We should often assume this is the case. There are almost always unknown unknowns.

As for whether it’s objectively true, what can we do when we just don’t know? Here are some heuristics we ought to use:

• Consensus and corroboration – Are multiple sources saying the same thing? 

• Reputation and credentials – Does the person or publication have a good track record? Who are they relying on in terms of experts and authorities?

• Falsification – We should explicitly consider as many counter-propositions as we can think of and try to falsify the original proposition with them, and try to falsify each of these as well.

And then of course, after all of that, with propositional knowing we should be humble, because we really don’t know.