Do We Know Anything?

Do we know anything? That’s a question I sometimes find myself asking that I find very difficult to answer. There are so many ways that our knowledge is limited that it’s practically impossible to keep track of them all and prevent ourselves from making irrational conclusions. To start off simple, we know through science that our senses are flawed in many different ways. For example, we have far too many cognitive biases to count, including confirmation bias (we’ll come back to this one a bit later), availability bias (where we give priority to information that is easily available to us over that which isn’t), and hindsight bias (saying “I knew it along” when you really didn’t, thinking things were more predictable than they were now that you know the result). Plus, our brain can block out some of the stimuli we received according to certain goals. For instance, we don’t notice our own smell nearly as well as that of others because our brains get tired of smelling ourselves constantly and dismiss that information as lower priority than new stimuli, such as the scents of other people. Our hearing is also logarithmic, so a quiet sound can seem extremely loud when it breaks complete silence, but the same sound doesn’t seem as loud at a party with music.

These are some of the simpler problems with how we experience reality, and we try to use items like tools to try and bypass these bodily limitations. But there are also many problems with what we would consider even as scientific reasoning. For example, a renowned Scottish philosopher named David Hume posed the famous problem of induction. This problem is targeted at inductive reasoning, or the idea that we can transfer our knowledge of past experiences to future experiences. Hume points out that, logically speaking, there is no logical way to justify this idea. For example, say that I see 10 white swans and conclude that all of the swans are white. Well, those two statements aren’t really causally linked. You could say that my sample size was too small. You could tell me to look at all of the swans in the world. But even if I did see every single swan in the world and confirm that they are all white, I still can’t know that the next swan I see will be white. This is because of one fundamental problem; the patterns we have observed in the past might change. We can’t rule out that possibility; they could change for a reason completely unbeknownst to us. What if all of the swans turned purple when I wasn’t looking? Our use of past experiences to understand the future rely on the assumption that the patterns we use won’t change, but there is no rational justification for that idea. We simply hope that is the case.

So, you might be tempted to ask: is there a way to know anything? Well, a scientist and philosopher named Karl Popper had an interesting idea: the only true science amounts to conclusions that can be disproven. How did he come up with this idea? Popper observed both Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud. He found that, no matter what the results of an experiment were, Freud could somehow use the results to justify his principles. To Popper, these conclusions were merely pseudoscience: they may be correct, but we’ll never know because the data we can collect wouldn’t ever be able to disprove his conclusions. On the other hand, Popper admired Einstein for his willingness to truly put his theory of general relativity to the test by measuring the positions of stars during a solar eclipse. The result would be binary: either the positions of the stars would support his theory for now, or they would disprove it immediately and they would have to go back to the drawing board. Popper claimed that this was real science: conclusions that could be disproven, or as he put it, falsified.

In my opinion, Popper’s theory provides an excellent mechanism to test our own knowledge. It may not be enough to predict the future, but it is enough to predict the future as accurately as we can. If you really want to know something, the best way to do so is to 1) make sure the idea can be disproven and 2) go to great lengths to disprove it. This is true with both objective facts and opinions in the sense that you can feel most confident about a particular stance when you have heard the strongest objections and decided that they don’t hold up. Popper’s view of Freud is somewhat linked to confirmation bias, where Freud could “confirm” his theories no matter what data was presented to him. To know something as best as you can, you must do the opposite; look for ways to conclude that you are wrong. It isn’t easy, but knowing isn’t easy either.