Knowing, believing and thinking clearly about word meanings

An essential part of good mental hygiene is having a clear understanding of the role language plays in leading us astray when reasoning about complex questions. The deceptively simple question 'What is knowledge?' attracts more than its fair share of linguistic confusions so today's Mind Patch™ will use it as a pretext to expose some common misunderstandings that people have about word meanings. And while the main point of this essay is to correct these misunderstandings, it will provide what I think is a fairly definitive answer to the knowledge question, and hopefully awaken the non-specialist reader to the scale of the rabbit hole that is language, and perhaps thereby cultivate in them a level of interest befitting these phenomena.

Philosophers may struggle to understand precisely what it means to know something, but the everyday intuitions of very small children are sophisticated enough to allow them to get away with using this word without anything remotely bad happening.

The perils of knowing too much.

To be fair, philosophers are also perfectly capable of using the word know appropriately at parties, but it's one thing to have an intuitive understanding of a word's meaning and quite another to arrive at an explicit account of what we mean by it.

Why none of us quite know what we're talking about

Photo by Douglas English (circa 1902) / Flickr

It would be hard to find an adult native speaker of English who was anything less than absolutely certain that they knew the meaning of the word mouse. It is, after all, a word that is perfectly at home in children's storybooks, and certainly nothing anyone would ever think of as a difficult technical term. About as many native speaking adults would also feel the same about the word rat, but not all of them could say with confidence how exactly a mouse differs from a rat, or apply their implicit understanding of what these words mean to distinguish say, a juvenile rat from an adult mouse. The average person knows a lot of things about these animals but not necessarily enough to tell them apart in every single case.

There's a whole genre of commonly confused animal terms in English with which we could make a similar observation: monkey vs. ape, alligator vs. crocodile, turtle vs. tortoise, rabbit vs. hare, frog vs. toad, crow vs. raven, and so on. Many of us struggle with at least some of these distinctions, or if not these particular examples, then others. In such cases, it's safe to say that our mental representations of the meanings of the words involved are not completely fleshed out despite whatever confidence we may have that we know what each of these words means individually. Of course, if our dinner depended on being able to tell various animal species apart, we'd probably do far better, but unless a distinction is relevant for something, we usually content ourselves with the thought that the details are known to somebody somewhere and that we could easily look them up if necessary.

Close Relatives of Deep Mysteries

The Martian surface as viewed by The Mars Curiosity Rover, 2014 (Image credit: NASA/JPL)

The people of our time are fascinated by the thought of life, especially intelligent life, existing elsewhere in the universe, and we have naturally devoted a considerable amount of effort into looking for traces of it in interstellar radio signals and Martian soils, but it wasn't all that long ago that we had a comparable mystery right here on Earth. Before we became a seafaring species, our ancestors could only look out from impassable shorelines and likewise wonder what mysteries lay beyond. Minds left to wonder about this imagined great sea monsters, cities of gold, and advanced civilizations on lost continents. How they would envy us for living at a time when we know in fantastic detail about what really lies on the other side of those oceans, and how surprised they would be to learn that we're not walking around in constant amazement about what we've discovered.

We may view the great period of naval exploration with some passing historical interest today, but we mostly take it for granted. Perhaps then, even a discovery as enormous as alien life would have the same fate, only raising a shrug from future students once it too became something people learned about from dusty old history books, or whatever future equivalents there might be of history books and dust.

Buying locally, but not in winter and not if it requires driving to more stores

We've all heard that buying locally-grown produce is better for the environment because of the fuel consumed to transport goods, but that isn't always the case. If you can buy locally-grown tomatoes in the middle of winter, it's likely because they've been grown in heated greenhouses over several weeks, which is far worse in terms of carbon emissions than buying tomatoes that have been transported from another country where they were grown without artificial heating. Indeed, the environmental impact of transportation is typically a drop in the ocean compared to the many different resources that go into producing our food. These resources will include the energy consumed to make it possible to grow crops in areas and seasons that are colder or drier than where they naturally grow, but also processing of food into more complex products like chocolate bars and ready-meals. As a general rule, the more processing involved, the more energy required, and this is a far more important factor to attend to in the supermarket aisle than whether something is produced locally.

The Extinction of Thoughtful People and Fearless Parrots

Around five percent of all the people who have ever lived are still alive. That's an astoundingly high proportion given that modern homo sapiens have been around for upwards of 150,000 years, and it speaks to just how steeply the world's population has increased within living memory.

This increase, along with the technological advances that made it possible, have fundamentally transformed our planet in a way that has obviously taken an enormous toll. We've cleared away habitats to make way for our agriculture, practically emptied the sea of fish, and begun to change our climate, but the pace of all this has been just slow enough for each new generation to grow up thinking it's always been this way, that our use of natural resources is normal so we can go on like this forever. But we clearly can't. The reality we are now living with, and have apparently been living with for the last century, is that the Earth is experiencing a mass extinction event on a scale not unlike the one that killed off the non-avian dinosaurs. Over the last century, vertebrate species have been disappearing at a pace that is conservatively estimated to be 114 times the background rate.

I Know an Old Lady Who Swallowed a War

A vulnerability exists in the human mind that allows the suspension of disbelief to be engaged outside of narrative contexts. This could allow an attacker to divert attention away from dubious claims and redirect the energy of well-meaning individuals into vigorous debate about irrelevant things.

When we encounter fiction, we instinctively divert our attention away from glaring questions like why Luke looks human even though he's from "a galaxy far, far away" or why Nazi soldiers speak English to each other in American films. We suspend our disbelief about these things, allowing them to pass us by uncritically and almost invisibly because they're somehow beside the point. We are critical of what is intended to be evaluated, but the background is often spared the same scrutiny.

The lyrics of the children's song I Know an Old Lady represent a particularly extreme example of the suspension of disbelief. They tell the story of an old lady who swallowed a fly (presumably by accident) and who swallows a spider to catch it. At this point, she has to find a way to get rid of the spider, so she decides to swallow a bird to catch the spider "that wriggled and jiggled and tickled inside her". Then she swallows a cat to catch the bird, and a dog to catch the cat, and so on up the food chain. The sequence of predators invoked after this point makes less sense though, swallowing a goat to catch the dog, then a cow to catch the goat, and finally a horse to catch the cow, but after the first few steps, the song has established a pattern and the implausibility of which predators come next doesn't seem to matter much. It's wonderfully silly and perfectly harmless fun. Outside of fiction though, the story would be about as implausible as you can get. Within the confines of a narrative though, we happily suspend our disbelief to enjoy the story, and if we spell out exactly what absurdities it asks us to entertain, we have quite a list:

The Dalai Lama's Greeting Card Company

This patch addresses multiple issues with minds that are receptive to Dalai Lama quotes.

Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama (Photo by Jan Michael Ihl via Flickr)

The Dalai Lama is an agreeable man with twinkly eyes, and obviously an inspiration to many people, but while I admire his emphasis on love and compassion, I don't typically find what he says about these subjects any more insightful than the philosophy found in an average greeting card. It's possible that I regularly miss the point of the things he says, but much of the time, he seems to be either rehashing age-old truisms that I can't imagine are news to anyone, or making statements that initially sound true and profound, but when you really dwell on the substance of them and follow them through to their logical conclusions have almost everything backwards.

I don't expect agreement about this from anyone who is not already of this opinion without looking at some examples, so let's look at a few of his most popular quotes. In each case, I'll try to interpret his meaning as charitably as I can, but you'll see the problems I get into. Along the way, I'll use the opportunity to discuss what I think are more instructive (and much more interesting) ways of thinking about the issues raised.

Uri Geller's Prison

When someone claims to have a psychic ability, there is the extraordinary possibility that they're telling the truth about a genuine ability, but the more mundane possibilities are obviously that they are consciously lying about it for money and attention or that they have managed to convince themselves that they have an ability they don't in fact possess.

All of us are capable of deceiving ourselves from time to time about one thing or another, and even more so if we see this as a problem that only other people are susceptible to. Many self-professed fortune tellers and mediums are conceivably in this category, but this is unlikely to be true of the spoon bending performances of Uri Geller because of the preparation and ingenuity that would be required to fake them. It just isn't the sort of thing a sane person could innocently convince themselves they could do if they can't. In cases like this, we could exclude self-deception as an explanation leaving genuine paranormal ability or deliberate, premeditated deception as the only options. If we assume for the sake of argument that there is no such thing as paranormal ability, some interesting questions arise about the psychology of people like Geller.

Analysis paralysis and wedge issues: When knowledge isn't power

A vulnerability exists in individuals who are especially receptive to learning, which could allow an attacker to flood them with information that could induce an excess of self-doubt and disunity. An attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could take partial control of an affected mind.

A few months after Hitler took over as Chancellor of Germany in 1933, Bertrand Russell responded with the kind of violence that is typical of philosophers: with a scathing essay. He called this essay The Triumph of Stupidity, and I want to expand on just two sentences from it. The first is one of his most famous quotes. Speaking of the new regime, he lamented that "the fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt."

Agreeing with Osama Bin Laden

A vulnerability exists in individuals who equate sympathy with an enemy's grievances as disloyalty. An attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could use it to minimize resistance to foreign policy decisions that result in injustices.

Shortly after September 11, Osama Bin Laden sat down and wrote a Letter to the American People in which he responded to the question so many Americans were asking at the time - simply, "Why?"