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.

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: