I believe that I know some things, and I know that I believe some things, but what the difference is between knowing and believing–I do not know.
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December 8, 2006 by addofio
I believe that I know some things, and I know that I believe some things, but what the difference is between knowing and believing–I do not know.
And I’m not sure that professional philosophers are any more clear on the point than I am. At least, I’m pretty sure there’s no widespread agreement about it.
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For a long time I thought believing was as close as you could get to knowing. But then I had a different subjective experience that I identified as knowing that felt differently than the subjective experience of believing. What I don’t know is whether either my knowing or my believing have anything at all to do with Truth.
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Precisely. Interesting, isn’t it? My Stanford professors defined knowing as “warranted belief”. But warranted by what? What counts as a warrant and why? Further, it seems to me that there are degrees of warrant, regrdless of one’s answers to those questions. Which means knowledge isn’t an all or nothing thing–there are degrees of knowledge. Which seems right to me, but makes people who crave certainty nervous.
THEN there’s the distinction between individual, private knowing and shared, intersubjective knowing. A whole other can of worms. I think one of the issues with spiritual “knowing”, assuming there is such a thing, is that there are few if any publicly shared and sharable phenomena for us to cohere our intersubjective knowing around. Take the extreme contrast–physical reality, say as embodied in a rock. The rock is outside all of us, and therefore we can all interact with it in similar ways. We call experience its hardness, the word “hard” comes to mean something because of this, and we all “know” rocks are hard. But there’s nothing comparable when it comes to spiritual phenomena. Not that there is NO intersubjective spiritual experience–but not sharable with the simplicity and directness of sharing the experience of a rock, which can be handed to someone, and multiple people can look at tnd touch it and discuss the resulting experiences they have, with the result that pretty much everyone will share some (though not all) of the resulting experiences (e.g., “hardness”). Indeed, the predictability of such shared experience is, I think, what has led us to conceive of the possibility of “objective” truth–for which I think we should substitute the phrase “intersubjective truth”, as more accurate.
OK, now I’m approaching deep waters, if not already afloat, so I’d better quit and go work on that dwindling but still there pile of papers.
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