What the Hell Do You Know?

In Defence of Epistemic Humility...

Photo by Lysander Yuen on Unsplash

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“She slipped from our fingers like a flake gathered by the wind, and is now part of the drift called "the infinite.""

— Emily Dickinson, 1882

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The last week on social media has been one of the most distressing I’ve encountered. The events we have collectively witnessed since Saturday are monstrous, obscene, and very difficult to process. Our new apartment in Australia — so far from home — has been under a bell jar as we watched, checked in with friends and loved ones, and attempted to continue the everyday mundanity of our own safe, complacent lives while wrestling a feeling that the world has fallen off the edge of something and can never climb back.

This is not an article for people who are currently worried for their loved ones’ safety or who are grieving. It is for the majority of people. The well-meaning and the overwhelmed. The pontificating couch-sitters and the silent unconfident people who don’t understand what’s going on and don’t know how to find out. I’m not interested in emotional exchanges about ideology, particularly in the comments below. I don’t care how right — or how righteous — you may feel. Peak Notions isn’t about that. It is, in fact, about asking questions. So I wanted to share the below, which is a shorter excerpt from a long essay I wrote in 2021. It asks what it means to know something, because most of the time, most of us don’t know as much as we think.

It’s an essay about knowledge — how slippery and complex a thing it is, how we tend to lack humility about what we consider knowledge, the difference between knowledge and belief, and how knowledge claims can be so tempting when expressing them makes us feel seen, included, or virtuous. When there is social profit to be made from reflecting the view around you.

Like so many of us, I have felt something bordering upon despair this week. Watching the political grandstanding on social media, the conflation of feelings with facts about the world, and people using the horrors we are seeing to further push whatever perspective they already held ostensibly without a sliver of compassion has made me awfully tired and more than a little hopeless.

And then I remembered that the loudest people are rarely representative of the majority, or the most informed. Sometimes, loudness is just loudness and it’s easily confused with strength, truth or validity. This essay is not for those people. It is for everyone — anyone — else who approaches conflict and complexity with humility, compassion and, when appropriate, a healthy level of despair. Because how else should we feel this week, no matter who we are?

At a time when several people I personally know (and countless waves I don’t) are waxing poetic on a situation they clearly know very little about, I thought I would write about the fact that I also know very little about it. I thought it might be useful to write about the nature of knowledge itself. Though people (especially those with large social media followings who have picked up many a cause like a Chanel bag) over the last few years may say otherwise, there is nothing wrong with conscious not-knowing— with being aware that you don’t know about something*. The wrongdoing occurs when we claim authority we don’t have, and especially when we move to pressure others to comply based on that combination of false authority and strong feelings. In the absence of sincere research and experience the only respectable position to take is an epistemically humble one, and to say, ‘What the hell do I know?’

In looking at what the hell we know, we’ll jump about a bit from philosophy and psychology to annoying guys at parties, so bear with me. We should probably begin, though, by considering how we know the things we know, and what it means to know something. Epistemology is the philosophical study of knowledge, or, more specifically, of human knowledge, as well as its nature, origins, and boundaries. It is the study of what we can know and how we know it, as well as what it means to know something. If you haven’t studied epistemology, it might seem occupied by ideas so fundamental that it is difficult even to clarify exactly what is being discussed, but you have no doubt considered what constitutes knowledge plenty of times. You have certainly questioned something that you know, or others know, or realised that you held something to be true and were dizzyingly, distressingly wrong in a way that changed your perspective and your life.

You have probably also struggled with what it is to believe something as opposed to knowing it. Someone could ask you right now where you left the keys to your front door, and you might answer ‘In their usual spot on the hall table’ (or wherever you generally keep them). ‘Are you sure?’ they’ll reply. ‘Do you know for certain that you left them there, if we were to check right now?’ On further thought, you might start to feel a bit less sure, but still feel pretty confident you remember putting them on the table last time you came home. When first asked, you may have claimed to ‘know’ where you left your keys, but are you now certain it isn’t just the case that you ‘think’, or ‘believe’, you left them in their usual spot? If you had to bet everything in your bank account on the certain knowledge that they are definitely on that hall table right at this moment, would you be confident in your knowledge? If not, can you really claim to ‘know’ where your keys are?

We are all spectacularly wrong so much of the time. Memory is unreliable, perception is fallible, and life in general is often almost unbearably complex. This is  why we outsource so much of what we ‘know’ to others – generally experts or specialists who work in one niche aspect of one niche area – because no one person has the time, talent, resources or mental bandwidth to gain and possess a high degree of knowledge in many areas. So, we go to a lawyer when we need to understand something about the law, and we go to a property lawyer when we specifically need to understand a point of property law. We go to the dermatologist when we need expert information on our skin.

People with expertise spend years of their time and focus obtaining it, and we understand (in general) that they probably know things we don’t, so we rely on their knowledge to guide us. What we actually tend to do, though, is appropriate their knowledge as our own and reproduce it without context in the world, like that guy at every party who spends the entire evening confidently talking interesting ‘facts’ at people. He says things like “14% of geese actually have a genetic form of drop foot”, or “there is an indigenous tribe in the English countryside that eats human brains and was established by Queen Elizabeth I’s sixth cousin, Phineas Mincemeat Tudor”. The ‘fact guy’ works in IT, and you listen with narrowed eyes, wondering if anything he’s saying is actually true (you have no idea because you haven’t spent your time researching geese feet or obscure cannibalistic relatives of sixteenth century royalty), and thinking ‘What the hell does he know?’

Every once in a while, fact guy will produce information that is interesting to you, and seems feasible, and you’ll reproduce it at parties for the next fifteen years until you happen to meet somebody working in zoology. You’ll relay your ‘knowledge’, and they’ll look affronted and say something like “A platypus is absolutely not ‘actually just the baby produced when a duck mates with a beaver’, and it is in fact never referred to as ‘a water mule’”.

We are all guilty of believing things - arguably without knowing them – even very basic things. For example, I don’t know how far the moon is from earth. I haven’t been to the moon yet, and I haven’t got a long enough tape measure, so I googled it instead and apparently, it’s around 384,400 kilometres from here. Earth, that is, not my desk. I don’t know that this is true. I have no way of verifying it for myself, except to rely on people who claim to possess that knowledge and appear to have the credentials to make such a claim. I believe that it’s true, at least roughly. It sounds a generous enough distance for the moon to be from earth and I’m not aware that there is huge dispute among the people who specialise in this stuff. I don’t even know what sort of a specialist knows ‘this stuff’, but I would, for example, feel suspicious if Google claimed the moon was three kilometres away. Beyond that, what the hell do I know?

That 384,400km distance is apparently equivalent to driving from Dublin to London (including the wet and freezing ferry trip) around 645 times, which certainly seems excessive. It does strike me as a better use of that sort of distance simply to head right to the moon rather than repeatedly risking hypothermia and organ failure on a ferry crossing the Irish sea. Come to think of it, I’ve never actually seen or felt my own liver either. I just trust – based on extrapolating from anatomical models and past medical examinations by doctors – that mine is approximately where everyone else’s apparently is. I’ve had blood tests checking on my liver function, so it must be in there working away I suppose. I mean, I have no good reason to believe it isn’t, but depending on how high you place the bar for ‘knowing’ a thing, I might not actually know that I have a liver or where it is. If I’m only relying on the expertise of others who know something, can I too claim to know it? Or am I just believing what they tell me, and claiming that belief as a form of knowledge?

You might argue that I can indeed claim to know it, and I’m not arguing that I can’t. I’m not even saying that our appropriation of ‘knowledge’ generated by others is a bad thing – I can’t see how else we might claim to know anything beyond what we can sense for ourselves, or even how we would ever get anything of substance done. I’m just leaving you to stew with the question to contribute to the sense, if you didn’t already have one, that epistemology (and consequently knowledge itself) isn’t simple or straightforward at all. The necessary and sufficient conditions a person must meet to be an epistemic authority on a subject – an expert – can be debated too. Experts in the same area often disagree with one another. Even apart from all of the things we don’t know, sometimes we don’t even know what it is to know something. Often, we think we know things that we don’t.

You’d think that when we realise this through buggering up as we so frequently do, we would respond by being humbler about what we claim to know, but this usually isn’t the case. Despite a universal history of being regularly and spectacularly wrong, human beings don’t seem to lose confidence in our own knowledge. I’m at the front of the line here – for years I thought the lyrics in that annoying 1999 Macy Gray song I Try were ‘I’m worth grumbles when you are not here’ instead of the actual line, ‘My world crumbles when you are not near’. I felt I knew it well enough to think ‘Jesus Macy, would you not have given a few more minutes to writing that line? It’s all over the place, like.’

Well, if Macy is reading this (highly likely), I’d like to apologise to her. I’d also like to apologise to the three other people who – apparently, because what the hell do I know? – wrote the song with her. I was wrong. I’m sure this is just one of around ten billion (conservative estimate) things I think I know that I don’t. I have been wrong about things that I have put a lot of time, reading and effort into understanding. It makes sense that while education definitely doesn’t insulate us from being wrong, the less effort I put into understanding something, the more likely I probably am to be wrong, or if I am right, only to be that way out of luck, given that I haven’t done the work to gain the relevant knowledge.

Wherever you’re standing, the world has changed. The way that information is digitally disseminated has radically transformed our relationship with, and confidence in, knowledge. We have to find a way to remember our own limitations without becoming frozen by them. We don’t want to be fact guy or the person who quietly absorbs what fact guy tells them because they’re too overwhelmed to think for themselves. Knowledge — ours and everyone else’s — should be interrogated, not swallowed and regurgitated. Knowing is an active state, not a passive one. This is no time to be passive.

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* One caveat here— because philosophers love them — I am referring to sincere not-knowing here, especially when accompanied by an equally sincere effort to seek out the knowledge we don’t have and to know more, if not to understand. I am very much not referring to people who use claims to ignorance as a copout to maintain their own comfort or to sit in the dissonance of indulging in an opinion without making any effort to base it in knowledge.