Fake news is everywhere. And with the staggering 3.5 quintillion bytes of data created every day, it can be hard for the human mind to tell truth from falsehood. Though the AI industry is working hard to produce algorithms capable of detecting fake information, it is important to train ourselves to understand the mechanisms behind this phenomenon. The following series addresses the dynamics and theories behind fake news. It is made of excerpts of a teach-out by the University of Michigan presented by Josh Pasek, Associate Professor of Communication. Any personal comments will be clearly outlined.
What is knowledge?
If we want to figure out what’s real and what’s fake, it helps to start by thinking about how we know anything at all. And it turns out that the question of how we know things is actually really difficult. It’s one for which there’s a massive literature in philosophy and one where philosophers have done a lot of work to try to figure out what it means to really know things in the first place.
What we’re going to talk about in this segment is, first, what we really mean by knowledge. What does it mean to know something at all? And we’re going to talk about a notion called Cartesian skepticism which is the idea that on some level you don’t really know anything at all. And then we’re going to talk about how, in practice, that doesn’t really work for our lives and what we need to do, instead, is we need to examine what types of evidence are out there and the quality of the evidence that we have.
So when philosophers think of knowledge, they think of knowledge typically in the framework of justified true beliefs. And the idea here is that if you believe something that happens to be correct and you have good reasons to believe that, that’s something that you know. It turns out that that itself gets a lot more complicated, and figuring out what it is that you might think you know that is actually justified is nearly impossible. So from very early philosophy, people have been skeptical about the idea that we could know really anything at all. If you go back to Socrates, Socrates at one point said, “I know one thing; that I know nothing.” The idea was he just couldn’t really show that he knew anything at all.
Practical limitations of cartesian skepticism
To get around this problem, Rene Descartes tried to really figure out what it was that one could actually prove that one knew; how you actually show that you indeed know something. And he thought, well, I don’t really know that there’s a world out there. I don’t really know anything for sure about other people. But what I am sure of is that I must exist. How do I know that I must exist? I must exist because I’m thinking, because I know that there are thoughts in my head and those thoughts give me the ability to say I am here, there is some me that is doing the thinking.
And so, Rene Descartes comes out with the line, “Cogito ergo sum” or “I think, therefore I am.” And that is the essence of what he could actually meaningfully say he knew for certain. So this perspective, this purist perspective or this skeptical perspective, makes you realize relatively quickly that there’s a lot you don’t know about what could be happening. It’s quite possible that you’re not really a human walking around on the planet Earth, you are instead a brain in a vat in a laboratory. There are signals that are going to your brain and those signals are telling you the kinds of things that you think you’re doing. They’re telling you that you’re sitting right now in front of a Teach-Out watching me talk about knowledge. They’re telling you that you’re going to the grocery store, whatever it may be. But, really, you don’t know that you’re not a brain in a vat.
You can think of the movie, The Matrix, where everybody is in this massive collective simulation and they’re really somewhere else where they’re not where they think they are. You could be dreaming. How do you know that you’re awake right now, that you’re not in bed, dreaming about whatever’s happening? You can’t show that for certain. You only know that to the extent that you’re fairly confident of the things you want to believe, but not because you can actually prove to me that you’re really awake. And a bunch of scholars have even suggested that we might all be a computer simulation from some advanced society trying to figure out how things might have gone differently.
So all of these are possibilities and all of these entail us not really knowing what is in fact the case and what isn’t. So if you adopt this line of reasoning, you end up finding that you know relatively few things. You know only the things that you can derive from logic alone. That is, in the case of “Cogito ergo sum” and Rene Descartes that thinking implies that you exist, or anything mathematical that’s true by definition. So one plus one equals two. How do I know that? I know that because by the definition of one and the definition of two, that statement must be true. It’s not actually all that interesting but, at least, it’s something that I can directly prove. So, in practice, you don’t want to go down this route. You don’t want to be a Cartesian skeptic. And why don’t you want to be a Cartesian skeptic? Because, if you are a Cartesian skeptic, it’s pretty darn hard to live life. You can’t live life doubting that everything you encounter exists. It’s not going to help you. If you’re not really sure whether the floor is real, you’ll be worried about falling through it all the time. If you’re not really sure about whether food is real, why should you eat? And yet we know, not to this level, but we do know that eating is important. And being able to walk around and trust that you can stand on things that look solid is kind of important to being able to have a life at all, let alone even a meaningful and fulfilling one.
Citation
@online{bodiong2023,
author = {BODIONG, Georges},
title = {HOW {DO} {WE} {KNOW} {WE} {ARE} {IN} {THE} {KNOW} - {PART}
{ONE}},
date = {2023-09-30},
url = {https://deebodiong.quarto.pub/posts/2023-09-30-how-we-know-things-part-one/},
langid = {en}
}