knowing vs Knowing

I have a suspicion that if there is a type of knowing that merits a capital letter (a different spelling) then you already acknowledge that it's not knowing, but something different. But if you are talking about something different to knowing when you talk about Knowing, then what do you reveal about knowledge?

The author of the SEP entry on Descartes's Epistemology thinks that it is helpful to split knowing into two kinds: the defeasible kind (knowing) and the indefeasible kind (Knowing).

I'm puzzled as to why he would do this. Descartes was, presumably, only talking about one kind of knowing - or at least, he thought he was. I don't remember him ever saying that the demon only wrecks one kind of knowledge, but it's OK - there's this other kind of knowledge out there.

The thing I find weirdest about this knowing/Knowing distinction, is why anyone would think that such a conceptual division could be explanatory. Obviously this person must think the split is intuitive and explanatory, otherwise they wouldn't have done it. But what motivates them to split the concepts, rather than decide they've screwed up and need to start again?

I guess the answer is pretty easy. The temptation to make the distinction between two kinds of knowledge lies in our intuition that we often say we know things like football scores, which bus goes near our flat in the evenings, and so forth, but which don't survive the method of sceptical doubt.

Since we want to continue to describe this ordinary stuff as knowledge, even though it can be doubted, then we need a weak concept of knowledge. But weak knowledge isn't everything - there is the second kind of knowing, that does survive sceptical doubt. That's the kind of Knowledge we really want. So, there are two kinds of knowledge.

Note that Descartes didn't make this distinction. As far as he was concerned, if you could doubt it then you couldn't know it. In order to preserve knowledge (with a small "k"), he had to invoke a benevolent God who would ensure that we weren't fooled about ordinary things. He didn't split knowledge into two varieties.

And nor should he have. We can't solve the problem of knowing by conjuring a new concept (not unless discovery of a sceptical argument creates a new class of knowledge). We're in the business of explaining and understanding the concepts we have - we can't just create new concepts to resolve these conceptual difficulties.

When Descartes talks about certainty, he at least believes he is talking about knowing. If he thought he was talking about a better, rarefied form of Knowing, then he wouldn't have written the Meditations as a manual for acquiring proper knowledge, but as an account of his amazing discovery of something called Knowledge (like knowledge, but Better).

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Scepticism reminds me of atheism

I'm not interested in the scepticism debate because it sounds to me like a nonsense. Suppose there was some Evil Demon (why is it always Evil?) out there, systematically duping me with duff sense-data. And here I am, under the impresion I'm sat in a chair at a slightly crappy computer, and there's my mother asking me if I'm not hogging her monthly bandwidth ration.

I'm not, Mum, really.

My point is, all the conditions for me being sat in a chair obtain, so I figure I'm sat in a chair. What else has to obtain for me to be sat in this chair? The Cartesians say the condition is is that an Evil Demon is not fooling me, but imagine - if he was "fooling" me with duff sense-data, what difference would that make? I'd still be sat in this chair. It would just be a chair the Demon had made in a world the Demon had created.

The bastard - my life is so rubbish, being generally warm and well-fed etc.

I guess the world I'm in could turn out not to exist, but I don't see why I should get worked up about that. Any number of things might not have happened, but everything can't not have happened. Almost everything has happened - it wouldn't make any difference if it hadn't. It therefore makes more sense to try to establish what this "knowing" thing is all about in this maybe/mabe-not existing world, than fret over whether or not we're being duped.

And that's the tenuous connection to my problem with God-botherers (I'm talking about believers and atheists both): maybe God does exist, or maybe God doesn't. The whole discussion of whether or not some supreme being exists or not doesn't make any difference to me on the ground right now. Either He is responsible for Everything, or Everything is responsible for itself.

Either way, arguing about whether or not He exists seems foolish - the interesting problems are to do with why people believe in God, how religion relates to power structures, and some other things that I was thinking about just now but fell out of my head before I wrote them down. Anyhow, these problems are perfectly accessible, and can be talked about quite intelligibly, regardless of whether God turns out to exist or not.

That's probably not a very sophisticated theology. Bugger it. Dawkins is a twat. And to Hell with ontology.

Why I'm not interested in scepticism

As far as I understand it, a lot of modern epistemological philosophy is occupied with scepticism: since we could be completely mistaken in what we think we know, how can we secure any kind of knowledge at all?

Descartes roped in God to rescue knowledge. Bertrand Russell relied on logical atomism founded on sense data. The younger Wittgenstein realised this couldn't work and went for full-throttle logical atomism. Since then we've had a number of attempts to establish certainty in one way or another - I remember reading a paper about tennis results that was supposed to be a big leap forward in understanding. It confused me even more.

I'm afraid I'm with the guys who say the problem itself is misconceived. I think there's something fundamentally peculiar about the idea that I could be completely, systematically mistaken about what I know.

Some anti-sceptical arguments seem to be driven by the intuition that we must have knowledge, therefore the sceptical scenario must be mistaken. I don't think this intuition has much weight: if the Demon is out there, I can't have knowledge - not in the Cartesian sense, because this demands that knowledge is unassailable.

There may be unassailable knowledge, but my feeling is that even if we could figure out what this is, there would still be serious inadequacies in the Cartesian understanding of knowledge. The problem is Cartesians make knowing such a hard thing to do that we have to conclude that knowing is almost impossible.

Knowledge must be possible - in fact, it must be easily obtainable - because we use the words "know" and "knowledge" perfectly successfully all the time. So I think any theory of knowledge that says there is no such thing as knowledge - that in the majority of cases when we say "we know" we are are in fact mistaken - can't really have the knowledge thing nailed down.

I take it that the knowledge problem is actually more subtle (and therefore interesting, ahem) than the modern anglophone treatment might lead me to believe. There is knowledge - what is mysterious is what it is to be a "knowing being". It has something to do with power and intellectual integrity, and this is what I want to talk about.

By-the-by, I've heard that Foucault runs a very good discussion in The Order of Things about how the modern debate about scepticism is misconceived and doomed to failure. I've not got around to reading this yet, but it has something to do with Descartes and modern philosophers having different understandings of the self but not realising it so their arguments talk past each other. What we need to do in order to understand knowledge is somehow unite these two conceptions of the self, rather than give one priority over the other.

Gutting's article about Foucault in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is pretty good - he knows what he's talking about (not so much on power/knowledge, but on the more classical philosophical problems he's dead good).