As Knowledge Crumbles

The question "How do we know?" requires an answer

“If someone believes something, we needn’t always be able to answer the question ‘why he believes it’; but if he knows something, then the question ‘how does he know?’ must be capable of being answered.” - Ludwig Wittgenstein

It is only in the 1840s that scholars named the philosophical examination of knowledge epistemology (literally: ‘the study of what we stand upon’) - and it is hardly a coincidence that the philosopher William Whewell coined the word ‘scientist’ in 1834. Never forget that before the Enlightenment, ‘science’ meant nothing more nor less than ‘knowledge’, and both philosophy and the arts (not to mention theology!) were sciences. The Enlightenment teased rational enquiry away from metaphysics, which led inevitably to the building of the lazy idol ‘Science’, the metaphysical shadow of the authentic work of the sciences. From a shining beacon of knowledge for the Victorians, today the sciences devolve into nonsense and we watch as knowledge crumbles around us.

In his later notebooks, Ludwig Wittgenstein wrestled with the question of knowledge through a deep engagement with the problem of certainty. He remarked that we can say “He believes it, but it isn’t so” but that we cannot say “He knows it, but it isn’t so”. Yet there is no difference of mind between belief and knowledge - the same mental state underlies both. We might speak of a different mental state for conviction, but we can be resolute whether we are correct or otherwise! Wittgenstein’s intuition was that “I know” is an expression of “comfortable certainty, not the certainty that is still struggling.” But this conviction remains divorced from the actual state of affairs. For Wittgenstein, the distinction between belief and knowledge rests in the idea that when we believe something we do not always need to be able to answer why we believe it. But the question “how do you know?” requires an answer.

The apparent collapse of knowledge in the so-called ‘post-truth world’ has at its root that metaphysical blindness springing from the Victorian crusade for certainty and marked by the arrival of both the term ‘scientist’ and the necessity of inventing a name for the study of knowledge. When Immanuel Kant laid out the methods and problems of rational enquiry in his critiques, he separated metaphysics from reason to clarify both domains. Thus Kant was able to write without compunction about philosophy, the sciences (he made significant contributions to astrophysics!), and religion. Today, philosophers are forbidden from claiming scientific ground, scientists celebrate their philosophical ignorance, and neither dare mention the crossed-out God for fear of professional suicide. When you cannot tell where metaphysics begins and ends, you inevitably become encaged within your own metaphysical beliefs, because you have absolutely no idea what they are!

An example of metaphysical confusions disrupting knowledge may be helpful, and there is perhaps no better example than mRNA-based vaccine candidates. Just a few years ago, the news media were awash with the dogmatic phrase ‘safe and effective’ - ironically in connection with a medical intervention that had undergone only a few scant months of pharmacovigilance and could not be known to be either. In this context, the widely cultivated belief that ‘vaccines are safe and effective’ categorically cannot qualify as knowledge about these interventions, since the answer to the question “how do you know?” offers only two legitimate options. Either the empirical validation of effectiveness and absence of harms is the requirement for earning the name ‘vaccine’, or we do not know the safety and efficacy of any vaccine candidate until we have tested it for many years. Neither applied in 2021. ‘Safe and effective’ was merely a metaphysical conviction, and an incredibly risky one at that!

I find it darkly amusing that we mock those doctors past who confidently deployed bloodletting as a supposed curative, yet reverently defer to the judgement of a medical community who have revealed through their own actions an utter ignorance of how to justify what they do. While this accusation can be applied to many other scholarly fields, it is in medicine where we find the most shameless parade of epistemic collapse. We have become like those Christians who rejected early evolutionary theories simply because they contradicted metaphysical dogma they were incapable of confronting. As Wittgenstein warned, when people with irreconcilable approaches clash, each “declares the other a fool and heretic.” Trapped in the vortex of the Reality Crisis, the crosswinds of conviction are steadily eroding all knowledge into foolish heresy.