Knowing What We Know: The Transmission of Knowledge: From Ancient Wisdom to Modern Magic by Simon Winchester
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Let’s Lighten Up

I don’t know what to make of this book. It seems to be a rambling journalistic account of something called ‘knowledge’ which it defines in a traditional way as “justified true belief.” Starting with Plato, it provides anecdotes and opinions from a vast array of philosophers, scientists, teachers and literary types about our state of knowledge without coming to any conclusion about either the efficacy of that state or it’s likely future. It therefore makes little if any contribution to either the perennial issues of epistemology or the more recent discussions of Artificial Intelligence. Perhaps the book’s primary function, intentional or not, is to provoke meditation. Here is mine:

Experience is mute. Knowledge has a voice. This voice sounds every time we speak about our experience, as well as in the archives, histories, manuscripts, diaries and algorithms that constitute our unique inheritance as Homo sapiens.

Knowledge is always in the form of language. It is consequently fundamentally communal. Even if some elements of knowledge are spoken, written, or merely thought by individuals, their linguistic character implies they have been shaped by a specific language and the culture in which that language is practiced.

Knowledge is, and always has been, infinite since the possibilities for the expression of experience are limitless. This is so even if our experiences themselves are limited by sensory abilities or technology. That knowledge is expanding at an increasing rate - from primitive signs, to language, to writing, to print, to electronic media - is a truism.

Experience is not knowledge. The connections between the world of experience and the world of knowledge have always been problematic, and have become obviously so as knowledge-technology itself becomes our dominant experience.

Nevertheless this dominance of knowledge over experience, long before the Internet or AI, has prevailed among the human species. Knowledge may not determine what we experience but it does most often set the bounds of what we can see. Knowledge has the advantage of the immense weight of a society to impose itself on individual experience.

Knowledge resists all attempts at verification through rational processes and calls experience which has not been captured/described/categorised in language as illusory. Conversely all experience that is so ‘encoded’ in language becomes part of recognised reality - most frequently with its own scientific, religious, superstitious, conspiratorial or other justification.

Knowledge only gives way to knowledge, and even then only when new knowledge is considered more useful in terms defined by/through/in the new knowledge. This usually occurs when adherents of the old knowledge die not because they accept the new knowledge as justified.

In short, knowledge is not something that we have or possess, either as individuals or as societies. If any thing, knowledge as the epitome of language possesses/controls/directs its participants. Education is, in the most general terms, the process of increasing knowledge, that is to say, one’s facility with language. But this means that education inevitably results in the mastery by language as much as the mastery of language.

Breaking the chains of knowledge may therefore be the challenge of knowledge itself. Knowledge is always misleading no matter how logical, sensible, or useful it may seem. Liberating knowledge, in other words, is doubt. Perhaps this is the authentic meaning of the myth of the tree in the garden of paradise - a kind of warning to not take anything too seriously.

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