KNOWLEDGE

file knowledge 12:43 pm October 24, 1994 8:12 pm February 7, 1992/ dec 24 1987

We know very little and things are very complex. We may in fact know nothing. Knowing nothing for sure, how can we have a science of knowledge. The basic premise is we can not be certain of anything. At the very most we can only purpose possibilities of what might be knowledge - - not what is knowledge. There is at least an infinite amount of knowledge. the amount can not be known there in fact may not even exist knowledge at all. For what ever we define knowledge to be there may not be anything that exists that has that or those properties. What might be a definition of knowledge is what philosophical epistemology (theory of knowledge) is all about. However, that is not what the science of epistemology is about. What makes a study a science. Usually it is the scientific method that distinguished one discipline from a science. The scientific method is supposed to be the knowledge verifier. It works in some circumstances but not in all. It works better for the physical sciences than for the social sciences. In any science the scientific method is better than nothing but its limitations are profound. Information that is produced in support of a social theory is at best only statistically valid this not to say that social concepts are not useful, only that the proof of a social theory is much more difficult to produce than many physical theories are. This is probably because social situations are much more complex than physical situations. As a result, The laws that describe social situations would need to be much more complex than physical laws. However, physical laws are saved in a way because the margin of error in physical laws are limited by the limits of experimentation. This means that the proof for a physical theory need not be exact because of the limits of the size and other constraints. Social theories have a tendency to give us exact data such as from a questionnaire. where as a physical theory is only as good as the scientific equipment used to measure it. The results may change as better equipment for measuring becomes available. A physical theory may have just as many anomalies as a social theory in the end. In fact this is what the uncertainty principle deals with -- the fact that, at best, we will only be able to statistically prove a theory.

Updated 8:29 am December 1, 1988

To delineate what might be knowledge is different than producing a certain method to find it and foundation for it. The information that we receive through our senses is already organized for us before it enters the brain. That organization puts a perspective on that relationship that changes the reality but through evolution it has helped us survive -- if evolution is a factor. If there really are people. And matter and energy. If. All these are in reality hypothesis that we take for granted when we make knowledge judgements. There may be many possible paths to knowledge but are we an one of those? Is there such a thing as ultimate knowledge?

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Foundations of knowledge

There is no certain path to knowledge. we could always be wrong about what is really knowledge. Until we know every thing we can know nothing for certain. We can however have good reason for believing something but there is no guarantee that we don’t find our selves in a totally different world than we thought we were in. All the laws of physics, logics, chemistry,etc. may not be true or they may change with time or place. There may not even be things like space, time,and numbers (quantity everything may be one or infinite no in between) in the real world. In fact, they may not even exist in this world. They are a construction that our mind have made that is supposed to correspond to the real world. We don’t know any thing about the real world. We think that we do but we easily could be deceived by what we think we know. If all our knowledge is so uncertain then how can we have a science of epistemology? Actually this science of epistemology is a science that does not put limitations on what knowledge is or how we get it what it does is comparable to what the biologist does, and that is study a thing or group of things that has been delineated for some reason by our mind and warrants an interest by people.

There is no ultimate foundation for our knowledge all we have are many (infinite ) possible foundations for our knowledge. We can become pessimists about the entire subject and say that it is not worth our efforts to continue, but we are forgetting that what we are trying to do is make our lives better and satisfy our innate curiosity about the world that we live in. Even that may not sound like a foundation for knowledge. It is a simplified version of pragmatism. Pragmatism is a reasonable foundation for knowledge. It may not be the best however, because it leaves out to much useful information or in others words it limits our scope. That, we can not have when we have a science. However, that is how most science function -- that is they limit the perspective in order to get and handle on the complexity that is in the world that they study. A science of epistemology has to have limits also but not in scope. A science that studies knowledge has to study ever aspect of it and to produce knowledge about knowledge and to organize it in such a way that it is useable by man and his machines. But how can we have knowledge of knowledge when we don't even know what knowledge is and will never have a way to find it for certain? Epistemology can not be limited in scope but must simply what it studies. One of the properties of certain knowledge is its ability to be organized in ways that are much easier to understand and use. Not all knowledge has such properties. What we really study in the science of epistemology is every thing and what we get is the closest thing to knowledge that we will ever have. Of course that is not saying much. What then can we expect when we study knowledge? The unexpected the unusual the useful -- everything that any science has found and more because epistemology ties all the sciences together is was that have never happened before. The science of epistemology is a human construct about what we think is an external world. There is always the problem that there is always more knowledge about knowledge than there is about there external world. But that knowledge about knowledge is what makes science,technology and understanding possible. With out higher order knowledge there would be no understanding because we really don’t understand the world, what we do is make constructs that can predict things and that is understandable to people. We lay one level of organization upon another level until we really don’t know what is real and what is a construct of our organization. We can not do much about it either because the sense organs do it even before the brain has a chance to deal with the information in the first place. What we can do is like we have been doing that is, developing ways to deal with the information that we get and use every way that we think of to deal with that knowledge in order to organize it and make it usable and understandable. Our knowledge is expanding in many ways we learn about how we learn through the cognitive sciences

The problem is that we really don’t know what to ignore in the way of things to study as knowledge. It becomes a matter of the economics of knowledge -- we only have so much time intelligence and machine resources so what is knowledge becomes what some one who is in charge thinks is important to spend the time and resources on. This effort can be on the individual level or all the way through the international level.