By Authority

In the last two posts I have looked at reason and experience as sources of knowledge. I will now discuss my last category: authority.

By “authority” I mean, in essence, taking someone else's word as an accurate source of knowledge. The vast majority of what we know about the world is known through authority. The schooling that we spend almost two decades of our lives in, is almost entirely about our gaining knowledge through the use of authority. Have you ever sailed or flown around the world with the purpose of discovering whether or not it is round or flat? No, you first believed it to be round because someone told you that it was.

Almost all of our knowledge of history is based on authority. Men in the past wrote things about their time that men today read. Even archeology, which some might argue is a purely experiential means of gaining knowledge, actually relies quite a bit on inscriptions and drawings, which are simply men of the past telling men of today about the world in which they lived. And, of course, as soon as the archeologist begins to tell anyone about his findings the listener is relying on the authority of the archeologist for his knowledge.
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C.S. Lewis spoke of this saying that if we will refuse to accept authority as a source of knowledge then we must be content to know very little about the world.

If the fact that I cited C. S. Lewis helped to persuade you that authority is a genuine and indispensable source of knowledge, then you have been persuaded by the use of authority. First the authority of the Lewis and secondly my own authority in recounting it to you.

Thoughts Continued

In my last post, I divided all of our sources of knowledge into three categories: experience, reason, and authority. I then discussed how experience works to give us knowledge about the world. I would now like to move to 'reason'.

Reason or logic is a method for discovering knowledge or truths about the world that is fundamentally an enterprise of the mind. It begins with some fact or axiom or assumption and based on these starting points attempts to draw conclusions about the world. It is a way of linking together information so that other information is revealed. Reason and logic may take slightly different forms but all those forms possess a similar structure. A man first states a proposition or multiple propositions. This proposition is presented as reason or evidence for the truthfulness of another proposition which in turn is meant to provide reason or evidence for third proposition. This process continues until a particular conclusion is reached. 

A syllogism is one form that this process can take that was very popular among the ancient Greek philosophers. A syllogism might be structured something like this:

                                   All men are mortal

                                   Socrates is a man.

                                   Therefore, Socrates is mortal. 

Reason was held to be especially important in discovering truth for the ancient Greeks. They found little use for studying the physical world as a means to gain knowledge but rather relied heavily on the process of logical reasoning to discover truths about the world. The Platonic concepts of ideal forms surely played a role in why this was the case. The forms that they were seeking to understand were not physical and therefore not available to be scrutinized under a microscope (assuming they had invented microscopes). 

Reason as a primary means of discovering truth was also very popular during the Scholasticism of the High Middle Ages and during the Enlightenment. Rene Descartes is famous for his statement, “I think, therefore, I am.” In this statement he was attempting to find a proposition that could not possibly be doubted so that he could then begin to lay claim to the veracity of other truths arrived at through the process of reason.

A Few Thoughts about Thought

Have you ever thought about your thoughts? About how you know what you know? The study of where knowledge comes from, that is, what our source or sources of knowledge are, is call epistemology. Now I am no philosopher, but I have been thinking about this topic lately. As far as I have been able to discern there are only three categories that our knowledge of the world around us can stem from: experience, reason, and authority.

I'll start with experience. I'm using the term 'experience' to describe our interaction with the physical world. When we walk outside and find that it is raining, we have learned something about the weather of that particular day. When we put a pot of water over fire, we discover that, after time, the water will boil. When we strike a pane of glass with a hard object such as a stone or a stick, we find out that glass breaks. There are countless numbers of things that can be learned from direct experience and observation. The scientific method relies on just such a principle. The scientist devises an experiment in order to observe some sort of condition, interaction, or situation that he wants to learn about. Plant A grew taller than Plant B when compound X was added to the soil of former. The scientific method attempts to systematize what we all do on a daily basis, namely, learn about the world around us through direct observation.

Now, there is another part of experience that is equally important to mention and that is our emotions. Very little of what we experience in a given day is unaccompanied by our own internal reaction to it. You might be very excited by the rain if you are a farmer with dry fields or you could be irritated by it if you have a long walk to the post office and have no umbrella. Boiling water is nice and can produce feelings of contentment when accompanied with tea leaves and a little honey. Boiling water poured into your lap, however, would not produce those feelings of contentment. The emotional reactions that we have to the various things that we encounter in the course of a day are themselves a kind of raw fact, much like the raw fact that water boils. Simply because we have some degree of control over our emotions (and some people have less control than others) does not change the fact that the emotions we feel are important bits of information about the world. If you think one thing to be good and another bad, that is possibly just your opinion. If something makes you happy and another disgusts you, your happiness or disgust are facts in and of themselves.