An answer to the post “What Is Knowledge?” at Self-Aware Patterns. If you don’t want to keep reading this, go read that…
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Imagine…the mantis shrimp sees zorp. Zorp is a color beyond deep violet, and it is a color which humans cannot see, because humans only have 4 of the 16 color receptors which the mantis shrimp eye possesses.
Once upon a time, long before anyone looked inside a mantis shrimp’s eye, a group of marine biologists set out to test the shrimp’s sense of smell. In those days, nobody had looked in a shrimp’s nose either, to map out the nerves and chemical receptors. So, the only way that the biologists could learn about shrimp olfaction was to wave something smelly under a live animal’s nose and see what happened.
The experiment went like this: The shrimp entered a bare tank from an isolation chamber at one end. Prior to the shrimp entering, the biologists had secretly painted a random corner with an invisible, smelly substance. Upon release, if it swam to the marked corner, the shrimp got a treat.
After a bit of trial and error, the shrimp picked up the trick; it swam to the marked corner every time. Mantis shrimp had an acute sense of smell. But the truth is: mantis shrimp could not smell a damned thing. Unbeknownst to the investigators, the invisible, smelly substance which they used to mark the corner glowed zorp.
As it turned out, by sad, chemical coincidence everything smelly, glowed zorp. Without understanding the micro-structure of mantis shrimp senses, the situation was hopeless. Only the shrimp would ever know the truth. Yet the biologists did know something. They got a predictive model of shrimp behavior out of their experiment. If they wanted to make shrimp bait, keep shrimp away from swimming areas, or start a shrimp circus, they had a reliable, practical theory to help them – they knew how to do it.
Furthermore, they did have some truth, even if it was not the shrimp’s truth. Because, the biologists stated the outcome of their experiment carefully.
“Mantis shrimp were observed to preferentially swim to a corner marked with Fragrance 5 after receiving a standard shrimp kibble in association with alighting upon a Fragrance 5 mark in 3 previous instances.”
Obviously, the truth itself does not get you a shrimp circus or anything else. The truth, being blatant, does no work.
Yet we think that we seek the truth when we seek knowledge. We have been told that knowledge is justified, true belief. Indeed, the justification-belief relationship seems unbreakable. If justification is a well constructed story, then all our beliefs have it, as we have somehow arrived at those beliefs. And, we certainly distinguish between things we know and things we merely believe, on a functional basis, which is really just the strength of the justificatory tale.
Truth has little to do with justifications. Knowledge stands apart from mere belief when it does something – when it proves itself reliable. Reliability, like an onion, has no core, and so, knowledge doesn’t have a core either. Peel back a layer and you can aim a cannon. Under the next layer, you have a laser. Under the next, you find the mechanisms needed to build a global positioning system. The same structure undergirds our psychological theory of mind, introspective faculties, and our aesthetics. All those tales which bear re-telling constitute our knowledge.
Truth is just what we’re stuck with.
Dedicated to the Game 