How to Know How to Know

In the following post I aim to talk about the route to knowing, to touch upon my thoughts on agnosticism as a philosophical stance, and to expound my general perspective on becoming more knowledgeable about a certain topic.

First, let us start off with a relatively all-encompassing definition of  the agnostic stance; agnosticism is the decision to claim that there is not enough compelling evidence neither for nor against a certain point (where point can mean theory, debate, fact, claim, and so on). A good example is religious agnosticism, which, based on our general definition, can be defined as: the decision to claim that there is not enough compelling evidence neither for nor against the existence of deities.

All forms of agnosticism, as I have just defined it, should be the initial stance of any sensible person when they encounter something they have never heard of before. For example, if you had never been exposed to cognitive science until now, you would be unable to position yourself in regards to the connectionism VS symbolism debate; you are by definition agnostic and must claim so. If you take a position without knowing anything, you are being irrational. But, of course, (I am going to assume) you are rational and so you will decide to claim that there is no evidence (available to you at the moment) for you to make a decision between the two movements. This initial form of agnosticism I will dub: ignorance.

So to make sure our definitions are consistent: ignorance is the special kind of agnosticism in which the decision to claim that there is not enough compelling evidence neither for nor against a certain point is indeed the most rational choice. You cannot decide between connectionism or symbolism (or perhaps even claim it is false dichotomy!) because you actually are ignorant in this domain.

So agnosticism  is rational when you actually don’t know something, this stance I previously named: ignorance (and don’t be fooled, you might think you know when actually you do not, so better to err on the side of caution with any topic you are have not yet read up on). But what about when one claims agnosticism when evidence is easy to obtain,  or counter-evidence is available? Well, in that case their decision is not fully rational. This is very much the case with religious agnosticism. There is no scientific evidence pertaining to any deity, while there are countless other theories providing more parsimonious and evidence-based explanations for the events normally ascribed to spiritual or religious “creatures”. In this case, therefore, agnosticism is an irrational choice, as the alternative explanations (derived from physics, biology, etc.) are taught in most schools and can easily be found on the Internet. Thus claiming to be an agnostic in such situations is intellectually dishonest.

Up to now, we have seen how we should start off rationally (and by choice) ignorant, agnostic, on a new topic, but we have not yet touched on how to progress. The first stepping stone, after accepting ignorance, is specifying what we want to know about. Our pet examples so far are perhaps too deep to go into, as both religion and cognitive science are huge fields (and religion, especially, is covered extensively in other posts), therefore instead let us use a made-up example (that of course could be real): the Magenta VS Cyan debate.

The Magentoids are a culture of people that claim to be oppressed by the Cyanites, who rule their nation called CYMK. You are so far rational, if you claim agnosticism, as you are completely ignorant as to whether or not each side’s claims are grounded in fact and logic. You must choose to remain agnostic, despite maybe wanting to pick a side, because you have no evidence either way and you have never heard of the Magenta VS Cyan debate before this post. The next step is to find out something about it, so you use Google Scholar and you find scientific papers or reports, or you use Google News and you find a number of corroborating news articles that claim that in June of last year: “a group of Magentoid armed militia killed a group of Cyanite civilians” (you can also use Google Video to watch videos of the event, and so on and so forth). This takes us from step zero: ignorance; to step one: knowing a single piece of data (and knowing that that data is true to approximately above 95% certainty, of course). It is highly important to understand the data of the news stories, videos, scientific documents, are just that: data. They are not yet information. You still know very little to nothing about the Magenta VS Cyan debate. Why? Because you have no context in which to place this datum.

So semi-knowing is definitely on the path to knowing, but it does not directly imply that from step zero to step one our knowledge has necessarily increased; the data has, but the knowledge, or information, does not immediately follow. There is no direct 1-to-1 mapping between data and information: the more data you know says nothing, on its own, about how much of the overall picture you can currently see. This is why we cannot still decide anything vis-à-vis the Magenta VS Cyan debate based on just one, albeit well-documented, incident and on one social feeling, which is that somebody claims the Magentoids (how many - all?)  feel oppressed by the Cyanites.

So what do we need to trace our way through the data and make it to the goal of information? Let’s define data first, to know what we are dealing with: data is made up of small facts, pieces of evidence we hold to be true to the needed level of certainty. These pieces of data all contribute to form a context, depending on the topic at hand we might require 200 pieces of data from 20 different scientific papers, to obtain the overarching context. And finally, we can define information: the output of a function that takes as input the context, derived from the data; this function is a combination of our critical thinking skills and our ability to keep adding new and removing wrong pieces of data. This final step (which is never truly final as, like I just mentioned, you always have to keep removing and adding data depending on its relevance and true value) is the acquisition/production of information, which allows us to draw conclusions. Information allows us to form theories, which are defined as explanations and descriptions of what is really happening and thus we can also form predictions of what will happen, at various levels of certainty.

On the way to solid conclusions (given the current available data), many malformed generalisations (e.g., “all Cyanites are oppressors”, “all Magentoids will grow up to be killers”) can be avoided by remembering there is still further to go before such sweeping remarks. Half-knowing is on the way to knowing. Stopping and looking back at all we have learnt on our way has to be done, but it has to be done very carefully. If not done with critical thinking (avoidance of generalisations, absolute constant requirement for dependable and reproducible evidence, to give two examples),  it will result in “information”/misinformation. In such a case ignorance is better than semi-knowing. Cultivating critical thinking is highly important, as without this mental tool the truth remains elusive.

To conclude, the zeroth step is accepting ignorance for a new topic that we have not yet scientifically looked into. The first step is defining exactly what we wish to know, this is dynamic of course and as we find out more it may expand to other areas or contract to just a very specific question. The second, third, …, and (n-1)th steps involve collecting dependable, reproducible data from respectable sources (e.g., Google Scholar is a great tool to dig for scientific papers, make sure they are peer-reviewed before taking any extraordinary claims seriously). The nth step is reached if and only if you feel you have sufficiently understood the data, and formed a context; at this point you may derive some information, conclusions, judgements, theories, etc. Then you must return to the second step and find out if your opinion, informed by data and context, still makes sense in light of new findings; and so on ad infinitum: oscillating between the second and nth steps.

This is the general procedure practised by true freethinkers, sceptics and scientists (although scientists also perform experiments, and therefore collect their own data, as opposed to just reading about other people’s data).