N.B. Today is a variation from my normal format in that I'm taking quotes only from a single work instead of my computer-generated random selections from books that I've read. I do this because I'm writing a review of The Constitution of Knowledge and in reviewing my highlights I found so many insightful and provocative quotes that I decided to share a bunch of them in lieu of the normal potpourri. Enjoy.
“Not that it is impossible that some true knowledge may dwell in us: but if it does, it does so by accident. And since by the same road, the same manner and process, errors are received into our soul, it has no way to distinguish them or to pick out truth from falsehood.” [Montaigne]
. . . .
“We would need someone exempt from all these qualities [of bias and passion], so that with an unprejudiced judgment he might judge of these propositions as of things indifferent to him; and by that score we would need a judge that never was.” [Montaigne]
The knowledge problem centers not on what you know or what I know, but on what we know.
“Nothing can be so dangerous as principles thus taken up without questioning or examination; especially if they be such as concern morality, which influence men’s lives, and give a bias to all their actions.” [John Locke]
Epistemic rights, like political rights, belong to all of us; empiricism is the duty of all of us. No exceptions for priests, princes, or partisans.
In the nineteenth century, skepticism—the idea that if certainty is impossible, knowledge must be impossible—was elbowed aside by a related but quite different idea, that of fallibilism, a term coined by the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce. “On the whole,” he wrote, “we cannot in any way reach perfect certitude nor exactitude. We can never be absolutely sure of anything,” at least when any matter involves facts and statements about objective reality. “The scientific spirit,” said Peirce, “requires a man to be at all times ready to dump his whole cartload of beliefs, the moment experience is against them.”
[Karl] Popper said, knowledge in all its glory, like the biosphere in all its glory, comes from that most unglamorous of all methods: trial and error. Science’s genius is its ability to both make errors quickly and find errors quickly. It kicks the evolution of knowledge into warp drive.
Perhaps his [Charles Sander Pierce's] most impressive contribution, however, was to lay the groundwork for network epistemology, which conceptualizes scientific knowledge not merely as the product of individual or even group effort but as an emergent property of interactions across a social network. His insights were so far ahead of his time. . . . [H]e saw more clearly than anyone before him, and also more clearly than almost everyone today, that the concept of objective knowledge is inherently social. “It will appear,” he wrote, “that individualism and falsity are one and the same. Meantime, we know that man is not whole as long as he is single, that he is essentially a possible member of society. Especially, one man’s experience is nothing if it stands alone. If he sees what others cannot, we call it hallucination. It is not ‘my’ experience but ‘our’ experience that has to be thought of; and this ‘us’ has indefinite possibilities.”
“Unless truth be recognized as public—as that of which any person would come to be convinced if he carried his inquiry, his sincere search for immovable belief, far enough—then there will be nothing to prevent each one of us from adopting an utterly futile belief of his own which all the rest will disbelieve. . . .” [Charles Sanders Pierce]
“The real, then,” explained Peirce, “is that which, sooner or later, information and reasoning would finally result in, and which is therefore independent of the vagaries of me and you. Thus, the very origin of the conception of reality shows that this conception essentially involves the notion of a COMMUNITY, without definite limits, and capable of a definite increase of knowledge.”
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