Bertrand Russell made a handy distinction between "knowledge by acquaintance" and "knowledge by description" (and there are other uses of "knowledge" but these are two main ones, it's the latter that's usually meant by the traditional definition, "justified true belief").Shatterface wrote:I wasn't claiming there was a binary, they were just examples - but even if there is an infinite 'spectrum' of feelings, in what way do those feelings constitute knowledge?gurugeorge wrote:But as I said, there's a lot more subtlety and variation in feelings than that binary, there's a whole landscape to the inner world; and a lot of literature revolves around evoking those nuances in a way that people recognize in their own experience, and writers can be good or bad at that.Shatterface wrote:
Other than 'I'm happy' or 'I'm sad' what does that knowledge amount to?
So while there's no measurement here, and no testability (until you start crossing over into psychology), there is the possibility of being right or wrong about something.
Having knowledge of those feelings might be knowledge but that knowledge is not the feelings themselves. A psychopath might know you are unhappy but they do not share those feelings, and that knowledge is not those feelings; on the other hand someone with alexithymia might experience emotions without any knowledge of what those emotions are.
So the person who has a feeling they can't name or understand, nevertheless knows it in the sense of being acquainted with it, whereas the psychopath can know you are having that feeling x (as distinct from other feelings), even if it's not something they're acquainted with themselves.
What literature does, generally, is that that the writer draws on their own acquaintance with their own inner landscape, in order to describe it in such a way (often by artfully juxtaposed analogies to more commonly known things) that others can recognize those thoughts and feelings in themselves. This gives others a name for those subtle, but recurring features, so they can talk about them in a way that others (who are also familiar with the literature) can understand. IOW literature gives a common vocabulary for the inner landscape. In that way, knowledge by description is expanded, we have a larger common stock of ways of talking about and signalling our inner states - and the utility of that is better, more refined co-ordination between people.
Yeah, and the thing is, maybe it can and maybe it can't - but where the writer leaves it up to the market to decide, the SJW is trying to force the issue.I don't think scientific knowledge is the only form of knowledge otherwise there would have been no knowledge prior to science. Experience is a form of knowledge. What science and reason and maths tell us is whether that experience can be generalised to tell us something beyond that experience. That's the difference between rational beliefs and the 'lived experience' SJWs bang on about: they take anecdotal data and assume their particular experience can be generalised.
I've never had any problem at all about the aspect of SJW-ism that's people sharing their feelings on Tumblr. It's amusing to the hardier, more stoic sort of personality type, but it's not per se a bad thing, and as a minorly psychologically wounded person myself (orphan, then adoptive mother died when I was 12), I have some sympathy for it, even in its crazier manifestations. What's been problematic has been the crossover between that and the "oppressor/oppressed" political analysis/ideology.
Yeah, all those things are forms of knowledge - they are "expectations" that the creature's environment will be a certain way (none of them would proceed in the vacuum of space). e.g. DNA blueprints a creature that will look for what we call "water" and drink it. IOW, it "knows" (i.e. is structured to expect) that there will be such a thing as "water" around somewhere. Its musculo-skeletal system is built to "expect" that there will be such a thing as gravity against which it has to constantly balance when it moves, and in that sense it knows (by description, going back to the above distinction - the description encoded in symbolic form in the DNA) that there is such a thing as gravity. As with all purported knowledge, it can fail and be false depending on how the world actually turns out to be.To be honest, you are losing me here. If a bird's capability of flight is 'knowledge' encoded in their DNA then gene regulation, cell division, morphogenesis and cancer are forms of knowledge. "Aperiodic crystals of language informing our own actions at a memetic level'' sounds like something from Deepak Chopra. If that's supposed to be an analogy the analogy is more comlicated than whatever you are trying to describe.
The only difference with us is that we can symbolize and discuss our expectations, that's what makes them non-scare-quotes expectations. (IOW, we retrofit our own case back to nature, but actually our own case is just a more sophisticated, self-reflexive version of what nature's already been blindly doing.)
"Aperiodic crystal" was Schrodinger's way of describing what the "code of life" logically must be like in his paper "What is Life?" DNA is like a language, language is like DNA, they're both irregular-but-regular sequences of physical things that physically switch other physical things into different states. DNA blueprinting the production of complex proteins which, in total, amount to an animal with its own funny little ways, is analogous to you looking at ink marks on a page, or hearing patterns of sound vibration coming from someone's mouth, and having your physical state (mostly brain/nervous system state, but also hormonal bath in the body) subtly switched so you approach the world in a certain way, with certain expectations about how it's going to pan out - which includes for example having bits of inner imagery, dialogue, feelings, etc. (Note that it doesn't matter that each person's individual imagery may be different, the thing that's "solid,", the thing that's objective, that crosses over between us, is the actual physical objects that we share access to, the social habit patterns of language use, the marks on paper, the stored digits, etc. Nevertheless there will be some similarities - e.g. most people probably have an image of a cat when someone says "cat", though for one it might be calico, for another ginger, for another just a vague cat-shaped blob.)
Roughly, there are three levels to knowledge (as "expectation" in this sense), the knowledge of the world that's built into us biologically; the knowledge of the world that's stored in folkways, customs, family forms and "metis" (know how); and the symbolic knowledge the individual accumulates in the course of their life (which may be consciously pooled and shared - e.g. a scientist's gauge readings contribute to shared science). Each successive form builds on the previous, and at each level you're zeroing in from broader physical, geological, etc. constants, through slowly shifting geographical and historical constants, down to the moment. (i.e. "Shit, a tiger, RUN!" builds on the previous levels, from the tacitly understood constant of gravity that means you'll actually move when you move your legs a certain way; through village tiger lore you heard since you were a child; to visual cues processed incredibly quickly in the here and now.)
(Sorry for dumping this stuff here, it's just things I've been thinking about a lot recently, and a discussion where knowledge is part of the topic seems like a handy place to let it bounce around the esteemed assembly :) )
