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Quote of the Day: Truth vs. Knowledge
“Truth is eternal. Knowledge is changeable. It is disastrous to confuse them.”
― An Acceptable Time
If there were one thing I wish I had grasped earlier, this would be it.
For all our scientific discoveries of late, think of the brilliance of Galileo, Michelangelo, Pasteur—they believed many things we now see differently. Will we always?
Will the great Climate Change debate go differently than the spontaneous generation of flies and maggots on raw beef?
Will George Washington, John Adams, or Thomas Jefferson be thought of differently than they are now? I graduated from high school in 1976. Jefferson was revered. Today, not so much. Adams was all the rage after David McCullough’s biography. Washington comes and goes in greatness. Yet without them, singly or together, our nation would have been much different.
Published in Group Writing
So is the idea that what we think is knowledge actually isn’t, or that we can know things that are false, or something else?
Something else—
Truth is immutable. Gravity happens. The sun rises in the east. Jefferson and Adams died on the same day, July 4, 1826.
Knowledge, because of perception or new discoveries, can change. Planes are extraordinary things. The earth moves rather than the sun (but the it appears first to us from the east). Jefferson and Adams will be deconstructed as long as American history is studied.
In my mind, truth is more likely in things unseen—the Creator, for example.
Thanks, now I’ll lay in bed and wonder about this the rest of the night. ;-)
Yes. The Truth is God. God is immutable.
Facts, or knowledge as is used here, are not Truth. They are, at most, a temporary condition.
According to study A, coffee is bad for you. That is a fact. Not that coffee is bad for you, but that study A said it was.
According to study B, coffee is good for you. That is a fact. Not that coffee is good for you, but that study B said it was.
We could say similar things about eggs or cholesterol or many other things. One study concludes this, while another concludes that. When one looks deeper into the studies, one may find that part of the conclusion was in the dosage. Drinking two cups of coffee per day promotes health. Drinking seven pots of coffee per day is unhealthy. Or sometimes a study is badly designed and they attribute a symptom as the cause. (And sometimes they treat the symptom rather than the real disease, doing greater harm than leaving the patient alone would have done.)
Sometimes a fact is refined. Lightspeed = 186,000 miles per second. Lightspeed = 186,623 miles per second.
Our senses are also not trustworthy and neither are our memories. We think we remember something, but the details are fuzzy and our mind will add details at the slightest suggestion and misremember the event next time. Did Sears buy K-Mart? Or did K-Mart buy Sears?
There are so many ways that facts can go wrong or be wrong.
From this it looks like you’re using the term “knowledge” loosely to refer to our informed opinions that are sometimes false. In other words, we can “know” things that are false.
And this suggests something very different: something along the lines of a distinction between fact and opinion.
And this suggests that truth pertains to higher immaterial realities, knowledge to lower physical realities.
Sleep is good. Best of luck!
Yet it is an immutable and permanent truth that Study A and Study B said those things.
No. It’s not. That’s not what “fact” means. What is refined is our understanding of the facts.
It looks to me like what you’re talking about is the distinction between fact and informed opinion. Truth and fact go together: Every true statement is a fact, and vice versa.
Knowledge follows truth. Knowledge (as the dictionary tells us is of truth). Knowledge could be defined more philosophically as true belief + warrant, justification, reason, or something like that (as long as it’s not a Gettier case).
So an informed opinion is knowledge when it is also true and has good enough warrant (and is not a Gettier case). But some informed opinions are not actually knowledge. We just think they are until we find out we were wrong.
But in a million years or a billion years, nobody will remember study A or study B. Truth can always be rediscovered. Facts pass away. Our souls live forever. Our bodies pass on.
So you’re defining “fact” as mind-based, like knowledge. (Ignoring definition 1 from the dictionary and sticking with definition 3 only.)
Not a big problem for me, although I prefer to stick with the dictionary without a very good reason not to.
Anyway, since knowledge and fact (by this definition) are dependent on us believing truths with good evidence, knowledge can certainly change. We can gain new knowledge, get better evidence for our knowledge, lose our knowledge, and so on.
That’s one way we can say that knowledge changes.
Another way is to say that “knowledge” just refers to our informed opinions, and when we find out they are wrong then “knowledge” has changed. I’m not quite comfortable with this because it’s such a loose use of the word “knowledge.” Our understanding of truth and facts changes, but truth and facts do not change. I think it’s better to say that what we think of as knowledge actually isn’t.
But I’m all for pointing out that our prestigious opinions change! I’m not too optimistic myself about the future of global warming theory, for example.
Or the Phlogiston theory of combustion, or that the Cosmos is filled with Aether to transmit light? Both of these theories made more sense that Glowbull Warming.
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An electron has an electric charge. This is a Truth. (It is everybody’s Truth, whether your knowledge has it or not. You do not get your own Truth. Sorry.) That charge has been defined by humans as the elementary electric charge. 110 years ago, Robert Millikan measured that charge. He got it wrong — not terribly wrong, just a smidgen — but the error influenced subsequent results until someone discovered that Millikan was using an incorrect value for the viscosity of air. Subsequent results were influenced by scientists who knew the value Millikan determined and nudged their results due to that knowledge.
You have to be careful with knowledge, particularly the stuff that isn’t Truth.
If you have an X chromosome and a Y chromosome in your cells, you are a man. If you have two X chromosomes instead, you are a woman. The shade of your lipstick isn’t going to change that.
Here’s a fact: Picasso painted things.
Here’s an opinion: Picasso was a great artist.
Here’s a fact/truth: People’s memories are sometimes faulty.
Here is a conclusion based on a number of studies. It may or may not be true: Scientific studies are sometimes superseded by other scientific studies: Too much sugar intake produces hyperactive children.
Here’s a theory: Great art is produced by people with personality disorders
It’s complicated.
Van Gogh is my favorite example of this. One of his paintings is a brilliant harvest scene, all golden and yellow. Sometime after it was finished, he laid on a thick rain storm in grays and blues. You could feel the depression descending as you viewed it. He painted mere weeks before his death.
That’s a great distinction, but doesn’t pertain to a fairly large segment of the population who knowingly and aggressively believe in neither.
Picasso aside, Van Gogh really is a great artist. That is a fact.