Sometimes we talk about things where we have a high degree of confidence and also where there is also a good amount of justification for that confidence in the form of supporting evidence.
Sometimes the evidence for is not that great but there are convincing reasons for thinking that the opposite of something we think we know is false. There are examples where this can be critical. Approaching a distant traffic signal in uncertain light conditions we might say that we are not sure if it is red or yellow but we are sure that it is not green, and act on that, which may save our lives. Or we may say that from scientific observation it is certain that the Earth goes round the Sun, where our first impression is the opposite. It is normal to talk in terms of knowledge about things like that. Sceptics like me might have theoretical issues with such statements, but it is normally fine to base actions on them. So we can develop medicines on the basis of our knowledge of biology and chemistry, even if I am not totally certain that we really know what we think we know. And when I am sick I am perfectly happy to rely on them. This kind of knowledge is good enough for ordinary life.
Included in this area are things like mathematics and the results of scientific enquiry. Confidence is both high and justified. There are good reasons for believing things like this. Without many of them modern life would not be possible – no engineering, no medicine, no cars or planes or trains, no satellite navigation, no radio or TV, vastly less agriculture, no computers, no credit cards, and so on and on and on. No-one fights wars over this kind of knowledge. There may be theoretical doubts like mine, but these are the things that we believe we know, and the results are before your eyes.
On the other hand are the things in which we have confidence but without any justification. I remember having a discussion some years ago with a man and his wife about the limitations of knowledge – a topic he plainly had a poor grasp of as you will see. The example he used was his certainty of is wife's fidelity. She growled at him: “Don't you be so sure!” My opinion at the time was that she objected to being taken for granted, something he was in the habit of doing, and I still think that's right. But until the advent of DNA testing, it has always been an issue because men did not have any way to be certain of the paternity of the children they were expending effort to bring up, apart from incarcerating their wives. Evidence of the defensiveness of men in this respect is all around us. That's what Harems are about, and you can easily develop the idea.
On a different level I was chatting to someone I had met when walking our dogs. Somehow the conversation got round to how things look from a dog's point of view, and I mentioned that they are colour blind. “Oh I don't believe that!” she said and went on with an anecdote that I did not commit to memory. The point is (and I did not bore her with it) that dogs' eyes do not have receptors (like ours do) that are capable of distinguishing light of different wavelengths, which is how colour vision starts. Of course we can't be absolutely certain of what a dog's brain does with the information that it does receive, but as it does not get information about variations in light wavelengths, colour vision has all the marks of being impossible. But the person I was talking to had her own opinion, in total ignorance of the science, and that was that. She believed, with conviction, her dog saw colour not merely without evidence, but flying in the face of evidence.
Beliefs of this kind can be incredibly strong, and very important to people. I knew someone who was absolutely convinced that she talked every day with her dead mother. Many people find great comfort in thoughts like that. They are convinced. It is remotely possible, we cannot be absolutely certain that people do not survive death in some way, even if it looks like a very remote possibility from a scientific point of view. But there is certainly no evidence that they do. People who are convinced that they can talk to dead loved ones are basing that certainty on something private to them, something going on in their own head that cannot be substantiated. However comforting or important such beliefs are, they remain beliefs, not knowledge. However, they are things about which we are found saying “I know” when we mean “I believe”.
There is a great deal of confusion in the area that encompasses belief and knowledge. Just the other day, in the American Museum of Natural History in New York, I was hanging on to a group that was getting information from someone at the front who was obviously very knowledgeable. It turns out that he was an anthropologist on the museum staff and they were a class of students. He was standing before a display of fossil hominid skulls explaining the relationships and where and how discoveries made since the display was built 3 years ago fit in. He was talking about the time, just over 30,000 years ago, relatively recently in geological terms, when there were 3 species of human alive on the planet. There was us, Homo sapiens, there were the Neaderthals, Homo neanderthalis, and the small human species whose fossils were discovered a few years ago on the Indonesian island of Flores, Homo floresiensis. He went on quickly to wave his hand over the display and show other times when there were “several human species alive at the same time”.
This last phrase was too much for one of the students, who interjected “Don't you mean human-like?”. He replied, I thought with a touch of irritation, “No, they are humans, genus Homo.”
At this point my imagination went into overdrive, and I quickly formed an opinion for which I have no evidence whatsoever. My speculation was that this young lady was having a problem, one that the lecturer had encountered before, perhaps often before. Her problem was, I guessed, that her religious beliefs told her that God created man in his own image, and that we are not related to the other species, and definitely not to the apes. But the anthropological evidence before her eyes, of which there is a mountain, is to the contrary. The relationships between human species and pre-human close relatives have long been studied. Controversies about exact details of relationships exist, but the framework is as certain as things get in science. There is no debate that we and the other apes share a common ancestor, and there have been other species of our own genus, Homo, to whom we are more or less closely related. If I am right, (and I emphasise that this is entirely conjecture on my part) the young lady does indeed have a serious problem because religious convictions are among the firmest we have. They are the beliefs of which we are, often, the most certain, our strongest convictions. But they remain beliefs, not knowledge, and often fly in the face of knowledge in the other sense.
Jung said that he “knew” about the existence of God – but he had no evidence. He knew what a lot of ancient people believed, he had evidence for that. He knew what his patients believed, he had evidence for that too. And he knew what he believed, but that does not add up to knowledge of the divine, only a lot of different beliefs. None the less, he said, and we say, “I know” with conviction and certainty.
It is, I hope, obvious that there is every reason to doubt, to be very wary, when we have beliefs, strong convictions, without justification. These are the sort of “knowledge” that throughout history people have been prepared to kill for, and on behalf of which they have been prepared to torture people, to burn them alive. Wars have been fought and terrible crimes committed because of these beliefs. In human history atrocities have been committed by people with a certain belief against people who differed from them by tiny amounts. No wars have been fought over the certainties of mathematics. But on the other hand mathematicians have been burned at the stake by religious believers whose beliefs could not stand being confronted by knowledge.
On a smaller scale, our preparedness to defend our beliefs, even on such a trivial thing as a dog's colour vision, can lead to people falling out in a big way. People resort to violence to defend unjustified belief, either against other beliefs or against the inroads made by knowledge.
For this reason it is vitally important that on the one hand we know what we believe, and on the other, believe what we know.
*I am grateful to Andre Comte-Sponville (see readinglist below) for the idea contained in his phrase "know what we believe and believe what we know".
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