knowledge, situated

June 5, 2024 10:11 AM

"We must accept the complexity of positionality—and with it the privilege of “centered” and “peripheral”—or dominant and subjugated—positions and the partiality of all knowledge. Situated knowledge needs to take into account the historical context in particular locations. It can only be reached in connections, in webs, in networks, in practices of solidarity and sharing. And it must be a critical vision, power-sensitive, brought forward in the best feminist practices." [on curating]
posted by HearHere (35 comments total)

QFT:

Changing position is not possible without being held accountable for it. The new position comes with a new vision and instruments of power. These transitions require critical, careful, and trustworthy practices; “infinite mobility and interchangeability” are the opposite of that. Expressions of whataboutisms in our daily life lend testimony to this naïve, uncontextualized, and superficial comparability trick.
posted by chavenet at 2:58 PM on June 5 [1 favorite]

wut

like quite seriously, what is this block of words trying to say
posted by Sebmojo at 3:29 PM on June 5 [5 favorites]

chatgpt to the rescue:


ChatGPT
Certainly! Here's a comprehensible prose version of the text:

In the essay "Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective" published in 1988, Donna Haraway introduced the concept of "situated knowledges." She addressed the limitations of traditional scientific objectivity and advocated for a feminist perspective that acknowledges individual positioning and privilege. Haraway argued that all knowledge and truth are influenced by our personal, cultural, and historical contexts. She criticized the notion of universal objectivity, which often masks subjective biases and maintains existing power structures.

Haraway's concept of situated knowledges emphasizes the importance of recognizing our own perspectives and positions when engaging in research or discourse. Instead of dismissing objectivity altogether, she suggested reshaping it to be more inclusive and accountable. This approach challenges traditional narratives in fields like science and art history, which have often excluded marginalized voices and perspectives.

Haraway identified two opposing paths to knowledge: the "god trick" of universal objectivity and the relativism of postmodernity. She criticized both for their failure to acknowledge the influence of power dynamics and individual perspectives. Haraway proposed situated knowledges as a third path, which embraces partiality and acknowledges the complexities of truth.

She argued against postmodern relativism, which treats all perspectives as equally valid and denies the importance of critical inquiry and responsibility. Haraway warned that relativism could lead to the proliferation of misinformation and the reinforcement of existing power structures.

Instead, Haraway advocated for a more nuanced understanding of objectivity, one that incorporates situated knowledges and acknowledges the social, political, and economic contexts in which knowledge is produced. She urged for a shift away from universalist approaches in disciplines like art history, which have historically privileged certain voices over others.

Ultimately, Haraway's concept of situated knowledges encourages us to critically examine our own perspectives and positions, and to strive for a more inclusive and accountable approach to knowledge production.
posted by Sebmojo at 3:33 PM on June 5

Question: is this different from 'be objective or subjective depending on whether it suits you and the point you're trying to make'?
posted by Sebmojo at 3:34 PM on June 5 [2 favorites]

embedded & extended cognition may be apropos, perspectives [Stanford]
posted by HearHere at 4:27 PM on June 5

"objectivity" isn't real. There is no privileged observer.
Facts are facts, even if they are different from different viewpoints, as in general relativity. There aren't "multiple kinds of knowledge." You know something or you don't. What you know is knowledge. When it is proven incorrect or incomplete, it's no longer knowledge.

I don't read long articles with unneccessary long words and rhetorical flourishes without an obvious point. I know obvious stuff is for dumbs like me, but I prefer plain communication, especially in the domain of "knowledge", which is slippery and vague enough already without philosophers muddying the waters.

Different "ways of knowledge" are different viewpoints examining the same things. The thing-in-itself is what it is, which may or may not be knowable. We know very little, and we constantly discover that what we thought was known was not so. Oops!
posted by Rev. Irreverent Revenant at 4:54 PM on June 5 [5 favorites]

Hearhere, if you have the time and inclination, could you summarize that second link you posted? it seems equally incomprehensible to me, and I have like three degrees.
posted by Sebmojo at 6:31 PM on June 5 [3 favorites]

There aren't "multiple kinds of knowledge." You know something or you don't. What you know is knowledge.

Is that the same as saying that I believe something or I don't, and that what I believe is belief? If not, could you provide examples of contexts within which making a distinction between belief and knowledge becomes useful?

When it is proven incorrect or incomplete, it's no longer knowledge.

Proven to what standard, by whom, for what purpose, with what motivation, using what method(s)?

What if I believe that all knowledge is inherently incomplete? Can I then claim defensibly to have any knowledge whatsoever?
posted by flabdablet at 8:12 PM on June 5 [1 favorite]

Sebmojo, sure. just need to rest a bit. i'll get back to you on this soon
posted by HearHere at 8:21 PM on June 5

There aren't "multiple kinds of knowledge."

I decided as a much younger man that there were. Here's the classification system I came up with for my own internal use:

Type 1: I can use this immediately

Type 2: I know where to look this up (in other words, the reference source is Type 1)

Type 3: I know that I can look this up (in other words, the reference source is Type 2)

This typology doesn't speak to reliability, merely to speed of access.

Later in life I have come to a much fuller appreciation of the distinction between knowing how to do a thing and the being able to do the thing that comes only with maintaining a practice. If I were still attached to my numbering scheme I'd probably slot the latter in as Type 0 knowledge.
posted by flabdablet at 8:48 PM on June 5 [1 favorite]

the title of the page in the second link is Embodied Cognition. So, here we’re talking about a body and brain working together. that’s different than what is described thereon as “computationalism”, basically that a ‘brain’ is separate from a ‘body’ in a way similar to how a ‘computer’ might be separate from an ‘office’. previously, posts on ‘mind/body’ may help further clarify

‘perspectives in conversation’ could be a condensed way to describe an alternative approach, anchored in the link, adjacent to Haraway’s: extended cognition

‘extended cognition’ is, well, what it says on the tin… to go back to the ‘computer’ analogy: this device can be seen as part of a larger system (or hyperobject, if you wish). this can be seen in terms of peripherals, e.g. keyboard, mouse, or/additionally; what role does the computer play in the office: composing reports for distribution, etc.

if you’d like to ‘stay with the trouble,’ Haraway also wrote A Cyborg Manifesto [pdf]
posted by HearHere at 2:17 AM on June 6 [2 favorites]

this is the situation

Situatedness, or, Why We Keep Saying Where We're Coming From is another book on the topic [gbooks]:
"Within the capitalist states—Britain and the United States especially—governments have been mostly cutting back on the rational interventionism that typified, for example, the New Deal and the War on Poverty, allowing the initiatives they represented either to disappear or to be spontaneously reincarnated as the results of voluntarist affiliations generated by a rebirth of some proposed ideal civil society (this last being a completely separate topic requiring skeptical attention, but not here). Making the world better to make better people has not been a high priority in recent years[2002: 11]. If there is at the same time a diminished language or no language at all for describing anything between atomic self (and its chosen groups) and global everything, then we will have been completely made over by the forces and interests that (I still believe) govern much of our lives and prefer to maintain an evacuated rhetoric in the sphere of social description."
posted by HearHere at 4:24 AM on June 6 [1 favorite]

No, I'm sorry, that doesn't help at all. What is the relevance of the second link to the first?
posted by Sebmojo at 5:23 AM on June 6

"Haraway’s simple but pervasive idea points out that all “knowledge” and therefore forms of “truth” are shaped from a positional perspective: the formation of knowledge is positional, and objectivity is situated in a specific context and environment, historically, societally, culturally, personally, bodily, and embodied."
...distillation...
embodied cognition
posted by HearHere at 8:47 AM on June 6 [1 favorite]

Is that the same as saying that I believe something or I don't, and that what I believe is belief? If not, could you provide examples of contexts within which making a distinction between belief and knowledge becomes useful?

It isn't the same, because beliefs are just thoughts. Knowledge is something you know.
Knowing means it isn't wrong. Each bit of knowledge implies its own test. For "science" knowledge the tests involve correspondence with observable phenomena which are assumed to arise from the "real world". I'm not claiming that the "real world" really exists. I'm claiming that if the real world really does exist, then it is the ground of scientific knowledge, by nature of the tests that "prove" that knowledge. It's a circular logic, but it's what we have. As far as I know.

Proven to what standard, by whom, for what purpose, with what motivation, using what method(s)?

I think I've covered this above, but to expand slightly: the standards, methods et al. vary according to the tests used to establish that the information is "knowledge" to begin with. My claim is that knowledge doesn't acquire a different "kind" just because it is established by a different test. All the tests of "knowledge", as far as I know, rely on correspondence with some idea of what's "real".

What if I believe that all knowledge is inherently incomplete?

Then I'm sorry to say I agree with you. It's a scary situation, I feel. On the other hand, there is hope in it. For example, Godel's theorem shows us that we can't achieve both completeness and coherence in any formal logical system, but we can find workarounds for specific examples of incoherence using isomorphism and other tools. Well I can't, but smartfolk can.
Can I then claim defensibly to have any knowledge whatsoever?

I think the defensibility of such a claim depends entirely on your rhetorical skill. If you want to argue "logically" about it, then first you have to choose a system of logic to use, which then becomes a source-of-truth by proxy. It's a proxy for the implied "reality" on which the logical system operates. You can prove anything you like if you choose your axioms carefully. That doesn't mean your arguments, however logically valid, will "come true". For that to happen, there would need to be a "reality" determined or reliably modeled by the logical system you're using. Finding one of those is hard, and the ones we've found all have big holes in them, but they are awfully useful just the same :)

Thanks for challenging and forcing me to think further into this. I hope my answers are useful.
posted by Rev. Irreverent Revenant at 12:35 PM on June 6 [1 favorite]

It isn't the same, because beliefs are just thoughts. Knowledge is something you know.

How is "something I know" not also a way to refer to a thought?

Knowing means it isn't wrong.

Not wrong with what degree of accuracy, and with what degree of confidence?

If I have a rule of thumb that works in roughly 95% of cases, is that rule a thing that I know? What if it works in 99% of cases? 99.9%? 70%?

What if it works in only 20% of cases but I'm confident that I can spot most of those in which it's not worth using by other means?

What if it works in only 20% of cases but the cost of having it not work is so low that always trying it first still ends up saving me time overall?

It's a scary situation, I feel.

Why would I be scared of a situation that strikes me as only to be expected, given my own size and complexity relative to that of the world of which I am such a tiny, tiny part?
posted by flabdablet at 12:59 PM on June 6

"Haraway’s simple but pervasive idea points out that all “knowledge” and therefore forms of “truth” are shaped from a positional perspective: the formation of knowledge is positional, and objectivity is situated in a specific context and environment, historically, societally, culturally, personally, bodily, and embodied."
...distillation...
embodied cognition

right. Well, thanks for trying.
posted by Sebmojo at 1:48 PM on June 6 [1 favorite]

How is "something I know" not also a way to refer to a thought?

flabdablet: The question of "what does it mean to know something" is definitely a very active question in philosophy—there is an entire subdiscipline, epistemology, devoted mostly to "what is knowledge and how do we know things?"—but the most common (although definitely not entirely sufficient) formulation that one sees bandied about runs as follows: "knowledge is justified true belief". You often see it abbreviated "JTB" (or "JTB+" for more modern epistemological formulations that regard JTB as necessary-but-not-sufficient and add extra conditions.) The Stanford Phil article i linked just above is very readable and goes into more detail here.

Sebmojo: i'm not HearHere and the last time i read Haraway was a long time ago, but maybe i can help a little. (I do recommend you read the article i just linked to flabdablet).

Let's fall back on science-fictional analogy and posit, for the sake of this conversation, an AI. A real AI, i mean—not stupid LLM bullshit but a notional sentient computer. We'll call it Joe (because i'm a Murray Leinster fan). Notably, Joe isn't a robot; it's a computer in a server rack somewhere. Its body, as it were, consists of a 6U chunk of plastic, metal, and electronics, and all the sorts of input devices and peripherals it has—network access, a keyboard, a camera. For the sake of the thought experiment, it can definitely look up anything available on the public internet, and probably a lot of stuff that people think is private.

Now: what does Joe know, and how does it arrive at knowledge (as opposed to simply information)? How does it arrive at justified true belief? (What does "true" even mean, to Joe?) How is that process affected by the fact that it has sensory apparatus that is entirely different from a human's? That it wasn't "born", nor "raised" embedded in a human culture (although it almost certainly got a lot of default cultural assumptions baked in by whoever built it)? That Joe is, in a fundamental sense, embodied differently?
posted by adrienneleigh at 2:35 PM on June 6 [2 favorites]

Is this a translation from an unknown language?
posted by Ideefixe at 8:31 PM on June 6 [2 favorites]

justified true belief

Seems to me that "belief" is the only uncontroversial word in that formulation.

I'm personally not a fan of trying to nail down some precise distinction between knowledge and belief, because it seems to me to be the kind of pursuit that would lead otherwise quite competent thinkers to waste countless years talking past each other.

Rather, I prefer to think of almost every belief I have as potentially unreliable under certain (possibly as yet unencountered) conditions, and do my best not to depend so heavily on any framework of beliefs that conditions that would require me to adapt or modify it cause me severe distress.

So when I sling around the terms "knowledge" and "belief", I try to discern how the person I'm talking to makes the distinction between their referents, if any, and follow suit.

Internally, the only belief I can find that has yet to contradict experience is the one I've formulated at various times as

This is.
Something's going on.
Sum.

and that is not so much a belief as simple reportage of the fact of direct experience.

This is a tricky idea to nail down in words because its referent is pre-verbal.

I personally dislike "cogito ergo sum" because I think it misses the point. I have experienced states of consciousness where "sum" continues to work just fine even though "cogito" is beyond my abilities to an utterly ludicrous extent. To me, cogito is a consequence of sum and not the other way around, and I think that if the same thing had occurred to Descartes, the whole tiresome dualism business would probably have been sidestepped and a great deal of violence avoided.
posted by flabdablet at 1:16 AM on June 7 [2 favorites]

Is this a translation from an unknown language?

To the extent that the writer's worldview apparently has so little overlap with that of some of those posting in this thread as to render her prose unintelligible to them: arguably.

To the extent that the question is a derisive rhetorical snort seeking in-group validation, as opposed to a genuine first step on a road toward picking up what she's laying down: unknown to whom?

Lack of instant comprehensibility caused by a writer's assumption of a comparable background on the part of their readers is a general feature of a lot of academic writing. Sometimes this effect gets weaponized to slip complete nonsense past peer reviewers, per Sokal. Sometimes the people slipping complete nonsense past peer review appear to have fooled even themselves. But such cases are comparatively rare; most academic writing is motivated by a spirit of honest inquiry and does pay dividends in understanding if approached in the same spirit.
posted by flabdablet at 2:36 AM on June 7 [2 favorites]

I do recommend you read the article i just linked to flabdablet

I also recommend doing that.

So far, this is my favourite bit:

1.1 The Truth Condition

Most epistemologists have found it overwhelmingly plausible that what is false cannot be known. For example, Hillary Clinton did not win the 2016 US Presidential election. Consequently, nobody knows that Hillary Clinton won the election. One can only know things that are true.

Sometimes when people are very confident of something that turns out to be wrong, we use the word “knows” to describe their situation. Many people expected Clinton to win the election. Speaking loosely, one might even say that many people “knew” that Clinton would win the election—until she lost. Hazlett (2010) argues on the basis of data like this that “knows” is not a factive verb. Hazlett’s diagnosis is deeply controversial; most epistemologists will treat sentences like “I knew that Clinton was going to win” as a kind of exaggeration—as not literally true.

It made me laugh because I couldn't help but update it a little and swap Clinton 2016 for TFG 2020. If TFG does win this year, it will be because a substantial number of US voters knew that he'd also won in 2020 but had been denied office by nefarious means, a position that will doubtless be confirmed as factual in almost all of the subsequent histories of the US's first imperial dynasty.

But, but, but, I hear you shout, that's not true! Anybody who claims to know that it is true has only a deluded belief about it, not knowledge!

And I agree with you. But what if you and I agreeing on this topic simply doesn't matter? I can easily imagine a 2124 edition of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy casually quoting the winner of the 2020 Presidential election as a matter of established fact.

There are a lot of propositions whose truth value is assigned more by loose consensus than by any kind of rigorous testing. I would go so far as to say that most of what most people think of as knowledge consists of propositions of this kind, and that the resulting social juggernaut is well beyond the capacity of academic philosophy to course-correct.
posted by flabdablet at 3:07 AM on June 7 [1 favorite]

Sebmojo, you’re welcome. and thank you for your question and responses!

Music might be another way to parse this. Say a violin player and a pianist meet. They want to play a song together. a piano player might be able to tap something out on a cello & the violinist might be able to make sound with the piano. the experience either specialist has with these instruments separately, however, might mean that they are more capable, in this example, of producing sound aligning with a composers goals, at least one thinking about expertise resulting from some level of familiarity with these instruments, if they switch. i hope that’s sensible to you [Stanford’s capability approach linked]

thank you also to everyone else involved in this conversation!
There are a lot of propositions whose truth value is assigned more by loose consensus...
“justification, rather than… knowledge” is explicit, relative especially to perception, in one of the books [gbooks] cited from the link (which i appreciate; thank you, adrienneleigh)

translation from an unknown language?
🤨 more transcription?
posted by HearHere at 12:01 PM on June 7 [1 favorite]

There are a lot of propositions whose truth value is assigned more by loose consensus than by any kind of rigorous testing. I would go so far as to say that most of what most people think of as knowledge consists of propositions of this kind

flabdablet: Congratulations! You have arrived at what we (and Donna Haraway) mean by "knowledge is always situated, positional, and embodied"!
posted by adrienneleigh at 12:50 PM on June 7 [2 favorites]

Fucking spoilers!

How is a bloke supposed to wax Socratic under these conditions? It's intolerable.
posted by flabdablet at 11:01 PM on June 7 [2 favorites]

(Side note:

I think that if the same thing had occurred to Descartes, the whole tiresome dualism business would probably have been sidestepped and a great deal of violence avoided.

Nah, that apparently goes back to the early Christian mystics, if not earlier, and is much more thoroughly baked in to Judeo-Christian Western culture. (See: A Brief History of Misogyny).
)
posted by eviemath at 4:48 AM on June 8 [2 favorites]

Mysticism can be huge amounts of fun as a practice, but beliefs derived from mystical experiences often just don't stand up all that well to practical testing.

Also, it's long been clear to me that the Will of God is no more than a rather pretty poetic metaphor, a way to refer to that which is beyond the will or control of any person or group. Mistaking that metaphor and others similar, such as God's Plan, for literal references to something real and specific inevitably leads the idea of God to inherit a bunch of conceptual baggage from the idea of a person, opening it to abuse by the grifters, sharks and zealots who have used it over the centuries to legitimize any amount of oppression and justify any amount of suffering.

So yeah, all of the Abrahamic religions are indeed thoroughly baked. But Descartes I have particular beef with, because his idea of starting from total skepticism was such a good one and yet fucked up so utterly royally by his not having had the guts to dump his faith over the side along with the rest of the conceptual chum bucket.
posted by flabdablet at 6:51 AM on June 8 [2 favorites]

Disappointing perhaps, but surely not surprising given that his starting goal was to prove the existence of God?
posted by eviemath at 10:20 AM on June 8 [1 favorite]

Yep. Bad-faith faith and didn't prove shit, just made up a more complicated Just So story and hoped nobody would notice.

This is much the same method used by those who attempt to elevate the idea of knowing to a position of conceptual privilege that would justify applying the adjective "mere" to believing.

What's really disappointing about constructing a complicated bad idea to prop up a simple bad idea is that it works. People just lose track and end up fully buying into their own horseshit. It's even worse when really smart people do it because it's damn near impossible for anybody less smart to convince them that that's all they've done and then they get disciples.

Epistemology is a cult, and anybody who thinks that knowing anything amounts to more than holding it as a provisional working assumption is a member.

I must memail bombastic lowercase pronouncements and get lowercase to write this up. Could be a paper in it.
posted by flabdablet at 11:30 AM on June 8 [2 favorites]

Epistemology is a cult

Says the person making pronouncements about the nature of knowledge, aka engaging in epistemology….

Seriously though, “all ‘knowledge’ is a provisional working assumption” is also an epistemology. It’s a broad field of study, not a set of specific conclusions. I’m only familiar with the epistemology of science and of mathematics end of things, and there is definitely not a unified consensus in either of those sub disciplines, and that’s before you get into non-Western-science “ways of knowing” or ideas about what constitutes knowledge.
posted by eviemath at 7:39 PM on June 8 [3 favorites]

“all ‘knowledge’ is a provisional working assumption” is also an epistemology

join us
posted by flabdablet at 9:39 PM on June 8

wax Socratic under these conditions?
❓[sparknotes]
posted by HearHere at 4:16 AM on June 11 [2 favorites]

❗[wikipedia]
posted by flabdablet at 4:53 AM on June 11 [1 favorite]

flabdablet.

If you want to know about something go look at it. Use your senses, the measuring devices that seem appropriate to you, and the techniques for making sense of measurements that seem best to you.

I don't trust any source-of-knowledge more than I trust the model I have made with my senses and my memories . I have techniques that allow me to use my senses and memories to demonstrate the unreliability of same. I just made finger-sausage, and made it disappear. Finger-sausage isn't real, but I saw it. I can see it anytime I want, assuming the relevant systems are working "properly". The real is not knowable to me or to you, not completely and not without ambiguity.

There is no call to hang out here and talk shit to me about whether ambiguity is scary or not. I'm glad you don't feel threatened by the unknown. I hope this means that the world you live in is not one that contains a lot of dangers over which you have little control or ability to mitigate. The world I live in is one in which people are free to threaten my life to my face in front of witnesses, with no consequence to them and no recourse to me. It's a world in which people have hit me without my consent, and when I tell others about it I am blamed, shamed and shunned. I am frequently targeted for no apparent reason, and it's entirely possible that I'm being targeted by malicious actors who have doxxed me. To my relief, I have no proof yet of the latter. It's a comfort to me, to not know for sure.

That's how I feel about it. Nothing about talking about how I feel dictates how you should feel. That's a weird flex on your part. I am not in charge of your feelings.

Similarly, you may not legislate my feelings. You can fuck right off into the sun with that shit.

I consider that I "know" something when I can do something with that knowledge, like make a machine or technique improve along some unambiguous metric. Hell, I settle for not-too-ambiguous much of the time and I don't lose sleep over it.

The "multiple kinds of knowledge" canard is one that I'm used to seeing in a woo context, like people say they get knowledge from prophetic dreams or crystals or their Dear Leader or a beloved novel. There's a lot of folk running around claiming to "know for a fact" all sorts of wrong or meaningless horseshit.

We don't get to know shit for sure, hardly, and we have to try very hard and be endlessly diligent to be a little bit less wrong, and then a little less still.

"err and err and err again, but less and less and less" is a quote I find apropos but not enough to bother attributing it
posted by Rev. Irreverent Revenant at 3:26 PM on June 19 [2 favorites]

It's a comfort to me, to not know for sure.

Me too, though I'm sure there are others for whom that formulation of this point upon which appear to be in heated agreement comes over as its own kind of "weird flex".

There's a lot of folk running around claiming to "know for a fact" all sorts of wrong or meaningless horseshit.

Sure are. I find it very helpful to run an internal filter over all incoming communication that substitutes "believe with high confidence" for all instances of "know for a fact", mainly because I've found that the same move has done so much to clarify my own thinking.

I consider that I "know" something when I can do something with that knowledge, like make a machine or technique improve along some unambiguous metric.

After my father retired from teaching physics and chemistry, his thinking got thoroughly captured by alt-med. This completely ruined his former ability to give an amazing back rub, because instead of just doing that whenever one seemed called for, he strongly believed that it would be more beneficial to employ "diagnostic" techniques like muscle testing in response to having the "patient" hold onto various horrendously expensive "radionically harmonized vials" so as to find the optimum spots to apply little jolts from his horrendously expensive little hand-held mechanical clicker machine.

Dad would argue that he was using the exact same criteria you've just cited in order to decide what counted as "knowledge" and by those internally evaluated criteria he had a hell of a lot of it. He was widely respected within the alt-med circles he moved in because he'd applied his formidable scholastic mind to soaking up so much of this "knowledge". It was hard to find a practitioner of woo whose methods Dad wasn't familiar with and able to discuss in depth and at length with others similarly inclined, and an unending stream of people in all kinds of distress would come through our front door, disappear into Dad's treatment room for half an hour, and leave smiling; most of them came back multiple times.

Eventually his "knowledge" killed him, his having become completely convinced that he was able to "manage" his "prostate situation" by various of these methods. The tumour eventually grew to the size of a football, crushing his ureters and thereby destroying his kidneys. On the upside, a lot of people came to his funeral.

The lesson I've taken away from watching my father's critical faculty crumble is that the distinction between knowledge and belief is not one worth making; the extent to which any given line of argument tries to defend that distinction is in roughly inverse proportion to the amount of respect I have for it.

I don't mind believing things, but I prefer to be clear on the degree of confidence I have in any such belief and to maintain a policy of expecting and welcoming the waxing and waning of those confidence levels in the light of experience. I also maintain a policy of assigning extremely low confidence values to beliefs that claim to be testable only by accepting them first. Faith killed my father and I resent it for doing so.

Outside the context of discussions specifically about knowledge, though, I'm of course quite content to use the word "know" as an informal shorthand for "believe with high confidence".

And yeah, lots of good stuff turns up in Piet Hein's published works.
posted by flabdablet at 5:13 AM on June 20 [1 favorite]