24/06/2019 O conhecimento é um conceito da idade da pedra, estamos melhor sem ele | Aeon Essays

O conhecimento é cru
Longe de ser uma pedra de toque da verdade, o
conhecimento é um conceito da Idade da Pedra
que prejudica nossas relações com o mundo
moderno.
David Papineau

Eu sou contra o conhecimento. Não me entenda mal: sou tão interessado nos fatos
quanto na próxima pessoa. Eu não sou amigo de notícias falsas. Eu quero a verdade
em vez da falsidade. É especificamente o conhecimento contra o qual eu sou contra,
não a crença verdadeira. O conhecimento pede mais de nós do que a crença
verdadeira, e não vale a pena. Na realidade, o conceito de conhecimento é uma
ressaca de um modo de pensar da Idade da Pedra que há muito sobreviveu à sua
utilidade. Estaríamos muito melhor sem isso.  

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Os filósofos gostam de mostrar como o conhecimento vai além da mera crença

verdadeira. Para ver a diferença, imagine que você está convencido, com base não
muito boa, que um cavalo chamado Meadowlark vencerá a corrida 3:40 em Ascot
amanhã. E então suponha que, de fato, seja uma brincadeira. Não diria que você teve 
conhecimento que iria ganhar, só porque a sua crença acabou por ser verdade.

O que mais do que a crença verdadeira é necessária para o conhecimento? Um

pensamento natural é que sua crença precisa ser apoiada por boas razões. Não pode
ser apenas um palpite que acontece de certo. Mas isso também não parece suficiente.
Imagine que um amigo lhe compre um bilhete de loteria como presente. Você não
pensa muito no presente, porque está convencido de que não vai ganhar, pela boa
razão de ser um em um milhão. E no devido tempo, na verdade, acaba por não ser o
vencedor. Mesmo assim, nós ainda não diria que você teve  conhecimento  de que o
bilhete foi inútil. Sua crença pode ter sido eminentemente razoável, bem como
verdadeira, mas ainda parece muito importante para se qualificar como
conhecimento.

For those philosophers who work in epistemology (the ‘theory of knowledge’), the
holy grail is to pin down the nature of knowledge and explain why it matters. But
despite thousands upon thousands of articles devoted to the topic, the philosophers
haven’t been able to come up with a good story. I say that’s because they’re barking
up the wrong tree. e notion of knowledge doesn’t in fact pick out anything
important. It’s a crude concept we have inherited from our prehistoric ancestors, and
it positively handicaps us in our dealings with the modern world.

Before the emergence of modern humans, our prehistoric ancestors couldn’t grasp
such sophisticated representational notions as belief. Instead, they worked with a
rough distinction between those thinkers who were in contact with the facts and
those who weren’t. is rudimentary way of thinking lives on in the concept of
knowledge. But we don’t need that concept anymore. e modern notion of true
belief is far more subtle and flexible. Yet somehow the archaic concept of knowledge
keeps us in its grip, like an old lover we can’t get out of our system. It messes us up in
so many ways. We really need to forget about knowledge.

I ’ll come back to the history of the concept in a moment. But first let me give some
idea of the damage it does. One particularly clear example relates to the treatment
of statistical evidence in the law. e courts get into a terrible tangle about this, and
it’s all because of the concept of knowledge.

Imagine that 100 prisoners are exercising in the prison yard, and suddenly 99 of them
attack the guard, carrying out a plan that the 100th prisoner is no part of. Now one of
these prisoners is in the dock. No further evidence is available. Guilt is 99 per cent
likely, innocence 1 per cent. Should the court convict? Everyone’s first reaction is –
certainly not. e court has no information that rules out the defendant being the one
innocent prisoner. You can’t convict someone solely on statistical evidence.

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e prison yard riot is a made-up example. But the same issue arises in plenty of real
court cases and, when it does, the law follows everyday intuition. Purely statistical
evidence isn’t enough. In both civil and criminal trials, defendants can be found
responsible only if the evidence relates specifically to them, and doesn’t just place
them in some general category in which guilt is likely.

It might be intuitive, but this legal ban on statistical evidence is puzzling. ink of a
man who is convicted because an eyewitness says she saw him steal a necklace.
Nowadays, thankfully, the courts know eyewitness evidence can go wrong, and so
they check carefully to make sure it’s reliable. Even so, the courts don’t demand 100
per cent certainty, only that the eyewitness makes doubt unreasonable – which seems
to mean something like 95 per cent assurance, whenever the judges can be persuaded
to put a number to it.

So we are often ready to convict on eyewitness testimony, but never on purely

statistical evidence. You might well wonder why, if 95-per-cent reliable eyewitnesses
are more likely to lead us astray than 99-per-cent reliable statistics.

What’s the logic in preferring sources of evidence, such as

eyewitnesses, that lead to more false convictions?

Perhaps you’re thinking that this comparison shows only that we should raise the
level for eyewitnesses too. What’s worse than convicting an innocent person? But that
doesn’t get to the heart of the issue. e preference for eyewitnesses over statistical
evidence isn’t a matter of numbers. Even if 1,000 prisoners had been in the yard, or
10,000, it would still seem wrong to convict on purely statistical grounds. No degree
of certainty seems enough for statistical evidence. Yet nobody wants to impose such
an absolute standard on eyewitnesses and other more direct kinds of evidence. at
would mean never gaining any convictions at all.

So why do we shun statistical evidence, given that we’re ready to tolerate a reasonable
margin of false convictions with other kinds of evidence? is is currently a hot
<https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/papa.12000> topic
<https://philpapers.org/rec/GARTBO-6> among legal theorists
<https://www.stanfordlawreview.org/print/article/sense-and-sensitivity/> , but so far
nobody has made much progress. e best idea
<https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11229-017-1608-4> I know of, due to
Clayton Littlejohn, my philosophical colleague at King’s College London, brings us
back to the topic of knowledge.

Littlejohn’s idea is that we don’t want to convict unless guilt is known. If we believe
the prison-yard defendant is guilty, we’ll be right 99 times in a 100. But in none of
those 99 cases would our true belief amount to knowledge – our being right would be
too happenstantial. By contrast, when an eyewitness actually sees a crime, she knows

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about it, and when she sincerely reports this in court, her hearers get to know about it
too. Admittedly, we won’t have knowledge in the 5 per cent or so of cases where
eyewitness testimony somehow goes astray. But that doesn’t mean we lack knowledge
in the other 95 per cent of eyewitness cases. So, to sum up, while eyewitnesses leave
us with a small 5 per cent chance that we don’t know about guilt, statistical evidence
is much worse – it makes it certain that we don’t know.

So far so good. at seems a plausible account of our thinking. But at another level it
only pushes back the problem. Maybe we intuitively feel that good eyewitnesses allow
us to know about guilt, whereas statistical evidence never delivers genuine
knowledge. But, even so, why is it a good idea to let this difference weigh in court?
After all, a true belief derived from statistical evidence is just as true as one derived
from an eyewitness – not to mention that the statistics deliver truths much more
reliably than the eyewitnesses. On reflection, it’s hard see how it can be a good idea to
convict only when guilt is known. If the courts are aiming to convict the guilty and
free the innocent, and to avoid the converse results, what’s the logic in preferring
sources of evidence, such as eyewitnesses, that lead to more false convictions?

Nearly all the experts assume that there must be some logic here, if only we can figure
it out. But despite huge amounts of effort, none of them has managed to find any. I say
that’s because there isn’t any logic to be found. In truth, our preference for
eyewitnesses over statistical evidence is nothing but a reflection of our crude
prehistoric concern with knowledge. is prejudice frustrates our project of
convicting the guilty and freeing the innocent, and offers nothing in return – a
microcosm, if you ask me, of how a concern with knowledge messes up our lives in
general.

o understand why we’re in such a mess with statistical evidence, we need to go back
to the evolutionary origins of the concept of knowledge. Many animals can

T discriminate between agents who are and aren’t acquainted with some fact. For
example
<https://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199890712.00
1.0001/acprof-9780199890712-chapter-16> , low-status chimpanzees can tell
whether the alpha male can see some tempting piece of food, as is shown by their
grabbing it only if he can’t. In the simplest cases, they rely on lines of sight: does the
alpha male have a clear view, or is something in his way? More generally, animals are
sensitive to whether or not something is blocking the access of other animals to some
fact.

We can think of this basic discriminatory ability as providing a primitive foundation

for the concept of knowledge. Animals with this ability can divide agents into those
who know some fact and those who are ignorant of it. But this doesn’t yet involve the
more sophisticated idea of agents believing things, in the sense of making inner
judgments that might be true or false. As young human beings develop, however, they
become capable of this more refined understanding. ey come to understand that,
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among the ignorant, it is worth discriminating those with false beliefs from the merely
oblivious. For example, they come to appreciate that, among those who don’t know
what’s behind some rock, say, some might actively believe there’s a banana there,
even though there isn’t. Agents with false beliefs are not only unacquainted with their
circumstances, they positively misrepresent them.

is is a very useful advance, since the false believers can be expected to behave like
the knowers rather than the ignorant. A hungry agent who falsely believes a banana is
behind a rock can be expected to go there, just like the agent who knows this. By
relating the false believers to the corresponding knowers, as both believing the same
thing, we sophisticated humans become much better at predicting their actions. (Of
course, the false believers won’t actually find bananas. It’s only the true believers who
generally gain what they seek.)

Evolutionary anthropologists are undecided about the precise historical point at

which our evolutionary ancestors added the more flexible categories of true and false
belief to the simple idea of knowledge. e developmental and comparative evidence
<https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3357322/pdf/nihms375148.pdf>
from human children and other animals is not straightforward. In the past few years,
evidence <https://science.sciencemag.org/content/354/6308/110> has emerged
that even some great apes have a rudimentary grasp of false beliefs. Still, whatever the
details, there seems little doubt that the evolutionary story began with a simple
distinction between knowledge and ignorance, and that the fancier idea of belief
came later.

Once the notion of belief is to hand, the old notion of knowledge becomes redundant.
We modern thinkers can distinguish between three kinds of agents:

1. those whose beliefs are in line with the facts;

2. those whose beliefs misrepresent the facts; and
3. those who have no opinion;

and we can anticipate their actions accordingly. Moreover, we can appreciate the
practical advantage of true beliefs, and so strive to make sure that our own beliefs are
true. e archaic notion of knowledge is not needed for any of these thoughts.

But unfortunately the old notion still has us in its grip. ink of the statistical
evidence again. We might believe that the prisoner in the dock is guilty. And it is
overwhelmingly probable that this belief is true, given the very strong statistical
evidence. But, even so, we aren’t ready to act on our belief. We don’t classify our belief
as knowledge, and so feel insecure. We don’t feel that we are in proper contact with
the facts.

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The prejudice in favour of knowledge leads us to act in ways

that are contrary to our interests

In reality, we’re being jerked around by an atavistic way of thinking. We hanker for
some clear and direct-seeming causal path from the facts to our mind, akin to how
nothing lies between the banana and the alpha monkey. Eyewitnesses and their
testimony fit that model, but the statistical evidence doesn’t. It’s too indirect. We
might nowadays appreciate at an intellectual level that roundabout statistical
reasoning can reliably lead us to true beliefs. But somehow we don’t feel that it
amounts to the real thing. We don’t feel we have the kind of first-rate hold on the facts
that we need to convict with confidence.

is preference for knowledge runs deep. I myself share the initial intuition that it
would be wrong to convict the defendant just on the evidence of being one of the 100
in the prison yard. We wouldn’t know the defendant is guilty, I can’t help thinking.

Still, this intuition just doesn’t stand up to examination. Nobody doubts that
punishing innocent people is a terrible thing. Even so, we’re prepared to accept a
certain minimal risk of false convictions, otherwise we’d end up never punishing
anyone. We can debate the appropriate level. I’m no law-and-order fanatic. I’d prefer
the level to be lower than the 5 per cent that the judges seem ready to tolerate. Still,
whatever the correct level, it makes no sense to set it lower for eyewitness than for
statistical evidence, just because we feel that eyewitnesses give us ‘knowledge’ of
guilt. We’ll only end up convicting too many innocents on the testimony of
eyewitnesses, or freeing too many guilty parties when the evidence is statistical, or
both. Our intuitions might run deep, but they stand in the way of our aims.

e legal shunning of statistical evidence highlights the distortions wrought by the

concept of knowledge. But the problem is a general one. Across the board, we trust
presumed sources of direct knowledge more than indirect reasoning. And, just as in
the courts, this can’t help but do us harm. e prejudice in favour of knowledge leads
us to act in ways that are contrary to our interests.

Take lottery tickets again. Many of us buy them at highly unfavourable prices. We
don’t know we won’t win, we tell ourselves, even though the statistics emphatically say
otherwise. Yet we are very quick to change our minds once we have more direct
evidence, such as reading in the paper that we had only four of the six numbers right.
Oh well, we tell ourselves, now we know we’ve lost, and we bin the ticket. Yet the
chance of having the winning ticket could well have risen significantly if the
newspaper is unreliable and capable of misreporting the two bad numbers. Our
penchant for direct evidence obscures this. I wonder what proportion of unclaimed
winning tickets are discarded for this kind of reason.

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nce we start thinking about it, the examples multiply. By and large, the people
we meet are trustworthy. We’d generally be safe enough entrusting a random

Ostranger with our wallet. Yet we are very disinclined to do so. We have no basis for
knowing, as we say, that the stranger won’t make off with the wallet at the first
opportunity. On the other hand, direct contact can quickly make things seem
different. We fall into conversation with the friendly fellow at the bus stop and decide
he’s on the up-and-up. In truth, such friendliness is a poor indication of
trustworthiness, but at least now we might know something about him. Generations
of con artists have profited from this irrational preference for direct evidence.

And so on. We keep favouring weaker direct evidence over good statistics. Our
neighbours recommend their washing machine, and this makes us much more
confident of the brand’s reliability than reading the carefully researched statistics in
Which? magazine. A friend’s mishap makes us feel we need insurance, even though
the actuarial figures show the risk is minimal. Time and again, we’re more ready to act
on information that fits the archaic stereotype of directly caused knowledge than on
good statistics. But it’s all a bad idea.

In their desperate search to find some good use for the notion of knowledge, the
philosophers sometimes <https://www.jstor.org/stable/2998423?
origin=crossref&seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents> say
<https://read.dukeupress.edu/the-philosophical-review/article-
abstract/111/2/167/2500/Assertion-Knowledge-and-Context?
redirectedFrom=fulltext> that ‘knowledge provides the norm for assertion’. What
they have in mind is that you can’t just say what you feel like. You’re not supposed to
lie, for a start. Nor can you mouth random wishful thoughts, just because you’d like
them to be true. You need backing for your assertions. e philosophers’ suggestion
is that the backing you need is knowledge. You shouldn’t say something if you don’t
know it.

Well, perhaps this is indeed how we normally operate. We think it’s all right to say
‘She stole a necklace’ if an eyewitness tells us, because chances are we’ll then know
this. But we can’t outright assert ‘He attacked the guard’ if our only evidence is
statistical, even if it’s overwhelmingly likely to be true, because that evidence doesn’t
deliver knowledge.

To the extent that this is our current practice, I say we’d be better off without it. If the
aim of assertion is to communicate useful information, why restrict it to knowledge?
Why report only facts that have had a casual impact on us, and exclude others that we
are confident of? I’ve shown that our preference for knowledge distorts our choice of
actions. Favouring knowledge in communication only spreads the contagion. Others
will be led to act against their interests too.

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We already check the precise backing our informants have

for their claims

So I’m for flouting the knowledge norm of assertion. is needn’t mean that anything
goes. You still shouldn’t say ‘He attacked the guard’ unless you have reason to be
confident. But strong statistical evidence is good enough for me. Who cares that
intuitively it can’t deliver knowledge? Sure, sometimes you’ll be unlucky enough to
light on the one innocent prisoner in the guilty crowd. But that danger is already
matched, and more, by the disinformation that is spread when we promulgate
uncertain eyewitness testimony and other kinds of insecure putative knowledge.

Flouting the knowledge norm of assertion isn’t as radical as it sounds. I would say
that, in contexts where it’s important to be right, people already transcend any crude
knowledge norm. ink of a seriously competitive pub quiz. Team members will
proffer competing answers, and the captain’s job is to figure out which is most likely
to be right. ‘Do you know?’ is far too crude a tool. A sensible captain will try to find
out the particular provenance of the suggestions – are you guessing, did you read
about it recently, are you reasoning from general principles?

e same applies in other cases where truth matters. When our choice of medical
treatment, or financial strategy, or travel plan, hinges on the view of some informant,
we don’t want to rest our trust simply on whether our informants ‘know’. We will do
better to find out what specific kind of backing they have for their advice, and to
judge whether to follow it on that basis.

About a quarter of the world’s languages, including indigenous American and Balkan
languages, have a system of ‘evidential
<https://global.oup.com/academic/product/evidentiality-9780199204335?
cc=us&lang=en&> ’ constructions. In these languages, you can’t just assert
something. You need to mark all assertions with an evidential that indicates the
provenance of your claim. For example, the Eastern Pomo language from California
has verbal suffixes indicating whether the source of your information is direct visual
observation, other sensory perception, hearsay, or inference. Such systems seem a
great improvement on those that simply assume that all indicative utterances are
geared to a single standard of knowledge.

I’m not saying that we need to go the whole hog and reform our language. We can
manage without a formal system of evidentials. In serious contexts, as I have
suggested, we already achieve the same result by other means. We check, if we aren’t
already aware, the precise backing our informants have for their claims. e simple
idea that ‘knowledge’ provides the touchstone for all assertions thus drops out of the
picture. Whether our informants satisfy the intuitive requirements for knowledge is
neither here nor there. All we really care about is whether their beliefs are likely to be
true.
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Bertrand Russell once said that the concept of causation, ‘like much that passes
muster among philosophers, is a relic of a bygone age, surviving, like the monarchy,
only because it is erroneously supposed to do no harm’. Russell was probably wrong
about causation. But his strictures apply perfectly to the concept of knowledge. is is
indeed a relic of a bygone age, and moreover one that does appreciable harm. We
should get rid of it.

David Papineau is professor of philosophy at King’s College London and the Graduate
Center at the City University of New York. He has been president of the Aristotelian Society
and the Mind Association. He is the author of Philosophical Devices
<https://global.oup.com/academic/product/philosophical-devices-9780199651733?
cc=us&lang=en&> (2012) and Knowing the Score
<https://www.basicbooks.com/titles/david-papineau/knowing-the-
score/9780465094943/> (2017).

aeon.co03 June, 2019

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