Knowing & Truth
Many philosophical explorations about knowledge would begin with a question such as “How do we know that we know something?” But perhaps equally crucial is the issue of learning, given that learning or unlearning/forgetting various things affects our level of knowledge. Learning would allow someone to go from knowing 0 (“nothing”) to knowing 1 thing, then 2 and so on. Unlearning would obviously mean going in reverse from 2 to1 and perhaps even back to 0. But there should be a level somewhere between the two where we are not learning or unlearning, shouldn’t there? So the real question is: Can we learn something that we already know?
The previous essay on logic and reasoning allowed us to understand how one might logically deduce or induce information, This processing of information is how we infer knowledge. But equally important to inferring/taking knowledge is the issue of conferring/giving information and knowledge. Logically inducing and deducing data allows individuals to conduce information in the same way that inferring and conferring information allows them to communicate knowledge (and, eventually, wisdom). In terms of learning, both inductive and abductive reasoning are referred to as ampliative methods, meaning that they expand human knowledge. Unlike deduction, which often relies on syllogisms (arguments where the conclusion is derived directly from the premises), induction and abduction reach conclusions that are beyond what is logically contained in the premises. Now that we’ve covered some formal terminology, it is time to return to the main question.
Can we learn something that we already know? The answer appears to obviously be “no” because learning suggests that the information is new. But let’s work with the logics and recall that deductive logic is not ampliative, and this makes everything more interesting. The deductive conclusion from the previous essay (i.e. “Socrates is mortal”) may not have seemed like a discovery or an example of learning, but consider the following two examples :
Bilinguals speak two languages Bilinguals speak two languages
I speak English and Spanish I speak Italian and German
Therefore I am bilingual Therefore I am bilingual
The interesting thing here is precisely how obvious all of this seems to all of us reading. There’s little controversy in calling both an English-Spanish speaker and an Italian-German speaker “bilingual”even if they have nothing in common. However, watch what happens when we substitute the second line as follows:
Bilinguals speak two languages; I speak Spanglish; Therefore I am bilingual
“Spanglish” is a combination of English and Spanish, which are two languages, so this person does in fact speak two languages, even though this is perhaps different than what we intended or imagined when we considered “bilinguals”. Is there a controversy here? The trick is of course that bilinguals speak both languages fluently. But the lesson here is that by using deduction, induction and abduction on these three examples we can revise and relearn our definition of “bilingual” so that we infer and confer the same knowledge about what being bilingual “truly” is.
