Random Pensées

I know nothing

I’ve been musing a bit about knowledge. How do we know what we know and why do we think we know it? I’m sure that philosophers and just philosophy majors have spent years and years debating these questions and have honed them down into a manageable mess. I am not a philosopher and I did not major in philosophy. Nor, for that matter, have I read much philosophy, preferring to leave my mind uncluttered to better appreciate the simple pleasures of beer and baseball, preferably at the same time. So, I bring no baggage to these questions.

My musings were prompted by a book I’m reading. My dad gave it to me, I threw it into my bag and forgot about it. It isn’t heavy, so carting it around without remembering I had it for several months was no hardship. I found it this week when I went digging for my as of yet not located notary stamp. Damn that stamp. Anyway, the book, One Nation Under Therapy : How the Helping Culture is Eroding Self-Reliance , is interesting. One chapter in particular got my attention. The chapter on grief counseling and grief therapy.

Basically, the book asserts, the long held and widely held beliefs that you need therapy to deal with your grief, that you need to vent, to share your emotions and how you feel about your loss, is a bunch of hooey. The belief doesn’t stand up to scientific review. In fact, for some, therapy simply prolongs the grief. The book notes that the 5 stages of grief that have become common cultural touchstones are in fact a distortion of the work of the shrink who came up with it. The 5 stages were not meant to apply to survivors but to people who had just been told that they had an incurable disease. Interesting, no? Pretty much anyone you ask will tell you (I know, over-generalization but, hey, its my blog) that grief and recovery from follow certain recognized pathways, right?

I paid particular attention to this because of the state my grandfather is in, you know.

Well, how is it that this is thought to be true if it isn’t? How do we “know� something? How can we be certain we know something?

We learn things by hearing them or by reading them. We rarely examine primary sources or conduct experiments ourselves. In fact, I think that for most things, we are probably three or four, at best, stages removed from the knowledge. The experiment is performed and the results are observed. Stage 1. The results are written up in a paper and presented somewhere. Stage 2. The results are then published in a journal. Maybe Stage 3 maybe just another stage 2. Then someone, maybe someone with no science training, writes an article about the report. Stage 4. That article is read or skimmed in the newspaper by the consumer. Stage 5. Public exposure of the article results in, maybe, a television appearance in which someone long removed from the experiment discusses the experiment and the results. Rarely is it the scientist. Stage 6. Maybe you’ve caught the 120 seconds of television airtime summarizing the article that summarized the report that summarized the experiment. And you become guided by it. Maybe you repeat what you think you’ve learned to your friends or co-workers, always with the authoritative phrase, “studies show� without really knowing that maybe it was just one experiment. Stage 7. And then we have public knowledge. Far removed, in 7 approximate stages, from the experiment and totally dumbed down.

That is how as best as I can figure out, knowledge becomes widely spread. At best, for most of us, we get our knowledge at Stage 4, the article. At worst, Stage 7. It doesn’t have to mean that the knowledge we obtain is unreliable, but it doesn’t bode well for a high reliability factor, does it, not when I break it down like this, right?

Sometimes we learn from school and from text books and from lectures from teachers or experts. Again, we are asked to accept the “knowledge� imparted in the book or from the lecture. We are asked to accept it as true. But we all know that information in this context is rarely complete and that information is often distorted by outside political forces. Take, for example, textbooks. Textbooks are often reviewed for “sensitivity� issues, for whether they may give offense to other cultures. In that regard, how can we ever accept, uncritically, anything that ever appears in a textbook, again, knowing that the contents have been, perhaps, distorted? Don’t believe me? Go forth and see what Diane Ravitch has said about some of these things (and then throw up):

*Diane on Math and

*Diane on Language Police.

So what can we do? I think that when you have the time, you should read and read critically the source material that an assertion claims to be premised upon. Grief counseling evidently rests on a very shaky foundation of science, or so the book claims in synthesizing the research of others. Don’t accept the bland “studies show� assertion. Go find out for yourself. Inform yourself, educate yourself, empower yourself.

But do it selectively. I mean, at some level, you have to trust or at least decide that the matter isn’t important enough for you to spend the time researching and you might as well accept what you read. Reductio ab absurdum and you find yourself repeating Newton’s experiments on gravity or learning ancient Greek because you don’t trust the Sophocles criticism you were reading. So, clearly, at some level, it can’t be taken too far. I assume we all, intuitively, know what that level is. If not, good luck figuring it out.

Posted by Random Penseur at August 11, 2005 12:16 PM | TrackBack