What is knowledge good for?

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En provenance du cours de The University of Edinburgh

Know Thyself - The Value and Limits of Self-Knowledge: The Examined Life

103 notes

The University of Edinburgh

Know Thyself - The Value and Limits of Self-Knowledge: The Examined Life

103 notes

According to legend, inscribed on walls of the temple on the sacred site of Delphi in Ancient Greece were two premier injunctions: NOTHING IN EXCESS, and KNOW THYSELF. This course will be an examination of the latter injunction in an effort to discover what self-knowledge is, why it might be valuable, and what, if any, limitations it might face. What is missing from a person lacking in self-knowledge that makes her less wise, virtuous, or competent in certain areas than others who have this capacity, and what if anything might she do to fill that gap? Historical sources as well as recent research in philosophy, experimental social psychology, and neuroscience will inform our investigation, in the course of which we will become students of our own dreams, and cultivate some meditative practices. Learning Outcomes: Learners will gain familiarity with prominent themes from Western, classical Chinese, and Buddhist approaches to our knowledge of ourselves. In the course of doing so, they will gain an appreciation of the relation of self-knowledge to wisdom, of the value of intellectual humility, as well as of methods of learning about oneself that do not depend on introspection. Learners will also become familiar with contemporary research in experimental social psychology, philosophy, and neuroscience into the emotions, the unconscious, the role of affect in decision making, and self-deception. They will also gain an appreciation of a challenge to the assumption of a coherent, unified self that derives from the Buddhist tradition. --- This course was created by a partnership between The University of Edinburgh and Humility & Conviction and Public Life Project, an engaged research project based at the University of Connecticut and funded by a generous grant from the John Templeton Foundation.

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Socrates and the Examined Life

At his trial, charged with corrupting the Athenian youth, Socrates isn't exactly apologetic. He tells the jury to their faces that they only charged him because they don't like that he forces them to confront uncomfortable truths. Somewhat unsurprisingly, the jury sentences him to death. Socrates accepts the sentence unfazed, famously stating that he'd rather die than stop making people think, as 'an unexamined life is not worth living'. In this module we will examine this dictum and ask: was Socrates right to throw shade on the unexamimed life?

Is anyone wiser than Socrates?4:11

I know that I know (almost) nothing6:52

Meditative moment3:41

Is an unexamined life worth living?5:51

"Not to be lived"10:54

What is knowledge good for?8:55

Rencontrer les enseignants

Mitchell Green
Professor of Philosophy
Dr Simon Fokt
Learning Technologist
University of Edinburgh

You'll see throughout this course that I try to channel lots

of different points of view and represent different types

of criticism of the views that we're discussing.

That's kind of what philosophers do for a living.

And I will also, in that same spirit, want to imagine a challenge to even

the qualified, the unexamined life is not to be lived version of Socrates' dictum.

You can imagine someone challenging even that, so that they say, look, I agree that

not engaging in self examination doesn't make your life not worth living.

We're on the same page there.

But is it even true that not engaging in self examination is something that is

not to be done, something that is to be avoided?

What's wrong with not engaging in self examination exactly?

After all, if you think about,

somebody might also say the unmusical life is not to be lived, and

the life that doesn't involve seeing sunsets is not to be lived.

And the life that doesn't involve traveling around the world or

engaging in a certain kind of yoga is not to be lived.

You can imagine someone saying each of those things and

doing so honestly, sincerely.

What's so special about self examination?

So you can imagine Ella.

She's a very good surfer.

She especially spends lots of time on the famous coast line of Cape Town,

South Africa.

And she says look, my surfing, I'm good at it, I'm good enough to

occasionally win competitions, so I can make a living out of this thing.

And I have a great time.

I'm very happy.

I don't feel like I'm missing anything else.

Are you going to tell me that my life is missing something?

Not that it's not worthwhile, not that it shouldn't be lived, but

that it's missing something.

I'd come back to you and say, I could engage in self examination,

that would be fine, but it's not my thing.

I don't get into it.

What I get into is being on my surfboard, enjoying the waves, enjoying the weather,

enjoying the excitement of looking for waves and riding them as far as I can.

What's wrong with that?

Socrates, in his reformulated version of his dictum, still, I think,

owes us an answer to Ella's question.

Why it is that?

I think of as a pluralist challenge

to the Socratic dictum, even the modified one.

But that pluralist challenge is one that Socrates can respond to.

And I think he might respond as follows.

Granted, you might be fully and completely satisfied with the sort of life you're

living, spending most of your days surfing, that's fine.

But think about the process of self examination and

living an examined life of the sort that I'm recommending,

as being something like building up some life insurance against the kinds

of surprises that life has a funny way of throwing at us.

It's not likely that you're going to be able to surf every day for

the rest of your life.

Eventually weather patterns might change because of global warming.

Or you might damage a knee, or you might hurt your back and

find yourself unable to surf as long as you would like to.

You'll probably want to take up something else.

And rather than have to start from scratch,

having thought beforehand about why it is that this life is the one that you choose.

Reflecting on why it is that this life is the one that makes you happy is one will help you

probably move on to a next step thereafter.

So too, each of us has many things that we enjoy, many things that we appreciate, and

my set of things that I enjoy might or might not overlap with yours.

There'll probably be a great deal of divergence, from one person to another.

But in so far as each of us can say why it matters to us,

why we care about the things that we do, we'll be more likely to

move on when one thing becomes less available than it had been before.

Move on to other things that give us satisfaction and make us happy.

Now notice that in so far as we're doing this, in so

far as we're trying to respond to all this challenge, this pluralist challenge,

we're also moving away slightly from Socrates' conception of self examination

or living an examined life, which involves discussing and

debating about the nature of justice, truth, virtue, wisdom, and the like.

And we're moving a little bit more towards a contemporary notion of self examination

that involves a certain amount of introspection,

taking account of our preferences and things that make us happy.

That's something that you don't hear much from in Socrates, but in order for

him to respond adequately to the challenge that Ella and pluralism generally offer,

I think he would have to take a page from a more modern conception of self

examination.

That involves paying attention to what we care about as individuals,

as opposed to these more abstract notions, such as examining justice, truth, wisdom,

knowledge, and the like.

But once we've done that, once you've made that slight concession

to a more expansive notion of what examination is supposed to examine,

then we're trying to understand ourselves, not just these broad concepts,

but individual preferences in things that give us pleasure.

That might be enough to provide an adequate response

to the sort of challenge that the pluralist offers.

Let me say, also, that this presuppose thus far, the nature of knowledge,

and I want to expand on what knowledge is in our discussion.

Knowledge as the way Socrates understands it is different from true opinion.

True opinion is when I've got a belief about a question, and

that belief happens to be true.

And that itself is not knowledge.

Why? Well, I might make a lucky guess.

For example, you might say, hey, there's a jar full of jelly beans in the next room.

How many do you think are in there?

And I say, "hmm 473."

Suppose I'm right.

It was a lucky guess.

I had no chance to ever look at the jar, no idea how big it was,

what the size of the jelly beans were inside of there and so forth.

Even if I guessed right,

I think we would not normally say that I knew how many jelly beans were there.

I just made a lucky guess.

Likewise, if I have no opinion on a question.

But suppose it just happens to be the case that there are 473 jelly beans in there

but I'm completely neutral on that question.

Of course, we, there too,

would not say that I know how many jelly beans there are.

If anything Socrates would want to say in order to count as knowing and in addition,

we'd have to have what Socrates would call an account.

The idea being that I'd have to be able to answer the question if you asked me,

how do you know that, what's your reason?

I'd have to be able to give something like,

well, I was able to look at that jelly bean jar for a long time and I counted.

It took a long time, but

I finally did, or I dumped them all out and counted one by one.

Or maybe I measured the circumference and the height and

looked at the size of the average jelly bean and got a pretty good estimate.

Would that count quite as enough of a justification?

I'm not sure, but it would come reasonably close.

So the idea is that knowledge in the ancient tradition,

in the tradition going back to the ancient Greeks,

is construed as justified true belief.

For me to know that something is the case, it has to be the case,

I've got to believe it to be the case, and I've got to be able to give an account.

Or in modern terms,

we would say I've got to be able to give some kind of justification for that.

Notice also that being certain of something is not enough for knowledge.

So for example, I'm going to buy a lottery ticket, and for

whatever reason, be certain that I'm going to win.

But it's not clear, unless I've rigged the system, it's not clear that I could ever

know that I'm going to win the lottery, even if I'm certain.

So let's make sure to distinguish between certainty and knowledge.

Certainty might come from having justification, but

it's justification that does the work and not the certainty.

Notice also that we're presupposing, or

have presupposed thus far, that knowledge is of propositions.

This is known as propositional knowledge.

That is, what I know is a proposition that something is the case.

We can distinguish, and we're putting a lot of emphasis in coming weeks

on a different notion of knowledge, which is something more like knowing how.

So I could know that 2 + 2 is 4, or a squared + b squared equals c squared for

the sides of a right triangle.

But I could also know how to tie a shoe.

Or to make a certain kind of cake or to ride a bicycle.

Those types of knowledge are genuine types of knowledge.

But they're not so much directed toward propositions as that they correspond to

skills of various kinds.

In addition,

knowing how includes such things as knowing what an experience is like.

So I know how or know what it's like or how it feels, for

example, to be sprayed by a skunk or to break an arm.

because I can, so to speak, recreate that experience if I need to.

I know how to bring that experience up into memory, for example.

And likewise, knowing how includes such things as knowing what somebody else's,

for example, emotional situation is like.

We're going to have a discussion later on in this course on empathy.

And empathy, in the way we won't understand it here,

is going to be a special type of knowing how, constitutes

essentially as a matter of knowing how to put myself into somebody else's shoes.

So knowledge, as you can imagine, given that it's a course on self knowledge,

is going to play a crucial role in our discussion.

And it helps right now to distinguish between knowledge that and

acknowledge how.

And we might ask, there's justification for knowledge that, that's required.

In order to know that something is the case, I must have justification.

A question for you to ponder for

now is just, is there an analogue of justification for knowledge how?

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