The floating of other Mens Opinions in our brains make us not one jot the more knowing, though they happen to be true. What in them was science is in us but opiniatrety.
This line from philosopher John Locke has been quoted in two (relatively) recent books I’ve read, with opposing interpretations of its legitimacy.
In both books, The Internet of Us and How Do You Know?, the passage from Locke assumes critical importance in assessing both the desirability and the costs of knowing and understanding in today’s information-saturated world.
In The Internet of Us: Knowing More and Understanding Less in the Age of Big Data, Michael P. Lynch, a philosopher from the University of Connecticut, quotes Locke in his attempt to summarize one of the dominant currents of Enlightenment thought, that of cognitive self-reliance. One of the accomplishments we credit the Enlightenment with is the downplaying of tradition, custom, hearsay and rumour when it comes to forming our world-views. Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it, as the motto of the British Royal Society has it.
This injunction to think for oneself is pivotal to Lynch’s purposes in his book. The Internet of Us casts a downbeat glare on the way our communications systems have made us more dependent on the testimony of others for the knowledge we acquire and use. ‘Just Google it’ in modern casual usage is the prevailing option for securing confirmation of what is knowable - in domains both trivial (restaurant quality, relationship statuses) and serious (validity of government statements, accuracy of scientific measurements).
Sophisticated devices that fit into our pockets and around our wrists improve our daily efficiency in ways unimaginable decades ago. But according to Lynch they have at the same time diminished our initiative as knowledge-chasers and truth-seekers. ‘A key challenge to living in the Internet of Us’, Lynch writes, ‘is not letting our super-easy access to so much information lull us into being passive receptacles for other people’s opinions’.
I guess Lynch here is drawing partly on his experiences at parties or at lecture halls, where people, in order to confirm or deny some fact will jump on their phones in order to have the last word. Such a scenario probably isn’t so much scary as it is irritating, although I am grateful to the fellow student who once used her laptop to correct me on which French director helmed Last Year at Marienbad (it was Resnais not Rohmer).
What Lynch calls throughout the book Google-knowing – downloading or looking up our knowledge – is something he associates with passivity. We do not expend much cognitive effort in simply looking things up, and thus don’t develop a rich grasp of the different types of knowledge we deal with. Lynch contrasts Google-knowing with that of understanding, or more specifically the act of coming to understand. To come to understand is a deliberate, concentrated act as opposed to merely a passive one. The process – more so than the outcome – of coming to understand enriches our comprehension of how the parts relate to the whole. Lynch defines our capacity to understand as a ‘creative’ act, one that can be refined over time.
A different approach to Locke’s warning against the floating of others’ opinions in our brains is found in Russell Hardin’s How Do You Know? The Economics of Ordinary Knowledge.
Hardin was a mathematician-turned-political scientist who taught for many years at the illustrious University of Chicago, an institution synonymous with pumping out stern economistic portrayals of social and political life, otherwise known as rational choice theory. Hardin's membership in this school of thought unavoidably turns up in his body of work, where issues of collective action, mutual advantage and prisoner's dilemmas dominate. Needless to say the much-maligned extravagances of rational choice, moderated in Hardin's case, do not prevent the elegance and persuasiveness of much of his output.
Hardin died earlier this year after a long battle with myasthenia gravis. How Do You Know? was his last published work as a single author, and he packed a fair amount into it, even though it’s relatively short.
An economic interpretation of how we come to know what we know, Hardin’s book starts off from the assumption that there are ‘costs and benefits of having and coming to have knowledge’. Hence there is an inevitable trade-off ‘between gaining any kind of knowledge and doing other things, such as living well’. From this starting point Hardin emphasizes the ‘happenstance’ nature of much of our knowledge, and that for the most part what we know to get by in the world is in fact derived from the testimony of others and not the result of our own direct inquiry.
As a result of this guiding conviction, Hardin negatively assesses the weight of Locke’s line:
Contrary to Locke’s view, the knowledge we have that is mere opiniatretry is what we live by, and it is enormously useful to us. This is arguably the most distinctive human capacity: knowing things we haven’t seen. If a monkey hasn’t seen it, the monkey doesn’t know it. For humans, only because knowledge is socially produced is it rich enough to enable us to live well. Locke’s dictum elevates the ignorance of monkeys.
Two distinct points are made here. The first is that we cannot afford to dismiss the ‘mere opiniatretry’ in our heads because we rely on such opiniatretry too much to make our way in the world. The second is that it is pure solipsism for us to dismiss as invalid any and all knowledge that we do not directly obtain through observation (not that Locke is necessarily advancing such a claim). The second point is more classically philosophical in that it brings up the old realism/idealism dichotomy, and so we’re not too concerned with that. The first point however is crucial to fully explaining the rival approaches to Locke’s line.
For Lynch, Locke’s point ‘seems to be that real knowledge only comes from your own personal observations, or use of your memory, logical reasoning, or so on’ (emphasis his). For Hardin, meeting Locke’s standards is 'impossible for the bulk of anyone’s knowledge.’ Lynch, as a philosopher, is making a normative appraisal of our heavy reliance on our devices for accumulating knowledge. Hardin, employing a cost-benefit analysis approach to knowledge acquisition, is making more a descriptive appraisal; his book repeats aplenty his governing theme that the knowledge we use to get by is by definition testimonial knowledge. For Lynch, knowledge by testimony, being passive, cannot lead us to genuine understanding; for Hardin, knowledge by testimony, being ubiquitous, is mostly what we have.
How specifically do these rival approaches play out?
In How Do You Know? Hardin uses a well-worn example of citizen ignorance that I’ve seen crop up in several books on American politics: the result of survey questions that ask Americans how much money their government spends on foreign aid. The rough number given in response is a staggering 25 percent of the budget. Not only is the actual number closer to 1 percent, but upon questioning the same people as to how much money their government should spend on foreign aid, the number is around 8 percent, eight times higher than it actually is.
Hardin scrutinizes this occurrence more deeply than most. Instead of simply lambasting the high level of ignorance on the part of citizens, Hardin asks the question: Why exactly would citizens know the correct amount of money their government spends on foreign aid? Not being academics or journalists, or people interested in political affairs, they have no incentive to find out. Ignorant, yes; but not irrational, according to Hardin (they are ‘rationally ignorant’ in the language of rational choice). They have invested their time and energy into pursuing forms of knowledge other than politics. But then how did they arrive at the conclusion that foreign spending is dramatically higher than it is? Well, from opiniatretry of course! The source of the survey respondents’ information was most likely generated from hearing complaints from friends and work colleagues about America’s excessive foreign aid spending.
Although Google-knowing is not present here, Lynch would see this exercise as confirmation of the dangers of ‘being passive receptacles for other people’s opinions’. As a result of their passivity, the survey respondents are indeed ‘not one jot the more knowing’, even less so are they understanding. But relying on such opinions (one can just as easily call them conventions) of those close to us is practically the norm for most areas of our knowledge, as Hardin would retort. Getting the question of foreign aid correctly also involves taking the word of others, or in a less extreme fashion, relying on the word of others to lead us to the correct answer.
‘Our task in life’, Hardin writes, ‘is not to seek all truths for ourselves, as Locke would seemingly have us do, but to judge the sources of our borrowed wealth of knowledge’. In this case both Hardin and Lynch would be in agreement. Short of directly discovering things for ourselves, the best we can do is to use our judgement, reason and common sense in discriminating between what most closely approximates truthfulness and what clearly resembles horseshit. Such a task can be abetted or hindered in equal measure by the omnipresence of communications technology.
Much else besides the differing takes on Locke’s message is explored in both books. Hardin’s especially looks at an impressively wide range of issues – from medical knowledge to political extremism to collective action theory. My take away lesson from reading these works is that we must (in a normative sense) think for ourselves and that (in a realistic sense) we cannot. This paradox opens up a whole interlocking panorama of questions and dilemmas, and partly from a desire to avoid confronting them, I’ll leave it there.
[I will say this on the subject though: In their recent book The Knowledge Illusion, Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach summarize about eighty years of the sociology of knowledge in observing that human thought is the ‘product of a community, not of any individual alone’. By definition everyone – even the person in utter solitude – uses the tools and resources of a shared community of cognition. So it must be reiterated that the expression ‘thinking for ourselves’ is meant in an ideal sense; it cannot be meant literally. Another way of putting it is that independence of mind can be achieved in degree – through originality, style, persuasive force, discernment etc. But complete independence of thought is a virtual impossibility.]
This line from philosopher John Locke has been quoted in two (relatively) recent books I’ve read, with opposing interpretations of its legitimacy.
In both books, The Internet of Us and How Do You Know?, the passage from Locke assumes critical importance in assessing both the desirability and the costs of knowing and understanding in today’s information-saturated world.
In The Internet of Us: Knowing More and Understanding Less in the Age of Big Data, Michael P. Lynch, a philosopher from the University of Connecticut, quotes Locke in his attempt to summarize one of the dominant currents of Enlightenment thought, that of cognitive self-reliance. One of the accomplishments we credit the Enlightenment with is the downplaying of tradition, custom, hearsay and rumour when it comes to forming our world-views. Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it, as the motto of the British Royal Society has it.
This injunction to think for oneself is pivotal to Lynch’s purposes in his book. The Internet of Us casts a downbeat glare on the way our communications systems have made us more dependent on the testimony of others for the knowledge we acquire and use. ‘Just Google it’ in modern casual usage is the prevailing option for securing confirmation of what is knowable - in domains both trivial (restaurant quality, relationship statuses) and serious (validity of government statements, accuracy of scientific measurements).
Sophisticated devices that fit into our pockets and around our wrists improve our daily efficiency in ways unimaginable decades ago. But according to Lynch they have at the same time diminished our initiative as knowledge-chasers and truth-seekers. ‘A key challenge to living in the Internet of Us’, Lynch writes, ‘is not letting our super-easy access to so much information lull us into being passive receptacles for other people’s opinions’.
I guess Lynch here is drawing partly on his experiences at parties or at lecture halls, where people, in order to confirm or deny some fact will jump on their phones in order to have the last word. Such a scenario probably isn’t so much scary as it is irritating, although I am grateful to the fellow student who once used her laptop to correct me on which French director helmed Last Year at Marienbad (it was Resnais not Rohmer).
What Lynch calls throughout the book Google-knowing – downloading or looking up our knowledge – is something he associates with passivity. We do not expend much cognitive effort in simply looking things up, and thus don’t develop a rich grasp of the different types of knowledge we deal with. Lynch contrasts Google-knowing with that of understanding, or more specifically the act of coming to understand. To come to understand is a deliberate, concentrated act as opposed to merely a passive one. The process – more so than the outcome – of coming to understand enriches our comprehension of how the parts relate to the whole. Lynch defines our capacity to understand as a ‘creative’ act, one that can be refined over time.
A different approach to Locke’s warning against the floating of others’ opinions in our brains is found in Russell Hardin’s How Do You Know? The Economics of Ordinary Knowledge.
Hardin was a mathematician-turned-political scientist who taught for many years at the illustrious University of Chicago, an institution synonymous with pumping out stern economistic portrayals of social and political life, otherwise known as rational choice theory. Hardin's membership in this school of thought unavoidably turns up in his body of work, where issues of collective action, mutual advantage and prisoner's dilemmas dominate. Needless to say the much-maligned extravagances of rational choice, moderated in Hardin's case, do not prevent the elegance and persuasiveness of much of his output.
Hardin died earlier this year after a long battle with myasthenia gravis. How Do You Know? was his last published work as a single author, and he packed a fair amount into it, even though it’s relatively short.
An economic interpretation of how we come to know what we know, Hardin’s book starts off from the assumption that there are ‘costs and benefits of having and coming to have knowledge’. Hence there is an inevitable trade-off ‘between gaining any kind of knowledge and doing other things, such as living well’. From this starting point Hardin emphasizes the ‘happenstance’ nature of much of our knowledge, and that for the most part what we know to get by in the world is in fact derived from the testimony of others and not the result of our own direct inquiry.
As a result of this guiding conviction, Hardin negatively assesses the weight of Locke’s line:
Contrary to Locke’s view, the knowledge we have that is mere opiniatretry is what we live by, and it is enormously useful to us. This is arguably the most distinctive human capacity: knowing things we haven’t seen. If a monkey hasn’t seen it, the monkey doesn’t know it. For humans, only because knowledge is socially produced is it rich enough to enable us to live well. Locke’s dictum elevates the ignorance of monkeys.
Two distinct points are made here. The first is that we cannot afford to dismiss the ‘mere opiniatretry’ in our heads because we rely on such opiniatretry too much to make our way in the world. The second is that it is pure solipsism for us to dismiss as invalid any and all knowledge that we do not directly obtain through observation (not that Locke is necessarily advancing such a claim). The second point is more classically philosophical in that it brings up the old realism/idealism dichotomy, and so we’re not too concerned with that. The first point however is crucial to fully explaining the rival approaches to Locke’s line.
For Lynch, Locke’s point ‘seems to be that real knowledge only comes from your own personal observations, or use of your memory, logical reasoning, or so on’ (emphasis his). For Hardin, meeting Locke’s standards is 'impossible for the bulk of anyone’s knowledge.’ Lynch, as a philosopher, is making a normative appraisal of our heavy reliance on our devices for accumulating knowledge. Hardin, employing a cost-benefit analysis approach to knowledge acquisition, is making more a descriptive appraisal; his book repeats aplenty his governing theme that the knowledge we use to get by is by definition testimonial knowledge. For Lynch, knowledge by testimony, being passive, cannot lead us to genuine understanding; for Hardin, knowledge by testimony, being ubiquitous, is mostly what we have.
How specifically do these rival approaches play out?
In How Do You Know? Hardin uses a well-worn example of citizen ignorance that I’ve seen crop up in several books on American politics: the result of survey questions that ask Americans how much money their government spends on foreign aid. The rough number given in response is a staggering 25 percent of the budget. Not only is the actual number closer to 1 percent, but upon questioning the same people as to how much money their government should spend on foreign aid, the number is around 8 percent, eight times higher than it actually is.
Hardin scrutinizes this occurrence more deeply than most. Instead of simply lambasting the high level of ignorance on the part of citizens, Hardin asks the question: Why exactly would citizens know the correct amount of money their government spends on foreign aid? Not being academics or journalists, or people interested in political affairs, they have no incentive to find out. Ignorant, yes; but not irrational, according to Hardin (they are ‘rationally ignorant’ in the language of rational choice). They have invested their time and energy into pursuing forms of knowledge other than politics. But then how did they arrive at the conclusion that foreign spending is dramatically higher than it is? Well, from opiniatretry of course! The source of the survey respondents’ information was most likely generated from hearing complaints from friends and work colleagues about America’s excessive foreign aid spending.
Although Google-knowing is not present here, Lynch would see this exercise as confirmation of the dangers of ‘being passive receptacles for other people’s opinions’. As a result of their passivity, the survey respondents are indeed ‘not one jot the more knowing’, even less so are they understanding. But relying on such opinions (one can just as easily call them conventions) of those close to us is practically the norm for most areas of our knowledge, as Hardin would retort. Getting the question of foreign aid correctly also involves taking the word of others, or in a less extreme fashion, relying on the word of others to lead us to the correct answer.
‘Our task in life’, Hardin writes, ‘is not to seek all truths for ourselves, as Locke would seemingly have us do, but to judge the sources of our borrowed wealth of knowledge’. In this case both Hardin and Lynch would be in agreement. Short of directly discovering things for ourselves, the best we can do is to use our judgement, reason and common sense in discriminating between what most closely approximates truthfulness and what clearly resembles horseshit. Such a task can be abetted or hindered in equal measure by the omnipresence of communications technology.
Much else besides the differing takes on Locke’s message is explored in both books. Hardin’s especially looks at an impressively wide range of issues – from medical knowledge to political extremism to collective action theory. My take away lesson from reading these works is that we must (in a normative sense) think for ourselves and that (in a realistic sense) we cannot. This paradox opens up a whole interlocking panorama of questions and dilemmas, and partly from a desire to avoid confronting them, I’ll leave it there.
[I will say this on the subject though: In their recent book The Knowledge Illusion, Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach summarize about eighty years of the sociology of knowledge in observing that human thought is the ‘product of a community, not of any individual alone’. By definition everyone – even the person in utter solitude – uses the tools and resources of a shared community of cognition. So it must be reiterated that the expression ‘thinking for ourselves’ is meant in an ideal sense; it cannot be meant literally. Another way of putting it is that independence of mind can be achieved in degree – through originality, style, persuasive force, discernment etc. But complete independence of thought is a virtual impossibility.]
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