A (Really) Brief History of Knowledge

This is a big subject—a long story—but I will keep it short, brevity being the soul of wisdom. We all know those books about the history of this or that area of human knowledge: physics, astronomy, mathematics, psychology (not so much biology). They are quite engaging, partly because they show the progress of knowledge—obstacles overcome, discoveries made. But they only cover the most recent chapters of the whole history of knowledge—human recorded history. Before that, there stretches a vast history of knowledge, human and animal. Knowledge has evolved over eons, from the primitive to the sophisticated. It would be nice to have a story of the origins and phases of knowledge, analogous to the evolutionary history of other animal traits: when it first appeared and to whom, how it evolved over time, what the mechanisms were, what its phenotypes are. It would be good to have an evolutionary epistemic science. This would be like cognitive science—a mixture of psychology, biology, neuroscience, philosophy, and the various branches of knowledge. It need not focus on human knowledge but could take in the knowledge possessed by other species; there could be an epistemic science of the squirrel, for example. One of the tasks of this nascent science would be the ordering of the various types of knowledge in time—what preceded what. In particular, what was the nature of the very first form of knowledge—the most primitive type of knowledge. For that is likely to shape all later elaborations. We will approach these questions in a Darwinian spirit, regarding animal knowledge as a biological adaptation descended from earlier adaptations. As species and traits of species evolve from earlier species and traits, so knowledge evolves from earlier knowledge, forming a more or less smooth progression (no saltation). Yet we must respect differences—the classic problem of all evolutionary science. We can’t suppose that all knowledge was created simultaneously, or that each type of knowledge arose independently. And we must be prepared to accept that the origins of later knowledge lie in humble beginnings quite far removed from their eventual forms (like bacteria and butterflies). The following question therefore assumes fundamental importance: what was the first type of knowledge to exist on planet Earth?

I believe that pain was the first form of consciousness to exist.[1] I won’t repeat my reasons for saying this; I take it that it is prima facie plausible, given the function of pain, namely to warn of damage and danger. Pain is a marvelous aid to survival (the “survival of the painiest”). Then it is a short step to the thesis that the most primitive form of knowledge involves pain, either intrinsically or as a consequence. We can either suppose that pain itself is a type of knowledge (of harm to the body or impending harm) or that the organism will necessarily know it is in pain when it is (how could it not know?). Actually, I think the first claim is quite compelling: pain is a way of knowing relevant facts about the body without looking or otherwise sensing them—to feel pain is to have this kind of primordial knowledge. To experience pain is to apprehend a bodily condition—and in a highly motivating way. In feeling pain your body knows it is in trouble. It is perceiving bodily harm. Somehow the organism then came to have an extra piece of knowledge, namely that it has the first piece, the sensation itself. It knows a mode of knowing. Pain is thus inherently epistemic—though not at this early stage in the way later knowledge came to exist. Call it proto-knowledge if you feel queasy about applying the modern concept. We can leave the niceties aside; the point is that the first knowledge was inextricably bound up with the sensation of pain, which itself no doubt evolved further refinements and types. Assuming this, we have an important clue to the history of knowledge as a biological phenomenon: knowledge in all its forms grew from pain knowledge; it has pain knowledge in its DNA, literally. Pain is the most basic way that organisms know the world—it is known as painful. Later, we may suppose, pleasure came on the scene, perhaps as a modification of pain, so that knowledge now had some pleasure mixed in with it; knowledge came to have a pain-pleasure axis. Both pain and pleasure are associated with knowledge, it having evolved from these primitive sensations. This is long ago, but the evolutionary past has a way of clinging on over time. Bacterial Adam and Eve knew pain and pleasure
(in that order), and we still sense the connection. Knowledge can hurt, but it can also produce pleasure.

Notice that the external world has not yet come into the picture. There is as yet no knowledge of material objects in space, so the first knowledge precedes this kind of knowledge (subjective knowledge precedes objective knowledge). But it is reasonable to suppose that the next big stage in the onward march of knowledge—the age of the dinosaurs, so to speak—involves knowledge of space, time, and material bodies (the “Stone Age”). I mean practical knowledge not advanced theoretical knowledge—knowing-how, as we now describe it. The organism knows how to get about without banging into things and making a mess. We could call this “substance knowledge”. How pain knowledge led to this type of knowledge we don’t know; what we do know is that it marked a major advance in the power of knowledge, because it introduced the subject-object split. Now knowledge has polarity built into it: here the state of knowing, there the thing known. In the pain phase such a division did not exist in res, but when external bodies came to be known knowledge distinguished itself from the thing known. That is, perception of the external world involves a subject-object split. Distant things are seen and heard. This division was already present in plants as they orient themselves to external objects—the sun, water, the earth. But they don’t know these things, though it is as if they do; it took pain (and pleasure) to convert this kind of directedness into knowledge proper. If trees felt pain, they might well be perceiving subjects, given their tropisms and orienting behavior. So, let’s declare the age of sense perception the second great phase in the development of knowledge on planet Earth. The two types of knowledge will be connected, because sensed objects are sources of pain and pleasure: it’s good to know about external objects because they are the things that occasion pain or pleasure, and hence aid survival.

I will now speed up the narrative, as promised. Next on the scene we will have knowledge of motion (hence space and time), knowledge of other organisms and their behavior (hence their psychology), followed by knowledge of right and wrong, knowledge of beauty, scientific knowledge of various kinds, social and political knowledge, and philosophical knowledge. Eventually we will have the technology of knowledge: books, libraries, education, computers, artificial intelligence. All this grows from a tiny seed long ago swimming in a vast ocean: the sensation of pain. From “Ouch!” to “Eureka!”. We go to universities because our distant ancestors felt pricks and pangs: one sort of knowledge led to the other after a brief period of time (by cosmic standards). A super-scientist might have seen it coming (“It won’t be long before they have advanced degrees and diplomas”). The point I want to stress is that this is a natural evolutionary process, governed by the usual laws of evolution–cumulative, progressive, opportunistic, gradual. As species evolve from other species by small alterations, so it is with the evolution of knowledge; there is no simultaneous independent creation of all the species of knowledge. Knowledge-how, acquaintance knowledge, propositional knowledge, the a priori and the a posteriori, knowledge of fact and knowledge of value, science and common sense—all this stems from the same distant root (though no doubt supplemented). It was pain that got the ball rolling, and maybe nothing else would have (pain really marks a watershed in the evolution of life on Earth). Knowledge of language came very late in the game and is not be regarded as fundamental. Epistemology is much broader than language. Knowledge has all the variety and complexity we expect from life forms with a long evolutionary history. Quite a bit of the anatomy of advanced organisms is devoted to epistemic aims–the eyes, the ears, the nose, the sense of touch, memory, thought, and so on. Knowledge is not a negligible adaptation. Yet it must have comparatively simple origins. It didn’t arise when a human woke up one bright morning and felt a love of wisdom in his bosom. It arose from primitive swampy creatures trying to survive another day.

I will make one further point: knowledge, like life in general, is a struggle with obstacles. Survival isn’t easy, and nor is knowledge. In both there are obstacles to be overcome, resistance and recalcitrance to be fought, battles to win or lose. Knowledge is hard: you know it don’t come easy. It’s a difficult task. Those books about the history of science draw this lesson repeatedly—it wasn’t easy to figure out the structure of the solar system or the laws of genetics. But that is part of the very nature of knowledge as an evolved capacity—the struggle to be informed. The organism needs to know if it is in danger, so pain came along; we would like to know whether the Earth is the center of the universe, so astronomy was invented. Knowing is the overcoming of obstacles, like the rest of evolved life. Knowledge was born in pain and struggle. It is not for the fainthearted. This is epistemology naturalized.[2]

[1] See my “Consciousness and Evolution”, “The Cruel Gene”, “Pain and Unintelligent Design”, and “Evolution of Pain”.

[2] Quine talked about epistemology naturalized, eschewing (his word) traditional epistemology. I am not eschewing anything; I am adding not subtracting. I want to acknowledge the biological roots of knowledge, finding knowledge in nature (it’s not about schools and examinations). Books are recent accessories. The very first knowledge is an organism feeling pain for the first time: it hurts but at least it gains valuable information. Eventually, organisms grow to love knowledge—we become scholars of reality. The pain is a distant memory. Still, if you read the book of knowledge (chapter 3 of the Book of Life), you find a footnote to primordial pain.

An Answer to the Skeptic

Skepticism gains traction from the true justified belief theory of knowledge, because it can be argued that our beliefs are seldom if ever justified. But that is just one theory, not a datum. What if we adopt another type of theory? I observe, to begin with, that other types of knowledge than knowing-that are not subject to skeptical argument: knowing-how and knowledge by acquaintance. You can’t use a brain-in-a-vat scenario to undermine the claim that we have knowledge-how and knowledge by acquaintance, because these are far removed from what is called propositional knowledge (Russell’s knowledge-by-description). I have knowledge-how if I have a certain ability, whether I can justify the claim that I have this ability or not, even while I am a brain in a vat and have never done the thing in question, e.g., throw a ball. I can also know by acquaintance what red is without knowing whether there is an external world; it just depends on what I have experienced not what beliefs I can justify. These are not evidence-based types of knowledge, so the quality of the evidence cannot be impugned. So, the concept of knowledge is not inherently susceptible to skeptical challenge. But what about knowledge-that?

Suppose we go for a perception-based theory of knowledge not a justified true belief theory: that is, we extend acquaintance to knowledge of facts.[1] For example, I might take myself to know that I am lying in bed, and suppose I am: do I really know that I am? That depends on whether I perceive that I am lying in bed, which doesn’t follow from taking myself to be and this actually being the case. Suppose I do perceive this (the fact of my being in bed causes me to have the experience); then we say I am acquainted with this fact—whether I can justify the belief or not. My knowledge depends only on the facts not on my ability to have true justified beliefs about them. Even if I can’t rule out the hypothesis that I am a brain in a vat, I am still causally connected to the fact in question, if indeed it is a fact. Thus, I can know this fact independently of my ability to justify my beliefs about it: for my knowledge is not based on any such justification; it just arises from my being in a perceptual relation to the fact. Knowing facts by acquaintance (perceiving them) isn’t susceptible to the standard skeptical argument. But if that’s what knowledge is, then we have defeated the skeptic about knowledge: the knowledge exists—whether we can know this or not (we are not discussing second-order knowledge). Perceptual knowledge does not depend on possessing justified beliefs. The skeptic has no argument against the possibility of first-order knowledge of facts based on direct acquaintance.

This point may be conceded, but what about all the putative knowledge that is not based on acquaintance but on inference? What about belief-based knowledge based on evidence and justification? Surely the skeptic can get his fangs into that! Here we might agree but insist that no sensible person has ever supposed otherwise: of course, we can’t know what goes beyond our direct apprehension of fact; we can only surmise. It is a misuse of the concept of knowledge to suppose otherwise.[2] Perhaps we can stretch a point and agree that we might call such belief “knowledge” in a relaxed frame of mind, but it was never really knowledge, as distinct from reasonable speculation, just loose talk for pragmatic purposes. I don’t know that atoms exist, though I might have reason to believe that they do; I only truly know what I myself directly perceive. If so, it was never part of (sensible) common sense to apply the concept of knowledge beyond its proper domain, so the skeptic is tilting at windmills and parading truisms. I know hugely many facts about the external world just by perceiving it, even though there are many things I reasonably believe that don’t count as knowledge. Isn’t that what we normally suppose?

Here the skeptic may retract his horns: okay, he says, but we still don’t have adequate justification for the beliefs we hold, despite the fact that we have a lot of knowledge by acquaintance. To that weakened form of skepticism we can reply as follows. We can simply agree with the skeptic but point out that he has said nothing to rule out knowledge in the areas proper to it; he is talking about something else entirely, i.e., justified belief. But second, we could recommend a comparative notion of justification combined with some absolute cases of it. Thus, I am fully justified in believing I am in pain and I am more justified in believing that eagles fly than that pigs fly. We need not claim that all justifications are created equal in order to rebut the justification skeptic—that would be absurd. Justification comes in degrees of cogency and not all measure up to the perfect case—whoever denied it? So, the justification skeptic has not raised a startling new epistemological challenge that undermines commonsense epistemology. We can all agree that our justifications are pretty shabby, judged objectively, but still maintain that the concept of justification is in good order with useful applications. What we are not going to agree on is that there is no such thing as knowledge of the external world; and the correct concept of knowledge does not invite any such conclusion. So, the skeptic has left commonsense epistemology more or less where it was, not counting those rash epistemological optimists who ought to know better. Sound minds have always known that human knowledge is a more limited affair than has sometimes been advertised; that is not skepticism but realism. Human knowledge: its scope and limits.

In case you think this kind of anti-skepticism is toothless, let me note its consequences for knowledge of other minds and the past. For we can now be said to know facts about other minds and the past: that is, such facts can act as the cause of our perceptual states. I know you are in pain because your pain has caused behavior that I perceive as pain-expressing—that is a fact. I can’t justify my belief that you have a mind to the skeptic’s satisfaction (and not unreasonably), but that doesn’t prevent me from being in a knowledge relation to the fact in question. Similarly, past facts cause current memories, so I know them by something akin to perception (it might even be perception)—even if I can’t justify my belief that there is a past. Thus, I can know facts about other minds and the past by something like perceptual acquaintance, though (arguably) I can’t justify my beliefs about these things. Knowing facts is one thing, justifying beliefs is another. To put it simply, if knowing is seeing, then I know a great many things; what beliefs I can justify is another matter, and may well be shakier than some people have supposed. Since no genuine knowledge is constituted by true justified belief—that is just an incorrect analysis—it is irrelevant to knowledge if adequate justifications for belief are unforthcoming.[3]

[1] See Michael Ayers, Knowing and Seeing (2019); also, my “Perceptual Knowledge”.

[2] See my “Non-Perceptual Knowledge”.

[3] A virtue of the account given here is that it concedes some territory to the skeptic—he isn’t just barking up the wrong tree—but it doesn’t concede his most radical claim, namely that nothing is known about the external world (or other minds and the past). Our alleged justifications don’t really warrant the kind of strong belief we are apt to derive from them, but that has nothing to do with our ability to have knowledge; and indeed, we have a lot of that. Knowledge proper was never about warranted belief. Human knowledge, like animal knowledge, is in good shape, though quite restricted; belief on the other hand cries out for justification and often falls short of it. That’s why some philosophers (e.g., Popper) dispense with it in serious contexts.