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Matthew Plomin's avatar

Jonathan - thank you for this wonderful piece. Just bought your book. I'm very glad that Persuasion exists as a place to support such writing. Keep up the good work.

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Steve Stoft's avatar

You say: "No final say” insists that to be knowledge, a statement must be checked.

It follows then that the fact that I hate the taste of over-cooked peas is not knowledge.

Now that is true according to your definition of knowledge, but that shows that your definition is not the common definition. Now I agree that you get to define the words you use.

But it is common practice in math and science (both of which routinely redefine common words) to warn people that they are changing the definition on us. (See the definitions of charm, color, flavor, and strangeness used by particle physicists. Or "open" and "closed" used in math.)

It's also considered polite not to use personal definitions when there is no need to (as the woke so often do). So I would suggest that you use the term "scientific knowledge" or "checkable knowledge" and leave the term "knowledge" to its common meaning. That way we don't need to argue over whether or not I know I don't like over-cooked peas. I say I know that. You say I don't. A pretty silly argument, but I think many people would side with me -- because that's the common English definition of "know" and they trust me on over-cooked peas.

Why does that matter? Because we are in the midst of a huge political fight, which you discuss -- Some say I know that hearing the sound of the word "nigger" affects me just like physical violence. And some say that is not knowledge. That's no different epistemologically than the question of over-cooked peas.

Of course, you could insist that your definition of "knowledge" is known to be the true definition, but I don't think that's checkable. So you would be trapped in self-contradiction.

So I'm not convinced you have really solved that problem, which is too bad because it's an important one.

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