Knowledge vs Belief

(Note: I copy the original, non-copy-edited text here below, because after 3 months I totally lost context of what I wrote, and I’m not sure I still grok the fine details. There are certainly some grammar mistakes, but I don’t feel confident in fixing them without distorting the original intention)

Knowledge is fundamentally subjective. We forget this because humans are social creatures, and we gain much knowledge by communication, which is objective. But knowledge is subjective, and not all of it can be communicated. The pain from receiving an electric shock; the delight in seeing beautiful things; the sensation of eating delicious food; the joy in meeting old friends; the feeling of wonder and awe when encountering something great – these are all subjective things and they are as much knowledge as 1+1=2, or arguably even more so.

As such, fundamentally, knowledge does not have to be justified by evidence. It can be falsified by evidence, but not justified by it. Evidence basically needed to convince ourselves or others that it is likely true and thus reasonable to believe it is true. We usually say some belief is justified, but we don’t say knowledge is justified. We need to justify belief because we don’t know whether it is true or not. This may be a matter of word semantics, but if there is a substantial difference, this would be it.

One may wonder, “if you don’t have evidence, how do you know you can believe it?” Putting it that way, it’s intuitive knowledge all the way down, because what you know you know you just know. It may turn out to be false, but the alternative of treating “justified belief” as knowledge can turn out to be false either. Trying to redefine it as “justified TRUE belief” doesn’t really help, because nobody knows what is truth in general. If we accept that nobody has a procedure to determine truth, the only conclusion from the exercise in semantics is that belief needs justification and knowledge does not.

Yet intuition generally difficult if not impossible to communicate. Thus if we wedge a semantic gap between “knowledge” and “belief”, we cannot transfer “knowledge”, we can only transfer “beliefs with justification”. Therefore it is possible to have knowledge of things that cannot be said or spoken of. Subjective experiences are such things. You cannot even explain or analyze them by yourself for yourself. Try explaining yourself what is physical pain - words cannot explain the fundamental experience of pain. You cannot explain to others the subjective experience of physical pain - you can only assume they feel the same way under similar circumstances - but this nobody knows (we believe it only).

When people forget that knowledge is subjective, they see some types of knowledge cannot be communicated, and they decide not to believe it. Since they wrongly presume that knowledge is objective, they then wrongly presume that what they themselves do not believe, the other party should not believe either. This is obviously wrong, for example if I feel burning pain on my foot, and I tell you I know my foot is in pain, the fact that you do not believe it, the fact that the doctor cannot find anything wrong with it, the fact that it does not cause any physical impairment, does not mean I don’t know my foot is in pain. Note that my knowledge may be wrong (since I may have mistaken it for another sensation – this happens), but still the knowledge is definitely subjective, not objective.

And thus once we establish that knowledge is much more than communicable justified beliefs, can we not entertain the possibility that there are such types of knowledge that, while unjustified by evidence, or even unexplainable by words, still known, and most likely true? It is the subjective kinds of knowledge, those unamicable to mass production (i.e. books), that get shoved aside in modern society, because objective beliefs are so easily transferable and obtainable. The serious study of such subjective knowledge (or even quasi-subjective knowledge, the types of knowledge that can technically be objectively described, but impractical to do so in detail, or difficult to obtain good objective evidence) is likely to yield interesting results given that we as a civilization have forgotten much of what we learnt (which means low hanging fruits, yay).