I commenced reading Winchester’s book on the 3/06/2023. I bought this book at Big W because it looked like a particularly philosophical book. Reading the title of the book ‘Knowing what we Know’ I thought that this book might offer me a epistemological theory (a theory of knowledge). What does the word empiricism mean to you? I would take a guess and say that for some of my reader it means nothing at all, and this is because you have never heard of the word in the first place. Well, for those of you who have never heard of the word empiricism, I want to let you know that on one understanding of the word, empiricism can be understood to mean ‘experience’. The reason why I wrote, and with emphasis, ‘on one understanding’ is because empiricism is a very broad term. Empiricism can refer to scientific naturalism, logical positivism, materialism, essentialism, and scientific naturalism. But for our purposes, when I am using the word empiricism I am referring to the empiricism of George Berkely, John Locke, and David Hume. Or as Google defines empiricism ‘the theory that all knowledge is based on experience derived from the senses. Stimulated by the rise of experimental science, it developed in the 17th and 18th centuries, expounded in particular by John Locke, George Berkeley, and David Hume.’
The conceptualisation of empiricism articulated by the encyclopaedia Britannica is also accurate:
Empiricism, in philosophy, the view that all concepts originate in experience, that all concepts are about or applicable to things that can be experienced, or that all rationally acceptable beliefs or propositions are justifiable or knowable only through experience. This broad definition accords with the derivation of the term empiricism from the ancient Greek word empeiria, “experience.”
Winchester’s book ‘Seeks to tell the story of how knowledge has passed from its vast passel of sources into the equally vast variety of human minds, and how the means of its passage have evolved over the thousands of years of human existence.’
How is Winchester using the word knowledge throughout his book? ‘Here we are only concerned with the noun. Today, most, but by no means all scholars believe that the word derives, and unsurprisingly, from the transitive verb to know. This verb has multiple senses and meanings, the sense most relevant to its descent noun being
To be acquainted with (a thing, place, or person); to be familiar with by experience; to have learned of by report or through the acquisition of information; (also) to have or gain such familiarity with (something) as gives understanding or insight.’
(Pg. 8)
And very accurately to the philosophy of our day, Winchester discusses and differentiates between two types of knowledge: ‘Moreover, since Immanuel Kant in the eighteenth century, great distinction has been made between two kinds of descriptive (or propositional, or declarative, or constantive — the terms are legion) knowledge. There is, on the one hand, a priori descriptive knowledge, the kind of knowledge that stems from deduction and reason and theory (such as mathematically calculated and deduced knowledge, much like Theaetetus’s convex polyhedrons, the knowledge of which comes from deducing things about these bodies rather than actually experiencing them, however that might be imagined). On the other hand, there is a posteriori descriptive knowledge, which is based on observation and experience. Still, this being philosophy, with rumination about the number of angels able to dance on the head of a pin so central to the practice. Plato’s glib observation — though maybe thought only to be glib at this remove — has been challenged. Many times.’
“It has to be remembered that the East India Company, despite being a joint-stock organization with an expectation from its investors that it make profits, was not merely interested in commerce — not outwardly at least. It was burdened also with all the myriad responsibilities of running an entire country. It had to maintain cities, impose taxation, operate docks, provide police forces, create roads, administer agriculture, build markets, write legal codes, and found a court system. And educate the children.”
EXAMS!
“But then, yes, those terrifying examination halls. Out of all this learning, what had in fact been learned, what remembered? What questions needed to be asked to determine what knowledge had been absorbed? And is that the point, indeed? Should examinations show if the examined person knows such things as were determined by the school, or should the tests determine if the examinee has the ability to think in such a way as to be able to know things as needed, and when? Debates over such matters have endured as long as children have been taught.”
I have not forgotten my exams either. I remember the exams I took — and there was 1 exam for every single unit of psychology I took at Deakin. I repeat: 1 exam for every single unit I took of psychology. And that was at least 12 subjects!
At the beginning of chapter 2: Gathering the Harvest, Winchester asks a very interesting question, he writes: “If we can bear the heresy of considering knowledge as just a commodity, it becomes a little easier to appreciate the dilemma: Considering that this commodity has always been expanding at an ever accelerating rate as humans have come to know more and more and more, how on earth, and where, should we store it all?”
I think Winchester is using the word heresy in the sense of it being an ‘opinion profoundly at odds with what is generally accepted.’ But what about knowledge that is then, unfortunately in my opinion, lost? It has happened many many times throughout recorded history. Songs are also lost, books are also lost forever, but where there is loss there is resurrection:
“But yes, even after so terrible a loss of knowledge and learning, this famous old Sarajevo library has been rebuilt too — with a scant few thousand of the most valuable and ancient books and manuscripts and scrolls, which had been heroically saved during the bombardment, now forming the core of the new collection.” (Pg. 105—106)
What is Winchesters point of contention, at least for Chapter 4 “Gathering the Harvest”? Winchester is relating the wholesale historical destruction and purges of knowledge, learning, ideas, and memories:
“It was in essence all due to Heinrich Himmler, who made his infamous declaration on October 17, to a Berlin conference of SS officers. In a direct response to the sixty-three day uprising by Polish insurgents who had battled in vain against their Nazi occupiers, the SS chief declared “The city must completely disappear from the surface of the earth . . . No stone can remain standing. Every building must be razed to its foundation.” (Pg. 107)
The most famous library ever built was the library of Alexandria, in Egypt. It is a true wonder of the ancient world for sure. But, interestingly:
“Here in Alexandria was another very much larger citadel of scholarship and learning and knowledge, and yet bookless too, holding instead upon thousands and thousands of scrolls made of papyrus.” (Pg. 109)
While Winchester relates to us the destruction of knowledge in Chapter 4, he is still arguing his case for ‘knowledge diffusion’:
“It did not happen overnight. The halfway house in the shape, look and feel of these knowledge-diffusion mechanisms was the codex.” (Pg. 112)
Winchester then discusses the invention of the printing press, no doubt an important moment in the history of knowledge — a pivotal moment. I think I also remember reading that Gutenberg himself was facing bankruptcy.
“Britain is a society today, where there flourishes is the phenomenon of the “pub quiz,” in which teams of three or four will, over pints of beer in the local pub, challenge one another to win contests of general knowledge.” (Pg. 202).
At the end of May 2004, the senior editors of the paper wrote a lengthy apology to the reader — an unprecedented act of contrition, that was in essence an appeal for mercy, not so much for their own ineptitude in the handling of the affair, but for the future reputation of the newspaper. Extraordinary damage had been done. The Iraq War affair came hard on the heels of a more trivial scandal that involved a young newly hired reporter who turned out to have made up or plagiarised many of his stories. (Pg. 213)
“The child had not been locally conceived, but had rather been rescued from a UFO crash in rural Arkansas. And the Secret Service was at the time building a special nursery in the White House where Mrs. Clinton could attend to the child’s unfamiliar needs.” (Pg. 233)
This passage brought immediately to mind all the talk of late relating to UAPs I am hearing come out of America and elsewhere. Chevy has been sharing much about this too, from memory he has been mentioning the podcast known as ‘Weaponized’, I still haven’t had a chance to listen to this podcast yet. The previous chapter ‘This Just In’, in one interpretation, might represent Winchester’s response to the question ‘What is news?’ A very good question, when I read the question ‘What is news?’ my mind asks yet another question: “Is news knowledge?”. But as Winchester writes on page 238, Chapter Annals of Manipulation “What exactly to believe in the public press? All manner of nefarious dealings can conspire to rob the reader of the truth.”
This chapter made me wonder if there were any philosophers who condemned the media. And by media I refer to news outlets like channel 7, channel 9 etc. I am unsure if there were, but do not let that mean there were none!
“Men who have manipulated knowledge in ways that stretch credulity.” (Pg. 238)
“The murdering — it could not be called a battle, because no one opposed the troops — went on until dawn.At least hundreds, more likely thousands, died before the sun rose over a shocked and bloodied city, a stunned nation, and a horrified world.” (Pg. 246)
Where? Tiananmen Square in China. But as Winchester will later write, Tiannamen Square never happened. Though let me be clear, I sincerely doubt Winchester is saying the massacre never happened, he is more articulating what the Chinese government wanted its people to believe: that there was no massacre in Tiannamen Square. But there was.
“And to make fiction of fact and lies out of well-known knowledge.” (Pg. 247)
I did not know this:
“In China there is currently no Wikipedia, no Google, no YouTube, no Twitter, and no meaningful contact with the outside world. Similar prohibitions now extend to the former foreign coastal possessions of Hong Kong and Macau. By such means and a thousand more does China try to keep a lid on all threats to its tyranny — threats imagined for the future, threats as recognised as occurring today, or as with the case of June 1989, threats very much in the distant past and vanishing fast in the rearview mirror.” (Pg. 249)
On page 322, I feel as though Winchester is finally arriving at one of the core questions his book set out to answer, recall the following:
Winchester’s book ‘Seeks to tell the story of how knowledge has passed from its vast passel of sources into the equally vast variety of human minds, and how the means of its passage have evolved over the thousands of years of human existence.
And then let us return to what he also thought of knowledge as being:
“How is Winchester using the word knowledge throughout his book? ‘Here we are only concerned with the noun. Today, most, but by no means all scholars believe that the word derives, and unsurprisingly, from the transitive verb to know. This verb has multiple senses and meanings, the sense most relevant to its descent noun being
To be acquainted with (a thing, place, or person); to be familiar with by experience; to have learned of by report or through the acquisition of information; (also) to have or gain such familiarity with (something) as gives understanding or insight.’“
Our question then becomes this: what is Winchester identifying as the problem facing us in the 21st century? Let’s consider a few more things Winchester argues for:
“The polymath is a figure of a bygone time when it was imaginable to know it all. Now there truly is too much, so that only experts and specialists are allowed authority over the world’s knowledge, each over only a small, selected parts of it.”
One of my all-time favourite polymaths would have to have been Leonardo DaVinci. DaVinci certainly knew a lot, he was truly polymathic! But Aldous Huxley, in his book A Brave New World, writes of an idea where people one day fall in love with devices that help us not to think. And according to Winchester
“His predictions appear to have strenuously taken hold.” (Pg.338)
Knowledge and learning are, in my mind, intimately connected — don’t you think? Winchester does
“Might we then observe a lessening in our minds’ tendency to thoughtfulness, to consideration, to a reverence for learning? And if that were to happen, what might then be the prospect for the development of wisdom?”
I think the best way to conclude what this book is arguing for, is by mentioning what Winchester says on page 380.
“It picks up on the notion, so often expressed in these last few pages, that all these wondrous machines that, in one way or another, now allow us to avoid overworking our brains, will somehow diminish our capacity for thought, in much the same way that underused muscles will tend to atrophy, will stop working in the absence of need. But what if the opposite is true? What if the mind does not at all work like a muscle? What if not having to tax our minds with such tedious matters as arithmetic and geography and spelling and memorizing so many facts actually frees parts of the mind.”
And very lastly, I rather liked this one:
“That each one of us could be our own Confucius, or Aristotle, or Plato, or even Socrates.”
I, for one, very much doubt my propensity for wonder, curiosity, and philosophising will die anytime soon.
A very nice book. I highly recommend it to anyone with a background in philosophy, they will enjoy this especially so. But even if you do not have a background in philosophy – read it!
Life, life and more life! 