It’s one of those sort of things that, well… everyone knows! But what does it mean, to know? How do we know we know? We remember stuff, but is that the same as knowing? Oh no, certainly not…
Philosophers have argued for over 2,000 years about what it means to know something. It’s called “The Problem Of Knowledge”.
Plato and Aristotle took a bite out of it. The so-called skeptics (the group of Greek philosophers around the 5th century BC, not the negate-all twerps on the Internet today) doubted that it could be proved that knowledge is possible. They were very cautious about stating anything was true because, as they argued, how could you prove it?
Even today, with quantum physics dominating our world, there is no way to prove that quantum theory is correct. It works right enough; but we might have the right results from the wrong explanation!
It’s fascinating really, to grapple with problems of the mind at this level. Continue reading