Nobody Don't Know Nothing

By Myrvin Chester

Thought-provoking philosophy with a smile.
The world seems to be full of people who know things. Wherever you turn, there are those who are absolutely sure of this, positive about that, or certain that such and such is the case. There are scientists who tell us they have demonstrated that something is true. There are mathematicians who say they have proved some
theorem or other. There are religious people who are certain that god exists, and that they know for sure what He wants Us to do. And, down the pub, there are those who definitely know what
simple thing needs doing about any and every seemingly complicated situation in the world.
This book stands in the face of this knowing and certainty, and denies it all. It states, and aims to show that, in reality:
Nobody don’t know nothing.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Myrvin Chester
• Release date: Sep 13, 2012
• ISBN: 9781301528080

Myrvin Chester

Myrvin Chester was a Principal Lecturer at the University of Wolverhampton.He holds a PhD, and an MSc in Information Technology from the University of Nottingham, as well as a BSc in Psychology from the University of Birmingham.He has worked for the railways and an insurance company in Computing, and as a university lecturer. Now he is footloose and fancy free.He has lived in the Black country, London, and now Northampton, UK

Book preview

NOBODY

DON’T

KNOW

NOTHING

Published by Myrvin Chester at Smashwords

Copyright 2009 Myrvin Chester

For

Lindsay

and

for

Chris

PREFACE

The world seems to be full of people who know things. Wherever you turn, there are those who are absolutely sure of this, positive about that, or certain that such and such is the case. There are scientists who tell us they have demonstrated that something is true. There are mathematicians who say they have proved some theorem or other. There are religious people who are certain that god exists, and that they know for sure what He wants Us to do. And, down the pub, there are those who definitely know what simple thing needs doing about any and every seemingly complicated situation in the world.

This book stands in the face of this knowing and certainty, and denies it all. It states, and aims to show:

Nobody don’t know nothing.

Nobody don’t know nothing.

No matter what they do.

Nobody don’t know nothing.

It’s the only thing that’s true.

Of the terrible doubt of appearances,

Of the uncertainty after all, that we may be deluded

Walt Whitman – Leaves of Grass

INTRODUCTION

The title of this book may not be that clear. In order to make some sense of it, we need to decode it. We have to chop it up like this:

Nobody + don’t + know nothing

– And then read it carefully, starting at the right:

To know nothing seems plain. However, we do need to look into knowledge a bit. Still, leaving that for the moment, to know nothing is to be ignorant or uncertain about everything.

To don’t know nothing may be trickier. It does not mean to know absolutely everything. The negative of nothing is something – at least one thing. To not know nothing is to know at least something. If I know only one thing, then that’s enough for me to be someone who don’t know nothing.

Now we can see how nobody fits into this. So nobody don’t know nothing, is to assert that there are none in the world who know at least something – at least one thing.

Therefore, the title states that nobody knows anything.

Do what they might, read whatever books, carry out whatever procedures they like, consort with whatever gods, think as hard as they like: they know nothing at all.

Nobody don’t know nothing.

Is this really such a shocking idea? I’ve lived it for most of my (not too short) life, so I am fairly used to it. However, this life has provided many examples to suggest that it is not an idea accepted by many others.

In order to deal with knowing, we shall have to be concerned with the meaning of words. There has to be the use of such words as ‘know’, ‘truth’, ‘certainty’ and ‘proof’. However, much of what people claim to know is based as much upon emotion as logic. We have to be careful not to confuse the rather loose use of these words, spoken in conversation, with what people would agree was their meaning when in a more contemplative mood. Nevertheless, people do use such words wrongly, even when they might be expected to know that they are misusing them. We have to look out for that as well.

Some Definitions

Knowledge

Noun: that which is known; information, instruction; enlightenment, learning; practical skill; assured belief; acquaintance; cognizance (law)

Truth

Noun: faithfulness; constancy; veracity; agreement with reality; fact of being true; actuality; … that which is true or according to the facts of the case; the true state of things, the facts; a true statement; an established fact; true belief; known facts, knowledge.

Certain

Adjective: sure, confident; not to be doubted, indisputable; resolved; fixed, decided, determined; reliable, dependable; regular; inevitable.

Proof

Noun: something which proves or establishes the truth of anything; the fact, act or process of proving or showing to be true; demonstration; evidence that convinces the mind … ; a checking operation (arithmetic); a test; … testing, especially of guns; ability to stand a test.

All these definitions are from Chambers CD, and all are about the sureness of things. I think an interesting fact about such definitions is that some dictionaries derive the word proof from the Latin for to test. We still have this meaning, as the definition above includes, for the testing or proofing of guns; and also in the adage The proof of the pudding is in the eating – it means the test of the pudding, not its certainty.

By the way, don’t forget to read the footnotes.*

[*Well done. But read all the others too]

The first part concerns theories of knowing in various fields of endeavour.

THEORETICALS

The first part of this work looks at some ideas about knowing in various spheres of thought.

Philosophy is, of course, the first place to look for a theory of knowledge, so we do that first.

Then comes Science. Science has been claimed to be the way to go about knowing the world, through experimentation.

After this is Mathematics. Maths seems to be the method of thought to run to, when you can’t believe that Science can give you real knowledge.

If Science and Mathematics cannot give certainty, then many people would say that Religion does. They say that at least we can be sure that God exists. So we discuss that next.

Finally, in this part, we look at Consciousness. Should Philosophy, Science, Maths, and Religion fail us, surely we can be positive that we have consciousness? Well, we shall see.

PHILOSOPHY

THE WISDOM OF IGNORANCE

In good philosophical style, before embarking on an exercise pertaining to what it is not to know things, we really ought to discuss what it is to know something. As C.E.M. Joad* used to say It all depends on what you mean by …. – in this case the word ‘know’.

[*Cyril Edwin Mitchinson Joad (1891 – 1953), famous for his appearances on the BBC radio programme The Brains Trust.]

The philosophy of knowing things is called epistemology – the theory of knowledge. It is a large area partly concerned with the different kinds of knowing, and what it means to say that we know something. Two big distinctions in knowing are: what it is to know a fact; and what it is to know how to do something. This is the difference between ‘knowing that’ and ‘knowing how’.

This book will concentrate on the possibility (or not) of knowing pieces of information. So, we are involved here with knowing that the object over there is a bike, rather than the, no doubt interesting, understanding of knowing how to ride the bike.

The theory of knowledge also deals with the way we come to know. There is an important division between what is called a priori knowledge, and a posteriori knowledge. A priori knowing does not depend on experience, while a posteriori knowing does. The first is often characterised by examples such as I know that all spinsters are unmarried. This, it is said, is obviously true, because the definition of the word ‘spinster’ is an unmarried woman. You do not need to know anything else about spinsters, or even need to have met one: the statement is certainly correct.

Contrariwise, the statement I know that all spinsters are happy, needs to be justified by some knowledge of particular spinsters. Indeed it would seem to require experience of all spinsters. This, if it were knowledge, would be a posteriori knowledge.

This difference is very similar to the distinction between analytic and synthetic knowledge. Furthermore, the distinction may also be that between necessary truth and contingent truth. The first of each pair is rather like a priori knowledge and truth, while the second is more like a posteriori knowledge and truth. However, these are very murky philosophical waters that we shall try to avoid as much as possible.

There is a whole area in philosophy concerned with what the word knowledge means. We have the dictionary definitions, but philosophers are very rarely satisfied with those. They want to know exactly what we really mean when we say we know something.

A standard explanation of this has been to say that when we know a thing, not only do we have a belief in it, but also it is true – knowledge is true belief. An expansion of this is to add the idea of justification. If I know something, then I believe it, it is also true, and I have good reasons for believing it – this is justified, true belief. I suppose this is to avoid cases where, for instance, some mad person believes some crazy thing that turns out, by a fluke, to be true. Nevertheless, I deny this justification.

In order to study the various ways in which people have tried to know about things, we shall start – as will often be the case – with the Greeks.

Ancient Greece

The first people in Western history to have questioned what it is to know, were probably the ancient Greeks. The real beginner of our study is my first intellectual hero, Socrates.

Socrates

It seems that the first person to feel that there is something wrong with knowing was the 5th century BC super-philosopher Socrates. He was balding, bearded, short, and not very attractive; so I like him a lot from the start.

Socrates was born in or near Athens round about 470 BC. His father’s name was Sophroniscus, a stonemason, and his mother was a midwife called Phaenerate. Their son may have had money to live on from his family, or from his own works in stone, because he could afford to buy the armour of a hoplite for himself in a few wars. Later, he seems to have relied for his subsistence on the kindness of friends. He was first married to a woman called Myrto. She died and, after a gap, he married Xanthippe, who was much younger than he was, and bore him three sons.

The problem with Socrates is that it is difficult to know in any detail what he actually thought. He himself wrote nothing down that is left to us, and the only way we know of him is through other people’s works – principally those of Plato and Xenophon. In Plato particularly, Socrates is very often used as Plato’s mouthpiece; so it is difficult to tell whose thoughts belong to whom. Plato wrote many dialogues in which his Socrates would converse with several men about the multifarious philosophical problems in which Plato was interested.

What does seem to be the case is that both writers agree that Socrates’ Big Idea is that he is convinced of his own ignorance – and, by extension, everyone else’s too. The story is that someone went to the oracle at Delphi to ask if there was anyone who was wiser than Socrates. The oracle answered, None is wiser. The response of the wisest man in Greece was that if he was so wise, it was only because he was wise enough to understand that he knew nothing at all. However, to test what the oracle had said, he went about Athens questioning all the people who were thought of as knowledgeable. He concluded that all the people who thought they were wise and thought they knew lots of things, in fact were rather stupid and knew nothing at all. Of course, these clever people didn’t like being shown up as ignoramuses, and many of them were powerful forces in the community. His existence as the self-proclaimed gadfly* of Athens was to be the cause of his eventual downfall, but I think he enjoyed the life for as long as it lasted.

[*Gadfly noun a bloodsucking fly (Tabanus) that distresses cattle; sometimes applied to a botfly; a mischievous gadabout; someone who provokes and irritates, especially deliberately (Chambers CD).]

They wanted to know how to live their lives.

What had the wise man said?

They came from afar, and tracked him down,

But Socrates was dead.

Apparently*, his second wife, Xanthippe had a reputation as a scold, and maybe a prostitute.

[*Apparently, all statements beginning with the word apparently are false.]

I like to think that it was one of his wives, perhaps Xanthippe, who started Socrates thinking about his own ignorance. He was obviously a very clever man – a scientist in his earlier days. So perhaps he would have sat at home pontificating on this and of course that. Imagine the scene: He would say, Of course my dear, such and such is the case, Everyone knows that blah blah blah, and I don’t need to ask directions; the shop will be just round this corner – or the next. I like to think of Xanthippe, putting up with this for a short time until she starts exclaiming the ancient Greek equivalent of: Who says so?; How do you know that?; and You think you know everything, Socrates. Well you don’t! And so on.

This sort of language would probably be easily enough to get herself labelled as a scold. In ancient Greece, women were not just meant to be seen and not heard; they were not meant to be seen either. But it may have caused even such a know-it-all to think rather harder about what he thought he knew. Eventually he knew he knew nothing, and set about persuading others that they knew nothing too.

So, after nipping the bums of the people of Athens for some time, the powerful people had had enough. Socrates was brought before the court of Athens accused of corrupting the youth of the city, was sentenced to death, and died after drinking hemlock.

There are people who think that the accusation of corrupting youths demonstrates that Socrates was gay, and fancied young men. There is some suggestion from his writers that he was gay; but the corruption that he was accused of, was turning the minds of young men away from the gods. This being one of the methods someone who taught other people to think for themselves could be stopped from doing so.

Unfortunately for this chapter, Socrates’ main philosophical concern was in ethics. His time was mostly taken up by trying to work out how a man could live a good life. So most of his thoughts belong in another chapter. However, it was perhaps he who first cast doubt on the very possibility of knowing things, so he belongs at the top of the list of philosophers here. He, at least, thought that Nobody