Knowledge vs Belief, Justification and Truth―What Scientific Knowledge Is and How it Works

Knowledge vs Belief, Justification and Truth
―
What Scientific Knowledge Is and How it Works
William P. Hall
President
Kororoit Institute Proponents and Supporters
Assoc., Inc. - http://kororoit.org
william-hall@bigpond.com
http://www.orgs-evolution-knowledge.net
Philosophy Forum, 7 July 2013
Access my research papers from
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Introduction to this talk
 For better or worse, science works. It has given humans dominion
over the earth
– It is now within humanity’s capacity to either destroy the
ecosystems we depend on for our survival or make the world a
better place to live
 What is it about the epistemological foundations of science that
makes it so much more effective helping us to understand the
world than are philosophical systems based on faith and belief?
 This talk introduces the epistemological work of Sir Karl Popper,
who I regard as history’s greatest epistemologist.
 Caveats
– I am not a student of philosophy and am not familiar with much of its
literature
– I have extended Popper’s ideas in a number of areas as I have
explored the biological roles and nature of knowledge in living
systems
2

Questions about knowledge arise from my career
in theoretical and applied epistemology
 Physics background, PhD in evolutionary biology (Harvard, 1973)
 University of Melbourne Research Fellow in Genetics 1977-1979
– Reviewers of my PhD work forced me to ask whether my approach to
comparative biology was “scientific”
– Spent two years studying history and philosophy of science on my own (no
one in Philosophy was then interested in my questions)
– Returned to the States for a year & concluded there was no career path
(complex transcript, Affirmative Action, etc.)
 Immigrated to Australia in 1980 & ended up as knowledge systems
analyst (i.e., “applied epistemology”)
– Personal computers were evolving much faster than lizards!
– Technical writer and documentation manager for software house (1982-
87) and the original Bank of Melbourne (1988-89).
– Documentation and knowledge management systems analyst for Tenix
Defence from 1990 until I retired mid 2007 (ANZAC Ship Project)
– Practical questions: What is knowledge to an organization or society?
How can we evaluate / value knowledge claims. Why is this important?
How should we manage knowledge?
3

This talk is one of the outcomes of researching and
writing a fugue on the theory of knowledge
 Application Holy Wars or a new Reformation – A Fugue on
the Theory of Knowledge (see working draft)
– Combines threads from my two major careers
 Evolutionary biology
 Documentation and knowledge management systems analysis and management
– Started part time in late 2000 to survey the co-evolution of and
revolutions in human cognition and the cognitive tools humans used
– Because the story is complex, crossing many diverse disciplinary
paradigms, I adopted a cyclically fugal structure of subject, counter-
subject, several episodes with an interlude, and a cadenza and coda.
 The historical part of the story was easy
 Understanding life and knowledge at the organizational level
was not!
– My constructions are at odds with published dogmas of organization
studies and most knowledge management practitioners
– In trying to answer the foundation questions, as will be presented here, I
have ended up unifying some quite disparate ideas into a common answer to
most of them
4

Science and
Philosophy of
Science in the 20th
Century

Human knowledge/dominance of the world appears
to grow through time
 Prior science largely based on “natural history” observations
 1687 Classical (Newtonian) mechanics
 19th Century
– Darwinian theory of natural selection
– Maxwell’s equations / theory of electromagnetism
 20th Century
– Chromosomal/genetic theories of inheritance
– Relativity
– Atomic theory
– Electrodynamics/unification of forces
– Quantum theory
– Synthetic theory of evolution
– Solid-state physics (i.e., transistors, microcomputing)
– Plate tectonics
 All based on theoretical speculation tested in practice resulting in
practical knowledge to control the physical world
6

Epistemology tries to explain the power of science
to understand world
 Plato’s “justified true belief”
 Vienna Circle & Logical Positivism (1930’s)
– Truth can be perceived and verified
 Post WWII
– Constructivism and radical constructivism
 Knowledge is constructed – does not/cannot “reflect” external
reality
– The historian
 Thomas Kuhn
– Anti-Nazi’s
 Michael Polanyi
 Karl Popper
– Popper’s “irrationalist” students
 Imre Lakatos
 P.K. Feyerabend7

 Problems
– “Gettier’s Problem”
– “Problem of Induction” - any number of
confirmations does not prove the next test will
not be a refutation
– The biological impossibility to know if a claim to
know is true
 Vision does not form an image of external
reality
– Photons are not the objects reflecting them
– Photons striking retina are converted into neural
action potentials in primary photoreceptor cells
– Neurons aggregate in the retina respond to lines,
brightness, changing contrast, movements
– A mental perception/construction is not identical
to the external reality
 The brain does not perceive the world
– Perception and cognition are consequences of
propagating action potentials in a neural network.
– Action potentials stimulated by physical
perturbations to neurons
Problems with Logical Positivism
8 Clock, via Wikimedia

Constructivism
 Basic constructivist tenants
– World is independent of human minds
– “Knowledge” of the world is always a human construct
– There is little point to be concerned about external reality
because you cannot know what it is. You only know what you
think it is
 Social constructivism
– Social relationships and interactions construct socially held
perceptions of reality and knowledge.
– Truth is what people believe to be true
 Radical constructivism
– Knowledge cannot be transported from one mind into another
– Individual knowledge and understanding depends on personal
interpretation of experience, not what "actually" occurs.
9

Philosophers who
explained science to
me

Thomas Kuhn
 Born 1922 Cincinnati, Ohio (Died 1996)
 PhD Physics (Harvard 1949)
 Studied history of science as Harvard Junior Fellow (Postdoc)
 Univ Calif Berkley 1957
– Taught both history of and philosophy of Science
– Professor History of Science 1961)
 The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962, 1970)
– Key ideas
 Paradigms
– World views
– Disciplinary matrices
– Incommensurable usages of same words
 Normal science
 Revolutions
 “Structure” is a constructivist historical interpretation not
epistemology
11

Reactions to Marxist and Nazi pseudoscience
 Three Austro-Hungarian expatriates with Jewish
heritage escaped Nazis & ended up in England
– Wittgenstein: logic and language
– Polanyi: scientist turned philosopher
– Karl Popper: philosopher of science
 Popper and Polanyi’s opposite responses to Nazi logical
positivism
– Popper the philosopher built an epistemology to do better
science; emphasized importance of “objective” knowledge
– Polanyi the scientist sought ultimate truth in faith & belief;
emphasized importance of “tacit” knowledge
 Popper’s writing reflected conflicts with the others
– Notorious affair of “Wittgenstein’s Poker” (word games)
– Less notorious but equally acrimonious affair of Polanyi’s
contribution to Popper’s LSE seminar12

Michael Polanyi
 Born 11 March 1891 (died 1976), Budapest as a Jew
– 1914 medical diploma
– 1919 completed doctorate in chemistry (Budapest), joined Kaiser Wilhelm Institute
(Berlin)
– 1923 converted to Catholicism
– 1926 professor, Institute Physical- and Electrochemistry
– 1933 accepted chair in physical chemistry Manchester Uni to escape Nazis
 Nominee for Nobel Prize
 Son – continuing the father’s work, two students all won Nobel Prizes
– 1948 resigned chemistry to take new chair in philosophy because of deepening religious
streak and concerns over Nazi & Communist positivism
 Developed anti-positivist anti-reductionist epistemology of personal knowledge &
tacit knowing
– Absolute objectivity (objectivism) is a false ideal, all knowledge claims (including rule-
based ones) rely on personal judgements ultimately based on faith and belief
– Denied that scientific methodology can reveal truth
– We believe more than we can know, and know more than we can say
 Polanyi, M. (1958) Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy
– At least partially a reaction to Popper’s critical rationalism (no citation anywhere to
Popper’s work – see next slide)
13

Karl Popper
 Born in Vienna to well-off Jewish family converted to Lutheran
 Early flirtation with Marxism but put off by pseudoscientific historical
materialism
 Apprenticed cabinet maker & earned teaching qualification
 1929 doctorate in psychology on method in cognitive psychology
 1934 Logik der Forschung (Logic of Scientific Discovery 1959)
– “solved” the problem of induction
– Falsifiability as the demarcation between science and pseudo-science
 1937 emigrated to New Zealand, completed Open Society and its
Enemies
 1946 emigrated to London where took readership logic and scientific method at London School
of Economics; 1949 became professor
 25 Oct. 1946 – the affair of “Wittgenstein’s Poker” (Popper will not define words to avoid word
games)
– Edmonds, D. and Eidinow, J. (2001) Wittgenstein's Poker: The Story of a Ten-Minute Argument Between
Two Great Philosophers
– Munz, P. (2004). Beyond Wittgenstein’s Poker: New Light on Popper and Wittgenstein. (full text)
 6 March 1952 – the affair of Michael Polanyi’s humiliation in Popper’s LSE seminar (neither
author / authors followers will cite the other)
– Watkins, J. (1997) Obituary of Karl Popper, 1902-94. Proceedings of British Academy 94, 645- 654
 1963 Conjectures and Refutations: the Growth of Scientific Knowledge
 1972 Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach14
Karl Popper - b. 1902, d. 1994
“Objective Knowledge”, 1972

Why many people who should know better ignore
Popper
 Popper’s intellectual arrogance
– Popper mostly ignored or denigrated those he disagreed with (e.g., Polanyi)
– Irritated many (most) academic philosophers (ref Wittgenstein & Polanyi affairs),
especially ex positivists and constructivists
 Disagreed with his earlier works, so ignored / unaware of his constructivist Objective Knowledge
 Even until today few constructivists have cited Popper’s strongly constructivist Objective
Knowledge (one citation in all issues of the journal Constructivist Foundations)
 Contra Wittgenstein, Popper had a “negative attitude towards definitions”.
 Problems with undefined usage of language & barriers between schools
 Popper’s use of ‘objective’ in the title Objective Knowledge caused those who
thought knowledge could not be objective (i.e., in the sense that it was verifiably
true) to immediately reject the book without reading it (ref constructivists)
– Popper used “objective” in the different sense that knowledge could be objectified in
tangible objects, i.e., "the world of the logical contents of books, libraries, computer
memories, and suchlike" (1972: p. 74) and "our theories, conjectures, guesses (and, if we
like, the logical content of our genetic code)" (1972: p. 73)
15
…clarity is an intellectual value since, without it, critical discussion is impossible. But I do not believe that
exactness or precision are intellectual values in themselves; on the contrary we should never try to be more
exact or precise than the problem before us requires (which is always a problem of discriminating between
competing theories). For this reason I have stressed that I am not interested in definitions; since all
definitions use undefined terms, it does not, as a rule, matter whether we use a term as a primitive term or
as a defined term.

Evolutionary
epistemology
―
A biologically-based theory
of the growth of scientific
knowledge

Sources for evolutionary approach to epistemology
17
 Charles Darwin (1859) On the Origin of Species
 Konrad Lorenz – 1973 Nobel Prize (animal cognition and knowledge)
 Donald T. Campbell (1960, 1974)
– Psychologist concerned with cognitive processes generating
knowledge
– (1960) Blind Variation and Selective Retention…. (paper)
– (1974) Evolutionary Epistemology (chapter in Schilpp)
 Sir Karl R. Popper ( 1972 – knowledge is solutions to problems)
– (1972) Objective Knowledge – An Evolutionary Approach
– (1974) “The main task of the theory of knowledge is to understand
it as continuous with animal knowledge; and … its discontinuity – if
any – from animal knowledge” p 1161, “Replies to my Critics”
– (1994) Knowledge and the Body-Mind Problem
 Knowledge revolutions
– Thomas Kuhn (1960) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
– Stephen J. Gould (and Eldridge 1972) - Punctuated equilibria

Karl Popper's first great idea from Objective Knowledge:
“three worlds” ontology
19
Energy flow
Thermodynamics
Physics
Chemistry
Biochemistry
Cybernetic
self-regulation
Cognition
Consciousness
Tacit knowledge
Genetic heredity
Recorded thought
Computer memory
Logical artifacts
Explicit knowledge
Reprode/Produce
Develop/Recall
World 1 – External
Reality
World 2
World of mental or
psychological states and
processes, subjective
experiences, memory of history
Organismic/personal/situational/
subjective/tacit knowledge in
world 2 emerges from world 1
processes
The most we can hope for is
reliability
World 3
The world of “objective”
knowledge
Produced / evaluated by
world 2 processes
“living
knowledge”
“codified
knowledge”
• Reality is what it is irrespective of
faith & belief
• Knowledge is ‘correspondence to
truth’, i.e. reality
• A claim to know may be true, but
there is no way to prove it

“Epistemic cut” concept clarifies validity and relationships of
Popper’s three worlds
 Popper did not have a physical basis to justify his ontological proposal
 Howard Pattee 1995 “Artificial life needs a real epistemology”
– An “epistemic cut” refers to strict ontological separation in both physical
and philosophical senses between:
Knowledge of reality from reality itself, e.g., description from construction,
simulation from realization, mind from brain [or cognition from physical system].
Selective evolution began with a description-construction cut.... The highly evolved
cognitive epistemology of physics requires an epistemic cut between reversible
dynamic laws and the irreversible process of measuring [or describing]….
– Also known as “Heisenberg cut”
– Different concept from “epistemic gap” separating “phenomenological
knowledge” from “physical knowledge”
– No evidence Pattee or Popper ever cited the other
 One epistemic cut separates the blind physics of world 1 from the
cybernetic self-regulation, cognition, and living memory of world 2
 A second epistemic cut separates the self-regulating dynamics of
living entities from the encoded knowledge of books, computer
memories and DNAs and RNAs
 See Pattee (2012) Laws, Language and Life. Biosemiotics vol. 720

Popper’s second big idea: "tetradic schema“ / "evolutionary
theory of knowledge" / "general theory of evolution"
21
Pn a real-world problem faced by a
living entity
TS a tentative solution/theory.
Tentative solutions are varied
through serial/parallel iteration
EE a test or process of error
elimination
Pn+1 changed problem as faced by an
entity incorporating a surviving
solution
The whole process is iterated
 TSs may be embodied in W2 “structure” in the individual entity, or
 TSs may be expressed in words as hypotheses in W3, subject to objective
criticism; or as genetic codes in DNA, subject to natural selection
 Objective expression and criticism lets our theories die in our stead
 Through cyclic iteration, sources of errors are found and eliminated
 Tested solutions/theories become more reliable, i.e., approach reality
 Surviving TSs are the source of all knowledge!
Popper (1972), pp. 241-244

First take on what knowledge is
 Popper's World 1 encompasses everything - it is the dynamic
reality that exists independently of observation, knowing and
knowledge
 To survive and flourish we must reliably understand how W1
works in order to dominate it
 Observation, meaning and knowledge dynamically emerge in W2
as consequences of universal laws governing physical processes in
W1 as these processes impact living entities with an autonomous
history able to distinguish themselves from the rest of the
world. Erroneous beliefs may be fatal / eliminated
– Observation is a dynamic change propagated within the observing
entity resulting from an interaction with the world
– Meaning is a consequence of the observation induced change in the
constitution of the observing entity
– Knowledge (in one sense) is the persistent consequence of selective
elimination on a history of observation and meaning in world 2 or 3
 There is an epistemic cut between phenomena of W1 and the
knowledge of the phenomena as represented in the living system
(Howard Pattee, 1995)23

Cyclic interactions between personal (W2) and
explicit (W3) knowledge
24
 Vines and Hall (2011) - Exploring the foundations of
organizational knowledge
– Applies evolutionary epistemology to understand individual
and organizational processes in the growth of knowledge

Cyclic formalization of knowledge
25
Personal
Accessible and
shared in group
Organizational

The cyclical construction and reconstruction of
formalized scientific knowledge
 Hall, W.P., Nousala, S. 2010. What is the value of peer review – some sociotechnical
considerations
 Vines, R., Hall, W.P., McCarthy, G. 2011. Textual representations and knowledge support-
systems in research intensive networks26

Developmental flows of scientific knowledge
27
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W.P. Hall - selected bibliography
28
 Hall, W.P. 1983. Modes of speciation and evolution in the sceloporine iguanid lizards. I. Epistemology of the
comparative approach and introduction to the problem. (in) A.G.J. Rhodin and K. Miyata, eds. Advances in
Herpetology and Evolutionary Biology - Essays in Honor of Ernest E Williams. Museum of Comparative
Zoology, Cambridge Mass. pp.643-679.
 Hall, W.P. 1998. When a good business case alone isn't enough to get SGML into your corporate strategy.
SGML/XML Asia Pacific '98, Sydney. [Kuhnian paradigm shifts]
 Hall, W.P. 2005. Biological nature of knowledge in the learning organization. in special issue Doing Knowledge
Management, eds. Firestone, J.M. and McElroy, M.W. The Learning Organization 12(2):169-188.
 Hall, W.P., Nousala, S. 2010. Autopoiesis and knowledge in self-sustaining organizational systems. 4th
International Multi-Conference on Society, Cybernetics and Informatics: IMSCI 2010, June 29th - July
2nd, 2010 – Orlando, Fla.
 Hall, W.P., Nousala, S. 2010. What is the value of peer review – some sociotechnical considerations. Second
International Symposium on Peer Reviewing, ISPR 2010 June 29th - July 2nd, 2010 – Orlando, Florida, USA
 Hall, W.P., Else, S., Martin, C., Philp, W. 2011. Time-based frameworks for valuing knowledge: maintaining
strategic knowledge. Kororoit Institute Working Papers No. 1: 1-28.
 Vines, R., Hall, W.P. 2011. Exploring the foundations of organizational knowledge. Kororoit Institute Working
Papers No. 3: 1-39.
 Hall, W.P. 2011. Physical basis for the emergence of autopoiesis, cognition and knowledge. Kororoit Institute
Working Papers No. 2: 1-63.
 Vines, R., Hall, W.P., McCarthy, G. 2011. Textual representations and knowledge support-systems in
research intensive networks. (in) Cope, B., Kalantzis, M., Magee, L. (eds). Towards a Semantic Web:
Connecting Knowledge in Academic Research. Oxford: Chandos Press, pp. 145-195.
 Hall, W.P., Kilpatrick, B. 2011. Managing community knowledge to build a better world. Australasian
Conference on Information Systems (ACIS) 30th November - 2nd December, 2011, Sydney, Australia.
 Hall, W.P., [Preview]. Application holy wars or a new reformation: A fugue on the theory of knowledge, 92
pp.

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