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Printer-Friendly ModeEpistemology: Know the fire is hot before getting burned
September 14, 2009 —
In the technologically advanced world of today, automobile companies frequently crash cars into thick, cement walls on purpose just to see what will happen. Inside of these cars they place the well-known crash-test dummy, which exists to endure horrible experiences so we don’t have to in order to know what happens. We all owe at least some thanks to these dummies; we are smarter from their perils. The demand for crash-test dummies illustrates something about the way we acquire knowledge as human beings: there are more ways to learn than to directly experience something yourself.
Though it is perhaps not a philosophically exhaustive list, there are three ways of acquiring knowledge—one could call it wisdom—that more or less run the gamut of the ways in which we learn: to experience something ourselves, to observe the experiences of dummies (perhaps genius dummies), or to venture a logically deduced guess of the way things are based on what we have learned via the first two methods. (For instance, people die when they can’t breath; there is no air in outer space; therefore I will die if I go into outer space without my own supply of air.) Certainly, the only one of these three methods that will allow one to know for sure whether the information produced is accurate. Anything that we “know” through the other two methods is and should be subject to some doubt, but that level of necessary doubt varies.
For instance, I am very convinced that what happens to that dummy as the vehicle collides with that brick wall is very close to what would happen to me. After somebody explains the perils of a car accident, you may still want to see one before accepting what that person has said. But after seeing the dummy, you decide experiencing a crash yourself isn’t worth it.
Experiencing things ourselves may be the most reliable source of information, but there are limits to how much we can experience: namely, time and the physical durability of our bodies. It is much more efficient and cost-effective to learn through the other two methods: watching the dummies of history and logically predicting the outcome of events yet unexperienced. Every opportunity to learn through the latter two vehicles is an opportunity to gain an advantage over the people who spent so much time and perhaps incurred so much damage to themselves by learning the same lesson through personal experience.
Imagine three teenagers: Stu is very skeptical of everything he is told and is not easily convinced that other people’s experiences are an accurate predictor of what will happen to him in the same situations; Chip is much less skeptical of explanations from other people and often learns from other people’s successes and failures; Manny is a huge momma’s boy and rarely experiences anything himself, having his entire perception of what the outside world must be like constructed by his momma’s advice.
We all know these three people, and it isn’t hard to predict what each of their adult lives will be like. Stu, who chose to test everything in the laboratory of his own time, injured himself frequently and will not be receiving a disability check because he is in jail as well. Manny, who sees the world only through the looking glass of momma, probably believes many things that are untrue, having never employed a more reliable test of knowledge to mold his wisdom. But Chip, he got through his youth with the necessary bumps and bruises to be sure that he wasn’t being fed a line of crap but has learned much more than the lessons of each scar he has; he has learned lessons from the scars of other people as well.
It is a mistake that people sometimes make to assume that because we can learn from our mistakes that we can only learn by making mistakes, and just as often people commit the error on the other side of the spectrum and think that because making mistakes can cause harm that they are never worth making. Extremely successful people, such as a president of the United States, would not reach such a level of success without having learned most of their lessons from the pain of others while at the same time getting a healthy level of verification from personal pain—but pain that isn’t in the form of permanent criminal records, diseases, disabilities or loss of life. Lessons with that kind of risk are better learned by looking at a statistical sheet or watching dummies crash into walls.