Distinguishing Knowing from Knowledge

Recalling the War on Fake News, the fallacy of the post-truth diagnosis, and why we need to push knowing beyond truth

Welcome to Dilemmas of Meaning, a journal at the intersection of philosophy, culture, and technology. This piece re-examines the war on Fake News, diagnosing why attempts to tackle it failed before proposing a better alternative: realising that many knowledge claims are discourse in disguise. I intentionally don’t discuss lies here, to save you a dissertation, that piece is coming soon.

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Based on The Death of Socrates (1787) by Jacques Louis David

Science teachers at the college level have a running joke. Their first lesson is getting you to forget everything you have learnt before. Upon beginning one of my first physics classes, my teacher wrote the famous Socratic paradox on the board: “I know that I know nothing.”

Far be it from me to draw out general conclusions from a half-remembered memory, but something has stayed with me. For years, I assumed the paradox was an attempt to humble those of us who felt we had reached the summit of knowledge, becoming comfortable and proud at how far we’d climbed. Now, with the passing of time, I see that it was precisely because what we knew wasn’t even true. The knowledge we had gained from a more basic account of the sciences would be next to useless as we were given a further peek behind the universe’s curtains. Telling us this at the onset was important, as my teacher could not rely on us discovering that ourselves as we learned new arguments for new facts; many of us, fresh from a blissful summer, had forgotten most of the facts we claimed to know. For example, I didn’t remember why Newton’s laws of motion worked the way they did, only that I know them, so I could not appreciate why quantum mechanics showed them to be less than accurate when the maths was put in front of us.

Science teachers, faced with students ready to say they knew science without merit, realised the only way to teach us what we knew wasn’t true was to let us know we knew nothing. That our claims to knowledge were irrelevant to what our teachers aimed to teach; they could not rely on knocking away a foundation that we had forgotten existed, for our claim to knowledge was not based on truth. Battling untruthful claims to knowledge is a cause championed, in their own way, by disparate groups, including university professors, parents, and the late 2010’s campaigners in the war on Fake News.

With the electoral successes of Brexit and Donald Trump in the Anglophone world, the near miss of a Le Pen presidency in France, and Modi and Duterte making right-wing nationalism cool in the Global South, it really did appear that a kind of creeping authoritarianism was on the rise, fuelled by a care relationship to truth and accelerating upon the information superhighway. For a kind of liberal it really felt like there was a war to be fought on disinformation. On its 28th anniversary, the inventor of the World Wide Web declared fake news as a worrying trend preventing the internet from truly serving all of humanity. Since those ominous words by Timothy Bernard-Lee in 2017, conspiracy theories are back, from COVID denial to some questioning why trees remain after forest fires. With tools to mimic audio and video improved to such a state that you can watch Donald Trump, Joe Biden, and Barack Obama play Wii Sports, you’d think fake news and disinformation would once again fill the liberal world with more worry and more concern. Apart from the few AI researchers worried about misinformation¹, we seem to have moved on. Fake News is yesterday’s problem, not solved, but far enough in the rearview mirror to prevent the same kind of anxiety it did almost a decade ago. These dire conditions appear to have inspired a kind of tolerated living. We did not choose this post-truth world; we just live in it.

Some might see this post-truth world as inevitable. Drugs, Terror, Poverty, how often has a war against a noun succeeded? The War on Fake News can take its place on that list. But is this really a natural consequence of entering a post-truth world? Or is this rather a failure of how we think about truth and knowledge–seeing the latter only as a component of the first? In other words, are we post-truth or beyond it?

Truth and Knowledge are related terms, especially in the war on Fake News, the former from which we added post- as a description was seen as both what was missing in the information we shared and therefore the solution. Knowledge, on the other hand, was the problem. The illusion of knowledge, that we believe we know more than we do or what we know isn’t actually true, is common to the world of conspiracy theories and falling for disinformation. Put simply, you could diagnose Fake News as knowledge without truth, leaving only belief and—for some—a rabid zeal to justify.

In the liberal mind, the real reason for the spread of knowledge without truth was the crumbling of trusted institutions. If you got what you know from sources less than your Facebook newsfeed, a salacious tabloid, or your secondary school science teacher, it will be without truth. Gone were the days of the state, university, and mainstream media being held up as paragons of truth in society. If the problem was knowledge without truth, then what was needed was impartial, objective, and trustworthy gatekeepers, designating facts and information as true or false. We see this with fact-checkers, deference to knowledgeable authority figures, and community notes on the website formerly called Twitter (maybe replace with critical thinking). Truth was forced and was soundly rejected, a politician can stand up, lie, and stare-down the fact checkers ‘til they enjoy a bountiful re-election. The prevailing diagnosis that underpinned the war on Fake News was, in retrospect, far too convenient for something as heady and abstract as truth.

We need to consider a world beyond it.

This reveals that many are not making knowledge claims at all but simply engaging in discourse. It’s how we communicate

Let’s ignore truth for now and ask the question: When we say we know something, what do we actually mean? I want to answer this with an example. In school, I learned that William the Conqueror won the Battle of Hastings in 1066. I’d wager a great many British kids learned that fact, but let’s ask some questions:

1. From where did I learn this? I could answer school, but pressed to be more precise, I’d come up short. Perhaps I read it outside school, heard it in a television show, or was told by someone I have now forgotten;

2. Do I believe the fact? Now that I’ve put myself on the spot, probably but it’s not something I’d stake a lot on. It is not a fact I have questioned but minor acquiescence is not the same as belief.

3. Finally, I promise this is the last question I’ll ask myself; can I justify my holding on to this fact? In other words, how do I know I haven’t arrived at this conclusion (if true) by luck? Perhaps I guess the year, misremembered an incorrect fact, or thought Hastings was actually somewhere else.

To some, asking these questions is how we check that what we know is true. For the common view is that knowledge is a composite of other factors that, should one be missing, out goes your claim. Considering knowledge as the resulting sum of a justified true belief, has consequences for how we deal with untrue information. I think it’s why you might believe that proving something isn’t true/or that a person doesn’t really believe what they’re claiming to know/or that they cannot justify how they came to that conclusion is the best way to fight fake news. Yet, some of those factors could not be proven here and I will still claim to know William the Conqueror won the Battle of Hastings in 1066.

Some of you are already thinking that all I must ask is whether the fact is true. If it is, there is no problem to be solved. If William the Conqueror was not called that or lost the Battle of Hastings or any other number of inaccuracies, that knowledge is invalid. So, let’s try another example.

I have a friend whose sports team had been at the top of the league for much of the season. They had played well and were multiple points clear. The betting markets had priced them as by far the favourites to lift the trophy and do so for the first time in nearly two decades. I talk to him, and he says he knows they will win the league. Using the first series of questions, we would say that he cannot say he knows they will win the league and, under the second test the league isn’t mathematically over so once again we ought to push back against this. I go to him and let him know that his information is invalid, and he laughs in my face.

What is clear from these two examples is that when we say we know something, we might be doing something other than making a claim to knowledge. We’re not attempting to transmit truth at all. So when we try and treat it as such, we find ourselves in clashes of understanding. Framing and separating knowledge and knowing like this overturns conventional understanding of epistemology.

Working along similar lines is philosopher Allan Hazlett who argues that philosophers group knowledge in the epistemological sense, that is, as something that has a series of stringent requirements and rigour, and knowing in the linguistic sense. When people say they know things, they do not mean they are factive, that is making a claim about the truthfulness of their statement. He proves this by substituting words. Going back to my friend and his trophy-less team, we could replace knows with a word that does not imply knowledge of facts: he thinks they will win the league; he believes they will win the league. Important is that there is nothing special about words like know that should make us believe the speaker is making a factive statement. The test Hazlitt proposed is rewording the phrase with what he called knowledge-wh phrases to the knowledge in question, for example: If I said my friend knows whether his team will win the league, or he knows who won the league. This can be contrasted from clearly non-factive telling-that phrases: my friend told us they would win the league vs my friend told us whether they would win the league. While the difference can be subtle, we can be clear that former is factive and the latter isn’t. This reveals many are not making knowledge claims at all but simply engaging in discourse. It’s how we communicate.

Therefore, it is less that we are in a post-truth era but that we have appropriated claims that are merely discursive as actually factive. We were never in a ‘truth’ era to depart from. Perhaps this owes more a view more popular today that sees societal debate and discussion as oriented to finding truth². My friend in telling me he knows his team will win the league was less about the two of us deriving the universal truth about football or an attempt at divination but a fun conversation amongst friends about a common interest. Thus, him reacting poorly when I epistemologically checked him. So, too, are many attempts at preemptively correcting untrue statements. We need to remember to not approach every discourse as if they are a) making a knowledge claim and, b) making a knowledge claim at us.

This problem is made worse by how social media encourages and incentivises us to communicate.

Algorithmic Identities

For one, we broadcast our thoughts rather than communicate them via conversations. So, when our posts reach others, it is without any context. Something that might be in response to something else is presented as if it stands on its own. If that is most of what you see, free standings broadcasts, social media platforms incentivise a language or norm within that group. For example, how many TikToks begin with a declaration that “we have to talk about” or “when are we going to have a conversation that”? Statements that treat the author as uttering the first statement in what is actually a long conversation. Another example is the site formerly known as Twitter adopting a strangely adversarial/combative tone, as if the author is preemptively arguing with phantoms. I don’t think these are the faults of the people communicating but how we align ourselves to norms. If everyone in a building takes off their hats, so will you.

The consequence of the internet becoming an open public space is that people encounter those they would not interact with normally. Activists, journalists, students, and, worst of all, teenagers. As we increasingly move from feeds populated by choice and instead by algorithms, this clash of peoples will only increase. So, we meet platforms that encourage specific norms of communication, often using the language of factive statements, and push those to people that have no trust, context, or patience with the author. So, when a 15-year-old claims that they know that a respected director is terrible or otherwise makes a factual error, perhaps the 30-something-year-old overeducated professional should not strike down upon them with great vengeance and furious anger. Attempting to epistemologically check them will, like my attempt, fail because the two parties are having different conversations. I mean, how dumb were you at 15? In the old days of twitter (rip), there was always a main character of the day, someone whose tweets dominated the day’s discourse. The aim, accordingly, was never to be the main character. What was striking was how often that main character was someone whom most users would never interact with, had a small following, and often made claims that received by their group would be innocuous. I’m embarrassed by how many edgy teenagers were on the receiving end of a barrage of corrections. Treating public discourse as truth-finding empowers everyone online with a hammer and turns every statement into a nail.

Making this process worse are the systems that present nails in a row, ready to be smashed. When you come across something that animates you to respond, rather than leaving a reply or a comment, most people choose instead to react. They quote the post, duet, or overlay their recorded reaction in a video. Rather than containing their responses to the comments and replies of the original text the natural response is to create something new. This might seem like a normal choice, but it’s a result of many micro-incentives by the platform builders. For one, replies and comments are lost in an ocean of noise. From scams to off-topic segues, leaving a comment on any platform is to be in a place where eyes glance through at best. So you of course you broadcast, with your thoughts and comments and original context removed. What might have been an innocent comment or joke or half-thought is now shared to more than it should’ve.

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The war on Fake News began overconfident with what we knew about the problem. Empowered, by the kind of blind optimism that can only exist in a technocratic society, believed we had solved most problems and the fault lay not in our systems and ways of communication but in us; human error rather than flawed design. The first part of solving a problem is acknowledging how little we know about it, so that we are not encumbered by bad habits and poor norms. The first thing we have to do is join in the joke, and like science teachers of years gone by, pull up a white board and write: all we know is that we know nothing.

1. There is a larger point about the difference between misinformation and disinformation and where Fake News fits into that. All will be covered in the accompanying piece

2. Thanks to Peter for illuminating this point