What do I know?

Ever had that daunting feeling that you don't understand much about the world and you will never know everything?

There have been plenty of times when I've had this existential dread; the sudden realisation that what you're capable of is limited and you only have the capacity to know so much. I had questions, and I wanted answers, because there is so much of the universe that just doesn't make sense. I want to know why we have a voice in our head, I want to know why we do things without thinking about it, I want to know why we always want to know more.

"I preferred to keep asking, without the courage to already have" - Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.

The study of how we know things is called epistemology. This branch of philosophy asks, "What is the process through which we come to know something and to what extent can we actually claim to know it?"

Do we know things through our senses? Through our reason? Do we already know everything, we just haven't discovered it yet?

At this point we should distinguish between the different types of knowledge:

1. Acquaintance - knowledge of things through interaction with them.

2. Ability - knowledge of how to do something.

3. Propositional - knowledge that something is.

Here are some examples:

1. I know my house has a brown door because I live there and lock it every night.

2. I know how to ride my bike.

3. I know that 2+2=4.

However to understand how we know things, we must first have a basis for what knowledge actually is. One of the first people to try and answer all of these questions was Plato, the third of the great ancient Greek philosophers. He proposed the Tripartite Theory of knowledge, and it is given this name because Plato devised that knowledge consists of three things: justification, truth and belief. I can claim to have knowledge if what I say is true, I believe that it is true, and I have justification in believing that it is true. For example, I can say I know how to ride my bike because it is true that I can ride a bike, I believe that I can ride it, and I have justification in believing I can ride my bike because I have practised and learned how it works.

Knowledge is being in "cognitive contact with reality" - Linda Zagzebski, PhD

Plato's Tripartite Theory has by far been the most influential and popular definition of knowledge, but how do we apply this to our day-to-day thinking? Every time we say we know something, do we really stop to think about whether it's true, we really believe it and that we have a means of justification for it? Perhaps not, which leads us to the issue of language. No matter how we define knowledge, whether we think knowledge is gained through experience or whether it's innate, we claim we know things all the time and we claim to not know things all the same.

We play language games with ourselves sometimes. We use words in different ways with different meanings across different cultures, so how can we expect ourselves to ever define something exactly as it is? Here is an excerpt from my journal exploring this idea:

"Language as a barrier, as not it, as not the thing in itself. My name is not my name but everyone's name. I, myself, can never be explained. If one cannot explain oneself, how can one ever explain anything else. And that is why we struggle and stumble upon words, everything is, and everything is itself, nothing else."

So, whenever I get anxious about not knowing things, I stop to think that I can't say I know anything anyway really, and that's okay. If the infiniteness of the universe ever gets too overwhelming for me, I ground myself by accepting everything in its infiniteness, because the universe just is. And I'm existing in the universe just being too.

While epistemology can't explain the universe for us, it can offer us a path, a guide, to understanding more about what we can know. For me, epistemology became a solid standing I could come back to when I couldn't control my spiralling thoughts telling me I was inadequate and had no purpose if I couldn't ever truly know anything. It was epistemology that taught me: my purpose is to just be.