Welcome to the article series where, over the next 20 weeks, I will share what I have researched and know (somewhat). Stay with me in this journey.

What is knowledge??

Most look at knowledge from a ‘trivial pursuit’ lens. One where knowledge is seen as facts that are largely discrete, simple, non-controversial and evidenced through recall.?

At the same time, we have these new slogans like lifelong learning and learning how to learn as qualities superior to being able to accumulate facts. Facts that may not be useful when you require application.?

Increasingly Google, Wikipedia and, more recently, ChatGPT are the sources of information. Everyone today seems to think of themselves as ‘information jurors’, that is, they themselves evaluate the authorities or facts and come to their own conclusions without consultation with an expert.?

We are in an interesting information age – one where social media and search algorithms present content that reinforces our current biases and thus leads to hardening of our hypothesis. ?

Up until the 20th century there were purveyors of knowledge – the Church or sages and prophets in the Middle Ages, then later with the book publishers and authors, state propaganda, and broadcast media. In all instances it was a small group of ‘curators’ of knowledge. They were seen as experts and hence accepted by most of society.?

With the advent of the internet just about all who have access to the worldwide web are invited to post their knowledge and opinions and critique other people’s content. To its credit the internet levels the politics of knowledge playing field. It is egalitarian but this is exactly where critical thinking is indeed ‘critical’ and quoting Umberto Eco:?

“Social media gives legions of idiots the right to speak when they once only spoke at a bar after a glass of wine, without harming the community ... but now they have the same right to speak as a Nobel Prize winner. It's the invasion of the idiots”.?

In the current era access is no longer a barrier to knowledge, but attention is. Retention of facts is no longer needed. Discernment and distillation skills are what we need today.?

Asking deeper questions like - Is this subjective or objective? Is it fair or is it biased? What are the sources and dependability of our knowledge? - are the new ‘ways of knowing’ processes.?

With ChatGPT you have access to every form of mediated knowledge vetted by some expert – sometimes known and sometimes imagined.?

?We all want our knowledge to be reliable and a notion of ‘reliabilism’ needs to be introduced and grasped. It is a measure of whether the knowledge has been arrived at through a process – e.g. scientific procedure or an indicator – like a calculator (used properly of course). One must caution that even reliability is comparative. This is why professional journalism, when seeking a fact, always requires a cross check or a doctor seeks a second opinion on a medical diagnosis in some cases.?

Wikipedia is a system of self-proclaimed epistemic egalitarianism. One where everyone has equal authority on what passes on as knowledge and then the only caveat is the validity of the claim to one?content versus another. It is not about who is the author of the content. ChatGPT does this on an industrial scale – it scours all public knowledge about a topic (or prompt) without any attribution or whether the information is authoritative or not. ?

Infact, I asked ChatGPT that if all information on the internet would say that ‘the earth is flat’ and if I asked ChatGPT this question how would it respond??It gave an ambiguous answer “While I do consider patterns in online sources, I’m designed to align responses with widely accepted scientific facts and knowledge frameworks...”.?

In addition to ‘ways of knowing’ we need to understand what comprises the systematic production of knowledge.?

More on this in the next article. Do share, comment and critique – you are contributing to the production of knowledge through this process.?

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Ajay Shukla?

11th November 2024?

References: Theory of Knowledge 2nd Edition, Sue Bastian, Julian Kitching, Ric Sims. Nexus, Yuval Noah Hariri, Umberto Uno, Goodreads. ChatGPT.?

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