YOU, ME, & AGNOTOLOGY

Knowledge. What is it? 

I've recently started reading about the fields of study that focus on knowledge at a fundamental level:

1. Epistemology = study of what knowledge is
2. Agnotology = study of what ignorance is

They ask questions like: When we're born, are we born with any sort of innate knowledge? Do we have the capacity for knowledge? If not, then are we born ignorant? Or is knowledge requisite to ignorance? Or vice versa? Or are we born in a state perfectly situated between the two?

A key question in the field of Epistemology:

What does it mean to know? How can we justify that we actually know what we say we know?

Where does knowledge start and stop? What things can we say with certainty that we know? And how do we confirm that we can actually know anything at all?

A key question in the field of Agnotology is: 

how should we regard "missing matter"—knowledge not yet known. Is science more like the progressive illumination of a well-defined box, or does darkness grow as fast as the light?

So, are we discovering/uncovering more of a limited pool of information with each experience/finding? Or does the pool's vastness expand infinitely in direct proportion to knowledge? This is a philosophical question with no answer as it stands. 

This is where it all starts. It doesn't matter who we are, where we are, where we've been, what we plan on doing. These are the questions that matter. There is nothing more fundamental to our lives than this. This supersedes all things since what we know and what we don't know directs our lives.

Most people do not approach life in a rational manner. We're emotional beings and that's no surprise given that as generations come and go, the transfer of knowledge and ignorance recapitulates. Our minds are cluttered with the thoughts and feelings of others before we can even think for ourselves. We are unwillingly subject to how they've handled life. This isn't us. Our experiences in life will shape you to an extent, but much of who we are will already be deeply rooted in who we have been around. We need to undo this if we're ever going to be our own person. 

Think freely. Listen to others, but understand that everybody is ignorant—especially to others interests and outlooks in life. What one person hates, there's another that loves it.

I'll leave you with a short story about a professor of mine in college: I had a professor for organic chemistry that I was told to run from. Almost everybody I spoke to told me he was terrible. Bad reviews online, was told his class was impossible, all of these horrible things that when taking organic chemistry, you don't want to hear. Long story short, I loved him. Finished the class being exempt from the final exam given my grade. Moral of the story: you're your own person with your own thoughts, feelings, judgements, etc. I wrote about this topic today to introduce the fact that there's a literal field of study around what we do and don't know and what it means to know in the first place. So before you go following a false sense of confidence and making decisions based on what other people say: just stop and remind yourself that nobody really knows anything and that you won't know something (outside the relations of ideas) until you experience it (a posteriori to use the epistemological term).

Work diligently everyday to lessen your ignorance.

~ Bonde