How many of us have actually taken time to ask - How do we know what we know?

Funny how words get invested, suddenly, with new meaning. Until very recently I’ve used the term “sceptical” with pride – it meant challenging what John Kenneth Galbraith called in the 1950s “the conventional wisdom” and few were, for me, better at this than Bertrand Russell whose Sceptical Essays I remember devouring in the late 1950s. In a new Introduction written recently, John Gray says - 

Russell had great admiration for Joseph Conrad and one of the reasons was surely his suspicion that Conrad’s sceptical fatalism was a truer account of human life than his own troubled belief in reason and science.

As reformer, Russell believed reason could save the world. As a sceptical follower of Hume he knew reason could never be more than the slave of the passions. “Sceptical Essays” (1928) was written as a defence of rational doubt. Today we c,an read it as a confession of faith, the testament of a crusading rationalist who doubted the power of reason. 

But now, thanks to climate and vaccination ”sceptics”, the word has become tainted with connotations of conspiracy, irrationality and tribalism. I want to understand –

-       how this apparent retreat to irrationality has happened and

-       what we can do about it 

Let me offer some tentative thoughts

-       for some reason, we have become more polarised in our thinking

-       the general consensus seems to be that the social media are to blame

-       as a good sceptic, I’m not so sure

-       perhaps increased educational opportunities have simply made us more aware of the subjectivities in our “take on reality” (pop psychology is a huge growth industry)

-       we have certainly become more aware, in the past decade, of the importance of “story-telling” whose importance first became obvious to me only a decade ago although people like Edward Bernays and Joseph Goebbels have been preaching its significance for almost a century and Alex Evans’ The Myth Gap appeared in  2017.

Evans was also the co-author of one of the most thoughtful pieces about polarisation which appeared in 2019 - Rebuilding Common Ground produced by a group which calls itself variously “Collective Psychology” or “Larger Us”. It’s a great analysis about what’s happened – although I’m not quite convinced by his recipes.

I have a feeling that too much of this is driven by attempts to be different and that we need to return to some of the basic issues of epistemology – namely “how do we know what we think we know”? Completely by accident, I stumbled a couple of days ago on a book entitle From Belief to Knowledge published in 2011 by Douglas and Wykowski. The focus may be organisational change but most of the book is a rare intellectual exploration – by 2 consultants - of a subject I have to confess I’ve spent too little time bothering to understand, put off to an extent by its name – epistemology. It’s not the easiest of reads but, fortunately, I also discovered another (downloadable) book which explores the same issue at a much more practical level - The Knowing-Doing Gap (2000)