Knowledge, Confidence, and Deceit in Descartes and Shakespeare

Knowledge, Confidence, and Deceit in Descartes and Shakespeare

“Knowledge is power,” the English philosopher Francis Bacon once said1. It seems obvious then, that knowledge is something to be sought after, and of course it is sought after in everyday life, in thoughts, and in fiction. However, there is danger in this. Bacon’s quote no doubt refers to true knowledge, as power rarely comes from being misled. Yet, we are misled, deceived, and betrayed when in the pursuit of knowledge. A challenge then arises: how to continue in the pursuit of knowledge, something obviously necessary in life, while verifying that we are not being led astray. It seems a well thought out process for collecting knowledge is in order.

Any pursuit of knowledge must begin with either an observation by the senses, or a piece of information supplied by a third party. This starting point must be verified, and then the process must move forward using a combination of Aristotelian logic, further observations and third-party information. Whenever observations or third-party knowledge is used, it must be verified carefully before proceeding.

This process seems satisfactory, yet is much more complicated than it reveals on its skin. To further clarify the issue, some of the terms that have just been thrown around must be more specifically defined for their context. What is Aristotelian logic? This is simply the process of deducing truthful statements from other truthful statements. The main point here is that only a truth can imply a truth. Any findings based on a string of logic beginning with or including a false assumption cannot be trusted. This can lead to tricky situations in which the logic itself can be perfect and yet still yield a false result. What does it mean to verify something? This is where things get difficult. Since it is very hard to know if we actually know anything, we can never verify something completely. This concept is well out of the scope of this paper, but it is important to understand that complete verification is impossible, and endlessly inefficient, so we must be satisfied with a certain amount of verification. This wildly subjective statement poses a great problem. What is a good amount of verification? There is no answer to this question, because in fact, it differs for every situation, and even within a single situation, two people may apply different levels of verification.