Socratic epistemology, Hintikka, questions and the end of propositional logic (Questions I)

The question of what knowledge is can be understood in different ways. One way to understand it is to focus on what it means to know something. The majority view here is that knowledge is about propositions that we can examine from different perspectives. Examples would include things like:

• The earth is round.
• Gravity is a force.
• Under simple conditions demand and supply meet in a market.

These propositions can then be true or false and the value we assign to them decides if they are included in our knowledge. The way we assign truth or falsity can vary. In some theories truth is about correspondence with reality, and in some it is about coherence in the set of propositions we hold to be true.

Now, admittedly this is a quick sketch of our theory of knowledge, but it suffices to ask a very basic question. Why do we believe that propositions are fundamental to knowledge? Why do we believe that they are the atoms of which knowledge is constituted?

Philosopher and historian of ideas RG Collingwood thought the explanation for this was simple: logic and grammar grew up together, as sciences, so we ended up confusing one with the other. There are, Collingwood asserts, no reasons for assuming that knowledge breaks down into propositions. There are no grounds for asserting that propositions are more basic than other alternatives. The reason we have propositional logic is just because logic is so entwined with grammar.

That leaves us with an interesting problem: what, then, is knowledge made of?

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Socrates was clear. In Plato’s Theaetetus we find the following discussion in passing:

I mean the conversation which the soul holds with herself in considering of anything. I speak of what I scarcely understand; but the soul when thinking appears to me to be just talking—asking questions of herself and answering them, affirming and denying. And when she has arrived at a decision, either gradually or by a sudden impulse, and has at last agreed, and does not doubt, this is called her opinion. I say, then, that to form an opinion is to speak, and opinion is a word spoken,—I mean, to oneself and in silence, not aloud or to another: What think you?

This idea, that knowledge may be dialogical, that it may consist in a set of questions and answers to those questions is key to open another perspective on knowledge. It also, potentially, explains the attraction of the dialogue form for the Greeks: what better way to structure philosophical debate than in the same way knowledge is structured and produced? Why state propositions, when dialogue mimics the way we ourselves arrive at knowledge?

It is worthwhile taking a moment here. In one way this all seems so evident: of course we ask ourselves question to know! That is how we arrive at the propositions we hold true! But this is exactly where we need to pause. The reality is that the leap from questions and answers to propositions is uncalled for, and a leap that fools us into believing that questions are merely tools with which we uncover our propositions. Shovels that shovel aside the falsity from the truth. But knowledge is not like nuggets of gold buried in the earth – knowledge is the tension between answer and question in equilibrium. If you change the question, the balance of the whole thing changes as well – and your knowledge is changed.

As an aside: that is why, in belief revision, we often are interested in generating surprise in the person whose views we want to change. One way to describe surprise is as the unexpected answer to a question, that then forces a new question to be asked and the network of questions and answers is then updated to reflect a new belief – a new pair of questions and answers.

This minority view is found again in people like RG Collingwood who writes extensively about the fundamental nature of questions and it has been explicated at length by Jaako Hintikka who in his later philosophy developed what he called Socratic epistemology. In the next couple of posts we will examine what this could mean for our view of the conscious mind, and perhaps also for our view of artificial intelligence.

I think it will allow us to say that the Turing test was the wrong way around: that the questions should have been asked by the human subject and the computer to the test leader. It will also allow us to understand why human questioning is so surprisingly efficient, and why randomly generating queries is a horrible way to learn any subject. Human questions shape the field of knowledge in an interesting way, and we see this in the peculiar shape of human go games in the overall game space of go, but equally in the shape of human knowledge in chess.

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When new models for learning are devised they are able to explore completely different parts of the problem space, parts you don’t easily reach with the kinds of questions that we have been asking. Questions have a penumbra of possible knowledge, and I suspect – although this will be good to explore further – that our ability to question is intrinsically human, and perhaps in some sense even biological. Here I would point to the excellent work of professor Joseph Jordania on questions and evolutionary theory, in his work Who Asked The First Question?.

This is an area of exploration that I have been mining for some time now with a close collaborator in professor Fredrik Stjernberg, and we are getting ready to sum up the first part of our work soon, I hope. It is not just theoretical, but suggests interesting possibilities like dialogical networks (rather than adversarial ones) and a science of possible categories of questions and ways to ask new questions, or better questions.