As a kind of limbering-up exercise, may we take a moment to savor the ambiguity of the title of this chapter? What do you take it to mean? On paper, it's hard to know what meaning is intended, though if I were to speak it to you, you would soon guess. If, for example, I gave each word almost equal stress and spoke "words" at a pitch the same as or just slightly lower than "knowing," you would infer that I am talking about the act or state of being familiar with words. If, on the other hand, I gave distinctly heavier stress to "knowing" and let "words" drop to a much lower pitch, you might be a little puzzled as to what I have in mind but you might guess that I am thinking about words that have to do with knowing. It is the latter that I mean to convey. We need not pursue this line of thought further here. But if we consider pitch and stress as elements of the information conveyed by the title phrase, we may begin to appreciate how wide the gap may be between simple information and knowledge.

By "knowing words," then, I mean those words -- verbs -- that we commonly use to mean that we have some form or degree of knowledge about some matter. There are many such verbs in English, and many, many shades of meaning made possible by them. Preeminently, of course, there is simply know. We say "I know that it is Tuesday." "I know that water is composed of oxygen and hydrogen." "I know that Elvis is living in northern Michigan." Each consists of a simple proposition about the world combined with a claim about me. For example, to say "I know that the capital of Scotland is Edinburgh" combines a statement of fact (or rather, of something represented as a fact) about the world -- "Edinburgh is the capital of Scotland" -- with a report on a relationship between that statement and me -- namely, that I know it. Know in this usage conveys something like a proprietary interest: I have this fact, I possess it, I own it -- though usually not exclusively. Unfortunately, not every use of know is like that. We also say "I know you." "I know how to make excellent martinis." "I know that my Redeemer liveth." These are all more complicated events.

Rather than "I know that it is Tuesday," however, I might say "I think that it is Tuesday," or I might say "I believe that it is Tuesday," each time conveying a different meaning. Moreover, "I believe that it is Tuesday" has a different feel from "I believe that Elvis is alive." It is these sorts of differences I wish to think about.

We also say things like "I consider that [something or other]." "I feel that...." "I hold that...." "I imagine that...." I don't propose to examine all these. Some careful consideration of know and believe in their common uses will suffice to make my point.

I don't want to overcomplicate the question, so let's try a simple approach. Let's suppose that there is a simple linear continuum upon which propositions are organized. Those that I judge to be certainly true are at one end, those that I judge to be certainly untrue at the other, and the rest are distributed in between depending on the degree of credence I decide to grant them. We might imagine something like this:

We might even imagine that this is not merely a filing system for propositions but part of the judgment apparatus. The line might actually be part of some inner gauge. We take some proposition that has come our way, hook it up to the truth gauge, and the arrow comes to rest at some point along the line, telling us what to think about the proposition, where to file it, and how to use it.

This mechanical sort of model is appealingly simple and might be helpful in some very general, very schematic way, but it surely doesn't really describe what is going on inside the mind. It doesn't feel right. In reflecting on the process of judging, on how judgments emerge or occur in the course of ordinary life, I have no sense of any such procedure. I don't feel myself holding propositions, one by one, up against some such measuring device and reading off a judgment from a meter. On further reflection, moreover, I'm not at all sure that I can arrange my various kinds of judgment along a single dimension like this.

The act of judging the truth of a proposition must certainly involve more than a single criterion, and it would not be surprising if different criteria required different scales and even scales that are in some ways incommensurable. With only an ordinary practitioner's knowledge of the psychology of judgment, we can guess pretty confidently that among the criteria we may bring to bear in a particular instance of judgment are logic (does the proposition make sense in its own terms?), consistency with experience (does it make sense within what we already know of the world?), consistency with the current context (does it make sense in terms of some hypothesis being tested?), personal appeal (is it congenial to our own outlook on the world?), interest (is it to our advantage that it be true?), and so on. We can guess further that there is some calculus that weighs the proposition against some set of criteria like these and arrives at a complex sum that places it at the appropriate point on the scale. And yet it remains true that I am seldom aware of any measuring or calculating going on as I arrive at a judgment. Even that purely conventional phrase seems wrong; more often it seems to me the judgment arrives at me -- it appears in my consciousness, whence I am not sure. It is only afterward, in reflection, that I may trace out some elements of the judgment and infer some of the premises and procedures by which it may have emerged.

Suppose I have been traveling around the world on business, stopping at frequent though irregular intervals to visit local offices and, because of the intricacies of scheduling, sometimes doubling back before continuing on in a generally easterly direction. It's altogether plausible that at some point, on being asked what day it is, I will be uncertain. I will not automatically say "It's Tuesday." I will stop and try to calculate, but from fatigue and confusion about the International Date Line I will hesitate to put my result as a firm answer. I will say "I think it's Tuesday." The word think will convey to my interlocutor my uncertainty, and she will thus be put on notice that my answer is to be taken as tentative, provisional. If I have made this trip many times before, however, and have developed both physical endurance and a knack for chronometry, I may be pretty confident in my answer. I may then say "I believe it's Tuesday," meaning to impart a higher level of confidence to the other. A very simple case like this looks as though it could be fitted to the scale of credence we just imagined.

What about "I believe that Elvis is alive"? Can we point to a spot on that same scale where that statement belongs? Let's begin with "I know that Elvis is alive." Assuming always the full sincerity of the speaker and thus the complete absence of either intent to deceive or irony, this proposition seems to belong in the same part of the scale as "I know that it's Tuesday." But where the shift from "I know that it's Tuesday" to "I believe that it's Tuesday" seems to be simply one of decreasing certainty, moving rightward along that single dimension of credence represented by our line diagram, the shift from "I know that Elvis is alive" to "I believe that Elvis is alive" seems different. The word believe in a context like this seems to be carrying some additional significance, some meaning that requires a different scale. There is some force behind it, a force perhaps expressed vocally by emphasis. More or less explicitly, the speaker is reaching beyond knowledge to assert something to be true even in the absence of the usual sorts of evidence. In other words, she is expressing faith.

Seeing is believing -- or so they say. In fact, the proposition is nonsensical. Seeing is knowing, whereas believing is trusting to the existence of something we cannot see. But belief can be stronger than knowing. When we trust to the unseen, we confer power. Deities and subatomic particles and, more recently, the silicon pathways webbed into microchips -- all of these we invest with a potency that we do not always grant to more objectively verifiable phenomena.
-- Sven Birkerts

Go on to the next section.

© 1998, 1999 by Robert McHenry