| the direct result of malice or rites by persons known to be witches. Yet it is still true that witches do not exist in anywhere near the precise form in which any one given witch-believing society describes and believes in them. It follows that what people in any given situation assume themselves to ‘know’, what passes for knowledge, may or may not be true. Whether I, or any other outsider, also knows it, is irrelevant to the fact that the knower knows with the conviction that he or she knows it. The individuals, and the groups or networks, who share a given item of certain knowledge are ‘subjectively’ unquestioning. 1.7 Summary By my argument to date, I seek to establish four points. First, that there is a large amount of shared human knowledge which is totally reliable, true and intercultural; and recognised procedures for checking that reliability. Second that all human individuals and all groups and networks assimilate to this body of universal truth a whole lot of other knowledge, that is, ‘beliefs’ or ‘subjectively certain knowledge’ which is not universal, and not totally reliable and true. Three, knowers can never themselves know, individually and as social beings, which bits of what they experience as certainty are totally reliable, true and intercultural and which are not. I add a fourth point; that the overwhelming majority of humans, in practice, would not accept that much of what they accept as totally reliable and true is in fact not so 1.8 Anthropologists’ view of knowledge Anthropologists are professionally aware that ideas and beliefs socially accepted as totally reliable and true in ‘other societies’ are not so. They share the cognitive stance of eschewing ‘ethnocentricity’. Any humans who grasp this point, - including non- anthropologists - develop a special tolerance towards others’ ways of thinking. Most professional anthropologists and some other people also realise, as I have argued, that a lot of what they themselves once assumed was totally true and reliable is not. If we think of the totality of knowledge and belief in all human societies, it is obvious that vast amounts of what is known for certain by people is indeed true and fully shared. It is also obvious that some people because of advantages they have in education and access to ideas and evidence are correct in defining large areas of truth as universal, even though large sections of humanity do not accept them. It is also obvious that huge amounts of what some people perceive as totally reliable and true are not. And I am arguing that it is also obvious that no one can ever by sure exactly where the boundaries come between the many varieties of valid and certain knowledge, and doubtful and unproven |
| belief in witchcraft in a witchcraft believing society is of much same order as a belief of many in the divinity of Jesus, the superiority of the Labour Party over the Conservative Party ( or vice versa), or the necessity of using Latin to train the young in logic. But it is absolutely untrue that a belief in any of these things is of the same order as say biologists’ acceptance of the theory of evolution or the double helix, a physicists’ acceptance that the universe is not in a steady state, or a doctor’s acceptance that there is statistical correlation between secondary smoking and lung cancer. So when I write that a huge amount of what passes for knowledge is not knowledge but rests on human credulity, I could equally say that a huge amount of what any given individual treats as their own knowledge is in fact their own belief, being at best unproven, and at worst wrong. They experience it as knowledge, but it does not rest on the kind of first hand rigorous and public testing by logic and experience which makes universal truths true. They think they know, but they are wrong; it passes for knowledge but it is not knowledge. I see no satisfactory way out. If I use the word “know”,some unwary readers or listeners (assuming I have any readers) might assume that I imply that whatever is known is true; even if they realise that my estimate of truth, which they may not share, is involved. If I use the word ‘believe’, some will join in an unstated ‘we’ the modern rationals who know these silly people are wrong and inferior. So both words are treacherous. A simple example. Do I say people ‘used to know’ that the earth is flat? Or do I say ‘used to believe’? One further corollary of this argument. The boundary between my ordinary non-professional use of ‘belief’ and ‘knowledge’ varies with my own ideas about my own knowledge. But since neither I (nor anyone else) can ever know for certain which bits of what I think I know for certain are in fact universally true; and since I know that very large amounts of what most humans think they know for certain is by strict criteria highly doubtful or downright false, I argue that I certainly do know for certain that a large proportion of what I assume to be knowledge and thus true, is in fact ‘belief’ and thus at best doubtful, and at worst false. This also applies to all other humans. For example, I know that witches - itself a fuzzy word used to translate a host of different ideas from a vast range of human ‘cultures’ - do not exist. There are many well attested cases of people knowing for certain that witches do exist; and there may be surprisingly well attested cases of evil falling on people apparently |
| logically true, larger amounts of what in any given social context passes for knowledge is either doubtful, or downright false7. This next step lands me in a typical trouble with ‘fuzzy’ words - in this case the words ‘know’ and ‘believe’. I have just asserted (as evidential and logical ethnographic fact) that a huge amount of what daily ‘passes for knowledge’ in every human society is unconfirmed, wrong or fantasy. Why do I say ‘passes for knowledge’ ? Because it is not ‘knowledge’? Because it is ‘only’ belief? I attempt to clarify some questions about some of the uses and implications of the two words ‘knowledge’ and ‘belief’. In normal usage, ‘knowledge’ implies that what is known is universally true. To be more accurate, it implies that the speaker or writer accepts that whatever it is that the people he is reporting ‘know’ is in fact universally true; that is, it belongs either with common sense truth or with natural science. On the other hand, ‘belief’ normally immediately implies at the very least some degree of doubt. In some religions, although what is believed is held to be sacredly and absolutely true, it is still implied that common sense evidence is not enough; faith is a moral duty, and belief takes some degree of moral will and of virtuous obedience to authority, some degree - as Needham (197 ) emphasises - of trust, of love. It is a duty to believe, precisely because to deny is possible without contravening evidence and logic. Faith is the way to enlightenment and salvation. But mostly, ‘belief’ implies quite sharply that what is believed is mistaken, misleading, or simply false; and often that those who believe are out of date, inferiors, outsiders, enemies, conspirators, fools, villagers, peasants, primitives, ignoramuses, or at least mistaken.8 Because of the implication of inferiority or hostility, some liberal intellectuals and especially anthropologists use ‘know’ where others might more conventionally use ‘believe’. They do this in order to make implicitly two distinct points; first, that the knowers/believers in question are not inferior or hostile, and secondly, that their cognition is as worthy of respect as everyone else’s. The first of these implications is praiseworthy and acceptable, and is the reason why I also often use ‘social knowledge’ rather than ‘belief” myself. The second implication is ambiguous. It is true that a |
| 7Trivially, some of this may be based on obvious facts, which nevertheless turn out to be false; for example, no human thought that the earth might be round until some point in quite recent intellectual history. Now almost all humans know for a simple fact that the earth is round, and moreover, those who think otherwise are quite definitely wrong. 8Thus “I know that my Redeemer liveth” depends for its rhetorical power on the unusual use of ‘know where most people might expect ‘believe’. |
| and what is established fact. So relativists - see Tylor on belief in magic - concentrate attention on areas of sensational doubt and dispute - the big bang, consciousness, breast implants, BSE, oceanic pollution, and ignore the main areas of certain knowledge. Thirdly, scientists like other humans are fantastical, commit mistakes, sometimes lie, are unconsciously biassed, are sometimes mad. Fourthly, both within science, and certainly in the understanding of science by non scientists, the fuzziness of the words we use makes all kinds of phoney arguments and misleading models plausible. Scientists with axes to grind, or money to make - and relativists - exploit such loopholes. Although experts in a given field of science know some truth, the rest of us have to accept this truth on their authority, including all the other hard scientists in different fields. So while ‘common sense’ is potentially open to any normal human, science depends on the authority of an intellectual minority, an intercultural, potentially universal elite. The word ‘scientific’ then becomes popular rhetoric for ‘true’, a claim for persuading other people; just watch the ads. Most have to be credulous about science, so scientific ‘truth’ looks not unlike other socially, religiously and politically authoritative ‘truth’ Reality, most day to day common sense, and almost all scientific truth about reality, are beyond question. Two quotes. One, a paraphrase from a recent BBC broadcast by a physicist - if minds at least comparable in intelligence and social organisation to human ones exist in societies out there on the planets of other suns, which seems highly probable, they will discover the similar basic structures to those which human scientists have discovered, because that is what is there. And secondly, a paraphrase {check} from Gellner ( 1994 p.31)’ intercultural truth is one of the glories of human achievement’. I acknowledge that the boundaries between common sense and natural science, and between ‘true’ knowledge and other kinds of what passes for true knowledge are open and fuzzy and undecided. But this existence of fuzzy boundaries does not in any way refute my claim that truth palpably exists.6 1.6 Untruth: ‘Knowledge’ and ‘Belief’. But while large amounts of human ‘knowledge’, are evidentially and |
| 6This fallacy - that A is not distinct from B because the boundary between them is fuzzy - is extremely common and deceives all manor of people, especially students. |