Everyone seems to have an abundance of knowledge in many areas of study. In fact, gaining knowledge defines everyday human experience, whether it’s scrolling through social media, having conversations with peers, or reading a book. But, what really is knowledge, and how do we know that we know? As students passionate in STEM, whenever we are told that something is true in the classroom, we often try our best to remember it for an upcoming test. Of course, this is how success is achieved in education today, but success must be followed by breakthroughs to achieve true knowledge and progress. In other words, STEM is a field that is built from questioning the truth. Discovered truths stack on top of each other piece by piece to form the basis and functioning of all aspects of society. Someday, this basis may be completely broken down from new, contradictory truths that prove everything we have ever known to be wrong. This is because truth may be powerful, but it is also extremely vulnerable, and what makes truth vulnerable is precisely the human mind. It has the ability to shake the pillar of something so foundational it is rarely given a second glance. As the future scientists, technologists, mathematicians, and engineers of the world, we will be the ones who could shake the pillar of truth and knowledge in STEM.
As a high academic achiever, I never saw philosophy, especially the branch of epistemology (the theory of knowledge), as something that was relevant to any of my learning goals, or as something that I should ponder. I certainly didn’t expect it to be the very first unit of my science course this semester, and I now realize that it was because I thought of knowledge as accumulated instead of broken and revised over and over again. I also didn’t and still don’t like the idea that knowledge could be wrong, that I could be wrong. This is because confirmation bias is part of the nature of my being, the tendency to select and support knowledge that supports one’s personal values, which are often aligned with the developed values of the rest of the world. For example, in Isaac Newton’s time, people believed light to be a force gifted by God, that its white colour symbolizes its holy power. Based on this accepted truth, people thought that a prism pollutes the holiness of light when it refracts light into the different colours of the rainbow. However, Newton questioned this truth and seeked to find the real truth with an experiment. He placed another prism in front of the blue area of refracted light, and found that it remained blue. This means that these colours of light aren’t man-made from the prism, they are part of the nature of light. Centuries later, and his skepticism of the truth of light has helped us understand the age of the universe, the composition of stars, the greenhouse gas effect, and much more. Imagine what would’ve happened instead if Newton hadn’t overcome his confirmation bias to explore different possibilities and land on the absolute truth.
However, not everyone is Isaac Newton, and what we experience with STEM today is a million light years away from his experience in the 17th century. Perhaps the most significant difference is the amount of truthful knowledge we have about the nature of the universe. We usually defer to others’ expertise in search of knowledge, being able to trust that they will provide the real truth to us. Along with this development in truthful knowledge, there has also been great developments in untruthful knowledge. Platforms such as social media offer the tools anyone can use to become an “expert” in nearly any field of study, and the sheer knowledge that has been built has strengthened our confirmation biases to the point that we can now manipulate the truth with devices such as fake news. In short, we are living in a post-truth world where truth and knowledge are being eroded by the very concepts that we used to gain them in the first place: skepticism of accepted beliefs. As students, we learn verified truths in school but encounter a ginormous spectrum of truths in the real world. This has taken the vulnerability of human progress to another level. Anything could break at any point, yet at the same time everything is upheld with extreme confidence and persuasion. At the end of the day, epistemology accounts for the nature of thinking and development: known truths are imperfect.
If this is the reality of truth, what does this mean for STEM? After all, STEM is generally accepted to be the subject area that contains the most inarguable, refined, and definite truths. Well, it’s important to reflect on the fact that STEM inexorably ties in with an increasing amount of societal sectors as knowledge advances, including politics, arts, communication methods, and more. Whatever discovery is made in STEM will also impact various other factors and billions of people with different values and tendencies of confirmation biases. Adding more and stronger pillars of truths is getting more difficult, and the rate at which the pillars easily fall is also rising. In the future, we will not only have to build more pillars but make sure that the right ones are broken for the overall benefit of the world. This will require us to override our own flaws in our reasoning and achieve higher learning. Philosophy and epistemology can motivate us to learn at higher levels, and can inspire us on the impact that we want to make on society. Success will be measured in its quality of truth, not its quantity of content.
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Resources
Abumrad, J, & Krulwich, R. (Hosts). (2012, May 21). Colors (Season 10, No. 8 ) [Audio podcast episode]. In Radiolab. WNYC Studios. Retrieved December 17, 2021, from https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/episodes/211119-colors
Enfield, N. (2017, November 16). We're in a post-truth world with Eroding Trust and accountability. it can't end well | Nick Enfield. The Guardian. Retrieved December 17, 2021, from https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/nov/17/were-in-a-post-truth-world-with-eroding-trust-and-accountability-it-cant-end-well
TEdxAbbotsford. (2018). Confirmation Bias and Naive Realism. YouTube. Retrieved December 17, 2021, from https://youtu.be/6XraX0Hu8zY.