You know what I hate?
Jun. 27th, 2006 10:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
conuly
I hate it when people say "I know" when they mean "I believe". It's almost (but not quite) as annoying as "I need" in place of "I want".
Say you know God exists. Well, that's all fine and dandy for you, but what about Joe down the street who knows God doesn't exist? As amusing as it is to watch the two of you duke it out, it won't help me decide which of you is wrong. And, unless God is like some kind of cosmic Schrodinger's cat and both exists and doesn't exist at the same time (which, as an omnipotent being, I suppose isn't beyond his capabilities, but if he's doing that I wish he'd knock it off, it's really very confusing), one of you has to, ultimately, be wrong.
You don't know about God. You believe.
There's a book I found while Googling, about kids who talk late and who then are perfectly fine. And one of the comments on Amazon was that the book is "dangerous". His son talked late, y'see, and his son had speech therapy, and he knows his son improved via speech therapy (and would not have improved otherwise). Because, what, his son has an identical twin, and they did some sort of double blind test with one son getting therapy and the other son not getting therapy, and hey, one son talks and the other doesn't?
Possible, but I'll go out on a limb and say that he doesn't, in fact, *know* anything. He believes his son got better because of the therapy (which seems probable to me), and also believes that his son would not be talking without the therapy (possible, but it seems slightly less probable to me). And he believes that this applies to everyone.
Well, he may well be right about his son, but that doesn't make him right about everyone. And I doubt we'll ever know - while I don't know this is the case, I suspect that any child with delayed speech is automatically pushed by doctors into going into speech therapy, which means we will never know what proprotion of children with delayed speech actually need therapy to begin talking, because they're all getting helped.
(That's not necessarily a bad thing, it just means that we don't know and are forced, instead, to believe.)
Naturally, we can't go too far with this - otherwise we'd never know anything, and we'd go crazy trying to prove that 1+1=2. But for things without any degree of proof, can we *please* go back to using the word "believe"? It's the right thing to do.
I just know it.
Say you know God exists. Well, that's all fine and dandy for you, but what about Joe down the street who knows God doesn't exist? As amusing as it is to watch the two of you duke it out, it won't help me decide which of you is wrong. And, unless God is like some kind of cosmic Schrodinger's cat and both exists and doesn't exist at the same time (which, as an omnipotent being, I suppose isn't beyond his capabilities, but if he's doing that I wish he'd knock it off, it's really very confusing), one of you has to, ultimately, be wrong.
You don't know about God. You believe.
There's a book I found while Googling, about kids who talk late and who then are perfectly fine. And one of the comments on Amazon was that the book is "dangerous". His son talked late, y'see, and his son had speech therapy, and he knows his son improved via speech therapy (and would not have improved otherwise). Because, what, his son has an identical twin, and they did some sort of double blind test with one son getting therapy and the other son not getting therapy, and hey, one son talks and the other doesn't?
Possible, but I'll go out on a limb and say that he doesn't, in fact, *know* anything. He believes his son got better because of the therapy (which seems probable to me), and also believes that his son would not be talking without the therapy (possible, but it seems slightly less probable to me). And he believes that this applies to everyone.
Well, he may well be right about his son, but that doesn't make him right about everyone. And I doubt we'll ever know - while I don't know this is the case, I suspect that any child with delayed speech is automatically pushed by doctors into going into speech therapy, which means we will never know what proprotion of children with delayed speech actually need therapy to begin talking, because they're all getting helped.
(That's not necessarily a bad thing, it just means that we don't know and are forced, instead, to believe.)
Naturally, we can't go too far with this - otherwise we'd never know anything, and we'd go crazy trying to prove that 1+1=2. But for things without any degree of proof, can we *please* go back to using the word "believe"? It's the right thing to do.
I just know it.
no subject
Date: 2006-06-28 03:23 am (UTC)And there's another distinction to be made as well - knowing something in your head but not believing it (though you know it to be true), and both knowing something intellectually and believing it as well.
The second one is a lot stronger, isn't it?
no subject
Date: 2006-06-28 03:28 am (UTC)Actually, that makes me think... I think part of the reason some people who I said choose to ignore the distinction are actually acknowledging it in another manner: don't many relgious people actually think of "knowing" in your heart as the capital and "knowing" in your head as the lower-case, because of Satan messing with the evidence and all that?
Man, this brings me back to ToK... Wish I had actually gotten to take that class through to the end. :-/