Thinking about thinking: epistemology, metacognition, and science

Epistemology and metacognition: so many syllables, so much to say

In moving toward a definition of science, we would be well-served to spend a little bit of time thinking about thinking itself, because science is a mode of critical thought, “a habit of thought … that relentlessly seeks to establish higher-quality, better-organized understandings of the world in which we live.”  When we characterize science as a way of doing something – or to be more accurate, as an enterprise or practice – we primarily have practices of thought in mind.  I would argue, and many scientists would probably agree with me, that the core of scientific practice is a way of thinking, with observational activities being of secondary importance.

If we are to give thinking about thinking a name, it should be ‘epistemology,’ because such an area of thought already exists by that name, as one of philosophy’s major subdivisions.  A more formal definition of epistemology is the “branch of philosophy that investigates the possibility,origins, nature, and extent of human knowledge,” or in brief, the ‘theory of knowledge.’  (The problematic use of the word ‘theory’ here will become clearer in later posts, as this term has many definitions, only some of which are accepted by the scientific community).  However, because epistemologists mostly reserve the term ‘knowledge’ to refer only to those beliefs having particularly strong support, irrespective of the level of emotional investment accompanying them, epistemology should also pay some attention to the relationship between knowledge thus defined and other classes of belief that vary both in degree of support and emotional investment, for example wishes, hopes, faith, intuition, hunches, guesses, convictions, dogmas, doctrines, axioms, and so on.  It is worth mentioning, however, that epistemologists tend to spend most of their time splitting hairs over where the cut-off line between knowledge and other beliefs lies; the rest of the universe of beliefs tend to fade into the generalized background as ‘not knowledge.’

Let's be honest, at first reading, ‘epistemology’ is an alien word.  It doesn’t closely resemble any other word in current English usage, and it's a big one to boot (six syllables!).  But if we dig back into the word’s history, we can learn a lot about it.  First, we can dissect it into episteme (roughly, Greek for ‘knowledge’) and logos (Greek for ‘word,’ ‘speech,’ or ‘discourse,’ though usually glossed as ‘study’), the latter being the root of the common suffix ‘-ology,’ as in 'theology,' 'geology,' 'ecology,' 'anthropology,' 'musicology,' and so on.  This suggests that ‘epistemology’ might mean something like ‘discussion about knowledge’ or ‘the study of knowledge.’  We can also dig a little deeper into episteme.  The prefix ‘epi-’ (Greek for ‘above,’ ‘on,’ or ‘approximate to’) appears in many English words, for example 'epidemic,' 'epidural,' 'epidermis,' 'epilepsy,' 'epilogue,' 'epiphany,' 'episode,' 'epithet,' 'epinephrine,' 'epiphenomenon,' 'epigenetics,' 'epigraphy,' and so on.  The rest of the word comes from the Greek verb histasthai, meaning ‘to stand.’  So, in short, episteme literally meant ‘to stand above’ or ‘to stand over,’ but figuratively it referred to having intimate familiarity with something.  This figurative sense of the word comes close to the English word ‘understanding’ which literally meant ‘standing among.’

However, it is dangerous to assume that dismantling a word into its historically constituent parts will necessarily lead to an accurate understanding of its meaning, a mistake that logicians refer to as the ‘etymological fallacy.’  More accurate understandings of the meanings of words come from the study of how they are actually used by the communities that use them, in other words by studying their ‘lexical definitions.’  In the case of episteme, the lexical definition is something like “an organized body of theoretical knowledge,” which, as I have already mentioned, is the end goal of science (though not of science alone).

In any case, epistemologists are concerned with what it actually means when we say things like “I know,” “I am convinced,” “I believe,” “I understand,” “I acknowledge,” “I hope,” “I wish,” “I have faith that …,” and so on.  In everyday speech, we are accustomed to using many of these expressions as synonyms: for some of us, belief, conviction, and knowledge are the same thing, while for others, belief comes closer to faith.  On the other hand, it is epistemologically useful to draw attention to differences between different kinds of thought.  (After all, this post is all about ways of thinking, isn’t it?)

At their most basic, all of these things – knowledge, belief, conviction, hope, wish, faith, understanding – are collections of statements or propositions.  In philosophical usage, a ‘statement’ or ‘proposition’ is a complete sentence that asserts something about the world, which can therefore be either true or false.  This is roughly synonymous with the term ‘declarative sentence’ that (hopefully) many of us learned it in elementary school (logicians do make subtle distinctions between ‘statement,’ ‘proposition,’ and ‘declarative sentence,’ but I won’t get into that level detail here).  Importantly, no person actually needs to pass judgment on a statement’s ‘truth value’ (its truth or falsehood) for it to qualify as a statement.  A statement’s truth value is independent of an individual’s, a community’s, or the whole human population’s judgment (with some special exceptions that I also won’t get into here), so neither our rejection of true statements, nor our acceptance of false ones, nor our suspension of judgment on either true or false ones is sufficient to actually change their truth value.  Perhaps most importantly, whether or not we can ever hope to determine the truth of a statement, it still makes far more sense to say that declarative sentences like “a hydrogen atom has one proton and one neutron” or “the world exists on the back of a turtle” have truth value than interrogative sentences like “How long did you sleep?” or imperative sentences like “go to bed!”  (Of course, these latter two sentences do assume that certain things are true about the world, and this fact can sometimes make them problematic, but their intended function is not to say something about the world but instead to solicit information or to make something happen, so we do not typically speak of their truth value as we do of declarative sentences.)

Under the heading of ‘statement,’ we can distinguish between (1) ‘beliefs,’ which are statements that an individual has accepted or asserted to be true, and (2) ‘uncertainties,’ which are statements about which judgment has been suspended.  (It is also important to note that the rejection of a statement still qualifies as a belief, because it is an acceptance of that statement’s falsehood, in other words of the opposite of that statement.)  ‘Belief’ may be further subdivided between into (1a) ‘faith,’ which refers to beliefs that are accepted as true despite a lack of compelling justification, as embodied in expressions like “a leap of faith” (over some metaphorical chasm or gap),  “taken on faith,” and “the assurance of things unseen;” and (1b) ‘knowledge,’ which refers to beliefs that are particularly well-warranted.  Cross-cutting this subdivision, we might also distinguish between ‘convictions,’ which are beliefs held with considerable emotional investment, and those that are not.  ‘Uncertainty’ may similarly be subdivided into (2a) ‘hopes,’ which are statements that an individual wants to be true, and may well be true, but which are not actually accepted as such; (2b) ‘wishes,’ which are like hopes, but with even less assurance; and (2c) ‘suspended beliefs,’ which are statements about which judgment is insistently suspended, with no particular desire that they be true.

Despite the elegance of this hierarchical scheme, it is worth mentioning that the differentiations it describes are perhaps best conceived as points or ranges along a continuum.  For example, beliefs vary in degree of support, between those that are exceptionally well-supported and those that are accepted by a sheer force of will, with ‘knowledge’ limited to the upper range (or perhaps only to the upper end) of this spectrum, everything else constituting ‘faith.’  It also says nothing about what actually constitutes support or justification, or by extension how we might go about evaluating the degree of support available for the truth or falsehood of any given statement.

The place of emotional investment in epistemology is also a matter of considerable contention, particularly (though by no means exclusively) when matters of religion come under scrutiny: an epistemology that accommodates for the idiomatic expression “to know in one’s heart of hearts” is one in which emotive force can drive knowledge, and one in which the divisions between knowledge, faith, and hope are exceptionally murky.  For the most part, however, we tend to keep our emotional investments separate from the judgments we make about the truth of statements or whether we are willing to accept them: many people of faith are well aware of the gulf between knowledge and faith, yet passionately ascribe to their tenets of faith just the same.  Conversely, many people who have extensive support for some of their beliefs, in other words who might be said to possess knowledge about something, do not derive any great emotional “reward” from such knowledge.  Probably all of us have suffered the emotional toll of unrealized hopes, while simultaneously we simply do not care about many of our uncertainties.  Richard Feynman, a physicist of considerable reputation, has provided one of the most articulate expressions of this attitude, but the scientific community certainly does not hold a monopoly on it (and there are also scientists who are just as afraid of doubt as anyone else, or at least afraid of appearing to have doubt about something):

Educators sometimes use a different name, ‘metacognition,’ to refer to thinking about thinking, and their emphasis is a bit different from that of the epistemologists.  Without getting into the details of its word history (in part because this history involves a misunderstanding of the original meaning of the prefix ‘meta-’), I will simply say that ‘metacognition’ draws much greater attention to the dynamic nature of thought than does epistemology, in other words to changes of state in our understandings about the world.  Specifically, it draws attention to the identification of deficits of knowledge and problem-solving strategies intended to address them.  Metacognition involves taking an accurate inventory of what we do know and what we do not, setting goals to improve the latter, and implementing strategies to accomplish them.  Put differently, metacognition is thinking about learning, and educators in particular have latched onto the concept under the belief that learning is better-served if we can understand the different routes that learning activities might take (some of which lead to no learning at all, or even worse, to miscomprehension), rather than passively accepting the default.  What separates epistemology from metacognition is that the latter tends to be situated in a much more agenda-driven, self-interested context; the epistemologist’s interest in understanding thought, learning, and knowledge might be characterized as neutral and personally removed (though this is probably less true than it seems), whereas educators, and sometimes students, engage in metacognition with self-interests in mind.  (Students are notoriously bad at knowing what they do not know, as well as at recognizing impediments to learning, though the most successful students master this.)

Thinking about scientific thinking

But what does all of this have to do with science?  Once again, science is a mode of critical thought focused on achieving higher-quality, better-organized understandings about the world in which we live (i.e., something like the Greek episteme, as mentioned above).  If epistemologists are interested in identifying the standards by which a belief qualifies as knowledge in general, scientists are dedicated to implementing a particular set of practices that are able to establish particular beliefs as knowledge, or conversely to remove others from this status (i.e., to show them to be matters of faith or of uncertainty) and in some cases to outright refute them (i.e., to indicate that we know them to be false).  That scientists believe that these practices will have these effects means that we are taking a specific epistemological stance: we commit ourselves to a particular set of standards that are sufficient to qualify some beliefs as knowledge and to expose others as lacking, and we think we know what sorts of activities are sufficient to make this distinction, or to move a statement from one category to another.

So, epistemologists should certainly take interest in the scientific enterprise, just as they do in other enterprises purporting to deliver knowledge or to distinguish between knowledge and other kinds of statement.  However, it does not follow that all scientists should be concerned with epistemology in general.  Scientists have a particular epistemological persuasion, and presumably we have good reason to be of this persuasion, but this does not mean that we should invest much of our time in epistemological activities (though some psychologists do exactly this by trade).  It also does not mean that scientists, convinced as we are of our epistemological persuasion, will necessarily agree with all epistemologists about whether the best understandings produced by science qualify as knowledge; some epistemologists set the bar quite high, even unachievably high in the case of epistemological nihilists, and as I will eventually argue, not all understandings produced by scientific inquiry are of the same quality, for various reasons.  In fact, even the best understandings produced by science are regarded as provisional, never proven, always impeachable, always accompanied by some lingering degree of uncertainty.  The scientist’s comfort with this fact should certainly be of epistemological interest, particularly if this is the best we can do, as the scientist contends.  More on this in future posts.

A disagreeable epistemologist might even accuse the scientific community of being conceited for choosing this label for ourselves.  The word ‘science’ derives from the Latin verb scire, meaning “to know,” which may go back to an earlier Indo-European word meaning “to separate, discriminate.”  As the present participle of scire, sciens literally means ‘knowing,’ while the related Latin word scientia has the lexical definition of “an organized body of theoretical knowledge,” approximately synonymous with the Greek word episteme.  Calling what we do ‘science’ may therefore strike the disagreeable epistemologist as arrogant, as if we believed ourselves to have exclusive access to the business of knowing, as if we had a monopoly on the means of getting there.

However, the word ‘science’ has taken on a more specific meaning in Western intellectual history than simply “knowing,” and disagreeable epistemologists would therefore be amiss were they to accuse the scientific community of such arrogance (remember the etymological fallacy?).  I already alluded to the fact that the scientific “seal of approval” of various understandings comes in degrees.  Furthermore, while I have characterized science as a mode of critical thought, purportedly capable of generating knowledge (or at least better and worse understandings), this is by no means an assertion that it is the only road to knowledge, or even that it is best road in every case.  That mathematicians and logicians sometimes prove things is leaps and bounds superior to the kinds of knowledge that scientists produce.  By the same token, however, there are certain enterprises of thought that scientists are quick to dismiss as bankrupt in terms of their ability to generate knowledge, particularly when these charade under the banner of science.  This is a touchy topic but an important one that I will address in the future.

While most scientists would agree that science is primarily a practice of thought, most readers will be aware that, in everyday speech, ‘science’ is most often used as a name given to knowledge itself, in particular to those statements that are accepted as true by scientists.  In other words, in everyday speech, the English word science is more similar in meaning to Greek episteme or Latin scientia, both referring to systems of well-supported understandings, than it is to the scientist's special definition.  We in the scientific community often contest this characterization, sometimes for good reason, sometimes for bad.  One of the bad reasons hearkens back to the historical derivation of the word (again, the present participle of the verb scire).  It is certainly etymologically true that science is a verb, in this case “knowing,” but putting any weight on this point not only commits us to the same etymological fallacy I have been diligent to avoid, but it would also violate the current, narrow sense of the word, which does not include all kinds of knowing.  In other words, to insist that science is a verb on the basis of its Latin derivation is also to expand it to include several categories of thinker who would not otherwise have been included among the scientific community, by us or by them.

A second bad reason that scientists sometimes give is that words mean what we decide they mean by consensus, and we (the scientific community) have decided that science is not a collection of specially privileged understandings but instead a particular way of thinking.  By the same token, consensus supposes … well … consensus.  Scientists are once again thwarted here, this time by lexicographic semantics – the study of what words mean as implied by how they are actually used, in other words their lexical definitions – because in everyday speech, ‘science’ does mean “a collection of understandings privileged by the scientific community.”  To lexicographers (the folks who write dictionaries), it is no big deal that the scientific community continues to use ‘science’ to refer to a particular habit of thought while the general public continues to use it to refer to a particular collection of beliefs; this is just reason to provide two separate entries for the word in the dictionary, just like many other words in the dictionary.

Though I grudgingly concede the lexicographer's point, my agreement remains with the scientific community, and I will continue to use the term ‘science’ to refer to a particular kind of practice, instead using the phrases ‘scientific knowledge’ or ‘scientific understanding’ to refer to collections of belief that have been subjected to scientific scrutiny.  There are several good reasons for doing so that I will present in closing.

First, many beliefs that currently enjoy scientific support were not specifically conceived by scientists, and some even existed before modern scientific practice emerged.  When such ideas are incorporated as items of scientific knowledge, it is because they have subsequently undergone scientific scrutiny, but scientists remain obliged to their collaborators outside of science for coming up with these ideas in the first place.

Second, many of the statements that scientists entertain in the process of seeking out better understandings about the world are not only undeserving of the label ‘knowledge’ but initially also of the label ‘belief’: instead, they are 'guesses' (or 'hunches,' 'speculations,' or 'conjectures'), which would fall under the heading of ‘suspended beliefs’ in the epistemological scheme I presented earlier.  Guesses are simply brainstorms, with not much to recommend them beyond the fact that they make better sense of some aspect of the world than do previous ideas (and especially if no previous idea on the topic exists).  When a scientist initially puts a guess on the table, his or her intention is not that it should immediately be accepted as true, and certainly not as knowledge, but only that it be considered as a possibility.  (One of my main gripes with science journalists is that they sometimes fail to explicitly discriminate between scientific guesses and well-supported beliefs, usually unintentionally.)

Third, one of the widely advertised virtues of science is its commitment to self-correction: the beliefs that we hold to be well-qualified today may eventually succumb to refutation following further scientific work, making “scientific knowledge” a highly fluid reservoir of beliefs, hence my use of the word ‘provisional’ earlier.

Fourth and by extension of the second and third, scientists trade in ideas that range in quality from the fresh-off-the-drawing-board guess, to the proof of concept, to all degrees of well-supported belief.  While we could draw a boundary around all of these and call them ‘science’ if we wanted to, few would be satisfied with doing so, either in or outside of the scientific community.  The alternative, excluding the less well supported ideas, requires that we establish some lower threshold for acceptance, and this is no easy task.  Even if we do so, scientists still need to work with the guesses, so in a sense, these never stop being scientific ideas, even if they lack the support to consider them scientific knowledge.  In future posts, I will go into greater detail about how science uses ideas to do what it does, but the point is, there are all kinds of ideas of varying quality that play a role in science, so it is an exercise in arbitrariness to decide that some of these ideas are 'science' while others are not.