Does Robust knowledge require both consensus and disagreement?
By: Faizan Ahmed
Tags: Knowledge, Must Read, Debate, Social Debate

Knowledge can be defined as facts, information, and skills acquired through experience or education, and/or the theoretical or practical understanding of a subject.

This definition of the word proposes that knowledge is basically the information and or the skills gathered through various situations and experiences. But, in this blog I will shed some light upon how strong certain knowledge can be, and whether for it to be strong, does it require unanimity and lack of agreement. However, in order to do that, we first need to decipher that although knowledge is acquired through diverse areas and circumstances, how many of these areas result in delivering us the most authentic and sturdy type of knowledge.

A question that may arise in many minds, can be that isn’t all knowledge robust?, and isn’t it belief that is not. Although a very peculiar question, one cannot deny how interesting it is. How can one be certain whether the knowledge he/she is attaining is the accurate one and

whether it holds immense strength and value?

Well some knowledge is knowledge based on belief without any strong justifications and conclusive reasoning, this type of knowledge is known as weak conception of knowledge. An appropriate example would be stating that you don’t know where a specific person lives, but you believe them to live somewhere in the area of main Islamabad. Through this it can determined that although you do not have strong knowledge about where the person lives, but you do believe them to live in a place your familiar with. Hence, proving it to be a weak conception of knowledge. Furthermore, it also

determines that knowledge sometimes is greatly dependent on the presence of belief, as if in doubt to prove or even rely on a piece of knowledge, belief may be the most beneficial route to take. As even though it may not provide the most valid and precise answer to ones question, it can play a major role in providing a specific area under which the piece of knowledge could be further looked upon. Thus it can be said by analyzing the above mentioned points, that not all knowledge is robust and similarly belief can not be discarded as

invalid if it has not much logical reasoning behind it.

The next claim that i would like to tackle is that, many believe that

knowledge relies on opinion and preferably the opinion of the majority. But however opinion may vary from one person to another and even from one group of people to another, hence resulting in the further distortion of the authenticity of a piece of knowledge. As wherever a piece of knowledge requires opinion rather then solid proof, it may be subject to criticism on

its validity. ‘Opinions can be true or false, as knowledge cannot be. When individuals claim to have knowledge about something that turns out not to be knowledge at all because because it is false, what they mistook for knowledge was only opinion.’(Adler, Mortimer J., 2011). Hence it would not be wrong to state that wherever opinion comes into play to prove something, it cannot ever prove it with enough efficiency required to distinguish robust knowledge, hence leaving the possibility for doubts to arise. It is even seen through sciences and the evolution of them that whenever there has been incomplete data to prove something, it has opened a gateway to change and criticism and is never denoted as firm knowledge. A fitting example

would be in mathematics where, Kempes’s four-colour theorem which he

believed to to be of four, however it was not, was later discovered to be five. Hence as he used his personal opinion to conclude that it was a colour theorem of four, it let elements of doubt to linger in his theorem, thus opening it wide open for further research, leading to new discoveries based on the research of the fundamentally flawed one.

Consequently, by taking in consideration of the above mentioned points i would like to conclude that although robust knowledge is a vast topic of discussion, consensus and criticism allow it to be narrowed down and distinguish in which area it lies in. Either the robust knowledge one, or the weak knowledge one. They provide us with enough information that if

one ever faces difficulty in producing firm knowledge, these elements could prove highly beneficial and may even result in breakthrough to other research and discoveries.

References Used

http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/5231/1/SRD1.pdf

https://www.giffordlectures.org/books/belief/lecture-3-belief-and-knowledge

https://mathoverflow.net/questions/879/most-interesting-mathematics-mistake

http://selfeducatedamerican.com/2011/09/06/knowledge-and-opinion/