Andis
Kaulins
Fore!
Golf Champion
at 61 3/4
My Most Recent Book
Ancient
Signs
The Alphabet
& The Origins of Writing
is a print
& ebook,
which shows that
modern alphabets are products of ancient alphabets
that themselves are derived
from even more ancient
syllabic
scripts
as found in
Sumer, Egypt, Persia (Elam), Anatolia, Crete, and Cyprus.
Stars
Stones
and Scholars:
The
Decipherment
of the Megaliths
(2003
softcover)
(2006
hardcover)
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How do you know?
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What are your
sources?
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Personal Experience
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Secondary Experience
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Personal
Experience
How do you know that something is so? When we are children, our parents
tell us that we will burn our fingers if we touch something hot, but
almost everyone first has to burn a finger on something hot to truly
"know" what this really means. We call this "learning by personal
experience". We know what "hot" means and we know that we can burn our
fingers on something hot because we have experienced that feeling on
our own person. Much of our knowledge is "experience" and we share such
knowledge with our fellow humans.
Personal
Experience can also be Subjective
Personal experience
can also be subjective. Scientific studies show that two spectators
sitting side by side in a stadium at a sports event - but rooting for
opposing teams - will favor their own team by two-thirds on disputed
calls made by the referees. But what did they really see or know? Was
the ball out or in? Our so-called knowledge of what is true (based on
what we "see") depends upon our allegiance and loyalty to a given team
- it is not objective, but colored by our personal subjective
prejudices. "Close calls" therefore do not go the way of truth but the
way of allegiance. This is not just so in sports, but in many facets of
life, including science. In assessing our personal experience, we side
with "our" team, even though - in fact - we may be wrong in our
conclusions. Mothers of accused criminals, for example, almost always
state that "my son is not guilty", even though their statement is
generally not true.
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Secondary
Experience
Much of what we know is not based on our own personal experience but on
secondary or vicarious experience. We know through the experience of
persons other than ourselves. For example, most of what we know about
current world events is secondary experience. We have not experienced
most current events in the world personally, but have read about such
events in the newspaper or on the internet, or have seen or heard them
on television or radio, as reported to us by others. This knowledge may
or may not be true.
Secondary Experience is Less Reliable
Secondary
experience is less reliable than first-hand personal experience. One of
the most famous examples of this is a Halloween night radio broadcast
in 1938 by actor Orson Welles and the Mercury Theatre presenting a
fictional "War of the Worlds" in which Martians invaded the Earth. The
theater radio presentation was so well done that many listeners - who
tuned in to the program late and who did not hear at the start of the
program that it was "just a story" - thought that the Martian invasion
was real. This led to a mass panic in the populace, especially among
those people who wished to believe in UFOs and extraterrestrials
anyway. Non-believers were more sceptical and at least called in to the
radio station to get more information. Especially hearsay experience,
that is, something we "heard said" from others, can be notoriously
unreliable. Just because we were told something is true, does not make
it true.
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Who
Says?
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The Professional
Principle
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Knowledge and
Authority
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Institutionalized
Knowledge
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Knowledge and
Authority
When parents tell
children not to touch a hot candle or they will burn their fingers -
and they still touch the candle and burn their fingers - the authority
of the parents then increases. They have made a clear predictive
statement which turns out to be true. The next time that they warn
their children not to do something for a specific reason, their
children will think twice about doing it, because the parents knew what
they were saying - at least in the case of the hot candle. Indeed, as
such cases multiply in childhood, the authority of the parents rises
proportionately. Someone who demonstrates knowledge about one thing has
higher credibility on the next thing. We see this for example in our
view of Nobel Prize winners, who we view as "knowing" persons after
their winning of the prize. A good "track record" makes a person
knowledgeable in the eyes of others. Such a person has authority. It is
for this reason that 50 percent of all Nobel Prize winners labored
under Nobel Prize winners. Apprenticeship to a master shoemaker is seen
more likely to make another master shoemaker. Knowledge thus runs the
risk of becoming institutionalized and reduced to "who you know" and
not "what you know".
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Institutionalized
Knowledge
Much of knowledge
is institutionalized. You have to have a piece of paper saying you know
something. To get such a paper, you have to read what other knowers
knew before - a process which reaches back quite some time into history
and often leads to absolutely outdated knowledge. One of the rules of
academia in fact is "publish or perish". What this means in the
academic world is that an academic career is not dependent on teaching
skills but rather on the ability to publish materials in so-called
peer-reviewed (crony tested) journals - the more footnoted citations
the better. Academia does not live from new ideas but rather from
copious citation to the previous alleged knowledge of others. Indeed,
the standard for knowing in academia, as judged by peer-reviewed
journals, is quantitative - as opposed to qualitative - reference in
published articles. The more an article is "cited" by others, the more
important the article is regarded to be, even if it is rubbish. The
content is secondary. Search engines are now applying this principle
even to the internet. In this manner much nonsense has been made
fashionable. Just because something is popular or accepted by the
majority or supported by experts does not make it true.
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How reliable is
citation?
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Who decides what is
true?
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Go to the ORIGINAL
Sources
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There are no
"courts of truth"
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As a student at
Stanford Law School, my mentor, the late Professor John Kaplan wrote a
book on drug abuse laws and asked me to research the major cited
sources in this political and legal conflict. He predicted that few of
these citations, when traced back to the ORIGINAL SOURCE, would say
what people claimed it said. This turned out to be just as Kaplan, one
of the nation's experts on evidence, predicted. Over time, people had
bent and twisted the original sources to suit THEIR purposes. It was a
bit like the party game in which a sentence is whispered into the ear
of one listener, who whispers it further to the ear of the next
listener, etc. After many such listeners, the last person repeats the
original sentence - and this often is a completely garbled version of
the original sentence. So, we should not be surprised to find the same
phenomenon for citations over time. Remember, one usually cites to
other sources not for the TRUTH of what others write, but because these
sources support THEIR position. At the same time, opposing sources may
not be cited. Hence, citation of sources is SELECTIVE and SUBJECTIVE.
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There are very few
"absolute" truths agreed upon by everyone. In the days of the communist
rule of the Soviet Union, the communist party newspaper was called
Pravda, which means "truth" in Russian. But as many a capitalist
Russian will tell you today, Pravda in fact also contained a great many
lies. But this is no different in the West. When I worked as an
associate for a large law firm in New York City, I was involved with
several projects which were reported in major daily newspapers across
the United States. As an insider I was amazed at the substantial errors
and subjectivisms found in the newspaper articles. What could you
really believe? Just as in the courts, the process of fact-finding in
everyday life was a complex and difficult one. Ultimately, the final
arbiter is YOU. Everyone has to analyze the facts and evidence on their
own and decide for themselves what is true and what is not true and who
they wish to believe and who not. Often, we decide in favor of
"authority", but as the famed Judge Learned Hand wrote, "20 Bishops
swearing on a Bible that something is true does not make it true, if
the evidence shows otherwise."
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What do people
really know?
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Belief is not Fact
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Knowledge and
Authority
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Institutionalized
Knowledge
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Almost everyone has
an opinion on affairs in the Middle East and yet almost no one knows
the first thing about the ACTUAL history of this region - yet, hostile
wars and conflagrations abound, all evidence of the mass ignorance of
humanity. Modern political events are guided by idiocy, not by
knowledge. One of the critical questions is - who were the Jews? In
fact, the famous Roman historian Tacitus, writing shortly after Christ
in ca. 70 A.D., gives us the oldest known account about the Jews as
follows (Brodribb Translation): "Some say that the Jews were fugitives
from the island of Crete.... Others assert that ... the overflowing
population of Egypt ... discharged itself into the neighboring
countries. Many ... say that they were a race of Ethiopian origin ...
Others describe them as an Assyrian horde. Others ... assign a very
distinguished origin to the Jews, alleging that they were the Solymi, a
nation celebrated in the poems of Homer, who called the city which they
founded Hierosolyma after their own name."
So what if this latter were actually true?
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I find that I
belong to a very small minority of people who truly want to know "what
really happened in the past". Most people dealing with ancient eras
seem to have vested nterests or are digging for buried treasures. They
also may be protecting their job or salary. Or they may be following
some political agenda. Or they may be working on establishing their
academic reputation by dutifully citing their predecessors. Still
others simply believe what they want to believe, out of ignorance,
laziness, prejudice or malice or by reason of nation of origin. Most
people simply adopt the views of their parents and their country and
take no time to study original sources or to make intelligent decisions
on important historical matters. The result is that we have a world
full of billions of people who are historical illiterates and who know
next to nothing about what actually occurred in the world before them.
They follow false prophets and idols of every description and serve the
devils of primitive sects and religions rather than seeking the
objective truth about things.
Belief is not fact. It is the absence of fact.
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Legal
Notice, Terms of Use, Impressum
The owner and
webmaster of AndisKaulins.com is Andis
Kaulins
B.A. University of
Nebraska; J.D. Stanford University Law School
Former Lecturer in Anglo-American Law, FFA, Trier Law School
Alumnus Associate of Paul, Weiss,
Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, NYC
This page was last updated on February 19, 2013.
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