How do you know what you know? If you're like most people, you probably haven't
thought about this question. but you
should and, really, it's pretty
interesting.
Think about it. Most organisms come into
this world with all of the knowledge
they need programmed into them
instinctually. Now, other organisms have
room for individual learning that they
can layer on top of that. And so they
know what they know by virtue of the
genes they receive from their parents.
Consider a sea turtle. As soon as it
emerges from its nest in the sand, a
baby sea turtle knows immediately how to
get to the sea and, once it's there, it
knows how to start foraging for food.
Compare that to a human baby. We consider
ourselves to be the most intelligent
species on the planet and, yet, we're
born stupid! Seriously,
we may grow up to become physicians or
dentists or lawyers or star athletes or
astronauts, but we start out in this
world unable to use a bathroom, much less
find our way to the sea or find our own
food. We know how to cry, recognize faces,
and learn language and, really, that's
about it. So, clearly, for us, individual
learning and genes aren't enough. We have
to get information from other sources. In
fact, to become fully functional human
beings, we need a lot of information. So
where do we get all that information?
Well, in the early years, we get most of
our information from our immediate
family: parents, grandparents, perhaps an
older sibling. As we grow older, our
social circles expand, and we start to
get information from lots of other
sources as well. And that's an amazing
adaptation. It's allowed us to radiate
and adapt all over the world in all
sorts of different circumstances, and we
can adapt rapidly to a changing world.
But it presents a problem, too. How often do
all of those sources agree? It doesn't
take long before we start running into
conflicting information. How are we
supposed to make sense of a confusing
information landscape? Well, one option
might be to test every bit of
information that comes our way.
Obviously, that isn't going to work. Right?
If we took the time to fact check every
bit of information that came in, if we
put everything to some sort of empirical
test, it wouldn't take long before we're
unable to learn anything at all. That
should give you some sense of the amount
of information that we have to take in,
that we're not able to test it.
Instead, we develop heuristics, guidelines
that help us distinguish between
reliable and unreliable information, to
distinguish between justified belief and
mere opinion. Everybody does this. Think
about it. All of you have that one person
you will go to in the family to find out
what happened. You just know, from
experience, that that person's going to
give you the true story. Now, you probably
also know five other people in your
family that you won't go to because
they're going to give you a biased account,
or they have self-serving motivations,
or they're manipulative, or maybe
they're just off the rails. Importantly,
what information you trust depends on
context. You probably don't go to that
same person that you went to for family
gossip to get medical advice or to get
career advice or to
get spiritual advice. We move in and out
of different social situations, and in each
one of those situations we have
different guidelines that we use to
decide what information to trust, and, by
the time you're an adult, you learn how
to navigate this really complex
landscape without giving it any thought.
But you should give it some thought! It's
really actually important. In fact, it's
so important that there's an entire
school of philosophy dedicated to its
study. Philosophers call this process
that we've been talking about,
epistemology, and epistemology is how we
know what we know, how do we distinguish
between justified belief and mere
opinion? Now, at this point, many of
you may be asking yourself, what
does any of this have to do with
technical writing? Have I downloaded the 
wrong video?
Have I signed up for the wrong class? No.
What epistemology has to do with
technical writing is, in a nutshell,
everything! You've spent years learning
science facts. Those facts were generated
using the scientific method. So, let's
take a moment to appreciate all of the
things that science has generated.
By virtually every metric, our lives are
better than those of our ancestors:
longer life expectancy, better health,
better material well-being. This is a
phenomenal accomplishment! However, how
science knows what it knows is, frankly,
peculiar. Not only is it unusual in the
way it generates new knowledge, but it
takes years of specialized training to
understand and to be able to participate
in its generation of new knowledge.
Now, most people in the world don't
understand the world in this way. They
use different heuristics to make sense
of the world around them. They use
different epistemology to distinguish
between justified belief and mere
opinion. This has probably never been
more evident than it is right now in the
middle of the COVID-19 pandemic.
I'm sure many of you probably know
someone, or perhaps many people, who don't
trust the information coming from
physicians or scientists or
epidemiologists or public health
officials right now. That's because they
trust different kinds of information. Now,
if you think you can change their minds,
if you think you can persuade them, if
you can think you can adjust their
beliefs, behaviors, and practices based on
a better understanding of science,
through more careful empirical
investigation, through citing the best
journal articles that are out there,
you're living in a dream world. And ,so, we
begin our explorations of technical
writing with epistemology for two
principal reasons. First, a hallmark of
scientific epistemology is the honest,
open, and transparent sharing of
information. That, combined with the sheer
amount of information that bombards
scientists on a daily basis, seriously
constrains and structures scientific
discourse. A lot of the conventions of
scientific writing will seem bizarre if
you don't understand the process by
which science generates information.
Note, too, that understanding how that
information is structured is going to
help you as you do your research for
your capstone project this semester.
Second, no matter where your career takes
you next, you'll be interacting,
professionally, with people who have
different epistemologies from you. They
are going to have a different way of
coming to their understanding about the
world. The only way you can persuade
those people to change their beliefs,
behaviors, or practices is to understand
their epistemology, how they know what
they know. And the best way to start to
understand other people's epistemology
is to really carefully reflect on your
own. So, how do you know what you know?
That's the foundational question we use
to begin our explorations of biomedical
writing.
