Learning about knowledge from toddlers

The instincts of little children teach us something important about where reliable knowledge comes from.

Photo by Derek Owens on Unsplash

In philosophy, one of the important, long-standing debates about knowledge has been between the rationalists and the empiricists. It is a debate about the source of human knowledge, over whether it comes from experience or from reason (I have explained these positions previously if you are interested). The debate, however, only really makes sense within a very particular way of thinking.

If you asked most people to explain the source of their knowledge, i.e. where their knowledge comes from, typical responses would likely include their parents, teachers, books, YouTube or that they figured it out themselves. While philosophers might grant that this is correct, for them it misses the point. Philosophers are typically concerned not with the means by which a person gained information, but rather what ensures that this information is truly knowledge, i.e. what ensures it is true (or reliable).

When doing so, philosophers have traditionally focused on the types of knowledge they most care about - important truths about life and the universe that you can discover in the armchair or the lab - rather than the majority of knowledge that humans have and use day-to-day. For a more complete understanding of human knowledge, we need to look at how it is transmitted, accepted and trusted in day-to-day situations, a process that starts when we are all very small.

Human knowledge in the wild, not the armchair

From a practical or functional perspective, humans require a very wide range of knowledge - information they can trust enough to rely on without worrying about it - to be able to survive and thrive everyday. Much of this is very mundane, like what to eat or avoid, how to shelter, who to trust, and - for many of us - where to get a decent coffee. If we focus on this type of knowledge, a couple of interesting factors stand out.

The first is that it needs to be reliable, but doesn't have to be bulletproof. It needs to be good enough to keep us out of trouble and help us do the things we need or want to do, but experience shows us it can be somewhat flawed and still practically work. We all know people who have wacky ideas about nutrition, health, or how to organise their daily routine optimally. Many of them will be living healthy and generally happy lives, even if their knowledge about these things is, to be picky, quite wrong. The point is that exact accuracy often doesn't matter for many, typically human, daily situations. Our knowledge only needs to be a good enough approximation to the truth that provides us with enough information to make reasonable decisions.

A second observation is that humans have strongly ingrained instincts that help us, as we need to start learning this type of knowledge from a very young age. As every parent knows, babies and toddlers will happily get into lots of things that are dangerous for them and so they need to learn important information to survive. Parents’ instincts, and their role, is to train children as quickly as they can to ensure they will not get hurt. Knowledge for all of us begins as a socialisation process.

If we look at these types of knowledge from a traditional philosophical perspective, there is a very big question about whether any of it is really knowledge given they are not precisely reliable or true, at least not completely. A particular philosophical concern would be that there is nothing intrinsic to the processes or thinking involved that can guarantee the reliability or truth of what we know. Parents, as we all know, get many things right and many others wrong. So there is almost an element of luck involved in the accuracy of our knowledge, which feels philosophically wrong.

Act more like a toddler

Where this philosophical mindset goes wrong, in my view, is that it looks for truth or reliability in the process or means by which we acquire the knowledge or information. Toddlers, by contrast, instinctively have a better grasp of how knowledge really works - and cause their parents much frustration and angst! They will very often not take what are told as reliable, but they insist on testing it out. So things go in their mouths, get whacked, thrown or tipped all over the place. And when a little child is told not to do something, it is often an invitation to do just that, often simply to see what actually happens.

This frustrating insistence on testing everything they learn (which evolves into the endless ‘why?’ questions as a child learns to talk better) is very good epistemic practice. The reliability of our knowledge ultimately comes, not from its source or the process someone used to identify it, but from whether it stands up to testing and use in the real world. In the end, it doesn't matter where some piece of knowledge comes from, whether it is from parents, a textbook, a dream, experience or reasoning it out. If it keeps stacking up as accurate and reliable whenever we test it against reality, then we should count it as knowledge.

So, to ensure we are continuing to build reliable and true knowledge, we need to be more like little children - at least in this aspect. We should take everything we hear as potentially reliable, no matter the source, and test it out in robust ways. Even when we are confident it is correct, giving an idea a good thump or sticking it in our mouths (figuratively or literally) is still a good idea.

Notably, going back to the opening debate, the process of testing knowledge out to build reliability involves both reason and experience. We need reason to tell us what will happen if the knowledge is accurate or reliable, and experience to confirm whether it does actually happen or not. There is no guaranteed method for building knowledge or finding truth, except for continuing to test out what we think we know and changing what we think when it is wrong. It is also another example that thinking too generally will never succeed.