Knowledge

Hi there.

This isn't really a physics based post, at least, not in the strong sense. I'm not going to talk about kinematics or explain how to derive the gas pressure laws (that should come in a few weeks!)

I want to talk about knowledge. Someone on TSR posted a thread, and it was titled "How would a biology student's knowledge be different if they studied in French?"

Well, I reckon it would be exactly the same, but they'd know it all in French.

The OP, though, was clearly not happy with this. They have different states of knowledge, after all: the French student can't pass the English student's exam. They can't communicate themselves to each other, as they lack the meaning of the words.

Maybe, in a general sense, when we say knowledge, we just mean "anything stored in your head". And in that case, yes. They have different knowledge and the thread is trivial. But the thread persistently derailed into a comment along the lines of "the concepts are the same, but the labels are different! So they don't both know the same things about biology!"

umm.. yes

Yes they do. Because if you got both of them together, and asked them (in their own language) what they predict will happen if you say, add sucrose to benedict's solution, then they will make the same prediction. Because they have identical models of the world. A french map and a british map (of the same place) do not encode different information. They encode the same information is different ways.

To make a physics analogy: there are two ways of reformulating Newtonian mechanics. These are called Lagrangian and Hamiltonian mechanics. If you solve the equations of motion in one formulation, you must have exactly the same information as you'd get in any other formulation. Because they are mathematically the same. Richard Feynman used to use his own notation for trig functions- did he mean something else when he said the sine of thirty degrees is one half?

I propose that knowledge does not just sit around in your head. In fact, you don't know most of what is in your brain (literally or metaphorically, you certainly don't know the positions of every neurone). What makes something knowledge is how you use it- to predict the outcomes of events. So I would suggest that the more detailed your model of the world is, and the more phenomena it covers (and how accurately that corresponds with reality)- that is knowledge. Knowledge is the ability to successfully make predictions.

#text #science