Blog of Wade Making Connexions

Knowledge and Self (”What Is Truth” In Economics)

I some how found a great article written in the The Journal of Political Economy on “What is Truth” in Economics. The site it’s hosted on has many other articles that I will eventually get to reading; The Competitiveness of Nations, in a Global Knowledge-Based Economy will be next up.

Whilst reading this article by Frank H Knight from Vol48, No.1 Feb 1940, I came across some stunning confirmations of knowldege and self. The more broadly I read, the more the same answers appear to keep coming back. It’s fascinating. Below is a quote that re-enforced this point, which in it’s very essicence, is part of Indra’s Net, which is the buddhist display/concept for interconnectedness of being.

And if ordinary normal human beings habitually and systematically lied, or talked dream talk (or reported free association), there would be no possibility of any knowledge, or of the existence of minds or intelligence. There could be no “feeling” of truth or of reality; we could never form these notions, or have any communicable, and hence any intellectual, experience. “We” could not exist at all as minds or selves. There might, indeed, be animate beings, or animate objects, making biologically “correct” responses to their environment and to one another’s physical behavior. But anything that can properly be called knowledge on the part of any subject is unthinkable apart from self-knowledge and valid intercommunication with similar (competent and trustworthy) knowing selves, living, thinking, and acting in and in relation to a common world of not-self, which is the general object of knowledge. This naturally suggests the question as to how we do know (imperfectly, of course) the content of one another’s minds, or how we intercommunicate.