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“Present knowledge is wholly dependent on past knowledge.”
This essay will examine the relationship between past knowledge and present knowledge and whether the former is inseparable from the latter. In order to determine a distinction between them, it needs to be specified what knowledge encompasses in the scope of this essay title. The title claim – stating that present knowledge is wholly dependent on past knowledge – implies that there is an unbreakable bridge between these two. If we consider knowledge here – in accordance with the title claim – as “all reliable information about reality together with the ability to use it in contemporary societies” , the line between^1 past and present can be drawn somewhat easily: the former would include information about reality that contemporarily have been accepted as the most reliable we could devise to date, the latter would include new findings that develop the discipline in question.
However, does present knowledge have to stem entirely from past knowledge, just like the title claim suggests? It is impossible to produce a piece of knowledge that is completely independent of any formerly discovered information? If not wholly , to what extent is present knowledge dependent on past knowledge? This essay will try and examine these knowledge questions on the basis of Natural Sciences and Human Sciences.
As for Natural Sciences, whose aim is to gather the principles and laws of the natural world into generalized theories, it would make sense for all new inventions to be based on previous ones. For example, the development of nuclear medicine
(^1) Philosophy News. (2019). Philosophy News | What is Knowledge?. [online] Available at: https://www.philosophynews.com/post/2011/09/22/What-is-Knowledge.aspx [Accessed 16 Oct. 2019].
and Targeted Alpha-Particle Therapy 2 in 20th century was possible thanks to the discovery of alpha radiation by Ernest Rutherford in 1899. Knowing its biological^3 effects, it was possible to predict their efficiency in destroying cancer cells - if controlled amounts of alpha emitters are delivered directly to the targeted affected cells without significant damage to surrounding tissues 4 , because of its strength yet low penetrating power and short-range absorption. As it appears, using the Way of Knowing - Reason scientists drew conclusions from the past knowledge of this kind of radiation to get a new invention, thus contributing to Shared Knowledge in Medicine and developing the discipline. This piece of knowledge is wholly dependent on past knowledge because the prior discovery of the former allowed future scientists to build on it and arrive at the latest conclusion. Moreover, it is reasonable to assume that had the former not been known at the time, the new discovery would not be made at that point in time. However, there are instances when new inventions result from accidents - that would suggest that, in fact, new pieces of knowledge can be created totally independently of past knowledge, as behind those there is no purposeful and active induction or deduction process based on the already known fact. A fitting example for this is the creation of the intraocular lens to treat cataracts. In 1940, English ophthalmologist Harold Ridley had to examine a^5 World War II pilot whose eyes were hurt by shards - he noticed that the plastic bits left no damaging effect on the man’s eyesight, not did his body show any signs of rejection of the alien object. Clearly, he did not plan to test the reaction of human
(^2) Oxford IB Diploma Programme: Chemistry Course Companion Brian Murphy, Author Gary Horner, Author David Tarcy, and Author Sergey Bylikin
(^3) Charge, Mass, & Definition. (2020). Retrieved 13 December 2019, from https://www.britannica.com/science/alpha-particle 4 Oxford IB Diploma Programme: Chemistry Course Companion p. 768 Brian Murphy, Author Gary Horner 5 , Author David Tarcy, and Author Sergey Bylikin Charge, Mass, & Definition. (2020). Retrieved 13 December 2019, from https://www.britannica.com/science/alpha-particle
teacher’s foreign accent, depending on whether his demeanour was friendly or unwelcoming, confirmed the existence of the halo effect outside of the military. Similarly to my first example in Natural Sciences, Reason was used to lead to the development of a discipline from its past knowledge. Just the same, this piece of knowledge is wholly dependent on past knowledge because the prior discovery of the former allowed future scientists to build on it and arrive at the latest conclusion.
Nevertheless, accidents are possible in Human Sciences too, and there are cases of serendipitous 8 discoveries that led to the creation of new valid pieces of knowledge, which have become accepted as canon in the discipline. One of such is an early-20th-century study of a Russian physiologist’s Ivan Pavlov, which resulted in a substantial advancement in Psychology.^9 The scientist’s field of research was digestion and its purpose were the salivation tendencies of dogs, however, it allowed for the understanding of a psychological phenomenon - classical conditioning. Over the course of his examination, Pavlov registered that his subjects would salivate even before they were given the food, already when they noticed the assistant in charge of distributing it - this suggested that this response was learned by association; association of the figure in charge of the anticipated occurrence with the moment when it actually occurs. Similarly as in the accidental discovery in Medicine, these results were not sought after and hence we cannot say they have source in past knowledge. However, in contrast to the case in Medicine, the incorporation of this information into Shared Knowledge was possible without any support from previous findings - it was something never before encountered in
(^8) APA Dictionary of Psychology. (2020). Retrieved 13 December 2019, from https://dictionary.apa.org/serendipity 9 Classical Conditioning (Pavlov) - Learning Theories. (2020). Retrieved 20 December 2019, from https://www.learning-theories.com/classical-conditioning-pavlov.html
Psychology. Therefore, the production of this piece of present knowledge was independent of past knowledge.
To conclude, the claim “present knowledge is wholly dependent on past knowledge” is multidimensional and its analysis ought to cover multiple perspectives to properly evaluate it.
I managed to determine that even when present knowledge does not entirely stem from past knowledge, its employment into Shared Knowledge might require its use, thus making the present knowledge dependent on past knowledge to an extent.
Nevertheless, an example from Psychology proved that it is possible to produce a piece of knowledge completely independent of the past findings of that discipline - given that the new discovery is made by accident and nothing of the kind has previously been known to the Area of Knowledge.
Still, I believe there is more room for discussion on this topic than I was able to take up in this essay while maintaining the structure I set out in the introduction and sticking to my definitions; such as whether the fact that Pavlov’s dog salivation experiment was based on his expertise in Physiology does not make this discovery in Psychology dependent on past knowledge, but from a different Area of Knowledge.
