| | Stepping away from the issue of new knowledge versus old knowledge for just a moment, take a look at rationality. When we are talking about human nature we are saying we have a kind of capacity. And we can define rationality within that context. But we also know that as individuals we aren't all the same in our use of the faculty. Within the context of engaging our rationality we understand that it is a skill and even an art form. And that takes us to a third context in which we can understand rationality - psychology.
By its nature rationality is volitional and we can use that as a point to delve deeper. Our choice-points, those instances of time where we could choose to focus our flow of consciousness differently, are there in every second we are awake. They are at the very border of conscious and subconscious activity. And it would be simplistic to think that we choose to think or we choose to blank-out and that was the end of the story. In fact, it is usually more like we choose to approach or retreat. Approach is to embrace - to accept - to get more deeply into the appropriate awareness of something. Different kinds of activities are best suited to different kinds of awareness. The sharp, purpose driven, open-to-the-unknown kind focus is best suited to solving a business problem, whereas a softer focus that constitutes a melting down of any barriers to experiencing the emotions and feelings and sensations would be the choice for sexual activity. Focus is variable, and it is purpose driven. Is a person choosing to focus in a way that avoids or dilutes an experience, or acts to blind him to an aspect of reality? Or is the person focusing in a way that maximizes the experience and/or the function that serves his life in that instance for that context?
Given that, let me get back to Bill's distinction between knowledge and belief. Many of my beliefs from childhood have since been shown to be false - they were not knowledge. But from the inside, at the time, some of them FELT like knowledge. This is the about "certainty". My sense of certainty is that it is a combination of emotion and reason. And if we are good at reasoning, our certainty will be an emotional state that is a reflection of the reasoning about a belief. It is as if we have trained this one corner of our mind to watch our mental processes and to keep score for each belief. Other people, who are not skilled at reasoning, or who avoid focus on many issues, or who mistake emotions or feelings for reason... they will end up having a kind of false certainty - an emotional reflection conjured up to support a poor process. Instead of a kind of independent score keeper they have something that amplifies impulses to avoid, to be defensive, to not know - and under the pretense of certainty in a belief.
But no matter whether we are behaving like whim worshipers or Ayn Rand herself, we use our sense of certainty to fuel activities. If we are rational, our actions flow from reason, but the strength behind the actions will have to come from emotions. And certainty (or uncertainty) is one source (or absence) of such a fuel.
My personal decision that a given belief is knowledge is a different thing than whether, objectively, that belief IS knowledge, ie, is a true fact of reality. My only access to reality is by means of reasoning regarding perceptual data. Then I have to decide what degree of certainty to apply. Notice that I can apply degree x, but my subconscious might give it degree y. We have all probably experienced a situation where our reason said such and such was a certain truth, but that our emotional response was doubt.
From this psychological, as opposed to epistemological, point of view, we only have beliefs and we decide which of them are knowledge by our level of certainty. Reasoning about our reasoning. From this psychological perspective, whether new knowledge replaces or invalidates old knowledge probably relates to a change in certainty, or requires us, as an individual, to act differently. From this personal viewpoint, my learning that chairs are made of atoms won't change how I use them or my certainty about how to use a chair, or what defines a chair. So, in that instance it does not invalidate my old knowledge. If I were to discover a sub-set of chairs that were fake - that they were stage props - and that it was dangerous to sit on them, that would change, at least temporarily and in certain contexts, my certainty, and how I acted.
I notice that in Joe's article he says, "...you aren't making a statement about the wood burning, but a statement about your present belief." That alludes to this distinction between psychology and epistemology where they must not contradict each other, yet they are different perspectives.
In the issue of the child who takes old batteries of the right size, puts them into the new toy and discovers that they don't work, I'd say that what we have here isn't old knowledge, but rather a hole in his knowledge needs - a piece of ignorance. He didn't have a category of information about the life of batteries. He didn't know they could die. That is different from a belief that they work forever. He acted "as if" they could live forever. It was an implicit assumption - meaning that we create this false belief and impute it him based upon his actions. But it might never have been in his mind. In this case it was not old knowledge being replace by new knowledge, but new knowledge being added to old knowledge. (In a different example, it could easily have been new knowledge replacing an incorrect belief.)
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