Well, what do you know?


What's the difference between knowing and searching?

If you're like me, you often overhear someone ask a question and immediately think, "Why don't you just ask Google?". It seems there is still a trend of domain sensitivity when it comes to looking up information on the internet. Someone might look up a restaurant, or driving directions, or their old buddies, but not even think about looking up whether cockroaches can fly, or what the Guinness widget is, or whether anyone else thought a particular line in a book was a good one. But that's not exactly what I want to talk about..

All right, so here's my first reference to Daniel Dennett in this blog..
(By all means check the sidebar for more references------>)

I've been thinking about something he brought up in Consciousness Explained, which I will paraphrase here:

Here's an easy question: what's your mother's maiden name?
Here's a harder question: just how, exactly, were you able to come up with that answer?

Some stabs at the harder question suggest themselves; what they all have in common is, before you were asked the question, your mother's maiden name was the farthest thing from your mind. After hearing the question, and after some subsequent process, you feel like saying or writing the name. The process is hidden from us and fast, and because of that, we feel like asserting this:

1) "I know my mother's maiden name."

This is essentially the same as this related statement:

2) "I am confident that I would succeed at any task that involves the correct speaking/writing/use of my mother's maiden name."

Now, the process of internet searching is neither hidden nor fast. Yet you can assert sentences like (2) above for anything you can expect to find on Google. For example, although I have never been to Chicago, in my environment in 2004 I can assert:

3) "I am confident that I would succeed at any task that involves the correct use of the postal address of the Sears Tower."

Can I also say that I know what the address of the Sears Tower is? It will take me longer to look up the address than my mother's maiden name, and I will use different processes to look them up, but is that relevant? WIll it still be relevant if internet searching gets faster, easier, pervasive -- and unnoticed?

Notes:
-- I originally spelled "Guinness" with just one N; it looked wrong. To check, I googlefought the two spellings against each other; "Guinness" won. Don't we often use tricks like this in our own thinking?
-- the "problem word" in the analysis of "I know X" isn't "know" or "X", but "I". (this can be said for many other things..)

Posted: Mon - August 2, 2004 at 05:18 PM | | | |

©