What is Forbidden Knowledge?

    What can be defined as forbidden knowledge? Shattuck has several different definitions of what makes forbidden knowledge, but after going through this whole class I would say that forbidden knowledge is anything that is not readily apparent to you. Anything beyond instinct has some sort of intrinsic barrier, from books (you have to know how to read) to language (you have to understand it) to thoughts themselves (you have to know how to organize them in a coherent manner.)

    Philosophers call the study of knowledge epistemology. What this means is that philosophers think they can make up their own words, but also that other people have given some serious thought to what we can and cannot know. Plato said that knowledge was a justified true belief. What he meant by that was that knowledge was a belief that you had that could be backed up by a sound hypothesis based on the facts and that was proved true. In that case could forbidden knowledge be the beliefs we have which we can neither justify or prove to be true, such as religion?

    Now this definition, which is widely held to be true, has far more implications than can be seen at a glance. One of them is that true knowledge is unchangeable and concrete. There is no arguing for the truth of something, there is only being able to prove what is true or not. While this seems to be a good thing it fails to take into account the human condition known as perspective. Edmund Gettier wrote a paper in the 1960's called "Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?" In this paper he pointed out through various examples that because of the subjective nature of humanity many "truths" could be justified from the same set of facts depending on the perspective one viewed the facts from. Does this mean that all knowledge is subjective? This question was asked by men much smarter than myself, one of which we can look at here.

    St. Thomas Aquinas asked "Can anything really be known?" He was asking what it was to know something, and I think this question has to be answered before we can look at the one at the top of the page. Is knowing something remembering it's essence, remembering it's shape and dimensions, and if so is it only an interpretation of those things which you claim to know? Do you really know the thing or do you only know one aspect of it, that thing from your perspective? In this case would forbidden knowledge include the memories of things that you have from someone else's perspective?

    What can we see from this study of epistemology? (That word is wonderful, isn't it? When someone asks you what you did today tell them you studied epistemology, they will be impressed.) We can see that not only is there knowledge that is forbidden by many outside barriers, but there is also knowledge that is forbidden from our limited understanding of ourselves. From what I can see, the very definition of forbidden knowledge could be classified as forbidden knowledge. What does this mean for us? I think we can look at the answer at the top of the page and change that to seeing that all knowledge is forbidden, including what is readily apparent.