Assessing the Usefulness of Knowledge Part I: The Affirmative Case

Pursuing knowledge, as with pursuing many things in life, requires a commitment of precious and limited resources such as time and energy. Nonetheless, the pursuit of knowledge that is sufficiently valuable is unarguably a highly worthwhile endeavor. What makes knowledge valuable is itself an intractable question but, at least for purposes of this post, suffice it to say that one criterion that makes knowledge valuable is its usefulness (it should be parenthetically mentioned that while knowledge and information mean different things in technical philosophy, this post will use both words in their ordinary, plain-English language meaning and, therefore, interchangeably when appropriate). As can be expected, judging the usefulness of any given unit or piece of knowledge is also quite the trial.

Human beings, as mere mortals, have limited abilities and tools to accurately or reasonably predict what the future holds, what types of circumstances one could find themselves in, what types of issues one would have to contend with, and, therefore, what types of knowledge would best serve one to optimally navigate life at such future juncture. In fact, it is not at all inconceivable that many unanticipated challenges could be overcome through purely the insights afforded by incidentally-acquired knowledge. It is precisely for this reason why we often cannot prudently judge how useful a given piece of information  is at the moment it is presented to us. What may seem unimportant to us at the time of its presentation could unexpectedly prove to be highly useful (and therefore highly valuable) in the near or intermediate future. Ergo we should never be too hasty in dismissing many pieces of information presented to us as being picayune.

Another thing that warrants consideration regarding the auspicious usefulness of knowledge is due to its interrelatability to other pieces of knowledge. To wit, a given piece of knowledge by itself may not necessarily be useful; however, relating it to disparate pieces of related and relevant knowledge may render it exponentially useful. This is because one can massively expand the implications of what is known by amassing and then interconnecting relatable pieces of information. A convenient example of this phenomenon that comes to mind is that the isolated knowledge of the positions of the different gears in an automobile’s manual transmission does not evidently serve any useful or practical purpose. But, when this singular bit of knowledge is meaningfully assimilated into an entire web of interrelatable pieces of knowledge regarding the operation of a motor vehicle—such as that regarding the function of the clutch, ignition, brakes, and so on and so forth—it becomes highly useful, practical, and, therefore, valuable.

This is yet another reason why one would be wise reserve judgment in declaring seemingly irrelevant information as having little worth upon its introduction. Again, humans are most likely not prescient beings—at least not supernaturally or even extraordinarily. Consequently, one cannot always know what information one is bound to come across in the near or intermediate future—information that can be interwoven into one’s preexisting tapestry of useful knowledge for its further enrichment and fortification. Since one does not necessarily know of the things one would likely become knowledgeable about in the future, one is in an inherently precarious position to judge the potential usefulness of information received in real-time.

This aspect of our epistemological inquiry is also profoundly relevant to the fields of pedagogy and autodidacticism. Consider that when learning an advanced topic, particularly one of considerable complexity, it may only be feasible for the learner to comprehend it in its entirety after an effortful, collative study of many different pieces of relevant, constituent, adjacent, and interrelatable information. So from a pedagogical standpoint it is ostensibly far more efficient to hand such learner one puzzle piece at a time—a singular puzzle piece that by itself may seem unimportant to a learner without enough knowledge to know better—that the learner could efficiently comprehend and then assimilate into other relevant puzzle pieces to eventually form a comprehensible, coherent, and cohesive complex whole.

Though the purpose of this post is to consider a couple of closely-related unobvious reasons that potentially render knowledge useful, it is in no way meant to purport that one should aimlessly or indiscriminately begin pursuing knowledge because one may not know immediately whether such knowledge could later prove itself to be valuable. The ideas discussed above are not universally or limitlessly valid and are instead meaningfully and maximally valid only within certain parameters. Those parameters will be the subject of our next post wherein we will explore the limitations of the foregoing ideas.