If a person had never seen fire, but studied all the logic behind combustion, could they truly know what fire is without experiencing it?
I think yes, because a brain is capable of producing the image/simulation of fire, due to relativity.
It’s not so much starting at the beginning, it’s starting from the human vessel.
Fire is in our lineage, and our brains capacity.
With enough understanding, one could learn about fire before ever experiencing it.
One could produce a fitting knowledge to the unknown outside.
If a partial clue, such as heat, was given, yes. If no evidence was given, no.
The human vessel itself has many traces of fire, we already have half of the evidence we need, and that’s all we need to paint a full picture.
There are a lot of ways to go here.
No amount of science and logic of the taste of apples can provide the same bits of knowledge or concepts or experience as actually eating and tasting an apple. So if you are asking if you can imagine how hot a fire must be and how bright tongues of fire look, without having experienced any of those sensory inputs, the answer is no. If you had no concept of heat, of yellow and white, and red, or tongues, or upwardly dancing gas, then you will have a hard time even understanding anything from the logic of combustion, let alone be able to imagine something remotely like fire from a mere description.
Let me ask this: does a person who HAS experienced fire, touched and seen it, does that person know what fire is, or do they need to understand all the logic behind combustion in addition to experience before they might claim to truly know fire?
All of that said, the fiction writer is in the business of giving you an experience imagined from mere logic. So there is something to be said from learning about something from a book. And further, if two people have driven trucks all their lives, and one of them drives a brand new truck with some new features, I do believe he could describe the new features (provide all the logic) to the other trucker who hasn’t experienced it, and that second trucker could imagine the experience and have some idea of the experience of driving the new truck without actually driving the new truck. Meaning, knowledge of the logic of things is most useful between people who already have shared experience. So in theory you can know things without experiencing them, but such knowledge is only able to be coherent to you as it fits into a context of general experience. Knowing works hand in hand with experience - they don’t displace one another.
And really this is a question about how experience arrives to you. Doesn’t arrive through the senses only, or can it come through language. Meaning, the logic of combustion is one experience of fire, and burning your hand is another experience of fire. Not sure they need to translate into each other.
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It seems definitional to me. How will we use the word ‘know’? Is experience a necessary element of knowledge?
If you’re asking for opinions, mine would be that I would hesitate to say that person knows fire. I would more likely say, “That person has a fine understanding of the logic of fire but doesn’t know what it’s like. He’s never sat before a fire and felt it and spoken across the flames to another person.”
But I am a known hedger, so….