Equivocality

I don’t think most people know how to tell whether something is true or not.

There is this field of study called “epistemology,” but it’s terribly badly developed. It has one big, huge success: science. The subdiscipline of philosophy of science is very well developed. Those things that can be studied by science, we as a species are really good at investigating. Things that are difficult to study empirically, not so much. When we start getting into the social sciences, or certain parts of economics and medecine, or politics, or espectially religion and spirituality and philosophy, it’s very hard to figure out where the truth lies.

One answer to this problem is just to say that such difficult subjects are bullshit, and I know people (or have been a person) who does not take each of these subjects seriously. You can throw out all of religion in one swoop, and say it’s unimportant. Personally, I don’t think any of these subjects are unimportant. I just think science is much, much easier precisely because it is much, much, MUCH less prone to bullshit. That’s because the principles it rests on are extremely well defined. This is not is necessarily true in every other field of study.

Sadly, the problem is circular. Epistemology is precisely one of the fields we don’t really know how to study well. We need to learn it before we can discover it. The human race is engaged in a giant intelectual bootstrapping process. I want to see where the next steps are and — okay, I know this all sounds mystical at this point, but seriously: what does the human race know about the different ways one can know things?

This is not an idle question!

Ok, then. Why am I thinking about this?

Because, despite its abstraction, I think proper epistemology is deeply important to human civilization. No, really. Actually, I think it’s vital. As societies become more complex and democratic, the people within them need to be better educated to make good decisions. For example, science education is critical if the citizenry is going to be asked to vote on global warming. Epistemology takes this one level further, because not only must the citizens be capable of understanding global warming, they must be capable of understanding what does and does NOT constitute a valid argument as they tune into the debates.

To take another example: does God want us to inade Iraq? Does Allah want us to blow up more transit riders?

In order to open debates into the “everybody knows” areas of human cultural assumption, our civilizations need to get very much better at understanding when complicated decisions are are clear and when they are not clear. This requires conceptual machinery around “truth.”

As Wikipedia puts it so well in its article on epistemology, “For something to count as knowledge, it must actually be true.” Thus the essential question of epistemology is “how can one determine that something is true?” Personally, I can think of no better question for the intellectual side of my day, not just to research but to teach. (In other realms, I am fascinated by such indeterminables as “how can I make this beautiful?” or “what is she going to do next with her tongue?”)

My notes for chapter list goes something like this:

• what is truth? what do you have to assume about reality to read this book?
• basic epistemology: examples of effective and ineffetive ways of knowing; consequences of false beliefs
• causation
• philosophy of science
• the psyschology of belief: emotions; rationaliztion; social pressure
• statistics, inference, and the placebo-controlled blind trial
• discussion of common cognitive errors
• the human construction of reality
• worldviews
• religion
• spirituality
• knowldege as models of reality
• systems
• limitations of human epistemology: research directions

Did that make any sense to anyone else? My aim is to write about this sort of topic in very simple, clear language — which this is not, I know. I do not want to write an academic book. I want to take all of this complicated stuff down to everyday reality, because that’s where it all actually comes from, and, I believe, matters.But first I want to see if I am making sense with a technical vocabulary.

The part that seems much harder to me right now is how to make this book, this discussion, a beautiful thing. I have to do that because no one will want to read something so technical otherwise. I want to be an artist as well as a scientist. And while truth and beauty really aren’t the same thing, I’d really like to see more of both in the world.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 19th, 2007 at 10:04 am and is filed under Blog-like. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.