Epistemology

How do you know that you know?

I’m sure we can all agree that philosophy, in general, tends to overstate its case – this despite the fact that most (good) philosophers are masters of understatement. So my question is this: why do writers still feel the paranoid urge to defend ourselves against universal doubt? For after all, absolute doubt was not just a personal adventure of Descartes.

So here’s a thesis to get us started. Let’s suppose the last century’s science writers were dealing more or less explicitly with the notion of an ‘epistemological’ break which founds new paradigms of ‘rationality.’ Hence, the latest installment of an age-old ‘metaphysical’ debate: Can we really found knowledge upon doubt… or do we have to abandon the category of ‘knowledge’ entirely, and say there are only ‘beliefs’?

It’s a new century. Let’s not let the confusion of the past cloud our lucidity; let us also not pretend to have passed into complete self-clarity! How much value still remains in the ironic injunction to know yourself? What will this century’s epistemological debate center around?

BONUS: What will be the next ‘paradigm shift’ (in science, or art, or politics, etc) and why?

I view it as a non-issue, actually.

When we look at the information that we have and construct a pattern for it, and that pattern is shown to be predictive, we can say that it works. To me the distinction between “knowing” and “working” is negligible.

Could the pattern be incorrect but still work? Of course. Could there be no pattern and I’ve just been incredibly lucky thus far? Of course. However, if the first one is shown to be correct, the pattern can be adjusted. If the second one is true, either my “pattern” is so horribly vague as to be worthless (see: astrology) or we are living in an absurd universe.

If we are living in an absurd universe, we have to act as though we aren’t, and instead are living in a knowable universe to complete any sort of meaningful task (which we all do regularly). As such, I think the issue collapses into itself and becomes entirely moot.

I think that the reason why this issue is harped on so often in Western thought is because of a Judeo-Christian hangover. Within the Judeo-Christian worldview (particularly the medieval one, that philosophy grew out of in the west and eventually separated itself from, at least somewhat) the universe is wholly knowable and is governed by a rigid set of divine laws. The whole “knowing” debate centers on disagreeing with that notion.

It is a matter of hyper-sensitive overreactivity as opposed to proper philosophy, IMHO.

I definitely feel what you’re saying, and perhaps it “ought” to be a non-issue, as you say… but at the same time, it’s a very different thing to claim to know what something means or produces, than to claim to know how it works.

But I’m actually concerned here with what it means in the first place to make a claim to knowledge. I think we often find ourselves in the debate where one person is claiming, “There is some kind of knowledge!” and another claiming “It’s all founded circularly, so it’s just false security for your paranoia…”

So I think this is in fact a quite political issue, Xunzian. Which given your somewhat enlightened disposition, I can certainly understand you claiming it’s a non-issue… after all, we still have to get up and DO stuff, regardless of whether we’re imagining it all, or whether it’s absurd, or what. The issue doesn’t collapse, though: we can change and grow with what we know and learn, especially about ourselves, and perhaps most importantly, we can grow towards virtue.

As Confucius put it, there are very few who know virtue. I agree that indeed there is a sort of ‘hangover’ from the divine law, but if we then have to create values of our own we have to WAKE UP, right? Clarity is the key. But I guess my point is there’s still a lot of fog to clear up… not, of course, to make ourselves, the world or God into something we can “know”… but on the contrary, to help us get work done, to investigate the way things work so we can create new ways of thinking, knowing, believing… even new ways of creating! :slight_smile:

Confucius also asserted that removing one’s self from a disordered realm was an acceptable option. People that embrace radical skepticism of that order are bound to be rather ineffective actors or in their actions, they betray their principles and so are ultimately paper tigers.

Let’s take the evolution debate, for example. Dover tried to include the ID nonsense in their curriculum and the school board that brought that policy about got trounced in the next election because people became educated on the issue and saw ID for what it is.

Given enough time, ignorance will be dispelled and replaced with knowledge, despite the best efforts of some. Likewise, more inferior forms of knowledge will be replaced with superior forms of knowledge.

It sucks that these things take time, but the march of history continues. The best we can do is to be on the right side of things while making sure that we are properly educated on the stances that we take, 'lest we find ourselves fighting for the wrong.

I heartily agree with what you are saying… but I wonder if we can really remove ourselves from “disordered realms”? (And I hope I’m right in understanding that to be part of your point.)

It seems we encounter them everywhere, perhaps especially when we retreat from the ‘artificial’ orders of nature and culture – that is, that most complex of assemblages, the home. Eastern thought reminds us beautifully that the primary order is not the evolution of ‘thought,’ it’s the spontaneous evolution of another order from (apparently) ‘disordered’ regimes. We read this in Western thought as the converse, or the genealogy of morality – how we produce peace from death, creativity from destructive, even ecstasy and the sublime from the depths of alienation and misery… how we get “a place like home” from the raw material of the ‘primitive’ state and it’s territorial war machines.

I don’t think we ought to escape this conclusion. Some of the more radical interpretations of Zen converge here as well, and I’m thinking specifically of the notions of the possibility of a practical or experiential wisdom which is not founded on the basis of the ordering of apparent reality. The real, after all, is change, not a hard kernel of necessity. The apparent stability of flux is not only arbitrary, but even imaginary – it is not merely that we evolved to have a certain kind of perceptual structure, but also that the world and the subject exist separately only after being distinguished (introduced by reason and language.)

So by introducing equivocation into the heart of being we’ve arrived also at the other end, Continental phenomenology, which would argue passionately that ordering is not primary, but introduced by the perceptual apparatus. In other words, it’s not so much that the subject imagines or creates the world around him, but it is true that the subject makes a world possible. The idea here is that perception is behavior, and so when we’re talking about ‘paper tigers’ – we have to remember they can roar! And as far as betraying principles, the question would be about ethical virtue, not ‘effected’ behavior but affective action… which does not require a move from a disordered realm to an ordered one! This is the question of the mystical, the invisible, that ordering which exists despite the fact we cannot perceive it: all faith and truth rest on this sort of equivocal basis.

So being authentically: doesn’t this mean to be in a univocal sense? In literature, it would be to speak the truth boldly in your own simple way, the truth of your experience. In ethics as in war, authenticity is to risk your life for the other. In politics, it is speaking truth to power. In science, it is to ‘reharmonize’ discourses, to realize them as organic, or if possible, even machinic disciplines: what is physics but tracing paths and mapping waves? What is mathematics but the logic of distinction? In each case, we are confronted with the event, which doesn’t fit into the situation – it threatens the state of affairs with collapse, with the rupture of its symbolic coordinates. Such is the power of the event, and so the danger of betraying it: the ethical injunction to virtue, in this light, would mean: become equal to the events of your life.

Similarly, we have to meet interpretation halfway. “The art of listening is almost as important as the art of saying the right thing.” History is not just about one system being replaced by another: history is paths and ruptures, waves and milieus… the question is not really about fighting history, after all – it’s about becoming equal to history, learning to think historically. Only then, once we’ve engaged as subjects, and become faithful to an interpretation, are we ever in a position to determine which side we ought to fight for.

Maybe I misunderstand what you’re saying here, but wouldn’t you agree that most scientists and philosophers today would say that knowledge about the world is neither absolute truth nor simple belief, but is more like justified belief?

Isn’t some level of doubt unavoidably inherent in any claim to knowledge made about the world?

Simplifying extremely:

“Justified true belief” is Plato’s definition of knowledge, and so would be the classical conception.

“What cannot be doubted” is Descarte’s definition of knowledge, and would be ‘rationalist,’ an early modern conception.

“Paranoia” is Lacan’s definition of knowledge, and would be something like a ‘postmodern’ conception of knowledge (as relating to power structures, a desire for security, fear of being wrong, of social shame, etc.)

But even in modernity, we already see doubt, insecurity and denial becoming the object of psychoanalysis, the locus of ‘subjectivity.’ This is Nietzsche, and even Freud (a little.) Foucault, of course, extends this, and Deleuze even further.

Your point that ‘some level of doubt’ is ‘unavoidably inherent in any claim to knowledge’ is certainly on the money, but I’d ask: how do you know? This is closer to the postmodern question: why do you want to be able to claim you know? What is this ‘perverse desire’ to touch the other, to know the world, to watch the other undress herself? :slight_smile:

But we shouldn’t feel guilty for having this ‘perverse’ desire to know. In some this resentment (of not-knowing, of wanting-to-not-know) can culminate into a powerful drive: I need to know. Is this the impotent philosopher (who will talk forever, but can’t ‘do the act’) or the priest who actually molests you (“as he whispers holy things”)? Which faces do we trust-- this is the kernel of doubt, and the beginning of real knowledge. Yes, a lot of knowledge is imaginary and symbolic, but some of it is real knowledge – and this is most paradoxical kind of of knowledge, because it’s knowledge about others. Socrates was being ironic when he told us to ‘know ourselves’-- this sort of knowledge is always symbolic, imagined, already a voice and a face before it even becomes someone…!

It’s not so much about my wanting to claim to know the truth as it is my wanting to know the truth; that is, I’d like to know what is true because I’d like to know as well as possible how the world really is.

Perhaps we cannot know how the world really is at all. Perhaps we can know only .00001% of it. Perhaps we can, one day, know almost everything about it. Who knows?

Although I’m no epistemologist, I know of no theory of knowing that has improved on the slightly tweaked jtb version. It seems that any proposition necessarily has to be believed, true, and justified to possibly count as knowledge, even though those elements in and of themselves are insufficient to make a proposition count as knowledge.

What I meant by “disordered realms” were disordered realms of the mind – radical skepticism, directed skepticism, solipsism, nihilism, and other philosophies that divorce us from ourselves and create a system that forces inauthenticity.

The cycle that you’ve described is something I agree with. Indeed, I just wrote about it the other night in my commentary on the tenth passage of the Daodejing. I’ll quote Xiong Shili again,

Now, the essay goes on to say that it is the tendency towards closing leads to an integration of many things and arrives at a single, physical synthesis. A closed door, while being comprised of a variety of things and may differ in nature from door-to-door is, ultimately, a closed door; whereas an open door is a place of infinite possibilities because of what can come through it.

The physical world is the closed door – its nature may be multifaceted and variable, but its principle remain consistent. Despite what the radical skeptics tell me, I have yet to wake up in a world where up is down and down is up and the sun is suddenly a giant chocolate cake in the sky or any other such nonsense.

However, what you were talking about was the human condition, the human desire to be more than our meager allotment. The whole of human history has been an exercise in opening that door and embracing the wild changes that it brings before shutting it in the horror of what we’ve released. Society progresses this way, on the corpses of daring men and older societies that gave way so the present could be born. What we perceive as “disordered” in the interaction of opposites and their synthesis is a fault of the human mind and its inability to grasp the mystery of the universe as opposed to a fault of the universe for being contradictory. Our aesthetic notions tell us that creativity and destruction should exist on opposite poles – but our aesthetics are merely mistaken in this regard. Likewise with peace and death, and ecstasy and the unknown.

Indeed, it is that last element I want to investigate further. It is that ecstasy that we feel when faced with the unknown that allows us to engage in the process of opening and thereby to allow the cycle of change to manifest itself. I have become convinced that we are only in a state of being when we are engaged in this process since change is our nature. The state of becoming exists in static times because they represent the lull between transformations.

However, I don’t think that this need lead us down the path of equivocation for not all distinctions are equally good. While the life of a schoolteacher and the life of a police officer can both be said to be “good” and even “good” on an equivalent plane, the life of a meth dealer or a professional hitman can both be said to be “bad” without contradicting this notion. We have to learn to have a pluralistic value system without sliding into relativism and equivocation.

So, I agree, we should not fight history; however, I do think we need to know our place within history and do our best to create the best possible future. This is why I so often harp on the value of expertise – we can’t all know everything or even most things. As Socrates so accurately pointed out, we need to remain humbled by our own ignorance at all times. While I am ignorant of many things, I am also knowledgeable in a few. If I can fulfill my role to the best of my ability and recognize those who fulfill their roles in creating the sort of future that I value, the creation of such a future is merely a matter of course.

By what realm of truth or authority?

If chaos was the beginning before man put his claws of subjectivity unto life one might say that such was the natural pre-existing order of things.

( This is where epistemology comes in handy. :slight_smile: )

If you want to discuss Chinese cosmology, we can. I’m not sure how much you’d take out of it, but don’t let that stop me! This would be a good place to start in terms of getting a handle on my cosmological leanings.

As for the chaos/order dichotomy, I don’t see it as having any actual meaning in the manner you broached the subject because for that dichotomy to exist there needs to be a human perspective in the mix. Devoid of perspective, things simply “are”, existing in a process but independent of any labels because it is the subjective viewpoint that creates those labels. The Value Judgements thread that JoeTheMan also started ties in directly to this subject.

The most important thing to understand about the Taijitu (often referred to as the “Yinyang”) is that there is only one thing. Because that thing is in a process, people mistake it for two things.

Xunzian

What do you think is really going on when we ‘become’ virtuous? Does this transformation require us to be evil first, in order to be reformed? Am I close to your point about the door, here – that it needs to closed before it can be opened? (After all, can you open an open door?) On this point, doesn’t Xun Zi argue that men are innately evil, and only become good by restraint and moderation… which eventually creates a deliberate intention to do good, even though we’re born loving profit (loving only ourselves)?

But this is all really besides the deeper point you’re making. You say that we’re only in a ‘state of being’ when we are engaged in the ‘process’ of change, because this is our ‘nature.’ Do you mean that it is our nature to change things… or are you saying that we only ‘become human’ when we produce change? Perhaps this is even a political quesiton: to be human (in a human State) we must produce value for other humans. Value emerges by our hands, eyes or voices connecting up with a natural or cultural flow of energy. The real as flux, or ‘pure’ energy, a difference in intensities which excites movement… isn’t this the cosmic form of value-in-itself?

What do you think the point of philosophy is, Xunzi? If it’s not to introduce equivocation into common sense… to ask an intelligent question and cause a social process to pause and reconsider the way it functions… then what? I think we would both agree that metaphysics is not merely chasing ecstatically after the unknown, or lapsing into a relativistic nihilism where ‘nothing is certain.’ The function of the philosopher is not to produce or engender an “art of life” (this would be to fail to distinguish poetry and art from philosopher); nor is his function to produce and refine accurate models of an unchanging reality (this would be to collapse philosophy into mathematics.) My position on this is more or less as follows: philosophy is creating ideas, that is, distinguishing between good and bad concepts… so it means creating new spaces for and within public awareness, and connecting up with a flow of energy which threatens the state apparatus.

/ sorry, tired… i wanted to get to your point about socrates, but that’ll have to be for another day. good post, btw!

Lots to chew on here. I’ve been thinking about how to respond since last night and I’m still not sure I have it totally figured out.

I’ve actually moved away from Xunzian heterodoxy and embraced the Mencian standpoint of man’s original nature (that it is good) with some reservations. I forget who offered this particular synthesis, but I do think that he had it right – when Xun Zi said “Man’s nature is evil” he was talking about the nature of the small body whereas when Mencius said that “Man’s nature is good” he was talking about the great body. With respect to what the “small body” and the “great body” are, I follow Chong Tasan’s lead:

Though I am not as openly influenced by Christianity in the same way that Tasan is, so I tend to keep my justifications a little closer to the Chinese Confucian tradition, which throws Yangming into the mix. Yangming argued that the mind and the world are coextensive. Since the external world is what the mind is directed towards and the two are shaped in a mutually reinforcing manner by each other (semiotics, essentially) the line between actor and agent becomes indistinct. Yangming then proceeds to go too far and deny that there is anything outside of the individual mind. I think that this neglects the central Confucian view of the self as it relates to co-humanity (ren), so I use Tasan’s system to correct Yangming’s myopia. From the perspective of the co-humanitarian view of the self, it makes perfect sense since the actor and agent are defined by and because of each other. The mind, in this case, is the mind of the great body (humans as a socially realized creature) rather then the mind of the small body (humans as defined by the physical boundaries of our bodies).

What this means is that, as individuals, we are subject to our passions and will behave as Xun Zi described. However, when we are acting as social, interrelated beings, our natures are as Mencius described. Since I have an affinity for the thought of Durkheim and other structuralists, to me the social-self, the great body, is foundational whereas the individualized self, the small body, comes about due to specialization and alienation from our true selves.

I talked about what virtue is and how one can attain a state of virtue in the Ethics thread. I believe that to become virtuous, one must first devote themselves to becoming virtuous and to restoring their original nature. This somewhat unsatisfactory answer, I feel, has a little more to it than it might appear at first glance – however, in order for it to have any additional meaning, I need to make one whopping assumption: virtue is a real and selective thing. I feel I have adequately defended this assumption in several threads, such as “Which Philosopher Best Represents Altruism?”. Given that assumption, it follows that by striving to be virtuous, one will learn learn what virtue is through the process of action almost independent on their starting position. Think about it like a science, where it doesn’t really matter whether the initial hypothesis is correct or not – what matters is what the implications of the actual data are and how we can construct a system around that. As we approach virtue, we thrive (eudaimonia) and this thriving drives us onwards towards virtue and further thriving.

As for the opened and closed doors, I think that there is a time for both and I won’t speculate on the original status of the door: we live in a processal world, and so all of our stories cannot help but begin in medias res. The nature of the opened and closed doors is less important than the actual process whereby progress makes its presence felt. Far from a simple slide into the future, it is instead a violent process. I feel that this co-dependent dichotomy between destruction and progress allows a reasonable critique of the post-modern objection to metanarratives.

I’m breaking up my response to your post somewhat since I personally find that I get lost on overly-long posts. The nature of message boards as opposed to actual books.

I think that what I said in my last post builds up to this notion – that change is, fundamentally, all that there is. “The only constant is change,” so it makes sense that we are only sincere when we are engaged in that process. I think that you’ve pretty much hit the nail on the head with your questions, and I would answer “yes” to each of them depending on the perspective we are employing.

Yes, since the human experience is coextensive with the world, our process of change necessarily involves the world around us. Our understanding of the world shapes how we see the world and interact with it. As we interact with the world, we both force a change as well as deepen our understanding of it.

Yes, since becoming human entails realizing the relationship we share with the world. We only become fully human when we engage in relationships with others and extend ourselves outwards but such interactions leave both parties altered.

I couldn’t have said it better.

I don’t see these elements as distinct, but rather as integrated elements of the same thing. In another thread I discussed the notion of ‘wuxing’, or the idea of how everything exists in a state of flux. Now, I think it is important to separate the ancient mumbo-jumbo that is false due to the ignorance of the framers (elemental theory and all sorts of alchemical nonsense) from the ingenious nature of the idea itself and how we can apply it to ourselves. We do not exist as one state but rather we constantly exist between states.

As for the nature of philosophy – for me, philosophy is by its very nature a moral pursuit. Perhaps you are right and I am mistaking philosophy for poetry, but I for one lament the division that has grown between them. Philosophy is learning to be human and embracing that humanity. I do agree that often we need to introduce a measure of equivocation to that mixture to ensure that our pursuits don’t become overly trivial, but I think that focusing exclusively on equivocation is, in-and-of-itself, a trivialization (in a Whiteheadian sense) of what philosophy is and ought be.

I am just looking for a honest answer to my questions.

Do you have any material that isn’t I CHING or Confucious related?

I’ve been doing nothing but give you honest answers to your questions.

As for material that can’t be related to Confucius or Yijing – is there such material? Especially on a philosophy website.

I am only familiar with Western philosophy mate although I do understand some Eastern religious and spiritual inquiries.

( Not enough for the way your are building the conversation though.)

Sorry. I try to be relatively accessible in my description of Eastern thought. That is part of why many of my posts get kinda long because I spend a fair amount of time either directly quoting or paraphrasing a hefty dose of primary material before I move onto my interpretation and how the material I just covered relates to it.

Is there anything you are unclear on that I could help with?

My reply was:

My point is that the notion of chaos and order can only exist when there is a perspective that creates that dichotomy. Just as we create value through the needs of our subjective viewpoint, so too is order and chaos created from the observations of our subjective viewpoint. I used a popular and presumably familiar representation of this notion:

This ties into the point I was making when I was talking to JoeTheMan, human beings have actually confused the states of being and becoming with one another, so when we perceive a thing in the process that is the thing-itself we mistakenly think that the thing will finish becoming when it is the process of becoming that is the thing!

Both chaos and order are actually states of becoming – nothing rests at either state but instead it changes between the two.