In the first article of this series, we established that the world as is and the world as perceived are separate entities. In the second article, we deduced the infallibility of knowledge, and the need for a rigorous, systematic approach knowledge acquisition. In the third article, we explored how seemingly fundamental concepts such as causation are actually illusions brought about by our conscious observation. Indeed, this line of reasoning can also be extended to ideas such as space, time, temperature, and many other concepts that we may believe to be foundational. In this final article in the Epistemology series, I would like to posit to the reader a question: why bother with the nonsense of epistemology? For the less scientifically inclined, it seems like a monumental waste of effort to adapt our view of the universe to this abstract, mentally taxing model of mass illusion. However, although it may seem that way on the surface, having this depth of understanding about the nature of knowledge turns out to be a requirement for any sort of higher level thinking.
I will give you a quick example, harking back to our exploration of causation in the third article. I would like the reader to imagine how the dropping dropping of a ball causes it to fall. The hand lets go of the ball, and the ball moves expectedly towards the ground. One line of reasoning will tell us that the letting go of the ball caused it to move to the ground. Another line of reasoning will tell us that the gravitational pull of the earth, facilitated by the letting go of the ball, caused the ball to move towards the ground. Yet another line of reasoning will tell us that in a vacuum, letting go of the ball does nothing, and so the letting go is a superfluous part of the equation, and the only causal factor is the gravitational pull of the earth. However, the correct line of reasoning is this: the events of letting go of the ball, and its plummet towards the earth, are concurrent events. The theory of gravity gives us some explanation as to why these phenomenon occur concurrently, but in reality, we do not actually know why this happens. All that we know is that the same action can be repeated to consistently yield the same result.
We are a society addicted to explanations. We seek answers for the innumerable phenomena of everyday life. It is only once we accept that there are no true explanations, just reasonable guesses and reliable outcomes, that we are able to actually move on to more complex problem solving. Most people are not able to adapt to this abstraction, the consequences of which are made clear through their decisions and faulty reasoning (we see this often during discussions about ethics and politics, however it also makes itself known for the worse in romantic relationships as well).
For a responsible wielder of reason, we have to make sure that our premises are built upon sturdy foundations, and it just so happens that in the realm of argument, the sturdiest foundations are also the most difficult to conceptualize. Indeed, it would be an apt explanation to posit that a truly responsible epistemological foundation is an anti-conception, a willingness to divorce your conceptual categorizations from the divine prospect of reason. If we begin making arguments upon poorly conceived or epistemologically lazy foundations, our conclusions can only be riddled with holes and redundancies. You see this in its most obvious form in political discourse, where people blame ideological concepts such as communisim, capatalism and facism, for problems in the world – as if a concept itself could hold a gun and force someone to act against their will. Upon pushing against such poorly conceived positions, the inevitable fallback arguments will point to unfalsifiable psychic phenomena such as “a way of thinking” and other contrived conceptual scapegoats, which only serve to reveal that the position of your opposition has not been thought through thoroughly and with respect to foundational principles of reason. Faulty argumentative styles are unfortunately satisfying and easy – to really drill down into the root causes of complex societal problems requires discipline and cutting honesty. Moreso, a desire to reason properly for the sake of reason itself is often a necessary emotional state superseding the desire to be correct, but that emotional battle is a conversation for another time.
An example of category mistakes in relationship to foundational thinking is as follows: The economy collapses due to corruption within banking. Blaming capitalism, corruption itself, bad morals or any other phenomena on the conceptual level would be making a category mistake. Blaming inspecific actions taken by a group of potentially responsible people would be a category mistake of a lesser travesty, for example, casting the blame upon insider trading. The respectfully foundational course of action would be ascribing blame to specific people who took specific actions which led to the collapse of the economy. Any line of argument which takes place on a conceptual level above specific people taking specific actions obfuscates the cause-effect relationship that we are trying to induct with our arguments, and constitutes weaker evidence the further away the actions in question get from concrete physical phenomena. (For example, saying “these political figures created an atmosphere of fear”, is much weaker than “The policies these political figures implemented led to increased risks associated with property investment, which likely resulted in less people investing in property).
In order to have an intellectually honest discussion of any topic, you must first delve deep to the foundational, or axiomatic principles of that topic. Before ethics there is meta-ethics, before physics there is meta-physics, and before knowledge of any kind, preceding argument of any kind, there is a baseline level of respect for the nature of our universe and the perverting affect our consciousness has on it. It may seem like a useless and dead end prospect to perpetuate that knowledge as an objective and unchanging entity that can be acquired doesn’t exist, but the critical importance of the distinction between objective knowledge and consistent reliability of prediction has been demonstrated in arguments from authority predicated on placing trust in scientific bodies to make decisions concerning things which fall outside the realm of what the scientific method is able to produce. It is critical that we, as responsible thinkers looking to gestate satisfying modes of living for ourselves and our communities, strive to delineate the difference between communicative conceptualization, and those things which can be said to be “real” in a metaphysical sense.
This rigorous approach to knowledge, which I like to call Foundational Thinking, will become all the more relevant once we move on to ethical frameworks and politics, as the mistakes we make at lower levels of reasoning will spiral into unfortunate and often tragic conclusions higher up the philosophical chain. Foundational Thinking involves cutting concepts away from each other which might be fallaciously or mistakenly married to one another by coincidental association, such as skin cancer rates and ice cream sales, which both tend to rise at the same time; or more deviously, feelings of intense love and partner choice; or more difficult to recognize as mistakes, such as the phenomena of letting go of a ball and seeing that ball fall to the ground.
I would like to end this article series on a joke I was told as a teenager, as it is very telling as to what these four articles were about:
A mathematician, a physicist, and an engineer are riding a train through Scotland.
The engineer looks out the window, sees a black sheep. He exclaims to the others, “Scottish sheep are black!”
The physicist looks out the window and comments, “In all of Scotland, there is at least one black sheep.”
The mathematician looks out the window and corrects the physicist, ” In all of Scotland, we can be sure that at least one side of one sheep, is black.”
