Philosophy for the layman I: Epistemology

Recently I’ve studied a man known as John Dewey, an American philosopher with a background in education and psychology. He believed that philosophy was only as useful as its reach. This is known as an instrumental idea. He sees philosophy as a tool or a utility. Kind of like how language is a tool. So philosophy is only good when people can actually use it.

As such, he wrote books about philosophy that were easy to understand for ordinary people. He tried to explain a lot of the terminology… as opposed to endeavouring to elucidate neologisms.

Obviously ordinary people aren’t stupid, but most schools don’t teach Greek or Latin, so it’s a good idea to stick to English words if you want a lot of people to understand your English writing.

Less sesquipedalian colloquialisms and more Lingua Franca as it were. (And yes, I’m being funny right now.)

Point is: I want to write a series of articles that will hopefully be useful to many people. That allow my readers to maybe examine the world in new ways, and ask interesting questions about life, society and even gain some practical ways of solving everyday problems.

That’s why I am starting with epistemology. Epistemology refers to the study of the nature of knowledge. To put it into a series of questions, it might be something like this:

“What is knowledge?”

“How does knowledge work?”

“When does something become knowledge?”

“Why do we even need knowledge to begin with?”

“How do we understand knowledge?”

These are very big questions, and the more you think about it, the more complicated it gets. The most straightforward way to examine the nature of knowledge is to look at the way we examine things.

But wait!

Straightforwardness, or intuition, is actually in itself an interesting epistemological phenomenon. Because it has a basis in what is known as the a priori. A priori is Latin for “What comes first.” In other words: An assumption. One of the most useful things about epistemology is that it makes us aware of assumptions.

Some assumptions are of course natural. “I’ll see you tomorrow?”, “Sure thing.” We don’t think “Hmm… will there be a tomorrow?”, “Is the sun going to rise this next time around?” We just naturally assume that our day-night cycle can be taken for granted.

But what about more insidious assumptions? We watch the news for instance, and the anchor-man says “Today there’s been reports about a lot of activity from enemy combatants in the region of Kabul.”

To the uncritical mind, that’s just public information, a normal news broadcast. But to examine it critically is to ask “Hang on. Why do I have enemies in Kabul?”, “Do I even know anyone in Kabul?”, “What has anyone in Kabul ever done to me?”, “On whose behalf is this news anchor actually speaking?”

That’s why epistemology is not merely some high minded idea that bookish people have fun discussing. These kinds of questions have real life or death consequences. Public opinion about a war is going to affect millions of lives on both sides of the conflict.

So first thing to note, quite literally, is the knowledge we take for granted. The thoughts and ideas that kind of blend into the background of thoughts and languages. Some are perfectly natural, but others can be of critical importance to actually examine and ask questions about.

So in that sense, epistemology is very grounded in language.

In fact, one very interesting thing to examine is the relationship between the sensory (seeing, hearing, feeling), and the language that describes such things. We hear a loud humming and see a winged shape in the sky. Then we think “Oh that must be an airplane.”

So in some ways knowledge isn’t just observations, but also affirming those observations through language. Until we can conclude that what we’re seeing is an airplane, then all we have is a shape and a sound.

And for many epistemological thinkers, there is a kind of invisible barrier between senses and reason. In philosophy these ideas can be divided into Empiricism (truth through observation) and Rationalism (truth through reason).

And this is where skepticism comes in. Especially by a man called Rene Descartes. To see is not to believe, and to believe is certainly not always to see. Religion is a good example of this. No one has God visit their baptism. “Hello I’m God, it’s nice to meet you, glad you could join us.”, no. No one sees God, but many people believe in God.

So if you want to make an argument for God’s existence, then unless you’re Abraham or Moses, then you must probably rely on a rational argument. The empirical argument would be to say “Here’s a photograph of God.” The rational appeal would be founded in a more indirect argument. For example “We feel love, we enjoy music, we can laugh, we have spiritual needs… therefore, we must possess a soul, and if we possess a soul, then there must be some kind of bestowal of such a soul.”

(That’s just a very basic example by the way, there’s a lot better arguments put forward throughout history, but they’re usually very, very, very long.)

But that’s a good example of a very passionate debate between empiricists and rationalists. During the renaissance when these two schools of thought really began to grow, a lot of empiricists became agnostics or deists. I suspect one or two might’ve even been atheists, but you could get in trouble for writing about that to the public.

But there was of course also a great deal of nuance. It wasn’t just this idea of Galileo vs. the Vatican, and Science vs. God. In fact, Spinoza is a good example of a philosopher who had a great deal of influence over how the ideas of modern science, but who absolutely possessed a spiritual motivation in his own passion for science.

A lot of renaissance empiricists believed that science was the highest kind of religion, because what better way to adore and appreciate a God than to explore the nuances and intricate ideas of God’s creation?

So the big thing empiricism did wasn’t so much to dispute God or the religion of ordinary people, rather it challenged the authority of the church.

Because at this point in history, the church decided what the truth was. Usually through the examination of scripture which was suspiciously forbidden to the public through strict regulations on publishing and translation.

If you wanted to read scripture then you had to study Greek or Latin, and if you wanted to study Greek or Latin then you had to go to a university that was controlled by the church.

So the church had immense authority over people’s minds, and today we know that this was in fact because of how the church frequently lied about religious teachings and scripture to serve the interests of their own institutions.

So empiricism was a great leveller in this sense. It gave people some way of actually challenging the judgements of the church and to produce their own understanding of what is true.

These days we kind of separate religion and politics, at least to a noteworthy extent. But during the time of medieval churches, religion was politics.

And that created a lot of problems for common people. Because for instance, if the church represents the indisputable truth of God, then why need human rights? Why need fair trials? If the church says you’re guilty of a crime, then you must be. As such you had a class of nobility that could sentence people to hanging just by pointing a finger at them and saying “God wants you to hang.”

And that was the truth.

So you can see how the concept of evidence. The concept of investigation. How these are very important ideas. Suddenly you can say “Hang on, I have proof that I didn’t commit this crime, I can show you that I’m innocent!”

This was a great relief to people everywhere, especially religious people who lived in religious societies, but it was extremely frustrating to the church.

So empiricism had serious impacts on the way we examine law, civil rights and criminal proceedings. As did rationalism.

And we see that in modern day court rooms. The police detective is an empiricist. He collects DNA evidence, fingerprints, surveillance footage, eyewitness testimonies, and he says “Here’s a bunch of pieces of information that demonstrate how this person is a criminal.” and then he charges the suspect with a crime.

And then what happens? In walks the lawyer. The lawyer is a rationalist. He looks at the evidence and he thinks about it. He comes up with rational appeals to contend the evidence. He says “Okay, sure, these fingerprints prove that my client was at the crime scene. But they don’t prove when he was there.”

So to find the truth you generally need a little bit of both. You need to investigate and find evidence, but you also need to question and think about the meaning of that evidence. Because sometimes when you hear the clopping of hooves it’s not a horse, sometimes it’s a zebra.

And we even have principled a priori ideas as well. A good example from law is the presumption of innocence. Because you can’t always prove that you didn’t do something.

For example: You’re sitting alone at home and reading a book, and someone accuses you of swearing. They say you spent the whole day sitting alone and telling the most profane and vulgar swear words. Really nasty things that would even make a sailor blush.

How do you prove that you didn’t? There’s no recording of you sitting in your living room and reading. God probably won’t climb down from heaven and say “Don’t worry, I saw the whole thing.” Should you be judged on the basis of such an accusation just because you can’t prove it?

That’s why, unless someone has a recording of you shouting a bunch of filthy things at the top of your lungs, then it’s probably not very fair to judge you as if you did.

Which brings us to another question. What if you actually did do it? Just because it’s not provable doesn’t mean that you didn’t do it. Should we just let it slide? What if you’re invited on live television and a bunch of kids are watching? Do we want to risk a foulmouth teaching them bad words?

There is no objective answer to that. You can say “Better safe than sorry.” or you can say “Some principles are worth the risk.” But generally speaking in modern societies we’ve settled on a very practical answer, which is simply that life is fairer and easier when we judge one another on the basis of proof.

No one likes to have nasty rumours spread about them, and no one likes to be punished for things they didn’t do. But most importantly: With great power comes great responsibility. The burden of proof should generally fall on the strongest party.

And that is of course the government and the legal system. The police has millions of employees, a huge tax funded budget, they have crime labs and forensic tools and specialists and technology that most individual citizens could scarcely dream of. So it’s only fair that they do the hard work.

Same thing is true about gossip or rumours. It’s a contest between the individual who is accused, and the large crowd who has been made aware of the accusations.

So we generally accept that a punishment from authority is more devastating than any transgression made by the individual subjects of such an authority, and that’s why they get the benefit of the doubt.

But in a more abstract (thought-form) sense, is that really truthful?

And the answer is no. In that kind of ambigious situation we simply won’t know the truth. All we can do is to come up with a principle that allows us to act even when we don’t have the truth.

So a big part of epistemology is also what kind of ethics or rules we turn to when we simply don’t know enough to make an informed action.

And that’s when we get into the subject of risk. Lack of truth and lack of clarity is what creates an element of risk. For instance: There’s no risk in jumping off a tall building. If the building is tall enough, then you die. It has an absolute and consistent outcome.

But let’s say you’re standing on the 4th floor balcony of a building that’s on fire? You might die if you jump, but then again, some people survive. And if you don’t jump then the fire might get you, or the building might collapse. Suddenly there’s an element of uncertainty. That’s what creates risk.

There’s no risk in jumping out of a speeding plane. You just die. But there might be some element of risk in jumping out of the plane when you wear a parachute. Maybe it’s a good quality parachute, and maybe you know it’s been packed by someone who knows what they’re doing, but it’s not as if you can test the parachute prior to jumping.

So epistemology is also about understanding risk, and even how to negate risk.

We can do this by looking at patterns, for instance to examine how well parachutes have worked in the past. That would be an empirical approach. But we can also use rationalism. A rational argument against jumping might be “It’s very windy today, and the parachute will probably not deploy correctly.”

Do you need to have 100 people jump out of a plane with a parachute during a tornado to establish in some empirical sense that using a parachute during bad weather conditions might be dangerous? Not really. We just need to understand how wind resistance and silk interact with one another. Not everything needs to be tested for it to be true. So in that sense, rationalism has an advantage.

In fact pure empiricism would be absolute insanity. “Sure, other people die from drinking cyanide, but I am not those people, perhaps I won’t die from drinking cyanide since there is no evidence to suggest that I specifically am vulnerable to cyanide poisoning.”

And then you die from drinking cyanide.

And just like how there’s a burden of proof, there’s also a burden of risk in ethics.

One example of that is war. If a soldier sees a shadowy figure approaching them at night, and they have no way of telling if it’s a friend, foe or civilian, what do they do? If they do nothing, then the approaching individual might shoot them. But if they take advantage of the element of surprise and fire first, then they might kill an innocent civilian or even an allied soldier.

And in such a situation the ethical answer is pretty obvious: Take the risk. You have military training, equipment, and you chose to be a soldier. You signed up for this.

And that’s often what professional ethics is about. It’s about direct or indirect liability. Lawyers, doctors, firemen, soldiers, even priests. They all possess some kind of code of ethics that makes them liable in situations of uncertainty.

And epistemology is what paints a picture of what defines uncertainty, and risk, and how to actually resolve it. Not exclusively, it’s also tied into other philosophical categories such as ethics and morality, but epistemology is absolutely necessary to have any idea of what morality or ethics are.

And religion tells us something very interesting about how we regard knowledge and morality as interconnected. Because God is always moral. God knows everything, and God is always moral. If you are a believer in religion, or at least in Abrahamic religions and not to mention Buddhism, then you believe that God knows everything (or, that Buddha has attained enlightenment and learned some essential truth about the universe), and therefore always does what is morally good.

And that’s an interesting assumption. Why does God have to do what is right just because he knows everything? Why not use his knowledge to play the stock market, or win big in Vegas? Why not use his knowledge to manipulate and take advantage of people?

The military has a vast network of intelligence, they are desperately searching for knowledge and information and they generally use that knowledge as a weapon.

So why wouldn’t God do that?

Why do we (at least for the most part) assume that if someone knows everything, if someone possesses some impossible and vast universal truth about reality itself, that they would become moral? That all this information and full understanding of absolutely everything would make someone conclude “The truth is to be good to others.”

That’s a very powerful assumption. And religious or not, it does say something very interesting about our species, and the sentimental nature of our species.

In fact, most human languages are structured that way. “To do what is right.” Right is after all not a moral qualifier, but rather a qualifier of correctness. 2+2=4 is right, but it doesn’t have any moral significance.

So we have this idea that truth and kindness are interconnected. That’s a very interesting thing to examine as well. Especially since there’s a lot of evidence to the contrary. The truth hurts, the truth is unfair, the truth is condemning and often times difficult. So what makes the truth so good?

Why even bother with the truth? If a lie makes us happy, then why not live a lie?

That’s when we really cut to the bone of philosophy. Because more often than not it comes down to freedom. Very few philosophers see happiness as something important. The existentialists believe the height of existence is to be authentic. The stoics believe that the height of existence is to be virtuous. The nihilists absolutely relish the painful truth, most of them see optimism itself as a lie no matter how well you can prove it.

Even philosophical schools who do in fact value happiness usually put some nuance on it. Like Epicureans. They believe in authentic and lived happiness through noble pursuits of knowledge and culture and health. They would denounce empty pleasure seeking as something destructive that ultimately undermines real spiritual happiness.

You would think that the philosophers of happiness would be a bunch of world denying alcoholics. But again, that lifestyle usually befalls the nihilists.

And what’s really fascinating is when we examine this idea of authenticity and also virtue. Because they have something in common.

Authenticity is absolutely grounded in the idea of truth. To be your true and authentic self, and to use that sense of attainment is absolutely a moral value.

We know this because the most influential existentialists such as Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone Du Beauvoir were all part of the French resistance during WW2. Their whole work is dedicated to confronting the evils they witnessed during the Nazi occupation of France.

To somehow reconcile the idea between having strong moral convictions, and yet to avoid the corrupting influences of dogmatism that they witnessed first hand.

So their perspective is highly informed by how they lived during a time when people were pressured into moral cowardice. To appease the Nazis by being informants, by participating in anti-Semitic rallies, by displaying and expressing obedience and conformity to Nazi ideas. Even if you hated the Nazis you still had a motive of survival in pretending to like them.

So the existentialists saw a bunch of people who probably were perfectly moral, and who, if they had some sense of empowerment, would probably have denounced the Nazis at the very top of their lungs.

And yet they would go outside and they would watch the parades and wave their little flags and listen to the speeches and try to fit in and avoid negative attention.

So in other words, they were being inauthentic.

Most French citizens hated the gestapo, and the firing squads and the concentration camps, but they didn’t do anything. They listened to their fear rather than the truth.

So we see just like with the Abrahamic idea of the truth being something that radicalises people towards morally good behaviour, that existentialists drew the exact same conclusion.

So what about the classics then? What about stoicism? Same exact idea. Virtue comes from the Latin word “Vir”, which means “Man.” Not the gendered man, but the universal man, as in man and woman. So virtue was to be exemplary human. To possess great traits of humanity. Goodness, wisdom, justice, strength, fortitude, insight, honesty, the list goes on.

And we don’t just see that in European cultures. Look at Buddhism. Buddhism has very similar ideas about the importance of kindness, and forgiving, and peace and they refer to the exercise of these things as becoming enlightened. To find the truth by doing good.

So we see many examples in history of how religion and philosophy and cultural values all gravitate towards this idea that to understand the world is to become a kinder and much more moral person.

And I emphasise understanding because I think there is a big difference between knowing the world, and to understand it. And I think true knowledge comes from a combination of knowing something and to understand it.

For example: A doctor knows your body. They can list names for all the bones, muscles, organs, they can diganose and treat illnesses, and so on. The doctor can explain a lot about your body in a very formal and categorical way. And that’s very important of course.

But what about understanding your body? In that case a doctor is certainly a good start. But you might also want to talk to a chef, or an athlete, or maybe even an artist.

They might not have as much descriptive information about your body as a doctor, but they can certainly offer perspectives and insights that most doctors can’t.

In fact, most doctors will tell you that the steeples of health is good diet and exercise, that those two parts of your life can make your need to see a doctor completely redundant. But very few doctors can explain just how to cook a good meal or how to perform an effective exercise routine.

So there is a distinction between the retentive (to have information) and the analytical (how to use and interpret that information.)

And in layman’s terms we often refer to the analytical part as wisdom, and generally we don’t have true knowledge about something unless we possess a degree of both. That’s the difference between you and google. Google has a bizarre amount of retentive knowledge, but Google lacks the analytical abilities to, for instance, brew a nice cup of tea.

Even if we made Google into a robot or an AI, then at most, Google could guess or estimate what is considered a nice cup of tea based on the information and feedback we give to Google. Google could never have the organic senses to actually understand what makes a cup of tea nice.

So it’s a bit like the tinman and the scarecrow. You need the brain and the heart if you actually want to understand something.

And that takes us forward in philosophy to the age of positivism.

Positivism was the result of how philosophy found itself being challenged by academic institutions. A lot of subjects had been disqualified such as astrology, phrenology and similar pseudoscience. Many people in what we now call the STEM fields (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) were giving philosophy and a lot of other fields in the humanities the side-eye.

And since STEM is a lot more directly profitable due to the sales and royalties on things like patents and vocational training, they had a lot more influence and authority. You can’t really sell a patent on the meaning of truth, or a new way to examine moral dilemmas.

And the only truly profitable wing of the humanities, namely the arts department, were generally usurped by the commercial abilities of the publishing industry.

So because of these institutional politics, philosophy was pressured into demonstrating its merit as a STEM field.

(Which is kind of ridiculous considering how STEM itself is entirely a legacy of classical philosophy. Imagine coming up with formal logic, or mathematics for that matter, without using epistemology.)

So a new movement emerged intended to “save” philosophy, and it was known as positivism… and it’s been kind of a disaster.

Positivism is the idea that all truthful statements must be logically positive. And what that means is that unless you can scientifically prove something… then it doesn’t exist.

Needless to say, this created a huge crisis particularly in the topic of morality, but also with regards to things like psychology, culture, art and similar stuff.

That’s when we see an age of very cold and hard industry. As well as settler-colonialism, world wars and very inhumane and cruel treatment of people in mental institutions. Suddenly people were no longer hurt by things, instead they were harmed, and harm was a very nebulous idea that often happened on a collective scale. Between nations, peoples… even races.

This is where we get so-called scientific racism, the bell curve theory, and the idea that human worth comes from technological achievements. We see separations between “human beings” and “animals.” We see separations between “nature and city.” We see a new kind of intelligence that’s cold, and harsh, and calculating. In the age of positivism, intelligence was a weapon that made people mean. It gave us petrochemical infrastructure, the atom bomb, and eugenics…

But it also gave us the polio vaccine, and space travel, and socialism.

Positivism is complicated. In some senses it was a dark age, but in others it was a renaissance. To summarise positivism is to say that it represented an age that gave us a lot of technology that we didn’t understand.

This was the age of electricity, modern medicine, combustible engines, and weapons of mass destruction.

For the first time in human history, we didn’t measure the past in centuries, but rather in decades.

And for the first time in human history, did not measure death tolls of war in the thousands, but rather in the millions.

This was the golden age of Nietzsche. When we cast away with the oppressive and meek superstitions of morality, and pursued the empowerment of the self. An age where the strong would live and the weak would die. Where the masses would no longer hold back the elites…

Starting to see why Nietzsche was such an inspiration to the Nazis?

God was — at least as far as academia was concerned — dead. And now was the time for science to conquer the world. We lived in an age without emotion, without metaphysics (stuff that’s sort of real and imaginary at the same time, like time or beauty), without morality and without principles.

And that’s what made a lot of ideas within fascism possible. It was when you applied the scientific method to morality, using technology as a kind of unit of evidence to determine how human someone was.

Because the idea was that you had “Humans” who were technological beings, and “Animals” who lived in what we called “Nature.”

Prior to positivism, these distinctions did not exist in such a way. We were all animals, and we all lived in nature. But positivists saw artifical environments produced by scientific agency as something outside of mere nature, as something inorganic that could defy the forces of nature.

They concluded that if a bunch of natives in the pacific islands didn’t have electricity or cars, then that must mean they’re not quite as human as people who do.

And that was very convenient for technologically advanced societies, because they also had very advanced modes of weaponry and warfare. So here we had this new scientific dogma that basically gave the green light for all these empires to go out and conquer the world.

And even though Hitler was the world leader that faced the most scrutiny for his actions, truth is that this was quite the bandwagon. French, Prussians, Imperial Russia, England, Germany, Belgium, Holland, United States, the list goes on. Colonialism gained a lot more momentum as these places invaded all kinds of regions. Particularly in Latin America, Indochina, the Pacific Islands and not to mention Africa.

Colonialism prior to this had been under a lot of criticism from the public. Even Christopher Columbus himself was actually very unpopular among the Spanish public when he was alive because they saw his slaving and pillaging as unchristian.

But now we had a new gospel to spread. The holy word of science. Once again we found a reason to go out there, meet new people, and accuse them of being savages. South Africa for instance was a good example of this. They make appeals to secularism when they attempt to justify apartheid. “Before we got here these people didn’t have cars or hospitals.” No one says “Before we got here these people didn’t have any churches or priests.”

So we see a rebirth of the old status quo. Instead of churches and priests having an authority on what the truth is, now it was universities and professors.

Say goodbye to the monsters of old. Crazy religious fundamentalists like Vladimir Tepes or King George V, and say hello to a new kind of scientific fundamentalist, men like Josef Mengele and Cecil Rhodes.

But none of this is to disqualify science of course. It’s just to say that science can answer some questions, but to directly use science as a moral instrument is no different from directly using scripture as a moral instrument. Because when you do that you deny the ambiguity that should be resolved with wisdom, and that in turn invites tyranny.

Because when it comes to the pursuit of power, the tyrants usually win. They want it more.

So there is no straightforward way of scientifically resolving morality or culture.

But that doesn’t mean that science can’t inform us on morality and culture.

For instance, medicine gives us a great deal of understanding when it comes to morality. By knowing what a healthy human being is, then we can discern what needs that human beings have. And one very straightforward way to do good is to make sure people have their needs met. To simply make life more liveable.

And I think that’s really where we see this idea of truth meeting morality. Because the truth is that generally speaking, we enjoy the same fundamental things. We want to live in peace, and safety. We don’t want to be cold or hungry. And in the broader strokes of life, morality is almost childlike in its obviousness.

I think the biggest truth of them all is that to understand others is to know how to help others, and to help others is to truly define oneself as being human. It is by working together that we have cities, and laws, and civilisations and languages. I think that’s the obvious and yet profound lesson that so many cultures and religious teachings have tried to convey to us throughout history.

To be alone is to know evil.

And with that, I conclude my first article on philosophy for the layman. I hope you found it to be worthwhile. Thank you for reading.