I had another meeting with a philosophy group tonight. We're in module 6, epistemology -- how do we know that we know what we think we know. I've decided to start capturing snippets of my philosophy class whenever I have live sessions. But here I'll give some personal thoughts that go well beyond class.
Ken
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1. It would have made a lot of sense to hammer out the question of knowledge and truth more extensively at the beginning of our quest. Shouldn't we have figured out more fully how to sort out what is true before we started exploring specific topics in philosophy?
We did lay some groundwork back in the beginning on the question of truth. For example, we asked what the proper balance of faith and reason was. We talked about logical fallacies and the three basic tests for truth: the correspondence test, the coherence test, and the pragmatic test. We talked about presuppositions, particularly those a person of faith might have.
If I've been doing my job, along the journey, you've been seeing that there is virtually always more than one perspective on an issue than the one we grew up with. That doesn't mean our "traditions" are wrong. But it does mean we do start off far more as "slaves" to our backgrounds than as free thinkers. So often, we don't know what we don't know.
2. For example, in ethics, we learned that the choice is not just between absolutism and relativism. I argued that, on most issues, the biblical position is "universal with exceptions." This is not absolutism but something closer to what we might call "principlism." Even then, the New Testament is much more virtue-based than act based -- a whole different approach than many of us grew up with.
Similarly, relativism doesn't mean a person doesn't believe in right and wrong. It's just relative to culture or the individual. No belief in right and wrong at all would be moral nihilism.
My point is that, when we first encounter a position we've never heard or thought of, our first reaction is often to be defensive. We go into "binary-thinking" mode. This is "either-or" thinking. This is "us vs. them" thinking. "My way or the highway."
But most of the time, there's a spectrum of possible positions a person could take on any particular issue. It's not just pacifist versus serial killer. There are several other positions in between.
3. Take our earlier discussion of economic philosophy. It's not just capitalism or communism. It's just bad thinking to say that if a person is not your kind of capitalist, they are a socialist or communist. There are gradations between these. Australia is capitalist, but they have universal health care. They are more socialist than the US, but far less than North Korea. They are still better classified as capitalist than socialist.
Binary thinking is often a defensive mechanism -- I'm caught off guard because I didn't realize there were other ways to think about something. It's also usually sloppy thinking. It gets me off the hook from having to think. You have a position different from mine so you're obviously wrong.
It's very useful. If I can give you a label, then I don't have to listen to you. "You're a Democrat" or "You're MAGA." Therefore, I don't have to think about what you're claiming.
I call this "labelism." I try to attach a label to something so I don't have to think about it. "That's woke." Or "that's evangelical." Or "that's Marxist." It works well for those who want to stay in their particular cave of choice. [1] No thought necessary.
But it won't do if you want to be a good thinker. It works well on the campaign trail or on social media. It is good old average thinking.
4. Early in our journey was a section on Unexamined Assumptions. I have sometimes called this "unitary thinking" because you think in one way -- the only way you know how to think.
Then you find out that there is another way to think about an issue. You are taken off guard. Maybe you are alarmed. "Well, everyone knows that's wrong." Maybe you villainize the other perspective or the person with it. Maybe you invoke religion to try to shut down thinking the other way.
But there are almost always other ways to look at things. We move into what I have called "spectrum thinking." We see that there are multiple possible positions on most issues, with several of them probably being within a tolerable range.
Eventually, we move toward a certain "epistemic humility." I become aware of my own fallibility as a knower. It doesn't mean we don't believe in truth. It means that we realize our own limitations as thinkers about it. We realize that there is much more mystery to God and the universe than we might like to admit. Indeed, we recognize that the meaning of the Bible itself isn't always a clear as we might like it to be.
5. You may have heard of the Dunning-Kruger effect. Apparently, a person who knows very little about a particular topic may sometimes feel like they are virtually experts on it. A person with no expertise may be convinced that they are masters on a subject. No doubt this dynamic is on display every day all over social media.
One of my complaints about media right now is that it is providing a lot of skewed talking points. We are provided with a host of half-baked arguments that we can use on our verbal sparing partners. They are sometimes misleading, skewed, or downright wrong. But they give us a feeling of intelligence in our lack of true knowledge.
When you actually begin to gain genuine learning on a subject, you usually begin to realize quickly how little you actually knew during your earlier "cocky" phase. I certainly have experienced this dynamic myself repeatedly in the course of my life. I hear an interpretation of a Bible passage that I've never heard before. My first instinct has sometimes been to think, "Well, that's stupid."
Then I begin to hear the argument. If I listen to the evidence, my arrogance often has softened. Eventually, I may even change my mind. I have repeatedly over the course of my life as a biblical interpreter.
Take the common sense that the story of Sodom and Gomorrah was about homosexuality. Extremely common. Yet these men want to rape the angels. An ancient reader would have assumed these men were married and had children. The more you dig into the context, the more you realize that this event is only tangentially related to contemporary debates about homosexuality.
When I first heard this claim, I thought it was ridiculous. As it turned out, I was reading my paradigms and assumptions into the text withour realizing it. I was an "unreflective knower," a unitary thinker on this passage.
6. We will only advance in our understanding if we have a genuine openness to the real truth. I have found over the years that it is often those who most shout, "Stand up for the truth!" who are actually the least open to hearing it. "Truth" for them really means "my tradition." Unable to make an argument on the merits, they often resort to labels, power moves, and ad hominem attacks.
Why is education so unpopular right now? I don't personally think it is because it fiendishly leads people away from the truth. It's primarily because it threatens unexamined assumptions. It exposes blind spots. That doesn't mean that the experts in a particular area are always right, as we will see. The paradigms of today's experts are often the traditions that the next generation of experts deconstructs.
I think it's understandable that many would see education as "making people liberal." What may be going on in many cases is that a good education tends to uncover our blind spots. It exposes our unexamined assumptions. In that regard, it may not "conserve" our traditions and "free" a person to think in other ways. But this is what "conservatism" and "liberalism" are -- conserving traditions or freeing from them.
And that may be the primary reason for the stereotypes. I don't think it's generally nefarious. It actually seems predictable.
[1] Referencing Plato's allegory of the cave, something we'll look at in the next section.
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6.1 Beyond Binary Thinking
6.2 Plato's Allegory of the Cave
6.3 Reason vs. Experience
6.4 Kant Breaks the Tie.
6.5 The Bible as Object of Knowledge
6.6 Wittgenstein and Language
6.7 Kuhn and Paradigms
6.8 Foucault and Power
6.9 A Pragmatic Epistemology
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