Epistemology #3

The one and the Many, Version 2.0 rebooted

                The gold standard of epistemology for almost a millennium now has been the ‘justified true belief.’   The idea that there was a test that could determine whether what a person believed was true and that the person had a justified reason for holding that belief and wasn’t just lucky, or in the Gettier case actually believed the right thing for the wrong reasons.  After a century of language critique undermining the very idea of true and justified,  I think it is important to resituate what a justified belief might be.

                I want to start with the assumption that is implicit in the notion of justified belief that there is a world independent of our cultural description of it (whether that description be linguistic or mathematical).  In resetting the framework for epistemology the first step has to be that we reject the ‘objective’ view of reality.  Instead, we have to begin with the notion that whatever we see is a creation of the cultural processes we share with those around us.  Multiple cultures might share the same processes – science, for instance – but it is still the product of those processes and not an ‘objective’ world that we encounter.  In other words, as Maturana puts it, we bring forth a world that we share with other people.  We do not simply or objectively encounter a world that exists independent of that description. 

                This is an important point.  What is true is not true because it is real.  What is true is true because we collectively believe it to be so.  As both Hutchins and Maturana insist, the culture determines what can be said and what can be said that is believed to be true.  Of course, the culture could be wrong, in which case it will soon be in trouble, but that is a later consideration.  The starting point has to be that we can only see what we are allowed to and that we have words or other symbols to communicate.  It also means that no individual ‘sees’ it by themselves.  Getting beyond the long held believe in the West that we live in a ‘real’ world that we process individually is a key step in an epistemology for this century.

                One of Maturana’s most insightful followers, Lloyd Fell, puts it this way, we are always both autonomous and connected.  We are never just one or the other.  As autonomous beings we are grounded to what we see, feel and think, and we know more about us than anyone else (which is not to say that we know everything about us).  As connected beings we are expressing – both to others and ourselves – what we see, feel and think in a language and other sign systems we share as part of a culture.  It is only as a member of that culture that we can process and communicate what we experience.  We may process the same information differently.  There be wild disagreements, but the cultural processes will produce a range of responses that validate a common version of reality.

                This is not the same thing as what we might call a weak sense of postmodern nominalism that seems to suggest that we can call something whatever we want.  Each individual and each culture has a structural coupling with a biological system that it cannot violate without risking death or collapse.  What we call things is, as Maturana likes to say, not trivial.  The key point is that we participate, sometimes more actively than others, is this cultural naming and regulating.  We don’t simply accept the languaging, we help reshape and redirect it.  It creates what Harari calls an ‘imagined order,’ because ALL order is imagined.  Sometimes we disagree or even think a person we’re interacting with is ‘crazy’ (a feeling you may even have reading this blog), but they are always operating in the cultural system or we couldn’t understand them at all.

                What epistemology has to account for, then, is not how an individual comes to have or not have a ‘justified true belief,’ but how individuals and cultures come to negotiate a world that allows some things as true or valid and rules other things out of bounds.  It is completely inadequate to settle for an epistemological project that focus on how the individual checks her beliefs with reality.  Instead, we need a project that questions how beliefs and realities are created in the interaction between individuals, cultures, and the biological couplings that sustain them.

                The 2.0 reboot part of the equation is that we now have to do this both assisted and threatened by the presence of machine intelligence.  Assisted, because we can now have access to data and patterns of data that were never available before, revealing connections and patterns that we never even imagined.  Threatened, because what machine intelligence produces is not necessarily part of the biological coupling we have to maintain.  So much of what so many people ‘know’ exists nowhere but the binary and decontextualized patterns of data swarming around them on the internet.

                Resetting and resituating the epistemological project requires adjusting to this new intersection of possibilities and problems.           

I remember the Democratic Party

                I grew up in a trade unionist family in a union town.  It used to be a Democratic stronghold.  Genesee County went heavily for Trump in the last election.  When I went to visit my father before the election, Trump signs were everywhere – big Trump signs. 

                In the shambles of the election, I’m left contemplating how the party of my father and my neighbors became the enemy of the people who live there now.  Flint and Genesee County have been heading down this road for a long time.  GM has pretty much abandoned “vehicle city’ for cheaper wages.  Only the truck plant on Bishop and Van Slyke still cranks out vehicles.  ‘Buick City’  is an empty field.  The rest is filled with the blight of a city with no real hope for a future.  The racism and segregation that were always there have a meaner tone to them now that the economic miracle is over.  The school systems were never meant to produce anything but shop rats, and they can’t even do that anymore. They voted for a man who wouldn’t even let them on his property, let alone understand or share their suffering.

                There a plenty of ways to explain the election.  Maybe it was as simple as the fact that the director of the KGB – I mean FBI – intervened in an unprecedented way.  Maybe the crony-capitalism and wall street coziness finally caught up with the Clintons.  There was certainly a heavy dose of misogyny and rejection of Obama in the mix.  It doesn’t really matter now.  All that really matters now is to understand where we are and what we have to do next.  We are at the end of politics as we’ve known them, at the end of a liberal democracy that dominated world affairs.  We find ourselves in the last, gallant (recognize irony when you see it) rise of the Confederacy.   We are in the last, desperate days of a white, male dominated narrative about the world that is determined to resist what is next.  We are at the last failed attempt by the Baby Boomers to make a better world.

                I suppose it was naïve to think we would ever reach the end of that narrative without at least one last plunge into darkness.  It seems inevitable that Trump and the insane clown posse (apologies to the band) that he surrounds himself with would try one last time to restore order to world that was slipping out of their control and understanding.  That world still awaits, but like all new orders it will have to fought for.  The answer to Trump is not policy or programs – the answer to Trump is a movement.  The polite political discourse of the past will not unseat what the Republican party has become, and it will not stop what they intend to do next.   Only a movement will do that.  The Republicans have chosen their path.  They haven’t really been interested in democracy for a long time.  They want power.  Power to make other people stop making them uncomfortable .  Power to stop the creation of a democracy that is inclusive and fair.  Power to make the most brutal form of capitalism triumph over democracy.  They haven’t been trying to ‘govern’ for a while – no compromise, no Supreme Court nominee.  Now they are ready to rule.

                We need to be ready for that fight, and if, like me, you’re a  Baby Boomer, you need to understand it is not really your fight.  There are things we can do, and there are things we know that will help, but this fight belongs to the Millennials (insert your favorite joke about them living in their parent’s basement here).   We had our shot.  It this is going to have the force and the energy it is going to take to turn the page on the failed narrative of white, male privilege, then they have to do it.  The movement has to be younger, more feminist, and more diverse in every conceivable way.  They have to find their own leaders, write their own progressive demands and be ready to fight for them.  If they are resolute and believe in their cause they will prevail.  They have to – the arch of history and age is on their side. But nothing is promised or guaranteed .  As Raymond Williams said in The Long Revolution, the next step can never just be assumed.

                I am optimistic.  I think the stakes are clear and there are too many of us to ever go back.  That doesn’t mean it will be easy or pretty.  But if the narrative is going to change, then let it be with a bang and not a whimper.    

Epistemology #2

The Conversation:

               

After framing the question of what makes human knowledge unique, a closely related problem is who has to be involved in the epistemological conversation.  One of the reasons that this conversation has lost its cultural importance is that it has been dominated by professional philosophers.  I respect the work that is done is specialized discourse communities, but there is a question whether it ‘travels’ into the public discourse.  There are certainly things that can only be developed in the back and forth of a highly technical and professional practice, but I’m not sure epistemology is one of them.  The current situation has clearly not served to promote a broader conversation about this issue.  I think that if the problems and potential of an epistemology for cyborgs are going to fully explored, it is going to take a much more inclusive conversation.

This is a tricky proposition.  Much of what I have to say here comes from my readings and conversations with people in specialized discourse communities.  I respect and appreciate that input.  On the other hand,  whenever I have tried to have a conversation about these issues outside that fairly limited circle of people, the specialized knowledge has either been a hindrance or a nuisance .   In his book,  States of Shock ,   Bernard Stiegler argues that the model of the university that grows out of the Enlightenment no longer works in a world where the competing spheres of knowledge intersect in different ways because of technology and capitalism.   Specialized knowledge is specialized precisely so it can’t be appropriated by ‘amateurs.’   That may be fine if the purpose of writing about it is promotion within a discipline, but it won’t foster a broader conversation.  We all have to be vigilant about how we use language to encourage others to want to talk about this issue.

If the most central part of human knowledge is knowledge about ourselves, there is no way around including people in their own sense of knowing.  Because we have split education away from any serious discussion of epistemology, we have fostered a sense of ‘learning’ that is completely divorced from the personhood of the student.  We have followed a modernist, social science model of metrics and statistical approximations of learning that we could ‘objectively’ measure and assess, but we have failed to see the person in the center of the learning.  If we see education as largely external to the growth of the person, then we will never expand the conversation about epistemology enough to find a deeper sense of learning.

We live at a time when so many people have rejected the elite narrative of the world that they are ready to embrace almost any simple narrative to avoid participating in a world that demands their presence.  The conversation about knowledge is also a conversation about culture.  As Edwin Hutchins says, intelligence is a cultural artifact.  It can’t exist in the isolation of individual minds.  It requires a context of tools and protocols, of definitions about what things are and how things work, that allow us to operate in synch with each other and our environment.  Those of us who care about learning and education have to find a way to open up this dialog in a way that is meaningful to the other people we share it with. 

In the year of Brexit and Trump it should be obvious that whatever public discourse we’ve had about knowledge has failed.  We are moving to a more unrealistic and less humane narrative about the world.  The idea that there is an objective reality we all can use as a common touch point is pretty well in tatters.  We not only can’t recognize a common reality, we can’t recognize each other.  The long, slow road back from this precipice is a learning that has an essential humanity at its core.  The modern belief in reason is dead.  We need a new conversation about who we are and how we survive on this planet.

That conversation will take place among cyborgs.  The acceleration of technology and social media has changed the dynamics of what it means to know.  Our conversations are no longer dominated by pulpits or classrooms.  There is no authority, no definition of ‘real,’ that can control what it means to know.  We find what we need to support our beliefs and reject anything that we don’t want to believe.  If there is a god figure in our epistemology its name is Google.  When we turned information into binary bits and freed it from context and location, the act of knowing fundamentally changed.  To embody knowing is no longer just a battle between mind and body but between the biological and the technical.  It’s not that long meditations in the form of books are no longer important, at least in some parts of the conversation, it’s that they are no longer adequate.

How we proceed isn’t clear.  My sense is that we start this conversation slowly and try to find ways to work it into regimes and domains that are part of the larger cultural artifact of intelligence.  It certainly means a sea change in what we think of as education and religion.  We are witnessing the decline and possible extinction of the great institutions of modernism and idea of reason.  The church, the school and the government have lost whatever control they had over the ‘imagined order.’  Being right isn’t going to help unless it penetrates what Kevin Kelly calls the ‘technosphere.’  There are biological restrictions to what we can know; machines aren’t limited by them.  My goal is to at least find that line and use it as a starting point for a new dialog.

An Epistemology for Cyborgs

In the next several entries to this blog I want to focus on epistemology and the implications of technology on the question of how and why we know what we know.  These posts will be numbered, not because they are in any kind of sequence, just to help keep them organized.

Recovering the Question:

                Epistemology has fallen out of favor (but not quite as much as its half- brother metaphysics).  It has been kidnapped by analytical philosophers who have starved it to near extinction, making it live off a steady diet of over and under coded sentence fragments.  The grand reach of the original question has been lost in the science of cognition and the rise of artificial intelligence.  Before we concede the field to ever more sophisticated machines and the algorithms that run them, I think we should step back and ask exactly what it means to “know” something in this environment, bordered on the one hand by technology and on the other by increasingly mechanistic notions of what it means to be human.  I think it is important to pause for a moment and sort out what human intelligence is; what are its characteristics, limitations and purposes.

                It’s become too easy frame these questions in disembodied contexts that focus on speed and information in one direction and chemical reactions in another.  The value of thinking epistemologically is that implies an embodiment – a biological, that is to say living, entity – that can’t be reduced to information or chemical reactions.  Epistemology also implies the consciousness of the knower, the awareness of the act of knowing.  Human intelligence may seem limited when compared to the speed and data of a computer, but it also presents an option that artificial (I would prefer to call it machine) intelligence lacks; it is organic.  It is organic in a way that even the most sophisticated algorithm, even ones that produce infinite variable, cannot completely mimic.  I mean no disrespect to the potential and power of machine intelligence.  It has become a valuable tool, maybe we could even day collaborator, in the way we understand our world and our place in it.  I simply want to draw a line between machine intelligence and what it means to know and learn as a human being.  Confusing them only confuses and limits the potential of both.

                When we learn, we are not learning about an objective world that is static.  When we learn, we are first and foremost learning about ourselves, and we are bringing forth a world that we share with others through the act of languaging.  Epistemology is not about absorbing or manipulating knowledge as much as it is creating consciousness.  What gets lost in the technological and materialist notions of learning and knowing is the connection between learning and living well, fully engaged in both the creation of the world we bring forth with others and the responsibility of harmonizing with it.  In other words, epistemologies move and change – they are themselves organic.   To reclaim epistemology is to reclaim the way we ground ourselves in an ongoing dynamic process.

                We live in a country that produces more technical and expert data and information than any culture has ever created.  There are over a billion pages of new scientific data alone published every year.  Yet we also live in a country where the shared understanding and value of that data is limited to a very small sub set of the population and in which many of the most basic findings of science are rejected by large swaths of the population.  We surround science, and every other academic and professional discourse, with barriers meant to limit participation and understanding.  While some people ‘know’ a lot about a particular subject, it doesn’t ‘bring forth a world,’ as Maturana would have it.  It also doesn’t shape the actions and consciousness of most of its practioners.  Only a few scientists really do science; most are mere technicians.  An even smaller number of the people who really do science think that way in the rest of their lives.  The same is true of the rest of the academic and professional worlds.  Separating the things we think from the social, biological, technical and spiritual worlds we inhabit is to engage in what Blake called ‘ single vision.’

                To reclaim the question of epistemology in a world dominated by technological and analytical systems is not going to be easy.  Not reclaiming it will mean that the only real outcome of ‘human intelligence’ will be to build machines that can escape this planet to colonize others.  Only by resituating ourselves in the autopoietic context of our own lives can we learn, again, who we are.