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.