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.