Epistemology: The theory or science of the method or grounds of knowledge. (OED)

How do we know what we know?

How do we distinguish fact from inference, speculation, hypothesis, or outright fabrication?

This is what the discipline of epistemology is intended to address. In the last hundred years or so, epistemological discourse has proliferated, creating a dense layer of abstruse philosophical jargon that is intimidating for a layman to penetrate (which is probably intentional).

But you don’t have to read a cubic mile of phenomenological bumf to get the hang of epistemology. There’s no need to unpack the writings of Husserl or Heidegger. All that’s required is common sense, an alert intellect, and ready access to Occam’s Razor.

Consider two very different examples of things that I might profess to know:

The second type of knowledge is distinctly different from the first. My flat tire isn’t a psyop. I can’t be gaslighted into believing my tire is flat when it isn’t. Media propaganda will not convince me that I can safely drive on my flat tire. Fact checking plays no role in my assessment that my tire is flat. My flat tire is not a conspiracy theory.

In other words: Only that which is immediately apprehended by the senses is known.

Unfortunately, very little of what is commonly accepted as knowledge is actually known. The vast bulk of what we think we know is simply inferred, deduced from available data, or received from authority, but it is not known in the same way I know I have a flat tire.

What I find most interesting is the process in which people think they know something, but they really don’t. I’ll give you an example from my own personal experience, one with no political connotations, which means it’s unlikely to spark any controversy. It concerns those nasty little creatures known as chiggers.

For readers who don’t live in the South: chiggers are tiny red mites that are also called red bugs. They’re a type of arachnid, roughly analogous to harvest mites in England. (The word “chigger” is considered rude. “chegro” is the polite word for them, but the mites themselves prefer the term “Arachnid American”. [Yes, this pathetic parenthetic aside is a joke — don’t take it seriously.])

From as far back as I can remember, until I was well into my adulthood, I knew that chiggers burrowed under the skin and remained there indefinitely, which was why they caused intense itching for such a long time. When I was in my thirties, however, I learned from a friend of mine that chiggers did not in fact burrow under the skin. He was a scientist, but not an arachnologist or even an entomologist. He had also thought that chiggers burrowed in, and had only recently learned otherwise.

That’s what everybody thought: we had all learned from an early age about the repulsive behavior of chiggers. Everybody knew it, both young and old.

But it wasn’t true.

Prior to the Internet Age it was more cumbersome to learn the facts, but now it’s a simple matter to look them up: chiggers bite and suck blood like other obnoxious pests. They just happen to secrete a digestive enzyme when they bite that breaks down skin cells and causes the formation of a structure known as a stylostome, a hardened cylinder of dead tissue. The stylostome remains in the skin for days or weeks after the bite and causes the maddening, burning itch for which chiggers are notorious.

So that’s the real story about chiggers. Yet in the area where I grew up, everyone knew that chiggers burrowed under the skin. It was a simple fact, and we all knew it.

The point is: What you know may not in fact be true.

Epistemology is the discipline that strives to discern the basis for what is known, and how knowledge is acquired.

Earlier this year I wrote about the terrorist attack on Istanbul airport in 2016. I have no direct knowledge of the deeper causes behind that incident — I only know what I read in various media accounts at the time. By patching together the different data points, I came to the conclusion that the Russian state had ordered the hit on Istanbul, in retaliation for Turkey shooting down a Russian fighter plane over the border between Turkey and Syria. The circumstantial evidence was sufficient to convince me that Russian responsibility was a fact, but it wasn’t something I knew. In order to be able to consider it knowledge, I would have had to have direct access to sources at the highest levels of Russian and/or Turkish intelligence.

This brings us up to the paranoia of the current moment.

The flow of current events in the last eight years has deposited a rich loam of conspiracy-generating topsoil in our popular/political culture. The advent of the COVID-19 “pandemic” and the ensuing push for “vaccination” prompted an explosion of speculation about what the major conspirators were doing, and why. As I pointed out a couple of weeks ago, the Corona hoax was a rare instance of when we could be sure we were being officially lied to by our governments. This wasn’t speculation, and it was more than an inference; it was a fact, and we can with full confidence assert that we know it.

There are other bits and pieces that we can say we know. We know the virus was engineered in a Chinese lab, with the connivance of the U.S. government. We know that various government apparatchiks made vast amounts of money from the patents they owned on vaccine components. We know that vaccines against the disease were patented months or years before the COVID-19 outbreak. We know that money from the pharmaceutical industry corrupted high-level government officials on both sides of the Atlantic. We know that the seasonal flu was simply re-branded as COVID-19. And we know that the federal government issued payments to hospitals for every COVID death they reported.

But there are a lot of things we might infer to be likely that aren’t in fact known. Some examples:

• Whether the virus was released intentionally or accidentally.
• Whether the illness and death caused by the “vaccines” was intentional, or simply collateral damage that governments and pharmaceutical companies were indifferent to.
• Whether the deadliness of the mRNA treatments was intended to be a means of population reduction.
• Whether the entire “pandemic” was engineered with the express purpose of implementing CBDCs and universal digital IDs for the entire population.

The above topics (and many others) may be legitimately argued, and various conclusions may be drawn, but none of them are things we know. You may make inferences about them, engage in informed speculation, and propose plausible hypotheses about them. However, unless you are employed at the highest levels of one of the three-letter agencies involved, you don’t actually know the answers.

The COVID-19 conspiracies have recently been superseded by the attempted assassination of Donald Trump. Once again, on the one hand there are things we know, and on the other things that we can speculate about, or infer, or construct plausible scenarios for.

We know that there was massive institutional incompetence on display in Butler, Pennsylvania on July 13. That’s an indisputable fact.

It’s quite possible that the incompetence was deliberate. The Powers That Be may well have left the henhouse door open on purpose in hopes that a weasel would get in and ravage the place.

But it could be even worse.

Donald Trump was supposed to be dead now, which would have made it much easier to conduct a phony “investigation” that drew the right conclusions. As it is, the feds seem to be scrambling to contain a crisis that threatens to spiral out of control.

The more data points that accumulate, the more sinister the conspiracy looks. The lying, the concealment of information, the deliberate failure to coordinate with local law enforcement, the refusal to hold press conferences, the absence of any data about the now-deceased gunman — all of these make it seem likely that the authorities are hiding the facts because they are criminally complicit.

But we don’t know that.

We know that we’re being lied to. And I think it’s safe to say that we know the government doesn’t have our best interests at heart.

The next few months are likely to make the previous eight years pale in comparison. I think we’re in for a rough ride, like nothing we’ve ever seen before.

During this trying time it will be important to keep your epistemological tools handy. To remember how to determine what you know, as distinct from what you think is likely to be true, or might possibly be true.

I know that I have a plate of dinner in front of me. I know that my phone is working today. I know that the rain is falling gently on the leaves outside my window.

And I know that I don’t have a flat tire.