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:
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I know that the attempted assassination of Donald Trump was orchestrated by the Deep State and implemented by various three-letter agencies of the federal government. |
| 2. |
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I know my car has a flat tire.
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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.
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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.
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