practical epistemology

or: don't let your first epistemological exploration end up in a slanging match with a mate

It's finally gone through - after a nervous night before my PhD upgrade, trying to understand this "e" word beloved of my supervisor...

Epistemology, or the theory of the nature of knowledge, is not Epidemeology (the study of disease in populations), although the words look very similar and, to be honest, theories of knowledge in a University look very much like infectious diseases you don't want to catch.

My problem, as well as mixing up words and not understanding many of the concepts, is that I am very poor at explaining myself

Explain yourself

The way you explain yourself is really very simple. Your thoughts exist as electrical impulses in your brain, darting around neurons. That's all very brilliant, and many amazing fantasy worlds, views of what's outside and fantastic theories dwell within (unless you're me, in which case you're thinking about trains, coffee, muscle pain and the constant battle against fatigue). Turning all the wonderful stuff inside someone's head into wonderful stuff inside another person's head is the difficult part.

Whether you believe it or not, we are all visually led (unless we're blind), as over 50% of the brain exists purely to process visual information, so naturally, we turn the thoughts in our heads into abstract symbols that we can see. So far, so good? well, not quite, because, as amazing as that sounds, and as useful as it has been in developing civilisation as we know it, it's flawed. These words are not the contents of my head, but an approximation that I happen to be able to make at the time... and in contrast to people who can use the media of language and words to tell wonderful stories and share amazing ideas, I suck at this.

Even worse, once someone's approximation of what's in their head comes out, it then falls to soem poor recipient to turn those abstract symbols or sounds back into electrical impulses in the right places. We spend a lot of our lives, from a very early age, learning how to do this. The result is that we have a form of "chinese whispers" that we manage, with a lot of training, to make work. The alternatives are telepathy (which has little proof of its existence in the real world) and neural transmission, which is the subject of esoteric, and frankly, quite scary experiments (see Doctor Frankenstein about that, he's down the hall)

Theories of knowledge and wisdom

Yes, so let's leave the psycho-physiology behind, and talk about fluffy abstract things. Everyone understands them, right?

Anyway, everyone knows what knowledge is, which is why the field of epistemology is so confusing. We can call it the learned ability to be able to turn memories into something useful, but that would be oversimplifying it (note also, that I'm being a bit slack by referring to Wikipedia), and everyone knows what wisdom is, right? Well, no; and since there seems to be no physiological basis for wisdom in the brain, it appears to either be a social construct (something we've developed a "feel" for in our societal groups), or it's something spiritual (which means it transcends other things, and only means anything to other people because we're told to value it). Either way, there's no way of turning it into something we understand... which is a problem.

Just as there aren't actually 5 senses (really: you didn't count kinaesthesia, hunger, intuition or temperature, did you? ...and that's not all of them), wisdom is probably something we sense more in others, either as a direct intuitive process, or by deduction. Certainly in European and Asian cultures, we would not be comfortable with someone identifying themselves as wise. Wisdom is elusive - perhaps it doesn't actually exist at all and we form the concept in our heads to praise others? There are people I would describe as wise, but then you might not agree; but one thing I can tell is that knowledge of wisdom does not make someone wise themselves. If that were the case I should have been wise by now, but that's obviously not the case (see the messes I keep getting myself into, for example). Wisdom is surely ethereal, no?

Smashing the world into pieces

I bear some responsibility for the argument which followed, on what the relationship between knowledge, wisdom and personality type might be, and how open or closed my mind might be, or how much what I say is bullshit. I won't go into that - this text is essentially either bullshit, or what will eventually become bullshit when a bull eats it.

Epistemology is big picture stuff, and big picture stuff is what I'm doing now. I can't pretend to be any good at it (as I mentioned, I keep mixing it up with epidemeology), but it's what I'm doing now. I'm trying to model the connections between human knowledge and society to the buildings we build and inhabit, and how we do that. We embed information about our society in the cities we build, and layer other pieces of information on that over time (creating a palimpsest, or a book of many layers, one on the other). People read this as they move and live in the urban area, being dictated to in a game of chinese whispers which goes back over centuries, and only from the past to the present. How do we react to this? How can the layers we lay down in the future produce more positive and favourable reactions?

This is big picture stuff - too big. The only way to understand a problem like this is to smash it into little pieces. There is no magic here: what this does is turn alchemy into chemistry. My supervisor will (rightly) claim that it's reductionist to break these things into little pieces, are we not trying to understand the human mind here? Yes.

The only reason we know anything of the way the brain and the mind work is by looking at what's wrong with broken ones. From brain injuries to mental illnesses, broken brains tell us what's gone wrong with unbroken ones, and therefore gives us insight into what processes go on in there. In the same way, we are only beginning to understand climatic systems as they break down, and well, broken hearts tell us most of what we know about love (and cardiology). The only hope is that when you put the pieces back together, it works - which is very much like putting a dissected rabbit back together and expecting it to jump off the table. Breaking things irreperably helps us fix other things (which doesn't do us much good with the climate, but I digress).

We're never going to know everything, but we'll damn well try... and if your way is to collect and distribute sayings from other people, or if your way is to break cities into little pieces and put them back together, then fine... but it's not going to make any of us any wiser.