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.

so where have you been?

Just getting a small push back to the blog, it's easy to forget that I posted nothing for over a month, which of course is not to suggest that nothing's happened - quite the reverse in fact...

Having passed my Upgrade to PhD status, I am now desperately trying to work out how to rectify the major failings with my methodology - namely a complete inability to say what I want to say in a way that other people can understand me.

Green Drinks Leeds' relaunch went well, and we're looking forward to the next event on the 19th. It wasn't the best attended ever, but certainly the best attended for the last 3 years or so. We're hoping to see more new people there on Tuesday, so if you're around, look us up... if not, support your local Green Drinks.

Otherwise, I gave a pretty poor talk last week at the Climate Chaos Café in Leeds, mainly because I didn't give myself enough time to put it together. Never mind... If you actually wanted to know about the New Mobility Agenda, you'd visit the website and not ask me, wouldn't you?

onwards and upwards

As usual after the end of a 4x4 Lecture Series, the diverse group of architects, planners, urban designers, engineers, environmentalists and others disperses for another 11 months in anticipation of meeting up again at Leeds Met the next year.

Clearly there's something wrong with this - not with the 4x4s themselves, which are excellent, but with the fact we all go back to our little silos again and do whatever it is we do that messes up what everyone else in their other silos do. Argulably, we're not going to make much progress in planning and managing cities if we carry on with this; and this position was argued at Thursday's lecture, suggesting all Built Environment degree courses should start with a common first year. But what is a Built Environment degree, and who is a Built Environment professional? Aruably the guy who collects the wheely bins from the end of my street is as much a Built Environment Professional as the Mayor, not to mention everyone in between.

Anyway, to sidestep the issue and begin to make whatever small steps we can, I am proposing a new event, along the lines of the very successful Café Scientifique (which also started in Leeds), where we have a speaker every month, introducing an idea or topic for 20 minutes, followed by a discussion. I'm off in the next few weeks (after Easter) to talk to a lecturer at Leeds Metropolitan's School of Built Environment, and Leeds' most high profile architect, Ian Tod; both of whom are interested in the idea... because as much as it hurts our professional pride, the bin man (for example) can probably see things we can't.

be careful what you wish for

I passed my upgrade viva today, so now I get to study for a PhD... except, I don't get to change my supervision regime, so it's probably going to go the same way it's been going for the last year an a half. I might as well have failed. Never mind, eh...

This evening's Café Scientifique was "Science: A 4,000 year history", which was Cambridge academic Patricia Fara taking us through the last 4,000 years of science history as she saw it, recognising the contributions of lab assistants and the important and unsung scientists' partners (usually wives, and of course with the tactful omission of Millie Einstein...). While the connections were made between 'science' (meaning the natural and physical sciences, she being from Cambridge after all) and arts (meaning predominantly painting, literature and history), the social sciences (which I would argue include history) were ignored. There wasn't enough time for the discussion on this though.

I have always maintained that I have something 'in the blood' that makes me want to learn dressmaking. My mother is a 4th generation (at least) dressmaker, and nobody of my generation of the family has taken up the cause. After an abortive attempt a few years ago, when I nearly went into business with a friend making corsets and dresses, and another abortive attempt to learn dressmaking at Swarthmore, I went back to concentrating on my upgrade report. When I saw George Davies on TV talking about how he felt fashion design was in his blood from having dressmakers for a mother and aunt, I understood. I don't like to use the word 'fashion', it's not something I care about, but what appeals is the art, the engineering, and the sensuality of clothes. In a sense it's the same kind of work as my PhD - how to create a physical object which surrounds a person, and affects the way they feel by interacting with various senses. My Mum is going to teach me a bit over Easter, and I'm quite excited!

Think about impending doom, don't think about impending doom...

So, Sunday I went off with fellow Green Drinks organiser Adam and eco-home builder Heimir to see The Age of Stupid, which of course is about the impending doom of climate change and the necessity to do something about it (says me, who really needs to get lower power lightbulbs, these 11 Watters are doing my head in)...

...and today, I am sitting here, watching telly and writing my blog, trying not to think about tomorrow's impending doom - the Upgrade viva. The end of my first year at University (a year of 18 months!) with an oral exam on a report that's taken me 3 months to write (since the last time I scrapped the text) and has turned out 3 times the guideline length. A lot of it doesn't make sense, and it is self-contradictory in many respects. Never mind, I am not scared of failure now, I just need to do some more reading and commenting... and so to lounging in front of the TV with a pencil and a cup of herbal tea. See you on the other side.

Police Profiling

After the London bomb attacks in 2005, various crazy suggestions went round about making all train passengers (and their luggage) go through a security scan when entering a station. This was before it was realised that 6 million journeys are made a day from some 3,000 stations and tram stops. Oh.

Anyway, West Yorkshire Police, in their infinite wisdom, and under the guise of an attempt to reduce knife attacks in Leeds Ciy Centre on a Saturday night, decided to pull over male passengers coming out from the ticket barriers - presumably on the basis that they looked shifty, aggressive, or Asian (I'm making this up, but it sounds better that way). I got pulled over, had to deposit the contents of my pockets (mobile phone, cards, cash, keys, iPod, torch) in a tray, and walk through a metal detector. Never mind I was carrying a heavy backpack and a jute shopping bag which weren't searched. Both of them contained sharp objects which could be used to cause injury (swiss army knife, screwdrivers, sharp nosed pliers)... but hey, they were the West Yorkshire Police - I wasn't exactly expecting them to be thorough, or effective.

Research Workflows on the Mac

A really brief, skimming introduction to a basic research workflow (ie mine) on the Mac, published in Yorkshire Mac Users' Group's magazine "Enigma".

It's available for download now

Return from the dead

After some prodding from the editor of World Streets, I have had to resurrect my old Blogger account, which means looking at this old blog. I might as well do something with it.

What's probably going to appear here are random musings about my research, and about life in general (everything from my MythTV setup to Sufi spirituality and environmental stuff). I'll get to witter on far more than I do on Facebook, which probably isn't a good thing, but there you go.

welcome to 'echoes'

Hello,

Welcome to the new 'echoes', transcience's online newsletter. It has been nearly 2 years since the last paper issue of 'echoes', and during this time we also launched the abortive "in a world where..." magazine.

So now we're online, and we can bring you...

• more information on stories
• more frequent updates
• information on all the various things transcience gets up to