Old Philosophers

Yesterday I was taking the train up north to spend a few days in Falun and give a talk at my old gymnasium about ”good, bad, and pseudoscience”. On the train I was sitting beside this probably very nice person who was solving some kind of word puzzle in a magasin. From the letters you got left you hade to form the name of an old philosopher. I know this because I was reading over her shoulder. The name had six letters (Swedish spelling, five letters in English) and I quickly checked if A, L, N, O, P, and T were still left and since they were I guessed that I had solved it although there were still other letters left as well.

I had solved it, but my neighbour didn't. I told her the name, which she didn't recognize. I realized that there are people in this world living perfectly happy lives, without knowing about Plato, Socrates, and probably Aristotle as well.
I realised that I take many things for granted. I apparently believe that people don't know about Plato's idealism or about his ideas about how a state should be governed but that they do so out of a choice. The idea that adults in a western country don't know or even recognize the name of Plato, that is just strange. Now I have to try to realise that it is probably I who is strange just because I have friends that have read Plato in the original greek. But I probably also have many friends who have not heared of Plato or at least don't remember that they ever heard of Plato. I never thought of that before.

Confession

If Socrates was right that ”the unexamined life is not worth living” it is evident that we must examine not only others but perhaps even more importantly ourselves. The other day I discovered yet again that I don’t always have an open mind. I overheard a conversation between two students after a seminar. During the seminar we had briefly discussed the meaning of a certain word in Nietzsche’s work. In German there are more words for “explanation” than in Swedish and one of the words has a meaning more like “illumination” perhaps with a hint of “self-evident”.

Translations between languages are always difficult and a reason to really learn different languages and understanding the meaning of the words, not merely a translation of the words, is that it will let you understand how your own vocabulary limits your possibility to think, and of course to expand those limits with new concepts. But I digress.

I am an imperfect human. I over heard this conversation and I at once formed my opinion that this person was not thinking in an intelligent way, that he was a buffoon, a philosophical buffoon but all the same a buffoon. Of course my reasons for thinking this can be found in what he said. But no matter what he said I had not sufficient evidence to jump to that conclusion.

Before I explain what I found so silly in this overheard conversation I have to confess that my opinion of this person is still negative although I know that I didn’t hear enough to be in a position to form a well founded belief. First impressions last.

The person who did most of the talking was writing a master thesis in sociology. He was glad that he had found a new idea of what an explanation is. He wanted to get away from the “theoretical explanations” that he found in sociology and have something more like “revelation”.

I hope that what he wanted was a way to describe how people use the word “explanation”. It is perhaps not always the case that what is given as an explanation in everyday life really explain things.

Of course I do not know what he meant with “theoretical explanation” but in my mind I formed the idea that he wanted to avoid analytical explanations, explanations that divide things into little pieces, explanations that limits the mind from seeing the big picture, so that he could just understand how it is. Indeed I got the impression that he wanted to steer away from old time ideas about explanations that limits the free and open mind of the researcher in sociology.

I am afraid that he will only find conviction, and conviction is a poor substitute for explanation. The important point of an explanation is that it explains things. It gives others the possibility to follow the analytical train of thoughts that lead to an understanding of how something works. A conviction, an understanding that is only based on revelation can never be anything else but personal. A personal explanation as well as a personal language is dead. Explanations are theoretical and analytical because they have to communicate something.

Everyday Epistemology

Epistemology is in philosophy the study of how we know things, often contrasted with ontology, the study of what is. There are many strange ideas about how to attain certain knowledge and some more realistic ideas about how to attain provisional knowledge. (The kind of knowledge that might be replaced by better knowledge in the future and leading to the question if the replaced knowledge really was knowledge to begin with.)

Everyday epistemology is something slightly different. Learning how to evaluate truth-claims is all very good but it is just impossible for one human being to build her entire world-view on tested claims. Each and every one of us, no matter how sceptical we want to be, accept things unchallenged out of necessity. With everyday epistemology I try to take a look at the limits of the examined life from a different perspective than what is traditionally done in philosophy.

In many discussions about epistemology the focus is how to find the truth about one thing or in one situation. In the real world we piece together billions and billions of impressions and data to form a picture of how the world is. Even if we had a perfect method of how to find the truth of each piece of data we would not have time to implement the method for each and every bit. When you want to study how a person knows how the world is, how her picture of reality is attained, it is a fact that mostly the knowledge, or information is perhaps a better word, is uncritically accepted.
(I use the word ‘information’ about bits and pieces of data without concern about if it is true or false, or even if it makes any sense.)

But very few accept everything they hear or see. At certain times people are more likely to test the claims that they encounter at other times they simply dismiss it. When people try to test new information we reach the field of classical epistemology, we ask ourselves if it is true and how can we find out if it is true. But before this we have the question of what makes people want to test new information and also when they should question not only new but old information.
The urge to test new information will arise then the information contradicts earlier ideas considered to be knowledge and it cannot be simply dismissed. The urge should arise than the information becomes, or is, an important part of ones world-view.

Factoids (mainly in Swedish) are interesting; they are small pieces of information that are not true, or at least unsubstantiated, but they are well known to be true or at least well know. Everyone knows Galileo’s famous utterance at the end of his trial because it is a good story. It is regarded as a true fact although it is not. For biographers of Galileo the story is important so they go through the trouble of checking the sources and find that they have to remove that piece of information from their knowledge of the world. Few people have that kind of a special interest in Galileo and the story will likely not contradict their world-view and thus simply becomes accepted as a small part of what they know. Factoids are not a perfect example of how information that is not confrontational and unimportant is easily accepted, because factoids are interesting and entertaining enough to be spread unlike much other information. Still they tell us that much of what a person know is uncertain because everyday we accepted information uncritically.

So the first “law” of everyday epistemology, the study of how people attain knowledge about the world in real life, is that everything is accepted as true.
The second “law” is that if new information contradicts what is all ready considered true there are three ways to handle the new information, testing the truth claim, dismissing the information without testing, or have a world-view that allow for contradictions.
It is out of necessity that we do not always test all the claims; it is out of necessity that we readily accept or dismiss information that agree or disagree with what we think we know. What is in my opinion a problem is that many appear to think that what is done out of necessity is also sufficient. Even when a set of believes have a prominent place in a persons world-view they think that accepting or dismissing information without testing is enough.

Perhaps the study of how people in fact form their world-view is more psychology and sociology than philosophy. I still think it is of huge importance to understand this part of epistemology if one wants people to live an examined life in the real world. Socrates said “the unexamined life is not worth living”.