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”.

Lost Integrity

It has happened again. It appears as if it is an eternal struggle and a lingering question, what kind of scientific rigour should you aspect from a university. Although, or perhaps because, Uppsala University is my Alma Mater I have to voice my concern. It happened May 22^nd and it was the defence of a doctoral thesis named The Eucharist as Orikonso at the faculty of theology.

The thesis is only one example of a fundamental problem at many universities and since I have not read it myself I will not linger in critiquing the thesis. Anyone can read the abstract of the thesis, it gives some idea of what aim the author had with his work. First the thesis and latter the defence is described by one knowledgeable source as:
“The author does not hide in his book that his ambition from the outset has been a normative one, not a scientific one.”
“When the author is ranking religions and cultures no secular values, norms or characteristics seem to be used but only private evaluations and declarations.”
At the defence of the thesis:
“In front of the faculty opponent he frankly declared that he as a Christian theologian is in his full right to formulate a Christian theology as a doctoral thesis. This is what he had done, he said. He seemed to be very satisfied with himself.”
It is certainly not the first time that someone uses a doctoral thesis to push his or her own ideas and it will not be the last.

A conviction is a dangerous thing because it can have a person looking for all the things that support the conviction and disregard anything that contradict it. This behaviour appears to have no correlation to the intelligence of the individual. In Uppsala the person that discovered the lymphatic system and who started the botanical research continued by Linnaeus was the same man who wrote a book “proving” that Sweden was the ancient Atlantis. His name was Olof Rudbeck and he was living in a time when the understanding of the scientific method was not common knowledge. (Not that the scientific method is common knowledge today.)

There will always be people with strong convictions that want the seal of approval from universities. It can be for strange theories where the facts do not agree with the preferred conclusion, violating the scientific method, or it can be for ideas and interpretations of a purely subjective nature, outside the scope of the scientific method.
These two types of conviction can be compared to claiming that chocolate ice-cream always contain pineapple and that chocolate is the best flavour of ice-cream; clearly none deserve any kind of endorsement from a university.
Still universities in Sweden and without any doubt throughout the world, give passing degrees to people that do not meet the requirements. Why?

A great number of other examples from Swedish universities can be found in the book Högskolans lågvattenmärken (in Swedish). And talking to friends still at university I know that teachers are now told to make sure that every student pass certain classes. This is of course recommendable if it implied making sure that the students all learn the curriculum unfortunately that is not the case.

Without doing the necessary research I can think of three different reasons why unscientific thesis are accepted and students that have not learned the curriculum are given a passing degree.

It is a fear of conflict. Every student consider it their right to get a passing degree and it is easier to give it to them than to have them making a fuss about it. (People that feel unjustly treated can make a real big fuss about it.)

It is an economic matter. Since a department receives money for each student they pass (meant to be an incentive for high quality education) in financially strained times money is more important than quality.

It is a question of epistemology. The universities are filled with people that have a relativistic view of knowledge where each opinion is of equal value.

Of these three the last one is the least likely because if the professors and researchers believed in that kind of relativism they would not complain. But perhaps more people will come to have this relativistic opinion even at the universities.

Whatever the reason, when the scientific rigour is abolished the university has lost its integrity and if the university loose the idea about the scientific method it has lost its soul. It was supposed to be about searching for the truth and not about pushing opinions.