Improved Epistemology

I once stormed out of a philosophy class because I didn't agree with my professor's point of view that speaking fictionally and speaking literally were a binary and nothing existed in between.

Epistemology is the

"study"

of what it means to know something which is closely connected with what it means for something to be true. Obviously people have had all kinds of wacky, unique ideas about this over centuries of people thinking about it, but I'm going to oversimplify that by putting everything into two big buckets.

The classical idea of truth is basically summed up by the famous

misquote

of Socrates, "I know that I know nothing." In this model actual truth is unattainable, but we console ourselves with calling things true because they seem true to us. If someone points out that we can't know anything is true we just remind ourselves not to invite them to our next party. This is a garbage idea of truth that has no real world application and doesn't even let us distinguish what's true and what's not.

The scientific idea of truth is that the truth is whatever our best evidence points to. This is a useful and self-consistent idea of truth. After all, our best evidence suggests that our best evidence points to the truth. Otherwise that bridge would be falling down. But this kind of truth, it turns out, seems to be impractical for a large swath of people for everyday purposes. It puts evaluating truth claims out of the hands of people who make truth claims. It doesn't align with people's sense of what truth is supposed to be.

Anyway, I experiment a lot with holding contradictory ideas in my head because it turns out that they very nearly don't exist. The only way to get solid contradictory ideas is to say, "Well that's not what I meant" every time you notice a way they can be reconciled. There's almost always more than one way of looking at things.

Hegel is attributed

with the idea of using a dialectical method to arrive at truth using the thesis, antithesis, synthesis approach. That is, you begin with a claim of truth, you formulate its opposite, and then you find something that reconciles the two.

As a philosophical exercise this is stupid. You can't take the statement that water is wet, contradict it with "water isn't wet" and then find some deeper truth by combining the two. But if we look at the world we'll find lots of places where people hold seemingly contradictory ideas, and have those ideas serve them in their lives. These are the kinds of ideas that we actually need to synthesize.

So this brings me to my third bucket for how to understand the idea of truth. Notions connect to truth to the extent that they ought to be taken into account when forming a higher truth. This idea of truth is less obsessive about labeling things as true or false and more focused on understanding things well so that useful parts of them can be salvaged.

I think this is probably actually closer to the ideal embedded in the scientific method than the statement of scientific truth I gave above is. I doubt more than a handful of people ever took the idea of best evidence being truth as literally as I did. But philosophy is primarily about spending a long time thinking about something to arrive at a conclusion everyone else already knew, so here I am.