Negative Epistemology

Is epistemology about building up our knowledge? I would like to put forward an alternative: the goal of understanding is to reduce our knowledge; or rather, to reduce our habitual sedimentations and programmed responses to the world. It is not something we hold on to, but a clearing away and a freeing up.

For example, I can come to the world conditioned by a good number of anti-Islamic attitudes, conditioned by society. I can then approach scholarly research which points out a number of ways in which I am just wrong about the Islamicate world. What have I learned? Well, there have been facts involved, and it can be helpful to keep them on hand as tools for various purposes, not least of which is helping other people come to the same point. But what I have really gained is a removal of old habits and a new openness to people and society. Even if I forget everything I read, I keep this new freedom unless old habits find ways of re-asserting themselves.

So when I approach philosophy from an historical angle, I should sometimes remember the arguments; they are essential for publishing and teaching, and therefore securing a job. But the mere memory of ideas is not necessarily what I am after. Of what use is mere accumulation of knowledge, other than as a mere pastime? I want to free my thinking, to see how I have become blind to my own presuppositions, and to how I already hedge in the possibilities of the world.

Now, one might say that there certainly seem to be times at which we want to have knowledge, and we mean by that that we are actually building up facts about the world. Granted. To this end, I distinguish two types of knowledge. One the knowledge of means to a given end, and in this case we want positive knowledge of how to go about achieving our end. But how do we pick an end in the first place? How do we come at the world in general, aside for using it for our own purposes? It is in situations like these where I would suggest that a negative epistemology might be in order, at least as an interesting thought experiment.

Fractal Knowledge

What would a perfectly ordered world look like? I think that there is a tendency to think that it would be decomposable into nice, neat conceptual parts, amenable to our thought. But perhaps the opposite is true: perhaps the world which is rationally broken up for us is really arbitrary, while one which is perfectly ordered down to the very depths would forever defy our reasoning.

I bring up the analogy of a fractal. See here for an example. A property of the fractal is that it is infinitely self-similar (more precisely, quasi-self-similar): no matter how far you zoom in, no matter where along the boundary you look, you will find something which is in its own way similar to the whole. So the fractal is my paradigm of perfect order, down to an infinite precision and covering the entire figure.

Imagine living on the fractal. You are trying to make sense of the twists and turns which you encounter. You get a sense of order; it is indeed ordered. Parts do look like each other. But every time you think you have it down, you go a little bit further along the boundary, and something throws you off. You didn't get it quite right, so you have to go through your concepts and reanalyze the world. Since every part in its own way contains the whole (that is, it is in a way self-similar to the whole), you do gain some understanding of the entire fractal from each piece. But you also can't really get any part of the fractal unless you were to grasp the entire thing all at once.

So an infinite order would entire that we could understand something, and understand everything in understanding something, but no understanding would be unrevisable. No set of concepts, no affirmative propositions could be held for any length of investigation.

By contrast, what would a world be like which we could break down into nice, neat concepts? At first, such a world appears ordered. But then we turn to the concepts themselves. Why is green what it is? Just because. Why a straight line? Just because. This "just because" is the only answer givable to any such question, no matter what the basic concept or simple nature at hand is. In the end, we have to posit an Intelligent Kludger to put the mess of arbitrariness together, because there's nothing in the parts themselves to suggest order; only in the arrangements.

The Purpose of Inconsistency

Why would one would consider contradictory speech to be philosophically appropriate? Given that contradictions can be meaningful, why would one use them? First, it may be that one believes that all systems are going to be inconsistent at some point anyhow. If this is true, then there is relatively little value in ironing out all of the wrinkles of discourse instead of simply investigating what one can. Also, if I have doubts about any given chain of reasoning or system, I have much less reason to follow it through consistently. It may be far better to pursue many lines of reasoning, even if they are mutually inconsistent, since then I may hit the truth on a couple points at least.

Second, one may be strongly convinced by both the arguments for x and the arguments for not-x. The contradiction does not mean that there isn't some y which is coherent with x but which is semantically and practically similar to not-x. This is the problem with some ad hominem attacks: showing that a given person is inconsistent shows nothing about whether a better version of their views could succeed, entailing that they really were close to being right in the first place. In the meantime, holding on to the contradiction may be the most intellectually responsible choice, while pursuing a research program of eventually resolving the contradiction while keeping the insights.

Third, it may be that certain mystical views can only be couched in contradictory terms. If there is some reality utterly responsible for absolutely anything, then language which can only look at certain things at any given time will encounter difficulties. Contradiction shows language's (and thought's) breaking points, and it is the fact of breaking which points to what is to be communicated.

Fourth, one may be holding to a dialectical tension. This I think is closest to what I am talking about with skepticism. On the one hand, I think that everything is doubtable (and once this is realized, also already doubted, for those familiar with what I've said before on this blog). But I also think that we should continue investigating the truth. Should I throw one side or the other away because I can't unite them at one time? No; I continue in a constant back-and-forth, which seems to accomplish a number of aims (including understanding) better than any single idea or system.

But if nothing else, saying that someone is being contradictory is a paltry criticism. It contributes nothing to discussion; it merely wins points in debate. It is therefore sophistry and not philosophy, unless it is accompanied by substantial interaction. Show how some premise is wrong, show how my understanding is off, show some alternative, but show something of value.

Common Sense and Explainability

We should be skeptical of a belief given by common presuppositions in the case that they can be explained by some reason other than their veracity. If we can explain how a habit forms (say, the belief in external objects, that historical events are actual, or within a given religious context that certain dispositions are sinful and that we have an innate conscience) and give an adequate account of how it comes to be, why do we need to assume that it also gives us a direct window on reality? Belief in external objects comes about in early stages of development as we learn to deal with the bloomin' buzz and confusion around us, to organize it so that we can make sense of it. It it a very practical habit to believe that our blankie is still existent when it is put behind the pillow, even though we cannot see it.

Reality is such that the belief is practical. But this does not mean that reality is as the belief holds. I see a green leaf; the leaf itself is not green (at least while I'm taking off my idealist hat for a moment and speaking from the perspective of the realist), but is a physical object that reflects the light of a given wavelength such that it hits my eye, where due to a complex interaction of rods and cones and processing in the LGN followed by assimilation in the visual cortex I experience the qualitative experience of green on a leaf shape. The belief that the leaf is green is not caused by the leaf's actually being green, though the reality is such to produce that belief, produce it regularly, and make it a helpful belief for navigating the world. Similarly, belief in external objects can be caused by some feature of the world that is not the actual existence of external objects.

But if this is the case, why believe that there are actually external objects? I have explained why there is a wide-spread habit pertaining to them (and there is the experimental data to further substantiate my claims), and there does not appear to me at this point to be anything left unexplained. So why do we assume some mystical sense which gives us real knowledge of the way things are? There is no facet of our experience otherwise unexplained which needs such a faculty. Therefore, positing such a faculty is arbitrary, merely a means of allowing us to hold to the same things we have always held instead of actually trying to think through them and explain them. There is as little reason to assume that faculties of this sort exist, as that a misargued mathematical theorem gives us probable mathematical knowledge. But if such a belief only arises from practical engagement in the world, then it is hard to see without further argument how it could even possibly have metaphysical value unless as merely a different dimension of the same world.

There is a positive side to this, though. While it seems utterly arbitrary to multiply entities beyond what is needed for explanation (not that the simplest theory must be true, but that whatever is posited must play some explanatory role not otherwise accounted for in order to have any meaning), if we avoid doing such, then typical skeptical arguments melt away. Take Hume, for instance: Hume doubts causation, as to whether it is anything more than constant conjunction, but then returns to billiards where natural impulses make him believe in causation again. On my view (which likely is a repetition of the work of others who have explored this much more deeply), Hume isn't merely caused by natural impulses to believe in causation and so engage in self-deception. The language of causation is rooted in empirical life as a way of organizing it. Talk of one billiard ball causing another to move is perfectly legitimate; when we are talking about causation in billiards, we are not referring to features such as necessity, or universality, or quantum mechanics. We are explaining that aspect of our experience which involves the balls hitting each other regularly, enabling us to play the game, without thought of what might be causing this; there is continuity in practical discussions of causation even as philosophy and science radically change our understanding of it. To self-reflectively talk about causation is to enter into another context, and in this context causation as a general principle may be doubted, and may even be meaningless, but this self-reflection is not a feature of most everyday accounts of causation. This philosophical context is not illegitimate, but its concerns are not the concerns of the billiard player, and its accounts of causation get at something else. Now, for the philosophical billiard player, these two accounts may be entangled, or one may take priority; it depends on the specific context and the specific person, but there is nothing that says that different language games are hermetically sealed from each other.

Let us take Descartes as well. Descartes postulates an evil genius which could be messing with his mind. On my view, this is irrelevant. Concepts are taken from experience and explain experience. If that experience is of an evil genius messing with us, whether we know it or not, then these concepts explain that experience of human-nature-being-messed-with. They are concepts forged from inconsistent memories or other tricks which are thrown our way, but this does not make them false; they merely describe a rockier terrain than one in which we would have perfect memories and veridical habits. Similarly, if we were in the Matrix, our concepts would describe the world of the Matrix, again whether we would realize we were in it or not. It would be the world of our experience, and thus what concepts would arise from and refer to.

I do not mean by our "experience" merely the world of sense-data, but absolutely anything experienced. Consciousness, imagination, and our conceptual life seem to be legitimate realms of experience as well. If there is some Agent Intellect beaming intelligibles into our minds, then this is a part of our experience. The worlds of the poet are just as much experienced, even in the wildest cases. Skepticism isn't about strictly rationing our intellectual diet; it is about clearing away sedimentations and ossifications which obstruct living.