THE IRONY OF EPISTEMOLOGY
... is that it recommends against itself
Epistemology captivates anyone who feels lied to, such as edgelord teenage atheists everywhere, for it promises a 'science' of getting the truth on your own, or at least, that's the vibe of historical intro texts like Descartes: route around the liars and evil geniuses and take a gnostic path. It also implicitly promises a language in which to justify belief to others, so as not to become the liar oneself, after all, the classical definition of KNOWLEDGE is JUSTIFIED, TRUE, BELIEF.
But the truth is, I don't owe any of you a justification--not because of some gross idea that "no one owes anyone anything", but because I owe you all the opposite. Let me explain:
While crisp 'classical' definitions like the above suffer a death of a million edgelord edgecases, more robust are relative statements like:
THE SAME BELIEF WITH MORE CONVERGENT LINES OF EVIDENCE IS MORE JUSTIFIED
And yet, this immediately pushes the gold-standard for knowledge out of the hyper-verbal realm of typical philosophical ambition, because linguistic thought, which excels at being *serial*, offers the least convergence, when nonverbal intuitions can converge from seeming infinite dimensions, combining information from all stages of life and sensory modalities: this is why some ideas seem to come out of nowhere, they are out of linear linguistic sequence.
THE MOST CONVERGENT LINES OF EVIDENCE ARE LEAST VERBALIZABLE
We can see this in modern neural network models, where the number of neurons serving as INPUT to even one neuron far outstrips the complexity of any linguistic justification for a belief ever offered in a social setting, such as in a published argument aiming to establish Philosophical 'knowledge' in print for the community. This gives rise to a sort of paradox:
THE MORE JUSTIFIED YOUR BELIEF, THE LESS YOU CAN JUSTIFY IT (TO OTHERS)
I put this in far less paradoxical form years ago, in what I was told was 'the epistemic argument for anarchism', long before I did some research and identified as one:
1. The more information we can base our decisions on, the better our decisions can be.
2. The more we decentralize our decision-making, the less we must centralize information in order to base our decisions on it.
3. The less we must centralize information in order to base our decisions on it, the more information (in human consciousnesses) we can base our decisions on.
4. Therefore, the more we decentralize our decision-making, the better our decisions can be.
So when I say I owe you the opposite, (and without-loss-of-generality imply that you owe others the opposite as well) I mean that we owe each other good decision making, which means we owe each other listening, and research, not reductive explanation and justification. Listening to our own gut, and everything else. I listen to everyone, I explain little. Please listen. Listen diversely, listen to what offends you, listen to people who are evil and people you think have done wrong, listen to the opposition and listen to your friends, listen at least as much as you refuse to explain yourself to anyone and listen at least as much as you refuse to justify in words what you learn by listening. This is a healthy diet for it's 'garbage in, garbage out' and unless we learn far more than we speak we generate bullshit on the daily. The right to remain silent is an epistemic principle. May all silence become meaningless.
(And yet, the moral neutrality of inaction is a social fiction, much like the indulgences of the medieval church--more on that in tomorrow's article "The Immorality of Inaction")