Hi all! It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything here but that’s because I’ve been hard at work on a major project. Over the last few years, I’ve been preparing my epistemology thoughts for a peer-reviewed publication. That process has gone through several starts and stops but I’m finally ready to share a rough draft. My proposals are quite ambitious (to say the least) so I’m starting by asking for feedback here before I proceed with the final submission. I have a journal lined up already (This View of Life), but if you have other suggestions for where this would be appropriate, I would very much appreciate it.
I literally have about 200 pages of quotes and citations ready for the final paper, but I won’t use most of that. In order to elicit feedback as painlessly as possible, I’ve compressed the arguments into a presentation deck accompanied by about 1300 words below. That’s obviously not in the form of an academic paper yet, but I trust this will be clear enough for you to be able to comment on any weak points or clarifications that you think need to be addressed for the final paper. Thank you in advance for any thoughts you can share! Here goes:
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I literally have about 200 pages of quotes and citations ready for the final paper, but I won’t use most of that. In order to elicit feedback as painlessly as possible, I’ve compressed the arguments into a presentation deck accompanied by about 1300 words below. That’s obviously not in the form of an academic paper yet, but I trust this will be clear enough for you to be able to comment on any weak points or clarifications that you think need to be addressed for the final paper. Thank you in advance for any thoughts you can share! Here goes:
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On the Origin of Knowledge*
In 1900, the young artist Gustav Klimt presented the first of his three “Faculty Paintings”, which he had been commissioned to produce for the Great Hall of the University of Vienna. It was a time of growing confidence in the Austrian-Hungarian empire, the sciences, and the power of reason. However,
| “Rather than the anticipated glorifying works, Klimt created mysterious symbolic paintings that, instead of celebrating the triumph of human knowledge, exposed it as powerless. In ‘Philosophy’, a group of naked people drift through a nebulous starry sky, despairing at the reality of their untethered existence.” (Gustav Klimt, p.61) |
This monumental painting, over 4x3 meters in size, was never installed and was later destroyed in a fire in May 1945. All we have left is a black and white photo of the original. But it is still powerful, and in fact captures the present situation of philosophy perfectly.
Why are we like this? The history of unsolved problems in epistemology makes it clear.
At the heart of this, is philosophy’s definition of “truth”, which has proven impossible to attain.
There are two ways that evolutionary thinking can help with this. First, is thinking in terms of gradualism rather than essentialism.
Second, is building from the bottom up, rather than using imaginary sky hooks to descend from the top down.
This gives us a starting point for knowledge as something like a pinpoint of light floating in the complete darkness of a universe that life was ignorant of.
Living beings slowly learned to navigate their environment using a process we now call cybernetics.
And so…
Over time, life develops two “species of thought” in this epistemological world. One is for the realm we can learn about. The other is for the realm where we are totally ignorant.
And so…
The field of evolutionary epistemology has identified mechanisms for how knowledge continued to evolve.
Note that the latest step in this evolution came with the invention of the scientific method. There are many ways this method can be depicted. Here is one example:
Reviewing the literature turns up at least 11 more ways that the scientific method has been depicted.
All of these are actually just extensions and refinements of the original cybernetics loop. Therefore, we could label all knowledge production (including the scientific method) as coming from an epistemological method.
Note that the 12 scientific methods identified earlier do map to this very easily. This is important because it helps us understand knowledge as existing along a continuum. So-called “scientific knowledge” or “philosophical knowledge” is related to simpler forms of knowledge.
With all this talk of methods and loops, it is important to see that we are not merely running in circles! Here is an AI-generated cartoon to help drive that point home.
As described in an earlier paper, we raise and lower the credence of our ideas as we discover more and more information about them.
Our new knowledge is connected to previously generated knowledge. It grows or shrinks with each new turn of the epistemological loop. This turns our 2-dimensional circles into 3-dimensional spirals.
There is a long history of different truth-seeking disciplines recognizing this and creating hierarchies for their evidence and knowledge.
Analyzing this history, we see the same pattern emerging over and over. The famous “Photo 51” helped Watson, Crick, and Wilkins win Nobel prizes for their roles in discovering the structure of DNA. That photo showed two crossbeams that determine the size and shape of the double helix. In a similar (though purely metaphorical) fashion, this paper posits that there are two crossbeams that push knowledge spirals outwards.
With each iteration of the epistemological loop, it is the quantity and diversity of observations that make for wider and sturdier spirals in our knowledge production.
This is because “intersubjective views from everywhere” are the closest we can ever get to the “objective view from nowhere” that would be required for full and certain philosophical truth.
So….
We start with an undifferentiated word cloud. (Do not actually read this.)
Then perform a “functional analysis” on this heap to help make sense of the emerging phenomena of knowledge as it evolves through different hierarchical stages.
Try to do all of this comprehensively. Tinbergen created his Four Questions for studies of biology, which are mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive because they sit at the four quadrants of a 2x2 matrix where “ultimate vs. proximate” distinctions are located on one axis and “current vs. historical” timescales are on the other axis. Similarly, four questions can be created for studies of knowledge. These lie in the four quadrants made by “objective items vs subjective knowers” on one axis and “current vs. historical” timescales on the other. Answering all of these questions about a piece of knowledge will give you a comprehensive understanding of it.
After performing such a functional analysis on the word cloud for knowledge collected above, the following hierarchy for knowledge is proposed. Knowledge grows from fragile to robust as the epistemological loops that produce it increase in quantity and diversity. Each piece of knowledge has facts, knowers, processes, and credence associated with it. These progress across five columns based on the knowers — subsystems of an individual, an individual, small niche groups, larger established groups, and globally diverse groups. Each column can only progress so far. The knowledge produced by these groups could also be placed in a hierarchy of quality from A to F. But note there is an overlap between columns as the best knowledge production in small groups transitions to new knowledge production in larger groups.
Placing all of the terms from the word cloud above into this hierarchy gives us the details we need to more fully understand it and use it for further analysis. (Click here if you want to read the details of this table.)
There are many points of discussion to be considered from all of this.
First, some important disclaimers…
This hierarchy doesn’t apply directly to all forms of culture. However, It can be applied to “knowledge about” the utility of those other items.
There is an important paradox about power embedded in this view of epistemology.
This view may also help us understand experts and expertise better.
We can imagine disseminating this using simplified scorecards for knowledge.
It may also shed light on another paradox about the perceived quality of knowledge due to its stability or instability.
It could help with the issues of “fake news”.
In fact, this evolutionary view can help dissolve all of the knowledge problems of philosophy.
This brings us back to Klimt’s picture of philosophy. In recent years, researchers have used historical facts and AI analysis to colorize the painting as it may have been originally. The result does not change the meaning of the painting, where its subjects are still floating untethered, surrounded by a universe of ignorance. But it does make things in there more beautiful now. Hopefully, the view presented in this paper on the evolution of knowledge can do the same for us.
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*Now that you have read this post, you can see why I think it is ambitious. The full title of Darwin’s revolutionary book about biology was, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. As a playful ode to this, I’ve been considering the following title for my paper:
“On the Origin of Knowledge by Means of Rational Selection or the Survival of Justified Beliefs in the Struggle Towards Truth — How the Universal Acid of Evolutionary Thinking Can Dissolve the Great Epistemological Problems of Knowledge, Scepticism, Relativism, Demarcation, and Disinformation.”
That is way more than one mouthful, though, so let me know if you have a better title in mind.
