Epistemology and the Limitations of Knowledge

By Steve Rensberry  

Epistemology is an important branch of philosophy concerned with the parameters and limits of human knowledge, with beliefs that are justifiably true and based on that which is genuinely real. It is concerned with the capability of things in general to be known and understood in their deepest essence.
   Are abstract constructs real? What do we make of the thoughts, images and emotions experienced by a conscious human mind? Certainly they can be said to be subjectively meaningful to the person experiencing them, but are they grounded in some deeper type of reality, independent of the subject? Plato attempted to make this exact point in his Theory of Forms, Aristotle argued against it and many others throughout the ages have sought to add their own insight into the definition of what is real, what is imagined and how it is we can know the difference.
   This essay will consider the idea that this thing we call knowledge is fundamentally a linguistic tool, albeit one which presumably helps us to understand and control the world around us. Giving a name to phenomenon which we consider most certain also helps us to reduce the physiological stress that can arise from doubt. In similar fashion, the attempt to define reality itself will be considered as making, at best, a series of relative and subjective affirmations. What we say, what we believe, what we think, takes shape only after it is filtered through a maze of human cognitive processes, replete with all of its genetic predispositions, emotional baggage and life experiences.
   First, let me address the false dichotomy which is frequently drawn between those who are skeptical about the existence of absolutes on the one hand, and those who are skeptical about skepticism on the other. Typical is the following criticism of absolute skepticism, as stated in Questions That Matter by Ed. L. Miller (McGraw-Hill, Inc., 1984, pg. 191): "Actually, there have been relatively few absolute skeptics. It is not hard to see why. Critics of this position have been quick to charge that it is impractical and impossible. It is impractical because, from the purely practical standpoint of getting along in the world, no one in his or her right mind can actually live on such a premise. Our daily lives are pervaded by what we take to be (whether they actually are or not) assurances, certainties, and in a word, all kinds of knowledge."
   Likewise, Miller provides the traditional response to relativism by pointing to its supposedly self-contradictory and self-refuting nature. "For they maintain, with the greatest assurance, that we cannot maintain anything. Otherwise stated: If we cannot know anything, then how do we know that? Stated again: If absolute skepticism is true, then it must be false!"
   Such criticism, however, misrepresents the issue. When people hypothesize that absolutes do not exist, all they are saying is that the weight of evidence appears, from their limited perspective as finite human beings, against the existence of absolutes; in the same way, modern empiricists question that substantive knowledge can be derived from sources that are completely independent of the senses.
   Why must we assume anything to be infinitely true, to necessarily be absolute in nature in order to live our lives? Perhaps this is just one dimension of many. Perhaps what we see now is not the way things always have been, nor how they will be millions of years in the future. Why must we make a leap into absolutism to be sufficiently certain about the world around us. Is it not enough to interact with things as relative phenomenon that are simply true most of the time, that display a high degree of probability and consistency but that also carry with them the chance of floundering in the face of contrary evidence? To object to absolutism is not to make a metaphysical claim but merely to point to the illogic of the concept and to the dearth of empirical evidence available to substantiate it. As I have mentioned in previous posts, to claim that there are absolutes is implicitly claim that there is no place anywhere in the universe where absolutes do not exist.
   Obviously there are many things which present us with a high degree of certainty that we cannot readily see with the naked eye, things such as wind and gravity, but we can test them as to their veracity through empirical, scientific means that act as an extension of human sensory organs. There also are many presumed entities and abstract concepts which, while theorized as real, are little less than figments of the human imagination. Placing our complete trust and in that which we have no solid evidence for, that is presumed in fact to be outside of the realm of scientific analysis altogether, is the issue at stake.
   Since the dawn of recorded history, human beings have embraced a large number of false beliefs. For one list of such beliefs, see: List of Common Misconceptions.
   Though it doesn't take an illness to believe a falsehood, the false beliefs of those who suffer from schizophrenia and other forms of psychosis are well documented, as are the suspected physiological basis for them.
   One report discussed in Time Magazine in a story by journalist Maia Szalavitz links the phenomena of false belief to the presence or absence of a particular fold in the human brain, a fold that is missing in an estimated one-quarter of people and 44 percent of those with schizophrenia.
   Hanna Pickard with the Oxford Centre for Neuroethics and All Souls College at the University of Oxford has written an interesting piece entitled Schizophrenia and the Epistemology of Self-Knowledge, in which she discusses what is termed "alien thought," leading many people suffering from paranoid delusions and schizophrenia to mistakenly assign alien responsibility for their own thoughts.
   "There is evidence that both schizophrenic and paranoid patients show a generalized attributional reasoning bias towards assigning causal responsibility for events to others, rather than to assigning them to themselves," Pickard writes, citing two references. (Baker, C. A., and Morrison, A. P. 1998. Cognitive processes in auditory hallucinations, Psychological Medicine 28(5): 1199-208; Moritz, S., Woodward, T. S., Burlon, M., Braus, D. F. and Anderson, B. 2007. Attributional style in schizophrenia, Cognitive Therapy and Research 31(3): 371-83.)
   Pickard also notes the tendency for such subjects to jump to conclusions more so than normal subjects. (Garety and Hemsley, Delusions: Investigations into the psychology of delusional reasoning, Oxford University Press, 1994).
   "The proposal suggests that they are prone to alien thought because they may also show exaggerated irrationality in the capacity for conscious reflection to causally influence the maintenance and revision of beliefs and other mental states; that it is something which in principle is open to empirical testing. But importantly, as I have emphasized, it is an abnormality that places them along a continuum together with the rest of us. Indeed, it is natural to envisage a spectrum of related abnormalities, more or less pathological, moving from immoral or selfish or shameful thoughts, to addiction and akrasia, to obsessional thinking and disorders, through to prodromal alien thought and finally full-blown schizophrenia," Pickard states.
   If only it were possible to venture into the epistemological jungle without also addressing the multi-faceted issues of belief, truth and evidence (or justification), but it is mighty difficult. One way to depict the relationship is by use of a Euler diagram. The diagram places knowledge within a subset represented by two overlapping circles, one representing truth and one representing beliefs. Something can be true but not believed, and visa versa. True knowledge, categorically speaking, must be something that is both true and believed. This is not to deny instances where a person's belief just happens to be true by accident or by luck. (see: The Gettier problem). Whether such cases of "luck-based belief" are justified ultimately begs the question: how do we determine (know) what things are real and what things are not?
    The great divide in epistemological circles is, generally speaking, between empiricists such as Aristotle, St. Thomas Aquinas, John Locke and David Hume; and rationalists such as Plato, René Descartes, Gottfried Leibniz and Baruch Spinoza, with philosophers such as Immanuel Kant attempting to bridge the gap by arguing that both are necessary to some degree in acquiring knowledge -- with reason being necessary to help make sense of experience, yet impotent in regard to claims about things of which no human can possibly have any experience of.
   Either way, the idea of knowledge being acquired by some sort of intuitive sense of truth that we are all born with seems to me an idea which can only survive by assuming an immensely broad definition of what constitutes evidence. Analytical philosopher Alvin Plantinga's reformed epistemology posits the idea of a "properly basic belief," as reason enough for one's beliefs, needing neither inference from established truths nor empirical evidence of any kind. The proposition falters in essentially appealing to subjective experience and to an overly-broad definition of what constitutes sufficient evidence.
   Plantinga, as with fellow theist C.S. Lewis, makes the mistake of reaching for absolute certainty without warrant, and by taking aim at empirical, naturalistic approaches to knowledge by building up the traditional straw man in order to be able to knock it down, falsely claiming that they are self-defeating and incoherent.
  Let me invite your consideration of two views, one espoused by Hume in his work, the Treatise of Human Nature, and the other by G.W. Hegel in The Phenomenology of Spirit.
   Hume writes: "But setting aside some metaphysicians of this kind, I may venture to affirm of the rest of mankind, that they are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement. Our eyes cannot turn in their sockets without varying our perceptions. Our thought is still more variable than our sight; and all our other senses and faculties contribute to this change; nor is there any single power of the soul, which remains unalterably the same, perhaps for one moment. The mind is a kind of theatre, where several perceptions successively make their appearance; pass, re-pass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations." (ed. L.A. Selby-Bigge; Oxford University Press, London, 1888 pgs. 251-153). See: Of Personal Identity.
   Faced with perceptions of an "inconceivable rapidity," and in a state of "perpetual flux and movement," as Hume puts it, is it any wonder the human animal is so prone to tether itself to something that is of an eternally unchanging nature, permanent and lasting, yet without proper justification?
   Hegel, in the Phenomenology of Spirit (Mind), writes: "The goal to be reached is the mind’s insight into what knowing is. Impatience asks for the impossible, wants to reach the goal without the means of getting there. The length of the journey has to be borne with, for every moment is necessary; and again we must halt at every stage, for each is itself a complete individual form, and is fully and finally considered only so far as its determinate character is taken and dealt with as a rounded and concrete whole, or only so far as the whole is looked at in the light of the special and peculiar character which this determination gives it. Because the substance of individual mind, nay, more, because the universal mind at work in the world (Weltgeist), has had the patience to go through these forms in the long stretch of time’s extent, and to take upon itself the prodigious labour of the world’s history, where it bodied forth in each form the entire content of itself, as each is capable of presenting it; and because by nothing less could that all-pervading mind ever manage to become conscious of what itself is — for that reason, the individual mind, in the nature of the case, cannot expect by less toil to grasp what its own substance contains."
   Hegel's point: The imperfect human consciousness instinctively establishes its own criteria for knowledge, subsequently modifying its concept of reality (the object) to fit an imperfect knowledge, rather than adjusting its knowledge to conform to the object, a distinction which ultimately is immaterial. As noted in this Wikipedia entry on Hegel: "At the end of the process, when the object has been fully 'spiritualized' by successive cycles of consciousness' experience, consciousness will fully know the object and at the same time fully recognize that the object is none other than itself."
   A rather interesting phenomenon often takes place whenever a person who has made an intellectual and emotional commitment to transcendent truths runs out of logical defenses. "It doesn't really matter," they'll say. "I know what I believe is true because I have a personal relationship with (pick your transcendent entity). In other words, they "just know," as if by magic, as if by some invisible force and source of knowledge wholly beyond human comprehension. By any measure, it's a response that relies on such a broadly subjective criteria for knowledge as to be essentially no criteria at all.

For Further Reading
Epistemology
David Hume
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
The Phenomenology of Spirit
Plato and the Theory of Forms
Logical Positivism
Questions that Matter: An Invitation to Philosophy
The Ontology of Concepts: Abstract Objects or Mental Representations
Schizophrenia and the Epistemology of Self-Knowledge

Confucius: Those Who are Absolute True Selves

 An excerpt from the writings of Confucius

   Only those who are their absolute true selves in the world can fulfill their own nature; only those who fulfill their own nature can fulfill the nature of others; only those who fulfill the nature of others can fulfill the nature of things; those who fulfill the nature of things are worthy to help Mother Nature in growing and sustaining life; and those who are worthy to help Mother Nature in growing and sustaining life are the equals of heaven and earth.
   The next in order are those who are able to attain to the apprehension of a particular branch of study. By such studies, they are able to apprehend the truth. Realization of the true self compels expression; expression becomes evidence; evidence becomes clarity or luminosity of knowledge; clarity or luminosity of knowledge activates; active knowledge becomes power and power become a pervading influence. Only those whoa re absolutely their true selves in the world can have pervading influence.
   It is an attribute of the possession of the absolute true self to be able to foreknow. When a nation or family is about to flourish, there are sure to be lucky omens. When a nation or family is about to perish, there are sure to be signs and prodigies. These things manifest themselves in the instruments of divination and in the agitation of the human body. What happiness of calamity is about to come, it can be known beforehand.
    When it is good, it can be known beforehand. When it is evil, it can also be known beforehand. Therefore he who has realized his true self is like a celestial spirit.
   Truth means the fulfillment of our self; and moral law means following the law of our being. Truth is the beginning and end (the substance) of material existence Without truth there is no material existence. It is for this reason that the moral man values truth.
   Truth is not only the fulfillment of our own being, it is that by which things outside of us haven existence. The fulfillment of our being is more sense. The fulfillment of the nature of our being is moral sense. The fulfillment of the nature of things outside of us is intellect. These, moral sense and intellect, are the powers or faculties of our being. They combine the inner or subjective and outer or objective use of the power of the mind. Therefore, with truth, everything done is right.
   Thus absolute truth is indestructible. Being indestructible, it is eternal. Being eternal, it is self-existent. Being self-existent it is infinite. Being infinite, it is vast and deep. Being vast and deep, it is transcendental and intelligent. It is because it is vast and deep that it contains all existence. It is because it is transcendental and intelligent that it embraces all existence. It is because it is infinite and eternal that it fulfills or perfects all existence. In vastness and depth it is like the earth. In transcendental intelligence it is like heaven. Infinite and eternal, it is the infinite itself.
   Such being the nature of absolute truth, it manifests itself without being seen; it produces effects without motion; it accomplishes its ends without action.
   The principle in the course and operation of nature may be summed up in one word: because it obeys only its own immutable law, the way in which it produces the variety of things is unfathomable.
   Nature is vast, deep, high, intelligent, infinite and eternal. The heaven appearing before us is only this bright, shrinking mass; but in its immeasurable extent, the sun, the moon, stars and constellations are suspended in it, and all things are embraced under it. The earth, appearing before us, is but a handful of soil; but in all its breadth and depth, it sustains mighty mountains without feeding their weight; rivers and seas dash against it without cause it to leak. The mountain appearing before us is only a mass of rock; bit in all the vastness of its size, grass and vegetation grow upon it, birds and beasts dwell on it, and treasurers of precious minerals are found in it. The water appearing before us is but a ladle full of liquid; bit in all its unfathomable depths, the largest crustaceans, dragons, fishes, and turtles are produced in them, all useful products abound in them.
   In the Book of Songs it is said:
  "The ordinance of God, How inscrutable it is and goes on for ever."
   That is to say, this is the essence of God. It is again said:
   How excellent it is, the moral perfection of King Wen."
   That is to say, this is the essence of the noble character of the Emperor Wen. Moral perfection also never dies.
   Note: Text selection is copyright expired.

For further reading:

Emperor Wen, Confucianism and a New Order

Confucius (551-479 BCE)

------------------------------ Gray --------------------------

Caustic consequences

Sequence initiated.
What! With only a whisper are we lured us into acquiescence.
But surely it is all but a game.
Zero, nine, eight, seven, zero, nine, four.
A roll of the dice.
What really did we humans do –
to force time into retreat?

A sea of darkness
There was no reference point,
as I looked around – nothing to see, to feel, to smell,
nothing but thoughts without matter.
In perpetual motion.
An ocean of silence in a sea of gray.
As a void slices, suddenly, through a crack in the sky.
Split like a seam, in a moment of birth.

Critical juncture
   I am millions of years old and broken beyond measure,
imploding, transmuting, shifting into a state
of non-definition and delirious despair.
Misery fights for control, tearing me in two,
between past and future –
between what I am
and what so many must endure;
such a prolonged, deplorable existence,
forcing their hand with what little there is  –
all at the expense of mere numbers.
Not that anything is easy.
Many of the brightest have thought it through,
and thought they had it figured out,
even without proof
even without correspondence,
with formulas far removed from reality.
Like bees to pollen, the theoretical, the speculative,
the string-laden phenomenon in
league with faith and absolutism
of a thousand transcendent varieties
comes loaded with half-truths
and a bevy of broken neurons,
to give us anything and everything
to avert the pain of uncertainty.
 
Cause and defect
   – external sensory collection –
– biological-based genetic data –
– hierarchical mechanisms of storage –
– the manifestation of time –
– emotion to mood to attitude –
– intuition and sensing –
– a synthesis of biological and psychological movements –
– urges to desires to a need for structure –
– logic to reason –
– self-awareness to consciousness –
– to universal awareness –
– equilibrium to despair  –
– anger to reconstruction –
– struggle to seclusion –
– meaning to knowledge –
 – acceptance to tranquility –
– growth to transference –

Trust and decay
There should be. There ought to be. 
There must be –
because comprehensive reality includes subtleties,
possibilities, worlds beyond perception –
gradients of matter stealthily occupying
the same earthly space
light years beyond recognition.
Abstraction or substance?
If every effect has a cause,
where's the tie between nothing and something?
Where's the link between body and mind,
between the real and the unreal,
between matter and non-matter?
Do objects ever touch?
Unseen forces have you feeling in the dark –
ripping, tearing, shredding the tiniest
morsel of knowledge –
inverting and flipping and reshaping
the obvious until its true nature is
effectively obscured.
You want to believe.
It feels good to believe.
We will make you believe.
You will believe.
In a world of restriction,
the socially dominant live for supremacy –
fragmenting and reforming themselves
until group control is assured.
The lies are true.
Trust us.
The contradictions are fabricated –
shameful insecurities bred in obscurity.
You have a duty to trash your tired imperatives –
wrapped as they are like wire around your soul.

A universe of gray
Strange it was.
Like the mind.
Bigger on the inside than it was on the outside
We surmised it was related to balance,
perplexed by the infinite nature of it all. 
Our minds it turns out were the strangest things of all. 
Were we making things too complex, or too simple?
 Where was the bedrock?
Why can we not immediately turn that which is
within our minds into material reality?
Imprisoned we are by the forces of the inanimate,
by the unknown and untouchable.
We observe patterns and shapes and centers
and breaks and cycles and borders and arrows
and sheets and spheres
and every possible synthesis in between.
We observe recurrent processes and phenomenon.
A complexity of emotions and drives and disassociation –
from fears to heartaches to love –
coursing through our veins, beyond our conscious awareness
We fasten our beliefs on unsighted faith and presupposition.
We make it so by redefining the nature of evidence.
We call everything matter or everything mind
– complementary but independent.
Do we really know what's real?
Are we not but conglomerates?
Relationships in search of a structure.
Compounds tethered to elementary forces
a thousand times more complex
and profound than we can imagine.
Phenomenally frail creatures
with small minds and big delusions.
We feel the edges. We touch a whisper.
We think we know it all.
Absolutes. Infinity. Morality.
Disingenuous desperation.
Assume – extend – believe – demand – conform
Can no one see – the depth, the ingrained elements,
the core in humanity that changes only by chance?
That idolizes then repeats? Ad infinitum.

Absolute confusion

By Steve Rensberry

"There are no absolutes."

"Everything is relative."

Both of these statements, uttered with any kind of sincerity, are but lightning rods for criticism. The response generally is along the lines that it is illogical and self-contradictory, requiring the person to assume to be true the very thing they are saying is untrue. No one can logically deny that absolutes exist, they say.

The charge however is disingenuous and for all practical purposes irrelevant. Why? Because the meaning and existential truth of a statement is one thing and its temporal or structural consistency is another. The preponderance of evidence also shows the nature of proof to be nebulous at best.

To say absolutely that absolutes -- or any specific entity or thing for that matter -- do not exist, certainly seems to lend itself to being self-referentially inconsistent. By implication, it is suggested, the person who says that absolutes do not exist is saying there is at least one that does, that being the one that says there are no others.

The problem is that the person who says that absolutes do in fact exist unknowingly makes the very same kind of statement, also by implication. That being that there is no evidence anywhere which can be used to prove that absolutes do not exist. Certainly a person would need to see or be everywhere to know such a thing with certainty, would they not? Logically, mathematically and in terms of being self-referentially inconsistent it fits the very same pattern.

Any statement for that matter which claims that something either exists or does not exist is, at the same time, making a negative existential statement by implying there is no thing or piece of evidence anywhere which proves the contrary.

Let me make three points:

First, all statements of being must of necessity presume to be outside the reality to which the subject matter exists. When we think about thinking for instance, or reflect upon ourselves reflecting, we break the loop only by presumptively stepping outside the realm of our own thoughts in order to assert some kind of objective statement about those thoughts. The nature of consciousness makes it imperative that we do so.

Second, every statement about being hinges on presumptions about existence, the trustworthiness of a person's senses, the nature of matter and time, and so forth -- presumptions that are always beyond proof in the absolute sense -- either from a logical or a materialistic standpoint. I can take an apple and place it in your palm, but you must still presume your senses to be telling you the truth and presume that what looks and tastes like an apple truly is an apple and not some kind of metaphysical, molecular impostor.

Every moment of every day we're busy trusting in what our limited, imperfect human senses are telling us. Trusting that no universe besides this one exists. Trusting that what exists now has this or that characteristic. Trusting that the concepts of logic and time and existence really matter in the grand scheme of things.

Third, the nature of the concept of absolutes puts it on thin ground from the beginning. If, for instance, the something we're talking about is of a brute physical and material nature like, say, a 200-pound chunk of granite rock, or a human being, then it's not too difficult to provide the kind of evidence for its existence that most people would agree on. Tiny, microscopic creatures on the level of an amoeba would take the assistance of a powerful microscope to detect -- but are still in the realm of revealing evidence. However, it's a whole different matter when that subject is something akin to an invisible, telepathic creature from another side of the universe, capable of being communicated with on that same telepathic level.

A person quite obviously could claim that no such 200-pound chunk of granite exists anywhere, but all it would take would be for one person to round up just one such rock to prove otherwise. Meanwhile, if that same person claimed that there was indeed such a thing as an invisible, telepathic creature from the far reaches of the universe who communicated with us earthlings, would they be able to prove it? I don't think so. Disproving them wrong may be equally difficult, though the burden of proof is arguably on the person making the claim.

Critics of relativism like to point to the self-referential inconsistency of the statement "absolutes do not exist" as though it somehow offers proof that they do in fact exist. But the assertion is a fundamental misrepresentation of what relativists believe. All the person is saying when they postulate that absolutes do not exist is that within the limited boundaries of human understanding and knowledge, the evidence in favor of relativism appears stronger than the evidence in favor of absolutes. They are saying that from the position of a hypothetical being outside the constructs of this theoretical thing we call the universe, it is presumptuous to claim absolute certainty. Not absolutely presumptuous, but rationally so given the weight of evidence available to finite human beings.