New Starts and New Missions, Jamming, 28/12/2017

I still have a bunch of notes from going through What Is Philosophy?, and I’ve written up some more thoughts on some of the commentaries I’ve been working on. I find it rather curious that many of the major names in Deleuze Studies™ are based in Canada.

Something about this country these days that feels welcoming to a philosophical community who revolve their thoughts around the creativity of difference. Canada can be an oasis today from the nationalist extremism that’s burning Western democratic traditions to the ground.

The icons of a movement are more than people;
they're pastiches of imagery that express raw desire.

If we defend it, of course. Democracy must always be defended. Freedom has never not been under siege. To be free is to be under siege.

You could call these my final thoughts on 2017. I’m not going to attempt some grand summary of the year to date. I’m not paid enough to write this blog to attempt anything so massive as that. History, in progress, now feels properly overwhelming to people. India and Africa, for example, are just as full of events and madness as the West, to name only two examples.

I feel simultaneously hopeful, agitated, and afraid of the future. Personally, more opportunities are opening in my professional life – a new job in Ontario’s education sector with a proper middle-class salary, real responsibilities, and real respect.

I do want to put to keys and screen some plans I have for the future. A few things that are ending and a few things that are beginning. I want to do as much of what I can that I can, because I’m no longer struggling to survive.

For 40ish hours each week, I’ll be working as Education Manager for Anderson College, a small trades college – business, some medical sciences – in northern Toronto. Basically, I make sure all the programs run smoothly, and that we keep up with our programs’ accreditation needs as we maintain and grow.

It puts an end to five years of contingent, precarious employment as a teacher and communicator. I never fit in well among the more mercenary culture of communications and public relations firms, but my position at Anderson lets me use the skills and conceptual frameworks I learned for that field in my daily work. A lot of my job falls under internal communications, liaising between instructors and college leaders.

While this changes the schedule of my research work, it won’t be detracting from it. I’ve taken over at Digital Editor at the Reply Collective, and expanding the reach of this platform will be my major publication project for the next year. I’m working on a few content strategies, but I’m only just starting my outreach to promote the platform and bring in new contributors.

My work here feeds into my work at Anderson because one subset of social epistemology – the study of social and political aspects of knowledge production – is education studies. So one direction the research at the Reply Collective will cover (among many, many vectors) is education theory.

I might make a return to some of John Dewey's ideas about the nature
and purpose of education as a starting point for this new professional
direction in my life and thinking.

Beyond that, I want to use contemporary research in education to improve accessibility and quality throughout Canada’s college and university education sector. Here’s one medium-long term goal that I want to work toward from my position.

This year’s public college instructors’ strike in Ontario was an unmitigated disaster in terms of the union’s leadership. Essentially, they walked ass-backwards into an unwinnable strike that alienated most Ontarians from any empathy with college teachers for the next generation, minimum. But one of their major issues – aside from the horrible inequality and terrible compensations most college teachers live with – is curriculum updates.

Generally speaking, Ontario public college curriculums are horribly out of date. This is because the only people with the authority to update curriculums are high-level college administrators. But they don’t move to update the curriculum until government employment surveys reveal that their graduates no longer have the required skills to build careers in their fields.

Facing this massive mismatch of learning material and working conditions, the colleges undertake a total and expensive overhaul of whole programs. The instructors’ union wanted teacher input into this process to make small, piecemeal updates that would save costs overall. A continuing process of updating curriculum as industry conditions shift and fluctuate.

Such a process is ordinary for a private institution like Anderson College, and there’s no reason why it can’t be done in larger institutions. I’m ultimately responsible for the programs of just over 300 students. But such a sensible policy needs to apply throughout Ontario – tens of thousands of students.

My work as an education manager, students’ advocate, and global research hub coordinator has this larger goal of improving education for Canada’s largest province – ultimately for my entire country of about 36-million people.

That’s the journey I’m beginning as 2018 begins. At the beginning of this year, I had no clue I’d get here. Hell, a year ago, my day job was still at the delivery department of IKEA Etobicoke. I am beyond grateful, and I will not let the people of Canada down.

Shame to Be So Very Ordinary, Research Time, 01/12/2017

Here’s why I think Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy is ultimately pragmatist – philosophy begins in ordinary life.

It’s not a special communion with being, as the early Greek sages and some modern revanchists saw it. It isn’t a tradition that seeks absolute truths or God’s truths, even though a terrible majority of philosophers in the Western tradition think so.

I'm glad exploring for concepts isn't as dangerous as exploring in
real life. I won't end up like the Franklin Expedition developing
posts for SERRC or book ideas.

When you're trying to say what is philosophy,* Deleuze says you shouldn’t think about the tradition itself and the lofty – sometimes, a little too lofty – pronouncements about philosophy’s purpose. No, look at philosophical thought itself and examine what it’s doing – philosophical thinking creates, analyzes, and maps concepts.

* Narrator: “Hey! That’s the name of this book I’m talking about.”

That makes philosophical thinking ultimately pragmatic – you’re building new concepts, new frameworks for understanding the world. The focus is on navigating problems, and different frameworks for understanding the world make up different ways to make sense of problems, different tools to reveal their complexities from obscurity.

Different substances are visible under different kinds of light. What one lighting condition obscures, another will reveal. Same with concepts. There isn’t one absolutely better set of concepts than another. You get that idea when you think philosophy is about accessing the truth. Because what isn’t true is false.

But when you’re talking about concepts – frameworks for understanding – you have only different models that reveal different aspects of the world. Everything that’s revealed is true, but there won’t be one concept that reveals every truth or all the greatest truths.

That’s why I once said – and still believe – that Deleuze’s thinking carries forward philosophical pragmatism. American pragmatism had a complex account of the production of truths and the plural nature of truth and reason. But the tradition couldn't escape the problems of relativism that kept creeping into John Dewey’s mature thinking.

Don’t think I’m being dismissive of pragmatism. It’s one of the few philosophical -isms with which I self-identify.** The landmark ontological work of his career, Experience and Nature, is a masterpiece that captures the spirit of his whole philosophical movement.

** Even though when I do, I run a decent risk of people thinking I just write commentary and other secondary literature on Dewey.

But that American tradition of pragmatism through its secular trinity of Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey could never get through to the other side of that skepticism – how many truths could still be true, even when they weren’t all coherent with each other. Truth is fractured, but no less true for all that.

The Deleuzian idea repairs this issue by showing how you can throw universal mutual coherence among every truth out the window. All you had to do was demonstrate the logic of philosophical thinking is compossibility. Coherence is a framework of logic and thought, not reality itself.

Reality itself is chaos – understood in the abyssal sense – and philosophical thinking is the best set of techniques humanity has developed to try to think chaos. Coherence is how you make maps and draw paths in chaos – plotting the order that does exist in any chaos by investigating what can and cannot fit together.

A small patch of arid desert can’t develop surrounded by a lush rainforest without a mountain range around its rim. That’s a possibility condition for a desert in the centre of a rainforest.

Mapping a plane of immanence is to do the same survey with concepts.

Gilles in LA V: Speculate Pragmatically, A History Boy, 27/11/2015

Since this series on the LA Review of Book's essays on Gilles Deleuze is done, I'm going to include all the links to my other posts. Here's Deleuze, Guattari, and the fluidity of identity; the self-destructive habits of academic scholarship today; how philosophy helps us understand our world in ways we've never thought of before; and why everyone should read philosophy, but not the way it's taught in schools.
• • •
Brian Massumi wrote one of those essays in the LA Review of Books about Gilles Deleuze. I remember reading one of his books, Parables of the Virtual, just over three years ago. It was remarkably dense, and a little too long for its purpose, but a wonderful book.

Massumi is one of the most metal philosophers working
in the academy today.

It took me a while to read it because I had just started work at an answering service, and I hadn’t yet adjusted how I scheduled my days around it to get enough reading time in. Reading is part of how I relax. 

Massumi talks about how Deleuze took so long to take off among the American followers of upstart French philosophy. He says a major reason was because there were so many different concepts, ideas, and inquiries threading across Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s works, you couldn’t focus on one single theme that stands out among them and could define the whole.

But there is, says Massumi. I agree with him, even if I think his essay is too long for what it ultimately achieves. I suspect this might be a feature of Massumi’s work.

Anyway, Massumi calls Deleuze’s philosophy, in its buzz-worthy phrase, Speculative Pragmatism. As he unpacks the label, it fits quite well with how I’ve come to understand Deleuze’s ideas and what they can do in the tradition of philosophical writing and discourse. 

Here’s a little story about philosophy. It’s really simple. So simple, it doesn’t really explain anything, except why I think Deleuze was our last real vanguard of thought.

Jean-François Lyotard came up with the term post-
modernism, so blame him if you have a problem.

So post-modernism was a thing that happened in the intellectual scene. The ideas this tradition developed were really useful to understanding the limits of human knowledge and how our knowledge can be manipulated. 

But the philosophy could never quite escape charges of relativism. It was the first school in the Western tradition to go all the way in rejecting transcendent sources or grounds of knowledge (like God, or eternal being, which amount to the same thing). 

Without this, it was left without any hooks to secure our knowledge. No to distinguish the truth from my, your, our, and their truths.

Postmodernism developed through the 1970s into the 2000s. It was largely French, though the German Martin Heidegger was an important influence. It gained a few American adherents, like Richard Rorty in philosophy, and became a standard framework in literature studies. 

Postmodernism makes contemporary meta-textuality in fiction possible. So thank you, or damn you, depending on what you think of that.

The relativism problem had a solution, but it had been developed decades before among the American pragmatists. Charles Sanders Peirce was the first to articulate the problem and engage with it. William James dealt with it as an ethical problem, and came up with the definitive pragmatist solution.

I'm always a little saddened that William James didn't
live longer than Charles Peirce. Peirce was older, and
did much more cocaine.

Stop thinking about knowledge as having the ultimate goal of being true. Knowledge is instead fundamentally about being useful. Knowledge is a tool to work in the world.

After James died, John Dewey expanded and applied this idea in fantastically interesting ways through pretty much every domain of human knowledge. The man’s archives are enormous, and he kept writing steadily until he died in his 90s. 

The Big Three American pragmatists were the only group of historically noteworthy writers in philosophy to solve the postmodern relativism problem. But no one realized it* because they never engaged with it explicitly. How could they? They wrote decades before postmodernism existed.

* Until Larry Hickman, in his book Pragmatism as Post-Postmodernism. In 2007.

Pragmatism had two problems. After Dewey, no one really rose to be his equal, the way he did to James. So by the time we reach today, pragmatism as a sub-discipline in academic philosophy consists of mostly of commentary on Peirce, James, and Dewey. The ambition’s gone out of it.

More than this, pragmatism doesn’t really leave room for philosophy. The project that used to be called metaphysics, thinking about the fundamental structures of reality, gets relegated to science.**

If philosophy can be said to progress, then its greatest
writers push the tradition in new directions. Deleuze
pushed farthest of anyone in the direction he wanted.
Many others had many different directions, but none
pushed harder and farther than Deleuze.

** Like the analytic philosophy school that adopted all the basics of pragmatism while ignoring the Big Three’s names. And frankly, science is more conceptually inventive than a lot of analytic metaphysics, because the metaphysicians rely on our intuitions as a guide to truth. Because quantum physics has made so much progress following our intuitions about reality.

At a conference four years ago on pragmatism and wider American philosophy, I told the organizer, Colin Koopman, that Deleuze clarifies all the mysteries and problems that Dewey’s thinking left behind.

So we’re back to speculative pragmatism, the theme-as-buzzword of Deleuze’s philosophy. He made philosophy itself a practical matter: we create concepts that help us adapt human nature to a changing world. All the metaphysical systems and ideas we develop amount to these profound transformative agents. 

Philosophy as the most powerful conceptual tool in human capacity.

All Humanity Is One Process I: Solutions Lay Problems, Jamming, 03/07/2015

Some of the feedback I've gotten about my recent posts discussing the philosophy of Filippo Marinetti and the Italian Futurists (as well as the wider culture and politics surrounding the First World War) asked why I'm talking about this at all. Essentially, they want to know what this weird period of politics has to do with today.

The problems of modern Europe seem of a completely
different kind than what they faced a century ago, but
the peace built from those old wars laid the groundwork
for contemporary struggles.

There are a lot of very important differences between Marinetti’s era and ours. Most of the world's population lived under the colonial control of European states. It's weird for people of my generation to conceive that, for example, India and Pakistan were British territories, or that most of northwest Africa literally was France.

As well, Germany was a monarchy, and had only recently come to exist as a single country. Marinetti refers to his support for a recent Italian war: the conquest of Libya, having taken the territory from the Ottoman Empire. Also, Turkey didn't exist; instead, there was a government called the Ottoman Empire whose capitol was Istanbul. There was no country called Saudi Arabia, and that territory was barely conceived as being important at all, just a huge desert wasteland. 

The international rivalry that threatened to tear the world apart with constant, recurring wars was between Germany and France, two mortal national enemies who could never have found common ground for peace unless one was under the other's heel.

Regarding the political institutions that shape global politics, our world is categorically different. But there are two ways that the society and politics of that era matter for understanding our own conflicts. 

Both these philosophical analyses of historical developments have their roots in my favourite paraphrased saying of John Dewey: the solutions of today are the problems of tomorrow. The European Union, and its financial and monetary union of disparate national economies on that small continent, is the solution to the most intractable problem of early 20th century politics: the conflict between France and Germany. 

Their economic, monetary, and institutional entwining means that the prosperity of one depends on the prosperity of the other. The French and Germans were forced to become partners simply because the international institutions they were part of made cooperation more useful to them than the domination of one over the other. 

Since the Second World War and the global success of
Hayek's Road to Serfdom, figures like Greece's Alexis
Tsipras and the Syriza Party are considered dangerous
state socialists by the right. This is simply for standing
up to the tyranny of hedge fund owners and financiers
over governments and populations. They don't
understand the progress the modern left has made over
the state-centric models. The right fights a war that's
long been over.

Economic union was supposed to have done this for all the countries of Europe, but this project faced two problems. Few other European countries developed the same industrial strength as France and Germany, so were vulnerable to diverse economic problems. Spain had a fragile home equity foundation, Italy had a perennially corrupt and semi-authoritarian government and an economy dominated by mafia, and Greece’s solvency depended on debt financing.

Understanding the generations-long conflict between France and Germany, and the trauma, violence, and terror it inflicted on hundreds of millions of people, lets us understand why such a radical new institution of Europe seemed necessary. Monarchies and empires were transformed into banks and finance organizations.

Another aspect of the problems arising from solution to horrifying problems is the modern power of finance and corporate interest over the power of states. For a liberal democrat in Marinetti's time, the state was the biggest threat to freedom. 

The most influential understanding of totalitarianism was a state government that had absolute control over its population through conceiving of a nation as a collective, and individual citizens as parts.

This was Friedrich Hayek's defence of democracy: to be free was to escape the control of the state, whether it was a security service, a tax agency, or a welfare and employment office. It was a natural conclusion of liberal thinking in response to the totalizing, collective politics of the era. And it shaped all the neoliberal political movements that designed the international institutions of our own era. 

New liberal politics and economic theories did help prevent Western democratic countries from twisting themselves into collectivist dictatorship, but they also created the problems of global impoverishment and disenfranchisement that define the political struggles of our own era. . . . To be continued.

I Wish Pragmatists and Deleuzians Would Talk More: A Note on Creativity, A History Boy, 12/01/2014

A couple of years ago, I delivered a presentation on John Dewey’s value for environmental philosophy at a conference on pragmatism at University of Oregon, a paper which was later published in expanded form in Environmental Ethics. The organization was called The Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy, and their conference was called the Summer Institute for American Philosophy, but damn near everyone was a scholar of pragmatism. There was a wonderful set of presentations on African-American philosophers Cornel West and W. E. B. DuBois, some other work on environmental thought, and presentations on Hispanic-American feminist thinkers. But the bulk of the conference attendees were pragmatist scholars.

Ranking my knowledge of the Big
Three Pragmatist philosophers,
Dewey comes first, then James, last
the above Peirce.

There were a slew of John Dewey scholars, a few specialists on William James, and everyone had their idiosyncratic background readings in Charles Sanders Peirce. But the general theme of most modern scholarship identifying itself as pragmatist was producing interpretive material on these three figures, the traditional triumvirate of American Pragmatism.* I made a remark to Dr. K, one of the conference organizers (and author of a nice little book on Foucault as well) that so many of the problems the pragmatists discuss are treated with much more clarity, and in some cases resolved and progressed, in the work of Gilles Deleuze. I’m still not sure how to characterize his reaction. Here’s an example of where pragmatism is a potential fellow-traveller with Deleuze’s thinking.

* And yet so few people in the discipline of philosophy give George Herbert Mead very much credit for his contributions to this movement at all. I’ve barely even read him myself.

A lot of Smith’s writing can become very mystical about Deleuze’s writing on the creative nature of thought. Henri Bergson could definitely wax poetic about how every moment of reality itself was the creation of a pure novelty, however small, pushing existence farther into unprecedented forms and expressions against the weight of its own resistance. Insert an allusion to Nietzsche’s spirit of gravity, and you have a classic cliché of Deleuzian studies. In a sub-discipline whose aim is to explain Deleuze, the recurrence of such kind of language may echo and salute the man’s influence in Bergson, but it doesn’t do much explaining.

Another admirable aspect of Deleuze is how
he could acknowledge his debts to his
influences without himself being so influenced
as to become a commentator alone.

If you want to understand what Deleuze means with this concept of thought’s creativity, you have to consider what phenomenon provokes thinking. Smith refers in “On the Becoming of Concepts” to an impersonal universal flow of thought, but he does this in reference to Spinoza, the philosopher of one single substance. Thought being an attribute of the universal substance, of course is unified under all those expressions in its modes. Spinoza emphasizes substance, and therefore unity; Deleuze emphasizes and prioritizes what for Spinoza are modes, multiplicities. That is, singular bodies themselves interacting. In attributing a universal thought flow to Deleuze, he’d be off the mark. Another instance of Smith reading Deleuze too much in terms of his influences and missing the pluralist point.

Deleuze’s central idea about the nature of thought is that most of the time, thought is banal and ordinary, a witless exchange of inanities. A philosophically creative moment comes in developing a new conceptual framework for thinking through a society’s problems. Plato sought to contain the fragile chaos of Athenian democracy by developing a means to sort rival claims to truth. Kant, at the height of the German Reformation, articulates a vision of human knowledge where a universal moral law is paramount. These philosophies don’t reduce to the social problems that brought them about, but are profound and powerful conceptual creations that these problems inspire. The same goes for an artistically creative moment in developing a new and interesting sensory experience, or a scientifically creative moment in uncovering a new and interesting relationship among phenomena.

A thinker’s encounter with a changing world produces new ideas. Deleuze writes that most of his encounters were with philosophy, literature, paintings, and cinema, rather than in real-world situations. Those, perhaps, were the fuel for Heidegger, Foucault, and Margaret Urban Walker.** Bertrand Russell, who Deleuze long admired as a philosopher, had his encounters in mathematical thinking. These encounters are very rare, and most people don’t even prime themselves to be prepared for them. They live passive lives taking most of what’s around them for granted, and by this Smith refers to people who believe everything they hear on television (or today, their favourite tumblrs and twitter feeds). 

** I do consider Walker who have articulated a novel take on moral empiricism, even though Moral Understandings was bogged down in later chapters in the tedious academic practice of replying to earlier articles objecting to her work on relatively minor grounds. 

Gilles Deleuze in an ordinary moment.

Yet the social problems of the time demand answers, and if those answers are adequate enough to the worldly challenge to change those problems somehow, then they end up being taken for granted. What were once revolutionary ideas in response to problems that a society had never faced before now become banal, trivial, obvious notions. They’ve lost their power to shock and induce thought. Indeed, sometimes these trivial, long-accepted, obvious ways of thinking about the world only get in the way of new problems that arise, for which the previous revolution laid the conditions. The solutions of today are the problems of tomorrow, we can say about Deleuze’s conception of philosophical progress in What Is Philosophy?.

Smith even identifies a pragmatist precursor to this idea, but it’s simply part of a checklist. He doesn’t devote much, at least in this essay, to showing in detail the commonalities of pragmatist philosophy and Deleuze’s. He paraphrases William James’ remark that what prevents us from discovering new truths about the world are the truths we already hold, take for granted, and which we all too often believe to be all we need. Let me elaborate on the idea. The old truths were already enough for a previous world. But the old truths going to work in the world have changed that world. In a changed world, those old truths are still true, but obsolete. The solutions of today are the problems of tomorrow, itself a central insight of John Dewey's conception of social and political progress in Experience and Nature. 

And that’s one way to think of how pragmatism and Deleuze are closer companions than the textbook set of philosophical divisions might have you think.

Why One Ism Over Another? Philosophy’s Most Important Question, Research Time, 14/11/2013

Just a brief post today after my epic meditation on Albert Camus and colonialism. As a member of the Canadian Philosophical Association, I receive the journal Dialogue. Sometimes, I look through it, and don’t really find anything useful to my research. It isn’t a strict specialty journal, but I like it because every now and then, I’ll find a good surprise.

Good surprise today was finding an article by Jiri Benovsky in the issue of Dialogue that arrived today. I had come across some of his work when I was researching some analytic ontology for a small section of my ecophilosophy manuscript when it was strictly a dissertation. While the specific topics of analytic ontology aren’t of much interest to me, Benovsky’s 2008 paper on it was very interesting, because he was critiquing a major argument on the grounds that the two sides weren’t that different at all. 

He continues this idea in the Dialogue paper, “Primitiveness, Metaontology, and Explanatory Power.” I’ll skip over most of the technical elements because they’re very technical, and they would just get in the way of explaining the most interesting thing about the article. See, this new essay fits more into meta-philosophy, asking just what the difference between ontological theories that are in dispute amounts to. 

The example he chooses to illustrate this is a debate over how the properties of an object are constituted. Say a car and an apple are of the same red colour. Is the property of redness an instantiation of a universal redness? Or is the property of redness derived from the visual resemblance of the car and the apple in colour? Benovsky raises an interesting question: What if there really is no difference between these theories? What we seek is an explanation of how properties inhere in their objects. The only worldly phenomenon we experience is the inherence of properties in objects; instantiation and resemblance are ways to explain how properties inhere in objects. But neither instantiation or resemblance theory is able to defeat the other. Ingenious arguments in defense of both sides are always being developed. We have alternative explanations that are functionally equivalent: they explain why properties inhere in objects.

If we think functionally about the questions we need explained (What fulfills the function of inhering properties in objects?), then there is no need to choose between theories which postulate some entity or phenomenon outside of experience to explain our question. All we ask of the entities philosophers postulate to explain some phenomenon is simply that they explain what we want explained. If there are multiple explanations for the same phenomenon that cannot invalidate each other, then we may as well consider them all correct. Even if the theories are contraries, the impasse is inescapable.

I think this is actually a critical philosophical question. The discipline of philosophy spends so much time meditating on complex and profound questions, formulating and arguing over theories to explain and answer these questions. Benovsky has actually summoned the fortitude to say that these arguments may be undecidable.* This is a conclusion that is bound to anger a lot of philosophers, who devote the energies of their entire careers to working to prove one theory in a sub-discipline correct over opponents.

* At the end of his article, Benovsky mentions a forthcoming piece he has in The Journal of Value Inquiry where he offers aesthetic criteria for choosing one philosophical theory over another. The prospect intrigues me, and if I can’t find my way to a copy of the article from my place here, largely cut off from easy access to professional academic journals in my year without a formal position, I may just write him myself. 

I, however, love this idea! And I’ve already concluded that it’s the truth. Does my conviction that many philosophical debates are undecidable contests between functionally equivalent explanations constitute a philosophical theory that itself could be part of a debate among functional equivalents? Yes, and that might be true. But I don’t care, because I don’t think philosophy works best when it focusses on proving one theory correct and others wrong. I think criticism is an important, really essential, part of philosophical discourse. However, I don’t think philosophical criticism is about identifying true and false theories, but about crafting theories that better explain the problems you’re trying to explore. Solving the problems of the current generation of a discipline will only create more problems for the following generation. John Dewey said that, and it was meant to encourage optimism. A discipline of human knowledge that solves all its problems has nothing left to say: it’s dead.

I want philosophy to live as long as humanity, if not longer.

The Quest for Certainty Still Exists (Not a Post about the Dewey Book), Jamming, 02/08/2013

As I was looking back over yesterday’s post speculating on the possible causes of the controversies surrounding evolutionary biology’s public reception, a curious and dangerous idea occurred to me. Curious because it’s potentially very interesting. Dangerous because, like most vague hints and shiny instincts, it might not make any sense at first brush. But as it develops into a more detailed approach, this idea might become central to some of my projects. 

There seems to be a disconnect between how scientists and most philosophers of science understand what knowledge is, and how everyday people and epistemic philosophers understand what knowledge is. And it all revolves around the quest for certainty.* The first group tends to view knowledge as better when it is complex, subject to doubt, and open to revision. That revision can be a matter of small refinements, or it can be absolutely radical. This is a perspective on knowledge that had thoroughly absorbed the lessons of Thomas Kuhn and Karl Popper. Science doesn’t progress by preserving and adding to an established tradition. It progresses by continually seeking out new fields of study or new techniques to investigate the world, and letting those new discoveries add to, revise, or occasionally completely reorder established scientific models. 

John Dewey, author of The Quest for Certainty, at the time
of his most badass moustache.

* That is, the general search for certain knowledge, not the book by John Dewey called The Quest for Certainty. However, Dewey’s book might turn out to be rather important in working through this idea. I’ve gone through a reasonable chunk of Dewey’s massive output as part of my work — I have an article in volume 33 of the journal Environmental Ethics on how Dewey’s ontological concepts have innovative applications to environmental ethics. But I’ve mostly concentrated on his ontological works (esp. Experience and Nature) and his metaphilosophy (esp. Reconstruction in Philosophy) in detail, not his epistemological work. The Quest for Certainty, the book, may turn out to be quite important as I investigate this.

But the general public aren’t taught about science this way unless they go to university, and even at university, they’d have to study philosophy of science where the professor teaches them about Popper, Kuhn, and their intellectual descendants. The most common public insight about knowledge is that it must be certain, not in any circumstance subject to revision unless the world itself changes. So goes the intuitive popular account of what knowledge is: a scientific theory is a dogma like any other, and we either believe it wholesale or drop it all as a falsehood. If a fact doesn’t inspire absolute certainty, it isn’t real knowledge. 

It used to be a standard in epistemological philosophy that a belief was genuinely knowledge if it was true and you could justify why you believed it. Edmund Gettier wrote a short paper in 1963 consisting of a couple of hypothetical examples of instances of justified true beliefs whose truth and justification were arrived entirely coincidentally — so justified true belief isn’t necessarily a marker of genuine knowledge, because the believer may just have gotten lucky. Ever since Gettier’s paper dropped, a perennial cause in epistemology has been trying to find a standard for knowledge that was even more certain, more rock-solid, than justified true belief.

Now, the complete structure of a scientific theory is a far larger and more complicated beast than a single person’s belief. But they’re both ultimately about the nature of knowledge, and they’re both totally incompatible. Epistemologists and the general public consider certainty the bedrock standard of what we should call knowledge, and anything less than certain is not worth believing. Philosophers of science, scientists, and I consider the best knowledge to be flexible, functional, always open to revision, always hunting for new facts, new evidence, new reasons for the very revision that for the general public invalidates an institution as knowledge. 

Ultimately, I think what conception of knowledge you accept depends on what kind of person you are. If you fear a rudderless world, then certainty will be your standard for knowledge. If I can put it in terms of yesterday’s post, such a person is more amenable to swallowing the pat certainties of religious dogma: you accept these certainties, and you need never have a doubt or ask a question again. If you’re strong enough to live in a world of contingencies, uncertainties, where anything could be open to change, then you’ll understand how science and knowledge actually work.

I’m not entirely sure what to do with this idea, but I think this weekend, I’ll take some long walks and try to figure it out.