One of my classes this quarter is called "Theory of Knowledge", an area of philosophy more formally referred to as Epistemology. I've found the class to be a pretty frustrating experience. Some of my frustration has to do with just generally being frustrated at classes in general recently (they're getting in the way of my education), but I do have some specific complaints about this class in particular.
My first complaint is that I simply find the class almost completely useless to me. The types of knowledge that we most commonly deal with and the examples we're using simply don't affect my day to day life in any meaningful or profound way. One idea that we've tossed around is that we can't really know anything, an example being that if our entire life is simply an illusion, we would have no way to tell. This question is irrelevant to me. If we were living in an illusion, my view on life and my day to day behavior would probably vary very little. I'm a firm believer in the idea that this life is all we have and therefore we should make the most of it, and this life being an illusion does not affect that philosophy at all. The examples that bother me come when we introduce an epistemological theory and then, after discussing it briefly, talk about counterexamples that might prove that this theory isn't correct. The issue I have is that often these counterexamples are excruciatingly specific. There was one example to counter reliablism that goes like this: "Brian is a normal peron with accurate and well-justified beliefs about the world around him. Brain is Brian's mental duplicate. Brain has experiences just like Brian's. And Brain's beliefs are analogues of Brian's. When Brian believes that he, Brian, is eating a hot fudge sundae, Brain believes that he, Brain is eating a hot fudge sundae. When Brian believes that he, Brian, is taking a stroll in the park, Brain believes that he, Brain, is taking a stroll in the park... Brian is right about each of these things, as he usually is. Poor Brain is wrong every time" (Feldman 94). I have two issues with this example. For one, it's just bizarrely specific and petty. It's based in no such reality that I'm concerned with, and seems to have constructed an absurd situation for the specific purpose of beating the rule. The second is that, instead of spending more time discussing the theory and how we might actually apply it, we spend the majority of the time that we're talking about the theory talking about this and other counterexamples. To me, that is not a useful way to spend our time, especially if the ultimate goal of a field like epistemology is to help us to understand how we understand the world around us.
The second issue I have is a metaepistomological complaint related to the different theories that have been floated. The way we've been talking about these theories has been in a very cleanly scientific way that I find offputting. The book and the class are both very entrenched in the idea that there is a "correct" theory that will cover all cases of knowledge perfectly. I very strongly disagree with this idea. Epistomology, other areas of philosophy, and the social sciences are not Newtonian physics and they should stop trying to be. It really bothers me that we're treating the human mind and how it understands the world like a pure scientific experiment where if an idea doesn't totally fit the world, then it's entirely wrong. Many areas of knowledge are not going to collapse neatly into a simple little formula that we can use every time to describe what's around us. The social and philosophical world are inherently messy and any theory that attempts to explain the world without acknowledging that are going to fail. Something that would be interesting to me is the idea of combining these different theories so that the theory can match the type of knowledge that it produces. We've acknowledged the idea of different types of knowledge in class, so I don't think that would be a huge jump.
Works Cited:
Feldman, Richard. Epistemology. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2003. Print.
No comments:
Post a Comment