On Epistemology

 I am prepared to admit, with some sense of pride, that I am a lover of knowledge. But that affection comes with a condition: I want to know that what I accept as knowledge is, in fact, knowledge. The moment we begin to ask how we can distinguish knowledge from belief, assumption, or error, we find ourselves standing at the threshold of epistemology.

Philosophy recognized this problem almost from the beginning of its Athenian tradition. The earlier Milesians had a more rudimentary conception of epistemological questions. Their primary concern was not so much how we know as what exists. In this respect, they might be regarded as the first theoretical physicists, searching for the underlying substance or principle from which the world could be understood.

The epistemological problem becomes more difficult once we turn from the nature of things to the reliability of our knowledge of them. One response is scepticism: reject everything that cannot be established with certainty and then attempt to build knowledge upward from some irreducible foundation. For Descartes, that foundation was the activity of his own mind—the famous realization that, even if he doubted everything else, he could not doubt that he was engaged in thinking. Others have placed their confidence in the fundamental axioms of mathematics and logic. Still others have put their faith, and it is worth emphasizing that it is a form of faith, in the reliability of our senses.

None of these approaches has been universally accepted. Some thinkers have instead looked beyond both rationality and experience, proposing an external metaphysical explanation that transcends the tools by which we ordinarily understand the world. Yet this approach seems, at least to me, somewhat anathema to the Western philosophical tradition, which has generally sought to discover the grounds of explanation within reason itself rather than appealing to something beyond it.

What strikes me most, however, is not simply the variety of these approaches but the difficulty philosophers seem to have in constructing something durable once they have taken another position apart. Many thinkers are remarkably good at demolishing intellectual structures but considerably less successful at building stronger ones in their place. There is something inherently critical about the Western philosophical tradition—a tendency that can sometimes feel as though it is driven more by destruction than construction.

Perhaps this should not surprise us. For more than two thousand years, philosophers have challenged, refined, rejected, and rebuilt one another's ideas. Yet, after all that intellectual labour, I am not convinced that we are fundamentally further ahead on some of the great questions of epistemology than Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle were. We have accumulated an enormous vocabulary for describing the problems. But does having more terminology necessarily mean that we understand the problems any better?

This is not to suggest that human intellectual progress has been illusory. Scientific progress is undeniable, and there have been significant advances in other areas of philosophy, particularly in ethics and political thought. My reservation is narrower: I am not yet convinced that epistemology itself has progressed in the same meaningful sense.

Perhaps the difficulty lies partly in the nature of the subject. Epistemology may be one of those fields that resists any simple or absolute system of measurement. We cannot easily determine its progress by counting discoveries, establishing universally accepted theories, or arriving at definitive answers. Its value may instead lie in the relationships it establishes with other disciplines—in showing us how science, mathematics, logic, perception, language, metaphysics, and even ordinary human experience depend upon, and challenge, one another.

If this is the case, then perhaps epistemology should not be judged as an isolated discipline at all. Its strength may lie precisely in its refusal to remain isolated. It occupies the space between our various ways of knowing, questioning the foundations upon which each rests and exposing the connections between them.

That possibility interests me. Perhaps the apparent lack of progress in epistemology is not evidence of failure but a consequence of the peculiar role the discipline plays. Rather than constructing a final edifice of knowledge, epistemology may be the discipline that continually examines the foundations of every edifice we build.

That is a possibility worth investigating further.