Epistemology—How Knowledge Emerges

By Geoffrey Moore

Author – The Infinite Staircase: What the Universe Tells Us About Life, Ethics, and Mortality

Epistemology is that branch of philosophy that addresses the theory of knowledge.? But what do philosophers mean by knowledge?? Traditionally, it is defined as justified true belief, and it is established by applying logic and reason to whatever set of claims is under discussion.? That is the path we are going to follow here as well.? But to get the full picture, we need to look at both knowledge and knowing through the lens of emergence.?

In The Infinite Staircase, we offered a global model of emergence that seeks to span all of reality, organizing itself around eleven stairs, as follows:

Justified true belief is a product of reason employing the top four stairs of language, narrative, analytics, and theory to test claims to truth.? It is the cumulative impact of all these stairs building one atop the next that allows knowledge to ultimately emerge in its fullest sense.? That is the path we are about to trace.? Before so doing, however, we should acknowledge that there are seven stairs below language, all of which are “pre-linguistic,” that also seep into the way we know things.? A complete epistemology would therefore go all the way down to the bottom stair, with particular attention to culture (what we learn from others) and values (what we learn from mammalian nurture and governance).? Nonetheless, we are going to focus on just the top four because that is where the bulk of the action is.

Beginning with the stair of language, its major contribution to justified true belief is its ability to communicate facts.? All facts are expressed through declarative sentences.? Each sentence makes a claim.? What makes a claim a fact is that we are willing to accept its assertion without further verification or validation.? For the ultimate skeptic who is never willing to do this, there are no facts.? For the rest of us, who are continually making real-life decisions in real-time, facts are necessary, and we accept or reject claims of fact based on the information we have at hand, including the reliability of the source and the probability of the claim given current circumstances.

That said, facts by themselves don’t mean much.? What gives them meaning are narratives.? Narrative is the cornerstone of all knowledge, the medium by which we communicate beliefs.? The book of Genesis represents one such belief-supporting narrative, The Origin of Species another, the Big Bang a third.? Each of these narratives not only explains how things have come to be as they are, at the same time they foreshadow how they can be expected to turn out in the future.? Whether it is the hand of God, the workings of natural selection, or the ceaseless operation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, narratives spotlight the governing forces in whatever situation they describe.? That in turn lets us identify actions we can take to turn our situation to best advantage.? Narratives, in other words, are essential equipment for any kind of decision-making.? The question, however, is are they credible?

This is where analytics comes in.? The role of analytics is to justify belief in the claims embedded in the narrative.? In The Infinite Staircase, I summarize Stephen Toulmin’s model for conducting such an analysis.? It is organized around six elements:

1. What are the claims being made?? Are they clear, precise, and unambiguous?
2. What evidence is there that these claims might be true?? What are the facts of the case as best we can determine them?
3. What warrants us to believe that this evidence supports these claims?? Are there clear lines of reasoning that take us from the facts to the claims and back?
4. Do the warrants themselves require additional backing to be credible?? Is there evidence to support their claims?
5. What counter-arguments could potentially invalidate our claims, and do we have a credible rebuttal to refute them?? Where do we draw the line between our claims and these alternatives?
6. Based on all five precious steps, is there some qualification we can apply to our claim to secure its overall justification more firmly?? What is our final statement of our core claim?

By applying this model to our beliefs, we can transform them into justified beliefs.? But that still begs one question: are they true?

To address the question of truth, we have to draw upon the resources of the highest stair in our model, the one labeled theory.? There are multiple theories of truth, but three stand out in particular:

• The correspondence theory, which says that claims are true when they are consistent with how things actually turn out to be, leading to a verifiable view of the world.
• The coherence theory, which says that claims are true when they are consistent with all the other claims you believe, leading to a coherent view of the world.
• The pragmatism theory, which says that claims are true when you act on them and your actions are consistent with your intentions, leading to an effective view of the world.

Rather than think of these theories as competing with one another, consider them as three dimensions of one and the same thing, namely knowledge that helps further one’s strategy for living.? In that context, knowledge does indeed consist of justified true beliefs.? It emerges from language contributing facts, interacting with narratives contributing beliefs, tested by analytics contributing justification, and confirmed by theory contributing truth.? In this context, it is neither complicated nor mysterious.

That’s what I think.? What do you think?

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