The prototypical questions of epistemology are: what is truth
? what is knowledge? how is knowledge attained? can knowledge be obtained?
You seem to be using “epistemology” ,to mean a fairly narrow set of prescriptions about how to do epistemology well (equivalent to object level ethics as opposed to meta level ethics).
Empire verification has its advantages and disadvantages. The disadvantages are that not every proposition is subject to empirical verification, and you do not have time to personally verify everything anyway. Outsourcing knowledge to other people is a defensible trade off. Most of the information people have comes from other people.
And those people should not be randomly selected .. they would need some kind of authority or credentials.
Mere popularity might be an insufficient credential, but that doesnt mean there is no middle ground.
I’m not arguing against relying on other people and outsourcing knowledge. I’m barely arguing for any action; mostly I’m describing what tends to happen regrettably often to people who base the definition of “knowledge” around answering questions like “who is popular” rather than “what will this program do”. In fact, both epistemologies will contain the concept of empirical verification! In the anti-epistemology, going to everyone in class and privately asking “hey, is Alice popular?” is the analog of empiricism.
In the anti-epistemology, going to everyone in class and privately asking “hey, is Alice popular?” is the analog of empiricism.
Or it just is empiricism? Popularity is an aggregate of subjective value. Aggregating individual assessments of valuekl by a survey is a reasonable way of assessing that. At what point did it stop being epistemogy?
That is my point: the people who think in this way are not unreasonable, they are not evil mutants or anything. They just happened to “ask the wrong question” at the starting point, and if they follow it tenaciously, they wind up with insane conclusions.
Once you have a stable epistemology based on an observer-independent reality, you can say that “oh, by the way, minds are part of causality a.k.a. reality, thus people can have beliefs about what other people believe”. In the cartographic analogy, this comes out clunky: “maps are part of the terrain, therefore maps can depict facts about other maps”, which I suspect is intentional, to make the claim that this is a degenerate edge case, not a central example. You can hold your nose and survey opinions.
But this is very much a second step. Try to take it first, and you stand a good chance of falling headlong into the bizarro-worldview where polls stand in for laboratories, opinions are the only sort of evidence there is, and engineers must have found a way to LARP nigh-infinite confidence because apparently their technobabble can convince most people in a way that crystal healers cannot.
The prototypical questions of epistemology are: what is truth ? what is knowledge? how is knowledge attained? can knowledge be obtained?
You seem to be using “epistemology” ,to mean a fairly narrow set of prescriptions about how to do epistemology well (equivalent to object level ethics as opposed to meta level ethics).
Empire verification has its advantages and disadvantages. The disadvantages are that not every proposition is subject to empirical verification, and you do not have time to personally verify everything anyway. Outsourcing knowledge to other people is a defensible trade off. Most of the information people have comes from other people.
And those people should not be randomly selected .. they would need some kind of authority or credentials.
Mere popularity might be an insufficient credential, but that doesnt mean there is no middle ground.
I’m not arguing against relying on other people and outsourcing knowledge. I’m barely arguing for any action; mostly I’m describing what tends to happen regrettably often to people who base the definition of “knowledge” around answering questions like “who is popular” rather than “what will this program do”. In fact, both epistemologies will contain the concept of empirical verification! In the anti-epistemology, going to everyone in class and privately asking “hey, is Alice popular?” is the analog of empiricism.
In what way is it “anti”? If you are trying to answer questions about popularity, that is a reasonable epistemology.
Or it just is empiricism? Popularity is an aggregate of subjective value. Aggregating individual assessments of valuekl by a survey is a reasonable way of assessing that. At what point did it stop being epistemogy?
That is my point: the people who think in this way are not unreasonable, they are not evil mutants or anything. They just happened to “ask the wrong question” at the starting point, and if they follow it tenaciously, they wind up with insane conclusions.
Once you have a stable epistemology based on an observer-independent reality, you can say that “oh, by the way, minds are part of causality a.k.a. reality, thus people can have beliefs about what other people believe”. In the cartographic analogy, this comes out clunky: “maps are part of the terrain, therefore maps can depict facts about other maps”, which I suspect is intentional, to make the claim that this is a degenerate edge case, not a central example. You can hold your nose and survey opinions.
But this is very much a second step. Try to take it first, and you stand a good chance of falling headlong into the bizarro-worldview where polls stand in for laboratories, opinions are the only sort of evidence there is, and engineers must have found a way to LARP nigh-infinite confidence because apparently their technobabble can convince most people in a way that crystal healers cannot.
Who told you that empiricism is The Way?