The second question we were looking at yesterday was, how do you know the incident 20 years before Mary's death caused the tragedy? There are a few responses to this question. The first - I promise this won't hurt a bit - requires a brief detour into the wonderful world of epistemology.
Epistemology is the study of how we know what we know, often divided into the study of belief, knowledge, and truth. Each of us has an epistemological map in our head, but unless you're a philosophy student or the odd clergy person, you probably don't think about how you know what you know.
Currently, our western culture uses an epistemology that emanates substantially from science. Science describes with great precision what constitutes knowing something: how to separate knowledge from belief, and how to figure out what are facts. This is a robust epistemology, leading to the computers we're all using to read this right now, or the powerful medicines I take every few hours that keep me alive.
A science-based epistemology works well. Problems develop when we apply it willy nilly, outside of science - using it automatically to understand other kinds of questions. When the Bible says, "I know my Redeemer lives," is the word "know" used in the sense meant by modern day science? If you say, "I love you," is this a fact exactly like "water freezes at 32 degrees?" When I told Mary that I loved her, I felt the concrete reality of that statement much more clearly than the abstract rule about water I learned in Spring Garden School as a child.
 |
| Norby Contemplates Eternally Unreachable Avian Life |
Scientific, rationalist epistemologies are especially dicey in complicated subjects with lots of gray areas, like morality and ethics. As a result, we often shrink those complex systems into simplified codes with less ambiguity - for example, the legal system. The legal system is to morality what a sketch is to an oil painting.
All epistemologies have hidden values, resulting in pre-made decisions about what's real and what things should be ignored. My doctor pays attention to the release of acetylcholine in my nerve cells; he'd probably ignore an overabundance of Bad Wind that might be the conclusion of a doctor in Shanghai examining the same patient.
Getting back to figuring out what caused my family's disaster, let's start by noticing that much of modern Western epistemology is based on cause and effect. I kick the ball, it flies forward. The modern Western world accepts the belief that actions inevitably lead to results we can predict and describe. With the rise of quantum mechanics, cause and effect is beginning to be challenged by science itself. But for most of us, cause and effect is the bedrock of how we understand the world around us.
People ask, how do you know that the incident you're describing caused what happened? The words in italics reflect underlying epistemological choices. That way of understanding the world is part of our culture that defines and allocates power.
We live in a society with structures of power based on a particular epistemology: responsibility is determined by establishing cause and effect, through a series of rules. This system creates the world of science, and the political world that creates corporations and funding and markets, with regulations and laws to keep it all neat and tidy.
I'm getting into what may seem like a digression into epistemology because it's so difficult to see our own ways of framing the world from inside our own heads. Our conventions about evidence, proof and responsibility reflect cultural values about science that are not universal. That's why some foreigners sometimes appear to behave strangely: they live with different frameworks of reality. For example, Bernard Lewis, in his interesting book "The Political Language of Islam," points out that Westerners seek the most powerful people "at the top." Islam expresses its organization of the world in a different way: it sees power in the center.
In the world defined by corporatized science and law, I can't possibly know what caused my wife's death, because law and science can only ever give me a crude sketch of the rich oil painting that was my wife and what happened to her. I can't know what happened if I think only in terms of the science and the companies that created the organophosphate, operating within a science-based epistemology.
I don't want to just roll over and say, oh well, we can't ever know what happened, so I'll move on - it was just one of those things. But I'm not out of luck, because there are alternative ways to understand what happened to my family, and what happens to millions of poisoned and maimed people around the world.
That is the subject of Part 3, coming tomorrow morning.
