Gospel Epistemology

 How do I know if I'm wrong?

Although I have studied philosophy and critical theory and literary theory and lots of other things related to them, I am not an expert at this topic specifically: if I am an expert (there's a PhD after my name, after all) it's in reading nineteenth-century texts. Reading them is closely related to this subject, but is not a full overlap. And so what I want to write about - to tease out - in this post is something that each person must decide for her or himself. And I want to decide for myself.

I believe that we all have to make these decisions many times during our lives, as our experience and knowledge takes in new possibilities. Right now, the impetus for my epistemological exploration is that one of my little brothers has begun forcefully proselytizing against the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints inside our family. Offensively so, at times. In trying to derail the verbal abuse that he frequently sinks to, I turned to Patricia Roberts-Miller, a rhetoric scholar and expert at public rhetoric. And I turned back to a lesson I teach my own writing students in a section on ethical decision-making (and assessing sources, naturally) that asks all of them to know what it would take to change their minds about a strongly held belief. Because if nothing would make them change their mind, what they have isn't belief, it's dogma, and dogma is ignorant and stagnant.

In Christianity, we also make a big deal about faith. Is there a difference between faith and dogma?

Well, there are probably several. The glibbest that springs to mind is that it's only "faith" if the thing you trust in is actually true. But that kind of tautology won't help anyone arrive at truth. It's basically just designed to give you headaches. Also, I'm pretty sure that blind belief in something that is true is still just blind belief, and is not faith. Yet.

Emailing with my little brother, he asked the question, "How do I know if I'm wrong? How do you know if you're wrong?" If I won't allow myself the possibility that I could be wrong, and confronting the possibility of surrendering the life and hope that I have built around my belief system, then it is not faith, it is dogma.

Although each person must decide their own limits of knowing and belief, I feel that to truly arrive at truth, some objectivity must exist. I cannot (as much as I want to) look back into my memories and cherry-pick the ones that lead me to keep doing what I'm doing. I need to select criteria for assessing the truth of what I know from what I know about knowing.

I know that people (especially men) tend to believe implicitly in their own rationality. I have almost never met a man who didn't express himself as if he were more infallibly logical than anyone else in the room (aside: he isn't, especially about his own rationality). How often do we have our facts (mostly) straight, but argue about the meaning of them?

We also often follow our feelings, like water flowing downhill, when it comes to belief. We define our truths in parallels and perpendiculars; in momentum and resistance. But the pain or comfort of hearing an idea is not a reliable criteria of objective truth, only of our relationship to someone's opinion or interpretation of it.

We all also include some measure of empiricism in our beliefs - evidence from our own experience - even if that evidence is purely anecdotal, and generalizing from it is a gross fallacy. We also build our belief system by relying on others to interpret facts for us. Ideally, we'd choose these sources for their expertise, but we don't. We just don't.

So from these mechanisms (rationality, instinct, empiricism, and delegation), with their limits, we build an image of reality inside which we attempt to function. If we can't trust these mechanisms, how do we arrive at truth? 

Very slowly.

Wayne Booth and Peter Elbow have some of the answers. In a dialogue published in College English in March of  2005, they talk about navigating around the Scylla and Charybdis of skepticism and belief. 

I think, for me in this moment, the answer has to be architectural rather than monolithic. I bend to facts. I do not hide from first-hand evidence if it is properly corroborated. I listen to experts, but I do not automatically surrender to any statement that wishes to take the work of interpreting those facts away from me, either on the side of what I already believe, or against it. I believe my memories and feelings and my interpretation of them at the time I experienced them, but I also reject sign-seeking.

So, what are my current criteria on assessing my own beliefs?

1) It must fit the known facts, even if it doesn't fit the popular interpretation of them. Or the unpopular one. Truth isn't at the mercy of public opinion.

2) It makes logical sense, and does not rely on obfuscation, paranoia/outrage, or mysticism. Basically, it's boring and probably includes hard work. There might be paradoxes, though. Those are fun.

3) It is large enough to contain all of me and all of my memories. I do not cut off my heel to fit into the shoe.

4) It rings true in my feels and instincts. These are parts of me that I have worked hard for. They are real.

5) There is room for new information and change - no "truth" should expect to be the final word, at least for a long while yet. And I need something to look forward to.

So when somebody says, "How can you still be a member of the church if you know that Brigham Young was a racist, and Joseph Smith married 27 women and girls?" My answer is that I did not delegate my acquisition of truth to either of them, or any other single person. They were central to the personal circumstances that created my epistemology (Brigham Young founded the university where I got my PhD, after all), but they are not my source of truth. They're dead. My eggs are not in those baskets. Not all of them, anyway. Maybe one or two. There are lots of eggs. (oh my gosh. Anybody need eggs?!)

I love you. Good night.