I'm fascinated the word 'epistemology' and what it actually means
If you want to understand how to know something about anything, you are asking an epistemological question. For example, how do we know that a falling object accelerates at a constant 9.8 meters per second, every second, because of the downward pull of gravity? We know this, because of what is referred to in the philosophy of science, as logical positivism. Positivism means that we only comprehend things through our senses of hearing, seeing, smelling, touching and taste. Logic allows us to draw inferences from our sensate perceptions using deductive and inductive reasoning.
If I drop a lead weight from a ten-story building and measure the downward distance covered and the time it takes to hit the ground, I will always find it moves at 9.8 meters per second, every second. I see it, I measure it, and therefore deduce that all objects will fall at the same rate, which means I know what will happen if I do this again in the future. This is the way science has worked for hundreds of years.
When thinking about epistemology, it is important to consider the possibilities of what we can know and how certain we are about what we know. But, by knowing something, can we predict what will happen tomorrow or the day after? It turns out that we can know these things either precisely, approximately, or not at all (with some caveats attached). Some epistemological models are deterministic, meaning that we know with certainty the result of something based on certain prior conditions; for example, the well-known formula e = mc2 tells us that a particular quantity of energy is equivalent to matter moving at the speed of light multiplied by itself. Some epistemologies are not exact but only approximate or probabilistic. With these, we cannot be entirely sure, but only somewhat right about what will happen based on prior conditions. For example, I can be 95% confident that there will be a recession within the next five years, based on information about previous economic cycles.
Finally, there are epistemologies that know how things work, but cannot predict what will happen in the future due to the emergent properties of these models. The mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot gave us fractal geometry as a means of understanding these seemingly chaotic events. He claimed that while it is possible to know the constituent elements of these complex systems, their development is dependent on a lot of variables, and therefore what happens tomorrow will occur at that time and cannot be predicted now.
The ability to know something about anything underlies our success as a species and we must continue to better understand what surrounds us. Epistemology is, in fact, a good word, and we should all know this.
Ron Messer holds six university degrees and teaches at Kwantlen Polytechnic University, located in Vancouver, British Columbia. He does not think of himself as a writer, but rather as an interpreter of ‘big ideas’ and how they apply to our personal lives. He can be reached at ron.messer@kpu.ca
This article originally appeared on Palm Springs Desert Sun: I'm fascinated the word 'epistemology' and what it actually means
