Epistemological Relativism

Today a friend of mine paid me a compliment. Yes, it happens seldom enough that I have to chronicle it here for posterity. Actually, I’m not sure he knew it was a compliment. We were discussing some basics of epistemology and he stated that he is always frustrated after talking with me. In particular he is frustrated because after our conversations, or perhaps during, certain inconsistencies in his world view are shoved to the foreground. I know, you (someone is reading this, right?) may be wondering why I consider frustrating a friend of mine something of a compliment. First, a bit of clarity. When my friend says he is frustrated I take him to mean that he is dismayed that his seemingly neat and organized view of the world is not so neat after all. This dismay turns to frustration when he realizes that it is going to take some mental exertion to discover the truth.

Of course, I would be remiss if I failed to tie in Plato to this situation. In the Meno, Socrates has a similar experience.

80A - “Socrates, I used to be told, before I began to meet you, that yours was just a case of being in doubt yourself and making other doubt also; and so now I find you are merely bewitching me with your spells and incantations, which have reduced me to utter perplexity.” - Meno

Meno, I think, experiences something quite similar. His experience with some of the poets led him to uncritically accept certain “opinions” as fact. During the course of their dialogue Meno realizes that his ideas are, in fact, false. This causes Meno some momentary distress as he grapples with the consequences with this realization.

No, I’m not equating myself to Socrates or my friend to Meno. This is a situation than many of us get into when we move from casual conversation to serious inquiry. When we move to this sort of dialogue we can be sure we will discover flaws in our perceptions and ideas. Socrates intention was not too “win” (whatever that means) the argument, but to come to valid conclusions, and hopefully, a clearer understanding of the topic being discussed. The challenge, and one I think Socrates met successfully, is what we do when we are confronted with a reasonable proposition that contradicts what we would like the world to be. Unfortunately, Meno chose to continue living in a dream. Meno chose to bend reality to his liking rather than bend his thoughts toward reality.

So, whenever I receive a comment such as this I know we are doing some heavy lifting and are well on our way to discovering truth. Are we really ready to follow it where it leads? Thanks for the compliment.

I hope this won’t be too technical or boring (too late), but after playing with the ideas presented here regarding the definition of faith-based categories and reading Jim West’s interesting analysis, I can’t help but wonder why this method of explaining objects is so abused. For this brief post, objects should refer to ideas, concepts and physical “things” like chairs and tables. In the past, a particular method of defining things, whether chairs, water or virtue, was to describe the nature of the object or its essence. This was difficult, if not impossible, for some objects. In order to define an object in this way, the object had to pass an “every and only” test. This means that every object we were attempting to define must have had this particular characteristic. As if this weren’t difficult enough, you also had to be sure that *only* the object you were attempting to define had this characteristic. If it didn’t pass this two part test, you definition was too general or incomplete. It, however, is still a worthwhile exercise to get you closer to defining your object. We don’t really use this method much these days. Instead, we rely on ostensive definitions. This, in a nutshell, is defining an object by referring to examples of it (in techie speak, its referrent).

In the current discussion there is an attempt to create categories for a particular concept. The challenge is this concept hasn’t been fully defined. Of course, when you attempt to ask a question, in this case “build some categories for this concept”, and the concept hasn’t been defined, you get all sorts of interesting answers. Yes, I am going somewhere. In this case, Jim attempts to define “faith-based scholarship” through ostension. He quite easily states that “faith-based scholarship” *is* apologetics. Jim gives us the defintion of this concept through an example. In this case, his example is yet another concept, but nevermind that for now. The challenge I think we have when using this method for defining complex ideas or concepts is that there is a temptation to simply use an example we prefer. In other words, ostensive defintion turns into something like “what I prefer this to mean” , rather than what it might really mean. In this case, Jim, I think, falls victim to this. It is a simple matter to prove whether this is so by falling back to our “old” methods. I’ll leave that as an exercise to the reader, but we can seek quickly that Jim’s assessment fails quite spectacularly when given the “every and only” test.

I like ostensive defintions, but we, too often, seem to abuse this method when certain concepts demand the rigorous analysis the “old” mechanism provides.

Here’s my comment on Jim’s blog:

I see a branch or segment of faith-based scholarship that may be identified by Jim’s definition, but certainly not all faith-based scholarly enterprises fall into this category.

Unfortunately, we still have not agreed to what “faith-based” itself means. It seems to me that until we have defined the nature of the term, we will simply create generalizations based on our variety of experiences. Saying faith-based scholarship *is* apologetics is, perhaps, a step, but it only points to a possible example. It doesn’t get us any closer to what it (faith-based scholarship) *is*. This is why I don’t agree that it is a complete picture.

Well, after finally getting a little bit dirty with Linux’s malloc implementation. I wrote a small tool that may help some people visualize the process of allocating and freeing that occurs on the heap. I’m still tweaking the code here and there as I try to inspect more of the internals. Hope this helps someone out there.

heapinfo.c