MUSINGS ON EPISTEMOLOGY OF KNOWLEDGE
THIS ESSAY IS A INFORMAL EXPLORATION ON EPISTEMOLOGY OF KNOWLEDGE. IT DOES NOT INTENT TO BE THE BEST SOURCE ON THE SUBJECT.
There is a ever growing tendency of news people to know the intention of public figures and even knowing their true values and intentions, even though these public figures have not behaved in the way the news people posit and have had the opportunity to do so, and did not.
Why these news people have engaged into this bad behavior, that ends up in their shame and retraction of news that are published. The problem being that the lie is broadcast intensively on the header page of the news and the retraction is published in small print lost between the less relevant material.
Removing personal malice and intent of spreading lies, why these news people actually engage into behavior that have cost plenty of professionals their careers.
One remembers the hoax on George W. Bush Killian documents controversy. A fake document was presented as proof that Bush had used his family influence to enhance his record in the Texas Air National Guard. This proved to be a false document, typed in Microsoft Word standard setting, but dated of 1971. Dan Rather resigned in disgrace and CBS was in jeopardy of losing their broadcast license. This was a frontal attack on the Republican party candidate and backfired spetacularly. CBS has tried to defend the authenticity of the false document saying that they had other corroborated evidence, even if the original document was false. CBS only relented when threatened with losing their broadcasting license and threw Dan Rather and the editors under the bus to save their hide.
The other instance of false reporting is the Laptop from Hell of Hunter Biden. There were 51 National Security Clearance holder people who signed a letter written on initiative of Anthony Blinken on demand of Democrat party to have something to rebuke the findings. Blinken later was rewarded as Secretary of State for this job.
Today it is clear that the data in the laptop belonging to Hunter Biden was actually true and that same information was used by the United States Government to condemn Hunter Biden in a criminal charge.
So how 51 trained, experienced, knowledgeable people got it wrong? How experienced seasoned journalists fell into the Democrat party machine saying it was Russian disinformation?
These people are not gullible people with no experience. They risk their reputations and their careers when doing the wrong assessment.
Besides partisanship and idiocy, we shall explore how they made up their minds in the Laptop from Hell story.
HOW TO KNOW WE KNOW SOMETHING?
We experience events and acknowledge that we actually know what happened because our senses have captured it. The smell, the visual appearance, the format of the object in our hands. We trust our senses for they have not failed us – much – until now.
So if there is a green table in a room, we can see it, sit on it, move it around, weight it with our arms and be confident we know there is this object there. This is of course, if we do not meet Bishop Berkeley, who will tell us that our mind’s perception and the perceptions of the actual object are indistinguishable from each other. Thus what we perceive is the identity of perceived object in our mind.
This moves us to know of things that are not physical. Some may even have a physical representation, but are not actual objects or the object perceived is indistinguishable from other different object.
Money in our wallets, the bills of money in our wallets, the banknotes is a representation of value of economic power. This economic power only works under certain conditions. A dollar bill is very much useless in Europe, for the currency in Europe is the Euro. Vice versa, the Euro bill will not be welcome in America, thus they are not actual economic power everywhere. They are valid in their jurisdictions.
The money value printed on the bill doesn’t represent economic power over time. In the past 4 years, an inflation of 25% have eroded the purchase power of the 100 dollar bill, making it worth 75 dollars of 4 years ago. The physical number is still 100, but the actual value is 75.
How do we know this is true?
Because we try to use the banknote and we repeatedly get less of goods and services because the money lost its value. The number of people trying to buy goods with dollars creates the market and thus the level of price where the goods and services are traded.
Sometimes it work the other way around. In 2000 the Swiss Franc was worth 0,50 dollar. Now it is worth 1,15 dollars per Swiss Franc. The purchase power of the Swiss Franc has increased, it has gained purchase power.
These exemples above are mostly foundational epistemological justifications.
COHERENT EPISTEMOLOGICAL JUSTIFICATION
The foundational epistemological justifications are sufficient for testimonial justification of what can be perceived but have some shortcomings regarding what is actually justified, leading to a recurring justification that may have no end.
Why one knows that the time is 12:00? Because one posits a heliocentric model for the planets, assume some period of rotation for the earth, divide it by a convenient number and when the sun is at a certain position that makes the shadow such and such, it is 12:00. This can be verified by anyone using the same assumptions, by different methods at different locations – not too extremely far from the Equator line – and at multiple moments of the translation of Earth around the Sun. This is foundational justification based on testimony and experiment.
How do we know that some history of the World War II is true?
We collect the information of those who were there and the publications of the time of the War and cross check for the veracity of the incident. There is a hierarchy of quality of information. The contemporary testimony of the events are better quality than testimony of the same event decades later. Some private diary of witness have more value as testimony than news reported thousands of miles away by a newspaper editor collecting data from his correspondents. This happened to the Katyn Massacre in 1939. Everyone knew that the massacre was a job of Nazi Germany. But evidences uncovered in the fall of the Soviet Union reveals that the Katyn Massacre of dozens of Polish Military officials was a war crime perpetrated by the Soviet Union. This is a coherent justification. Until the evidence was uncovered, there was consensus that Nazi Germany was at fault on this particular Katyn Massacre. Now, the consensus is that the Katyn Massacre was perpetrated by the Soviet Union and covered up by the Kremlin who accused the Nazi German to hide their responsibility.
One problem is that coherent justification is based on the absence of disproof. This is troublesome for the absence of proof or disproof is not proof or disproof of absence. There may be a knowledge that has not surfaced yet that will break the justification as per the above example.
Atoms were defined as unbreakable. That is what the Greek meaning is for “atomos”. All scientists “knew” that atoms were indivisible. Until research demonstrated that atoms do break naturally, in decayment of some materials, radioactive materials, some atoms break forming new atoms of different elements and particles are ejected, sometimes in form of Gamma radiation and alpha particles, Helium. This is the Earth source of Helium. The source of Helium on Earth is the decay of radioactive material, Thorium and Uranium. The Helium we use has been decaying for ages. There always been atoms breaking, we just didn’t know about it, but we knew about Helium.
Black swanns also did not exist until they were discovered in 1790 in Australia. The coherent justification for the non existence of black swans fell when the counter example was found.
COHERENT THEORY OF TRUTH
There is a system where the truth can be assured by a set of beliefs that is internally coherent. The posit is true because there is coherence in the cognition of the posit.
This is dangerous because the set can be arbitrary and some non-coherent aspect of the posit can be taken out of the set, making it true and false at the same time, as observed by Bertrand Russell.
When a set of Coherent Theory of Truth is misused, the hierarchy of preferences of the debaters may create an illusion that the set that best describe the candidate for truth is their preferred candidate for truth. It can be interesting when there is actual interest in analyzing the posit with people with a priori knowledge that suffice for a deemed quality debate. In most cases there is a risk that a popular view, albeit wrong, will be deemed true just because the real understanding of the question is complicated and hard to learn.
This plays badly when in situations where power may interfere in the selection of the sets. Power can be used to move people to accept the posit as true.
The other problem is the democratic tendency of making the most popular set the set of choice, but the knowledge of the individual voters may be variable, making the choice of set made on quantity rather on quality of the posits.
CONCLUSION:
In the case of the failures of news people to assess what they know and do not know, we can criticize the following:
The news people got trapped in several scenarios, some of them occurring simultaneously.
The first was the time constraint to verify the computer. The computer was Hunter Biden’s. This is obvious for the personal photographs of Biden smoking crack, having intercourse with diverse women, smoking crack with his lover-ex-wife-of-his-deceased-brother, emails sent to Joe Biden at the White House official email and emails received by Hunter Biden from Joe Biden official email. There were also backups from his iPhone and plenty of personal messages to his family. This laptop was actually Hunter Bidens. The FBI was weaponized by the Biden presidency not to pursue the investigation of Joe Biden corruption. Not the actual crime, but the investigation of the possible crime.
The FBI failed miserably to clear Joe Biden reputation by investigating and dismissing the case. Instead, the FBI left Biden presidency tainted with the suspicion of corruption, until the ratings for re-election were so bad that even the DOJ turned onto the Bidens and used the laptop contents as proof of Hunter Biden crimes.
The engaged journalists then started to speculate that this was a the actual Hunter’s laptop, but somehow the messages were tampered with, by Russians, to accuse Joe Biden and his family of using the presidency of the United States to enrich themselves.
This was hard to verify, because Hunter Biden was dismissing ownership of the computer and the FBI had actually threatened the shop owner who was in possession of the laptop. Time has passed and the data was released way later than the election.
The second problem was the usual activity of other countries to bamboozle the political campaigns in other countries, in order to make their political system be ridiculed. The United States used this tactic as well as many other countries. The Soviet Union engaged in these tactics – Active Measures – all over the world, helping leftist parties with hoaxes about the conservative candidates. These sometimes were true, like the sexual escapades of politicians and some sexual preferences that could embarras politicians.
The fact that this time Russia disinformation was against the leftist party was conveniently left out. This was also propped up by the Russia Hoax that Hillary Clinton paid to an disgraced MI-6 agent to prepare a dossier – Steele Dossier – where he claimed that there was a video of Donald Trump in a sex party in a hotel in Moscow. The tape was never produced and there is yet one to declare that the tape actually exist and moreover, there was no actual advantage to Russia during 45th presidency. Russia invaded Crimea under Barack Hussein Obama and Joe Biden. Under Trump, Russia was very quiet within their borders, even Georgia had better times under Trump.
The third problem was the echo chamber where the engaged journalists live. They have to thread carefully in their discussions because their colleagues are not very generous with conservative views on news organizations.
The echo chamber consider whatever is between Bernie Sanders and the center as extreme Right and the scale is used without restraints in most of the editors desks. They desperately needed something to help their party win the election.
Only the New York Post, a newspaper in tabloid format took the content as truthful and published the news.
The engaged media managed to hide the evidence of corruption.
This changed the world. Russia invaded Ukraine and tried to annex the whole country. There are hundreds of thousands of people dead in this war due to the bad assessment of knowledge.