LDS Epistemology

[standard4truth]

Hey guys! This might seem like a strange post but I was wondering what it truly means to "know" something. I came across the Gettier problem in philosophy (there is a lot written about it). I find it very difficult right now to figure out how we can know that anything is truthful, knowing how easy it is to be deceived. I have had times in my life where the Spirit told me this that or the other, and they turned out to be wrong. Maybe it was the influence false spirits, but I am not sure. How am I supposed to know the difference? The question I guess is this (and forgive me for how silly it seems): how can any of us know that we know anything aside from just knowing that we had an experience? If the answer is that we can't then it seems the most rational position to take is agnosticism, if I am not wrong.

[Pyreaux]

Humans don't function off of empirical data. You know using; Intuition; Sensory data; Reason; Moral outcomes (it works or functions); Appeals to Authority.

I can't say I know you are real, but I'll say I know you are real = I mean I have confidence you are a real person. Why? With my senses, I saw this post here. But there is a chance you could be a bot. But then there are anti-bot protocols here. That authority is evidence that I know (90% confident) you are a person based on that evidence. 

Test every spirit whether it is of God or not, experience is how to tell the difference. If it functions, it should be evidence. Not a baseless claim.

[Benjamin McGuire]

12 hours ago, standard4truth said:

Hey guys! This might seem like a strange post but I was wondering what it truly means to "know" something. I came across the Gettier problem in philosophy (there is a lot written about it). I find it very difficult right now to figure out how we can know that anything is truthful, knowing how easy it is to be deceived. I have had times in my life where the Spirit told me this that or the other, and they turned out to be wrong. Maybe it was the influence false spirits, but I am not sure. How am I supposed to know the difference? The question I guess is this (and forgive me for how silly it seems): how can any of us know that we know anything aside from just knowing that we had an experience? If the answer is that we can't then it seems the most rational position to take is agnosticism, if I am not wrong.

 I am reminded a little of a line from the 1997 movie Men in Black:

Quote

Fifteen hundred years ago everybody knew the Earth was the center of the universe. Five hundred years ago, everybody knew the Earth was flat, and fifteen minutes ago, you knew that humans were alone on this planet. Imagine what you'll know tomorrow.

I think that you are confusing 'knowing something' with knowledge in a technical sense. It's true that even given our experience, we can't know with certainty that the things we take for granted will still be there tomorrow (gravity, a breathable atmosphere, things like this). But, given our experience (our knowing) we can function even in the absence of this sort of certainty. What we know doesn't have to be knowledge (as defined by the Gettier problem) for us to make it through our day.

So a couple of things for you to think about relative to this issue before I provide something of my own way of explaining it.

First, you might do some reading on the Perry scheme of intellectual and ethical development. The link goes to a very high level summary, but there is a lot of good material out there if you search for it. What you will see is that there is a natural shift that occurs for many people from a world view full of absolutes to a world view full of ambiguity. You might look to see where you are along this spectrum and then look at ways that help move you towards the next stage.

 I really like what Richard Rohr had to say about ambiguity:

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Whenever I think there’s a perfect pattern, further reading and study reveal an exception. Whenever I want to say “only” or “always,” someone or something proves me wrong. My scientist friends have come up with things like “principles of uncertainty” and dark holes. They’re willing to live inside imagined hypotheses and theories. But many religious folks insist on answers that are always true. We love closure, resolution and clarity, while thinking that we are people of “faith”! How strange that the very word “faith” has come to mean its exact opposite.

I will circle back to this in a moment because in religion, truth has its own special challenge here. As far as science goes, it is fascinating to me that the Nobel prize for physics last year was awarded for the proof that the universe is not locally real. This pushes into an area that few are comfortable discussing in the context of your question. Is science incapable of producing knowledge in a Gettier sense? Even the idea of progressive knowledge is flawed - not because we can't measure how our knowledge improves (we often can), but rather because we don't know what we don't know. We have no understanding of what absolute truth is, and so we don't know how far away it might be - or even if our improvements are really in the right direction.

So, back to religious truth. I like to describe it in terms of a gap. There is a gap between what we know and what truth really is. Part of our struggle is that we don't even know what the size of that gap is. If I were to draw a line for each person who participates in the forum - from where they are to where God is, we would have a whole bunch of unique lines converging at the horizon. The gap between us (collectively) is insignificant compared to the distance between where we are and where God is. This doesn't mean that we can't take progressive steps (that we can't move in the right direction) - merely that those progressive steps don't move us significantly closer. The last stage of the Perry scheme is characterized by three features (according to the link I provided):

Realization that commitment is on-going and ever evolving

Lifestyle consistent with one's beliefs, values, and identity

Ambiguities and uncertainty become an integral part of personal identity

From a religious standpoint, this means that we recognize that our relationship to God (and to the Gospel of Jesus Christ) is on-going and ever evolving. It also means that as we learn more (and experience more), that our lifestyle needs to shift to be consistent with our changing position. We might say that the better our understanding of gospel principles is, the more we live accordingly. And finally that we recognize that we know very little - and this recognition becomes a part of our personal identity. Going back to Richard Rohr for a moment, he also said this:

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People who’ve had any genuine spiritual experience always know they don’t know. They are utterly humbled before mystery. They are in awe before the abyss of it all, in wonder at eternity and depth, and a Love, which is incomprehensible to the mind.

In one of my published essays, I point out that Nephi follows this pattern in his writings in 1 and 2 Nephi:

Quote

In many ways, this end to his writing stands in contrast to his first beginning. Over the course of Nephi’s literary journey, there is a profound change in the outlook on the text and its contents. In its first beginning, the text identifies itself as “true” (1 Nephi 1:3). By its last beginning, the text labels itself as weakness. In each iteration, the text’s self identification changes. It goes from truth to desire and intention, to a state of representing an unknown purpose, and finally at the end, to weakness. And with each change of the text, our investment as its audience changes as well. (p. 68)

As a final thought, a quote that I have used regularly for the past 15 years or so come from Joseph Natoli's A Primer to Postmodernity:

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the problem is not that we might wander and that we therefore would be  faced with contesting views none of which can validate itself as The Truth. The  problem is that we might elevate some narrative to Truth status and stop wandering.  We might invest some observation . . . with full determinate status."

When we are young we want to know that we have knowledge - that our truth is determinate, that we have an absolute understanding - we want a well defined and well-ordered world. As we get older, we (hopefully) begin to recognize that we aren't going to have absolute truth - that we aren't always going to know - and that there will be times when we are faced with decisions and questions that don't have a single true (or even a best) answer. As we come to realize that real truth is far enough away that we cannot see it across the horizon, we hopefully come to realize that the real risk in our lives is that we will stop searching for truth and decide that we have traveled to the end.

This doesn't just apply to us as individuals, it applies to the institutional LDS church just as well. The risk for the institutional church is not that the church might wander from time to time, or that it might be faced with contesting views of truth - none of which can be self-validating. We shouldn't be surprised to find a church that claims to be true and living doing some wandering and investing in conflicting narratives. The risk to the institutional church is that someday it decides that it has arrived at the point of Truth and Knoweldge (in that Gettier sense), from which it never leaves. And at that point, it will no longer be a living church, and it will certainly never be true.

You wrote at the end of your question:

12 hours ago, standard4truth said:

If the answer is that we can't then it seems the most rational position to take is agnosticism, if I am not wrong.

Perry discusses this idea under the label "Dissociation" and uses it in the context of an early exit from the process of intellectual and ethical development - this is from his original research report:

Quote

"Disassociation," the term we use to denote the potential of this 'drifting,' refers to a passive delegation of all responsibility to fate. Its tone is depressed, even when pleasure is still possible in irresponsibility. The sense of active participation as an agent in the growth of one's identity is abandoned. Its final destiny lies in the depersonalized looseness of Multiplicity (Multiplicity Correlate, Position 4) dissociated from the challenge of meaning.

In the research this is illustrated with a respondent who suggested that they were just waiting for the good thing to happen to them (and they noted that it hadn't happened that year). The most rational position to take isn't agnosticism - the most rational position isn't really even related to the question of believing or not believing - it has to do with coming to terms with the ambiguity in our world, deciding who you want to be, and then working to take ownership of your life - and in this context, choosing to believe or not to believe is a part of this process (where agnosticism simply isn't). In this sense, what we know may not be knowledge in the Gettier sense, but we will have an understanding that gives us purpose and direction and allows us to become better human beings within the scope of an uncertain mortality.

Edited March 10, 2023 by Benjamin McGuire

[MustardSeed]

The only thing I can say I know at this age is how little I know about anything because so much changes minute to minute.  I guess I know that flexibility and resilience are important qualities to foster and that the need to control others is only a prison for myself.  Other than that…. All I can do is hope.  

[brownbear]

On 3/9/2023 at 9:51 PM, standard4truth said:

Hey guys! This might seem like a strange post but I was wondering what it truly means to "know" something. I came across the Gettier problem in philosophy (there is a lot written about it). I find it very difficult right now to figure out how we can know that anything is truthful, knowing how easy it is to be deceived. I have had times in my life where the Spirit told me this that or the other, and they turned out to be wrong. Maybe it was the influence false spirits, but I am not sure. How am I supposed to know the difference? The question I guess is this (and forgive me for how silly it seems): how can any of us know that we know anything aside from just knowing that we had an experience? If the answer is that we can't then it seems the most rational position to take is agnosticism, if I am not wrong.

I think there are an infinite number of definitions for "knowledge."