As this Wikipedia article states, “Epistemology is the branch of philosophy that examines the nature, origin, and limits of knowledge. Also called the theory of knowledge, it examines what knowledge is and what types of knowledge there are. It further investigates the sources of knowledge, like perception, inference, and testimony, to determine how knowledge is created. Another topic is the extent and limits of knowledge, confronting questions about what people can and cannot know. Other central concepts include belief, truth, justification, evidence, and reason. Epistemology is one of the main branches of philosophy besides fields like ethics, logic, and metaphysics.”
The exploration of epistemology begins with exploring how humans know what they know, through a highly informative dialogue between Dr. Menachem Fisch, an internationally renowned historian and philosopher of science, and Dr. Robert L. Kuhn, the host of Closer to Truth.
“How do we know what we know?” is the question Dr. Robert L. Kuhn asked his guest to start the conversation.
Dr. Fisch started by stating that, according to “latter-day philosophy,” “we do not know by our eyes or by our ears, but by means of the words we speak.“ The significance of that statement is that, by associating what humans see and hear with the words they speak, it suggests that the knowledge they gain from words is influenced by what they see or hear.
Indeed, Dr. Fisch continued that “we are stimulated by the world,“ and while “the world impacts on us in a causal manner through all our senses, but the content imparted on those stimuli is the reading in of the mind. It’s imparted by the mind.”
Dr. Fisch continued, “How we know is by means of their conceptualization.” “Sitting in the command room of our minds with the inner-eyes and looking out, … we don’t look out the windows of our eyes; everything happens within the head,… so sitting back on that armchair in the command console, and seeing on the screen the world that we experience, all that data has already been fashioned and conceptualized by our minds in ways that we do not govern.” “This is sensing.”
“Knowing,“ Dr. Fisch continued, “is to render explicit those conceptualizations. In other words, to take stock explicitly, um, that’s a horse, ah, I am talking to an interviewer, and so on and so forth.“ “What we can know, not what we can feel, is the function of the language of conceptual schemes, the concepts by which we conceptualize.“
Additionally, Dr. Fisch suggested, “if you look into the dictionary, words are explained by other words. The conceptual scheme, the vocabulary at our disposal, by which we experience and by which we know, is inferentially connected.“ “In other words, if this point is north of that, then that point is south of that. That is about the meaning of the words. This isn’t an empirical fact. This is about how these concepts relate to each other. The limits of what we can know, the limits of our world, is the limits of our language!“
“The intriguing thing about bringing language into epistemology is that you can only know something new by using old words. If you invent a new term, it’s just a tag, not a concept.“ “Like every person in this studio, you are unique. But the only way I can account for your uniqueness is by means of a set of concepts by which you are likened to others.“
“We know by means of using a concept.” “Using a concept is to liken what we see to something else. So, concepts are little metaphors, a little class names.“
Dr. Kuhn immediately recognized the immensity of Dr. Fisch’s words as he questioned, “What prevents you from cascading into skepticism where we can’t know anything? Everything is related to something else. I have no foundation between what I believe and what the world really is. So, how do I know anything?”
In response, Dr. Fisch asked Dr. Kuhn, “Define know.“ However, he answered his own question before receiving an answer as he continued, “What you are saying now is that we should be skeptical about knowing for sure, about how things stand in themselves, not how things are experienced by us.“
“How things are experienced by us,“ Dr. Fisch expounded, “is already language informed, or concept informed.” “We know pretty much about the self we experience, the world we experience, the world we find ourselves living in.” “We got it right. We got it right according to our standards, no other standards.”
“Do we know things stand in themselves?”
“God knows,“ was the reply.
So, according to the “latter-day philosophy,“ human knowledge about the world is a two-step process. First, humans sense, using their sensory organs such as the eyes, ears, nose, tongue, and bodily parts to see, hear, smell, taste, and touch, respectively. Once sensing is complete, humans use word-based knowledge to “take stock explicitly“ of what they have sensed, i.e., to describe or identify it.
However, words are inferentially connected. For example, “if this point is north of that, then that point is south of that.“ That is about the meaning of the words. This isn’t an empirical fact. This is about how these concepts relate to each other. The limits of what we can know, the limits of our world, are the limits of our language!“
Indeed, one can call the east the west, and vice versa; the sun would still rise or set where it does. Or one can call the river the mountain, or vice versa; the one that flows still flows. As Shakespeare so elegantly put it, “A rose by any other nae would smell as sweet. As Dr. Fisch said, “they are not empirical facts.”
So, what are “empirical facts?“ By definition, empirical facts are what the senses directly perceive.
Let’s explain using observation as an example. According to Dr. Fisch, observation consists of the following five steps.
- “the world impacts on us in a causal manner through all our senses,”
- “the content imparted on those stimuli is the reading-in of the mind,”
- “the content gets fashioned and conceptualized by our minds in ways that we do not govern,”
- “Sitting in the command room of our minds with the inner eyes and looking out,”
- “seeing on the screen the world that we experience.”
Empirical facts are the “contents“ that “the world impacts on us in a causal manner through all our senses.“ In observation, the senses are the eyes. The empirical facts that the eyes sense inform “how things stand in themselves,” as Dr. Fisch describes them. The terminology used on this website, “how things stand in themselves,” is “What Exist?”
However, humans do not get to understand “how things stand in themselves” because the empirical facts immediately become the “reading-in“ of the mind, where it gets “conceptualized in ways we do not govern.“ In other words, it happens by itself without anyone knowing. While nothing is said about what happens during conceptualization, we can be sure that whatever conceptualization does distorts the empirical facts received by the eyes.
We know that because, while the input of the observation, the empirical facts received by the eyes, is invisible, the output of the observation is “the world we experience,“ something that can be “seen on the screen“ through the “inner eyes.”
In other words, when one observes the world, one actually manifests it from the invisible empirical facts the eyes sense!
Post 1 started by stating that quantum mechanics, one of the best scientific theories available today, holds that “reality at its fundamental level is uncertain, fluid, and dependent on observation.“ Quantum mechanics is right. The world is dependent on observation.
However, although quantum mechanics and philosophy offer beautiful theories, they both derive their knowledge through words. As such, they cannot understand “how things stand in themselves.” Without knowledge of “how things stand in themselves,” they make assumptions in their theories to make them more perfect. For example, are there really “command centers,” or “inner-eyes” in the mind? Even within the circle of quantum mechanical scientists, some prefer other “physical” theories to explain the so-called “observer effect,” rather than the Copenhagen Interpretation that involves consciousness.
In the next post, we will discuss Buddha’s teaching called the Five Aggregates, the equivalent of the five steps of sensing in philosophy, where all five steps involve consciousness.
In Buddhism, the means of knowledge that uses words to understand reality is inference, known in Romanized Sanskrit as Pramana (Chinese: 量).
Inference (Romanized Sanskrit: anumana; Chinese: 比量), according to The Princeton Dictionary of Buddhism, “allows us to glean knowledge concerning objects that are not directly evident to the senses.”
As discussed earlier, only empirical facts are “directly evident to the senses.” On the other hand, “the world we experience” is “not directly evident to the senses” because, as an object “conceptualized in ways humans do not govern goven,” it is illusory, as Adyashanti can verify.
Anumana is closely associated with another concept known in Romanized Sanskrit as agamadharma (Chinese: 教法), which, according to The Princeton Dictionary of Buddhism, is “in Sanskrit, ‘scriptural dharma.‘ In contrast to adhigamadharma, it refers to the mere conceptual understanding of Buddha’s teachings through studying Buddhist sūtras.“
In a future post on the Kalama Sutta, we will discuss why the Buddha advises his followers to relinquish agamadharma if they want to be like him and fulfill his soteriological goal.
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