Epistemology revisited

Post-PhD, I am much older and a little wiser. I used to imagine that the use of a common language pretty much assured that ideas would travel along a solid channel from my mind to the minds of my readers. Nowadays, I realize that almost the opposite it the case: the fact of having a common language means nothing when your environment and formative influences are not the same. In the these cases, language can have the opposite to the desired effect, giving false reassurance that effective communication is transpiring. This seems to be the case due to one's sheer familiarity with the words themselves. Yet, just because one is familiar with the way that words were used during one's childhood and in one's environment whilst one was growing up, does not necessarily imply that one has a full, rather than partial understanding of the content of another's person's words, as they intend to convey their meanings.

It's not precisely that we are locked into a solipsist's mental space. The willingness to avoid such a conclusion had sent me running towards metaphysics as a means to mediate a realm of social meaning that could otherwise have been made to feel as if it were purely subjective. Western metaphysics tends to function by means of polarizing ideas and values into opposite camps. So, what is masculine cannot be feminine, what is 'good' in some way cannot have anything 'bad' in it, what is progressive cannot in any sense be regressive -- and so on. To create divisions, in the world, in such a way seemed like a way to get away from the theorized pure subjectivity that would not guarantee I would be speaking to anyone other than myself.

Yet, this metaphysical approach also proved problematic in that Western metaphysics provides us with the form of 'objectivity' that is based on social consensus, rather than something that retains its truth even when social consensus is missing. To rely upon Western metaphysics as a means to stabilize the universe is not an effective solution to the philosophical problem of solipsism, since it works more in the fashion of a mold -- pushing the world into conformity with its prior existing shape, rather than as a mode of hermeneutics. Western metaphysics does not, despite what it seems to do, give us access to meanings that existed prior to an interpretation of the world based on Western metaphysics.

As a method of interpretation, it is only able to find what is already part of it: its basic dualisms. The computer science term for this phenomenon: garbage in; garbage out. There is an additional problem with seeking to build our recognition of truth on something as precarious as social consensus: It establishes mob mentality as a primary means for establishing new "truths" (which are, in turn, built upon a re-establishment of archaic truisms: women are like this; men are like that.) Epistemologically, nothing new is actually discovered using this approach. Ethically, human integrity is undermined, as the dominant side of the polarity -- "men" -- get to condemn and punish those at the wrong end of the archaic dualism -- "women".

Such a way out of solipsism is unacceptable. I have learned that it has less than no use. It fails on the level of enabling knowledge of how people actually experience their lives and it fails on the level of ethics, by using social consensus (mob ethics) as a means to establish facts. Those who don't want to work too hard at thinking, yet still want to feel 'in touch' will be the ones who continue to prefer this method, despite all its failures.

For those who have the time and will to go a whole lot further with their thinking, dialectics proves to be an answer. This approach involves figuring out the way the cultural landscape lies, by using language a bit like radar. One sounds things out. One gets 'responses' of various sorts. These responses should not be taken to indicate anything about the rightness or wrongness of one's ideas, at least not in the immediate sense. Rather, they are a sign of how others are positioned to respond to your ideas by means of their social conditioning and experiences. If a majority respond in a similar way, we can put this down to a certain part of the environment having certain objective 'geographical features'.