Truthology or Epistemology?

To the students and professors of philosophy who may look at what I'm doing (and I hope there are some), why even consider an undignified sounding made-up word like truthology rather than epistemology?

Short answers: (1) I would like to foreground the word "truth". (2) After  years, my wife still asks "Remind me which is epistemology and which is ontology?"



Wikipedia, quoting Webster's 1913 edition and  Edwards'  Encyclopedia of Philosophy as

the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature and scope of knowledge ... also referred to as "theory of knowledge". It questions what knowledge is and how it can be acquired, and the extent to which any given subject or entity can be known.

My project is more like: 

[THE GREAT QUESTION]
"What would it take for you (and me, and a skeptical person to be designated) to feel confident that you know (adequately) what is going on in the world, and/or that you have the best possible chance of understanding something if you set your mind to it?"

Of course this is problematic, very problematic, and all sorts of criticisms can be made of it, like what is "adequate", and do I really mean "for you [..me.. and one more person]" to stand in this golden state of "confidence"?  "Adequate" will be left a tentative and moving target, while "you and me ..." can and ultimately should be expanded to include more or less everybody.

But the academic attitude, for all its greatness, seems problematic in other ways.  It tends towards statements like "It is known" or "can be known", seemingly uninterested in who knows, or can know it whatever it is.

The "great question" probably needs a lot of improvement, but for it to evolve with consistency, it may help to say what drive or vision is behind it, and my answer -- probably less subject to change than the question -- is it is about maintaining our independence and democracy, and making the most of our lives.  "Making the most" of our lives requires the other two bits if our lives are to really be our lives.

This makes the project more than mental.  Far from just wanting to know "what knowledge is", I am suggesting, along with some "self-improvement", changing the world so that it supports my attempt to "know what is up", and both supports and motivates others to know what is up.  If this sounds like in part a desire for others to change, it is.  But it is not about imposing a certain vision on others, and certainly not imposing one version of the truth.  Mostly, I think it should work through persuasive demonstrations that will lead people to wand something for themselves.  Still, on suitable subjects, there tends to be one truth -- not any number of subjective ones, and if I'm right about that, it should lead to more areas of agreement among people, and I think it might surprise us just how far that might go over the course of a couple of generations, say.

On how this relates to democracy, Thomas Jefferson, often seen as an epitome of small government thinking said "I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education. This is the true corrective of abuses of constitutional power."


Rather than being pessimistic about people's ability to govern themselves, and thinking only to minimize the damage they could do, he saw that regardless of his optimism or pessimism -- if they couldn't govern, there was nothing better to fall back on.  "Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves, therefore, are its only safe depositories. And to render even them safe, their minds must be improved to a certain degree."  In his inaugural address he said that "the diffusion of information" is one of the "essential principles of our government."  He even went so far as to specify "three distinct grades of education, reaching all classes.", admitting that this would "throw on wealth the education of the poor."

 Thomas Jefferson quotes are courtesy of Reid Cornwell and can be found at
 tcfir.org/opinion/Thomas Jefferson on Educating the People.pdf on "The Center for Internet Research" web site.

Now, as an example of the directions in which "THE GREAT QUESTION" might take us, I'd like to illustrate the sort of thing unlikely to be discussed in a university seminar on epistemology, which I might call "truthological practices".

It is standard practice, when mapping out a (not so obvious) area of thought to begin with very simple examples, even, you might think, childishly simple.

Suppose the world you can access is very limited; in fact you are in solitary confinement in a white walled room with nothing but a pencil.  If you want to maintain the knowledge of how many days you have been there, you might do the classic mark, the cartoon cliche, of adding a mark to the wall every morning when you wake up.  The number of marks will be the number of days you've been there.  Now suppose you also have a pad of paper, and want to maintain the knowledge of what you did yesterday, or the day before, or five days ago.  Without writing, this would begin to get difficult; actually it would be hard to tell one day from the next (and hard to even keep your sanity).  What sorts of events are there in such a life?  Maybe you write down what was provided for lunch or dinner.

Actually, if all you have is a pencil (kept sharp and replaced when necessary) and pad of paper, you could use them to construct a life in which you might not go insane.  Every day you could write the date, and then write about something you remember.  This would expand your knowledge of previous days -- you could know, e.g., that 6 days ago "I thought about summer on the beach in 1988" or something like that.  Note that in this case, the "truthological practice" created the event as well as making it accessible.  The "thinking about the beach" that goes with writing will be different, and probably much sharper, than casual thinking.  There will  be a major sense of doing something, not just wandering in ones mind. Could that be somewhat typical?  Or do we expect, in general, "truthological" recording of events to be just that -- recording -- and not intertwined with the events themselves? 

This introduction of the pencil and pad, and practice of writing is something like the original introduction of writing to civilization, which did not just make it possible to record events such as had always occurred; it greatly enriched events, and the nature of life.

The same applies to today's smart phones, and the constant connection to social web sites in which you may record, and to an extent live, your life.  An increment in "truthological" technology and practice has created a vast set of event that would not otherwise exist.