Epistemic Crisis

I’ve evolved beyond an existential crisis.

I think I’m now having an epistemic crisis.

For those who don’t know, epistemology was a favourite sub-topic of mine within the field of philosophy. Roughly, roughly speaking, epistemology is about the theory of knowledge. What can count as knowledge, how do we know that what we know is true, etc?

Okay, there’s some philosophical translation for my non-fluent friends.
Here’s more personal explanation.

Over the past week, being home with a sick child, I have had far too much time for introspection, and this, in turn, almost always inevitably leads to me depressing myself. I have cried a little upon going to bed every night. Perhaps it’s a relief. Perhaps it’s because I carry a story that happened three years ago that remains untold, and the memories of this haunt me every afternoon as the light from the sun in late summer is all-too-similar, no, heartbreaking. I want to tell the story in pieces, one day. But that’s not what I’m trying to do here. (Or maybe I am, and this is just the start.)

Back to philosophy: in the 1960’s, a man by the name of Gettier spelled out an epistemic problem that “shook” the epistemological world (or so I’ve been lead to believe). Up until Gettier came along with his eloquent, three-page paper, it seems to have been accepted that for a proposition to count as knowledge:
1. That proposition must be believed;
2. that proposition must be true; and
3. the believer of that proposition must have good reason for their belief.
Now, we philosophers grant that what counts as “good reason” for the belief is itself a complicated issue, but for the time being, let’s assume it’s easy enough to decipher. These three conditions are more commonly known as justified true belief, or JTB for short.

Gettier’s paper spelled out cases where JTB exists, yet does not match with reality. The first example Gettier’s first “case”:

Suppose that Smith and Jones have applied for a certain job. And suppose that Smith has strong evidence for the following conjunctive proposition:
d. Jones is the man who will get the job, and Jones has ten coins in his pocket.
Smith's evidence for (d) might be that the president of the company assured him that Jones would in the end be selected, and that he, Smith, had counted the coins in Jones's pocket ten minutes ago. Proposition (d) entails:
e. The man who will get the job has ten coins in his pocket.
Let us suppose that Smith sees the entailment from (d) to (e), and accepts (e) on the grounds of (d), for which he has strong evidence. In this case, Smith is clearly justified in believing that (e) is true.
But imagine, further, that unknown to Smith, he himself, not Jones, will get the job. And, also, unknown to Smith, he himself has ten coins in his pocket. Proposition (e) is then true, though proposition (d), from which Smith inferred (e), is false. In our example, then, all of the following are true: (i) (e) is true, (ii) Smith believes that (e) is true, and (iii) Smith is justified in believing that (e) is true. But it is equally clear that Smith does not know that (e) is true; for (e) is true in virtue of the number of coins in Smith's pocket, while Smith does not know how many coins are in Smith's pocket, and bases his belief in (e) on a count of the coins in Jones's pocket, whom he falsely believes to be the man who will get the job.

If you want to read the second Gettier case, please check out this link: http://www.ditext.com/gettier/gettier.html

Okay…enough philosophical background.

On Saturday night, as I lay in bed, I felt the restlessness of someone who’s over expended herself and her resources. Over 9 days of taking care of a 2.5 year-old with swine flu is draining enough. Attempting to care for your sick partner, and then fighting off a vomiting-inducing migraine doesn’t really recharge my batteries, which is what I did all last week.

Here, not spelled out in finite details because I don’t wish to bore you to death, is my train of thought Saturday night:

Three years ago, as we hit rock bottom, I had a justified and true belief that B loved me. Not only that, but I was naïve enough to believe that this love transcended time. That we would love each other and be together as long as we both lived.

So grant me, I ask you, the JTB that B loved me and the JTB that we would spend our lives together.

Now, I realize there are several fallacies here. For one thing, it was hubristic and stupid of me to think anything about the future was certain. But I did. I really did think that this much was certain. What else the future might bring I couldn’t and still cannot tell you. But I thought, I believed, we would stand by each other’s side to the end.

[One could argue here that the B who told me that he was with me forever died, and thus, my JTB was and remains a JTB. I would have to sorrowfully concede this point, as it’s never a “happy” thing to acknowledge the death of a loved one who remains alive.]

Crap, this is long.

I had a JTB.

And when B’s illness took over, when we ceased to be…I was left with a JTB that was wrong.

If I cannot trust my instincts, if I cannot trust propositions that are justified, if I cannot trust propositions that are true, and if I cannot trust propositions that I believe such…

With what am I left?

Lying in the dark, tears streaming quietly down my face, A and C sleeping quietly next to me, I cannot help but wonder:

I believe A loves me.
I think the proposition, “A loves me” to be true.
I am justified in believing this.

Thus, I have a justified true belief that A loves me.

I had a JTB that B loves me and we’d forever be together: I was wrong.

Is it even necessary, at this point, to explain to you my conclusion? How can I be certain A loves me? How can I be certain he truly wants to spend the rest of his life with me? What’s to keep this from changing?

At this point, I became envious of my dear friends who better understand Eastern philosophy. I am certain there is more in Eastern philosophy about living in the moment and accepting what you have in the present as is, simply. It also appears in my beloved Stoic philosophy.

But I’m not able to see this for myself, in my own life. So I am left with my epistemic crisis.

What is true? What do I know, if I know anything?

To conclude this entry, I feel that I need to share I earned solid A’s in my epistemology classes. I have never worked so hard or felt quite as invigorated. I should also note that at the end of each and every epistemology class, I was left with the fatalistic and Socratic conclusion: “So we don’t know anything, we can’t even be certain that we know nothing.”

I was okay with this conclusion up until Saturday night, when my tired mind started applying these scholarly theories to my personal life.