Kimya Dawson wisely penned the words:
“Just because I said exactly what I meant doesn’t mean I meant what I said.”
Structurally, it’s a poignant and deliberate equivocation, the same kind employed by stand up comics and cartoonists to create humor. Philosophically, it is an invitation to notice that we can create specific and clear meaning both by building a linguistic armature and by shattering it.
Words are tools. A word is a handle on a mug. Alone, a word holds nothing.
This is an odd chapter because it sits at two extremes. Much of what is in this book is stuff that your grandmother would have told you if you had known to ask. Some ideas are notions that have seemingly never been considered by the very people whom society expects to know these things — academics, politicians, decision-makers. The idea which makes up this chapter sits at the extreme end of both. It is a curiously deceptive way in which most of society has adopted a known terrible habit in thinking. The celebrity philosopher Alex O’Connor once said that the last big upset to hit philosophy was when Edmund Gettier dropped his paper on the questionability of justified, true, knowledge. Well, in this chapter I’ll show why we should all be very concerned that the Gettier paper was so well received. I speculate that anyone who’s raised a few kids, cleaned a few toilets, or grown a bite of food from seed will see straight away that there is a huge hole in it. What that hole implies is disturbing, and shows us how certain social ills have gotten as awful as they have.
What I tackle first is the nature of words and their influence on our thinking. Then we can make a short review of the epistemologies that have come to sit off to the side of our thinking. Once we can see the differences between them, we can start to see that each tool used to frame a class of thought has certain advantages and limitations. And, this also exposes the degree to which many of the people taking a paycheck as a philosophy professor in contemporary times are milking society for a job left consequentially undone.
Hey, I know this chapter sounds really heady, but that’s only because it is. I promise it is intimately connected to our predicament with unclear thinking on social design. Thank you for being here for it. If you’re just happening by and want to stay up to date with everything related to this work, sign up for occasional updates here.