A reading guide to Humble Knowledge

Suggestions on how to browse the articles here

For those who have been reading Humble Knowledge for a while, it is likely clear that my writing is not simply a collection of different thoughts but is an attempt to articulate a broader intellectual project. However, the shape of that project may not be clear - especially if you have only started reading recently. This post is therefore an introduction to the broader intellectual approach and includes some reading guides if you want to read the different articles in a logical, thematic order. This will be updated fairly regularly, so feel free to back check in.

The guiding idea behind the broader intellectual project is that how we think about what we can know, or our epistemic attitudes, is foundational to our philosophies, worldviews, science and culture. This idea has been explored through two main strands of writing.

The first is primarily philosophical and looks at the history of ideas and the role that epistemic attitudes play. You can find the main articles below under Philosophical Foundations and History.

The second explores the role of these attitudes in the modern world as a range of Reflections on Modern Culture. This is the place to go if you are interested in the ongoing cultural debates and analyses that are common on Substack and elsewhere. I hope you’ll find something different here!

These two strands of writing are primarily analytic or explanatory. They are trying to make sense of things as they are. As important as this is, my intellectual project goes beyond analysis and is attempting to build something new. A humble attitude towards knowledge is uncommon in published philosophy and cultural thought, yet it may provide keys to resolving some important philosophical and intellectual challenges.

This positive account is built around a third strand of writing that explores the considerable but often over-looked Evidence for Epistemic Humility, that is for a humble attitude to knowledge. If there is significant evidence for epistemic humility, which my aim is to convince you that there is (or prove myself wrong trying), then we should take it seriously as a philosophical and personal principle. This evidence also includes a range of work looking at the advantages of epistemic humility.

However, the real effort in building something new has focused on a fourth strand that is trying to Build a New Epistemology that takes epistemic humility as a starting principle for understanding human knowledge. This is focused on understanding human knowledge, including all of our limitations.

To help follow the different strands of thought, the articles published so far on Humble Knowledge are listed under the four headings and placed into a logical order if you want to read through them in turn. For awareness, the four strands are often interwoven within individual articles, so a number of articles are listed under multiple headings. Short posts that comment on other articles have not been included.

New articles will be continually added to this guide and some upcoming articles are already flagged. Feel free to comment on what you would like to see added and whether there might be better categories to use to organise my writing.

Philosophical Foundations and History

This strand is the philosophical core of my writing. It covers key definitions of different epistemic attitudes and their roles in the history of ideas. It is currently very much a work in progress with large gaps to be filled in.

1. Beginnings: the core motivation and philosophical definitions.

2. A brief epistemic history of Western thought: traces epistemic attitudes in Western Philosophy from Socrates to the 17th century.

3. A brief epistemic history of Western thought: Reality and Knowledge : follows core philosophers and schools from Descartes until today, focusing on epistemic attitudes and attempts to ground confidence and certainty.

4. A brief epistemic history of Western thought: Science as a Method : looks at the development of science as a method for building knowledge and the assumptions required for it to work.

5. Truth within Critical Theory: A look at the underlying epistemic attitudes of an important current school of thought.

6. Incredulity towards Total Narratives: postmodern thought ties together different attitudes, and teasing them out gives insights into the limits of our knowledge.

7. Paradox and Truth: explores how challenges in modern logic and theories of truth remind us of the gaps between our knowledge or language and the world.

8. Arguments for Epistemic Humility: Looks at different types of arguments for epistemic humility, including moral, practical and existential approaches.

9. The human cannot be removed: formal philosophy has a habit of trying to build philosophical accounts of knowledge that ignore the peculiar human limitations and structures we inhabit.

10. Humans, rightly, take stories seriously: Story-telling is intrinsically human, and essential for how we understand the world.

11. Deciphering the weirdness of mathematics: Looking at how we learn maths helps figure out what sort of discipline it actually is, which has been a long philosophical puzzle.

Reflections on the modern world

Understanding epistemic attitudes can help make sense of some of the puzzles people are having about the direction of modern culture and technology, and suggest better ways forward.

If you have an interest in the hot topic of 2023 - Artificial Intelligence - these article explore some of the philosophical foundations.

1. Generative AI might dream, but it cannot hallucinate: the structure of information processing means that AI has no access to the real world, and so cannot truly be said to hallucinate.

2. AI sees patterns. Humans see things. : there is a fundamental different between how humans and AI process information about the world, with important consequences.

The easiest way in to the cultural analysis is through these articles:

1. Parsing our Apocalyptic Mood: the modern imagination is often pre-occupied with collapse, or even apocalypse, but to a large degree this can be traced back to an epistemic fracturing within many societies.

2. Misinformed about Misinformation: while there is a lot of discussion about misinformation and disinformation, the analysis relies on unacknowledged epistemic attitudes.

3. Are our research practices holding back scientific progress? : there is evidence that research productivity has slowed, plausibly because modern research encourages certainty and agreement, rather than humility and exploration.

4. Elon’s World: Twitter and Free Speech: Elon Musk’s planned takeover of Twitter has inflamed debates about freedom of speech, so we should make sure we understand the philosophical and epistemic attitudes that justify it.

5. Elon’s Headache: Moderation and free speech: moving on from the examination of free speech above, this looks at the consequences of taking epistemic humility seriously and what type of moderation approach it inspires.

6. Elons’ Twitter: a philosophical experiment begins: With Elon Musk in charge of Twitter, there is a chance social media platforms will divide over their epistemic assumptions - providing a natural philosophical experiment.

7. A floundering natural philosophical experiment: Taking interim stock of where the epistemic changes to Twitter are going.

8. The philosophical experiment formerly known as Twitter: I test some of my predictions from previous posts to see how things are going.

9. Uncertainties around the Trolley Problem: one of the most common ethical thought experiments today runs into questions when we consider the role of epistemic attitudes and uncertainties.

10. Do academic journals discourage the discovery of knowledge? : well-intentioned design, when based on flawed epistemic assumptions, leads to unhelpful real world consequences.

11. Do writing norms shape government decisions? : the philosophical assumptions built into how people write for government can shape decisions that are made.

A more in-depth and theoretical attempt to understand modern culture, politics and society is covered in what we might whimsically refer to as the 'Algorithm Cycle': three posts that explore modern attitudes towards knowledge and control, primarily inspired by the works of Hartmut Rosa and Jacques Ellul. They cover a lot of ground and are a harder read:

1. Algorithms versus the World: this introduces Rosa’s focus on ‘uncontrollability’ and Ellul’s concept of technique, to provide a description of a algorithmic mindset that frames how much of modern society understands the world and human actions.

2. The Algorithmic Path to Knowledge: the algorithmic mindset presumes specific assumptions about human knowledge and how we achieve it that are worth understanding.

3. Algorithms versus the True: despite the widespread presumption that algorithmic approaches are the best way to achieve knowledge, a range of reasons suggest they are flawed - undermining our broader belief in the controllability of the world via algorithmic means.

Evidence for Epistemic Humility

A number of articles make the case for a humble attitude towards knowledge. Stay tuned for many more posts here, but so have we have covered:

1. The Humility of Quantum Physics: quantum physics is an incredibly effective scientific theory yet is based on unconventional philosophical principles, especially a strong presumption of epistemic humility.

2. Humility from cognitive biases?: teases out the relationship between modern research into cognitive biases and the philosophical understanding of epistemic humility built through these posts.

3. The death of logical certainty: explains a series of mathematical and logic results from the early 1900s that ended dreams of building fully reliable and certain knowledge on a foundation of formal logic.

4. Models are not reality: picks out the key lessons from a book that explains the humility we need as we take note of the gaps between mathematical modelling and the world.

5. The Primacy of Chaos?: summarises findings in a recent book from the science of uncertainty and the mathematics of chaos to look at implications for how we understand, and seek to build, knowledge.

6. Totalitarian Government relies on an epistemic error: assumptions that epistemic certainty is attainable drive totalitarian systems.

7. Humble in knowledge every day: this article takes a look at the personal implications of adopting an attitude of epistemic humility, with the conclusion that your claims to knowledge will be more reliable as a result.

8. More information isn’t always better: too often we crave more data and more information, but this can be counter-productive.

9. A Common Epistemic Weakness: we get ourselves into trouble when we mistake our theories for reality, yet it is an easy trap to fall into.

Building a New Epistemology

If the evidence for a humble approach to knowledge is strong, then it stands to reason that taking that attitude will be always applicable. In particular, it should be a foundational principle for how we think about epistemology. The following articles are attempting to do just that in a detailed way.

One important article is a summary of this work, so it would make sense to start by reading What we can know about knowledge. It is fairly concise and ties many of the threads in these more detailed arguments together:

1. Pictures of Reality: explores how sentences relate to relate by comparison to how pictures relate, sketching an account of language that supports and is consistent with epistemic humility.

2. The basic units of knowledge are not facts or observations: in practice, human knowledge is not build from facts but built out of theories and stories.

3. There is no neutral way to choose between theories: the common belief in a neutral, objective standpoint from which we assess knowledge is untenable.

4. So what do we mean by truth? : explaining how we make sense of ‘truth’ if neutrality and objectivity isn’t possible for humans.

5. Science and the scientific method: while there are at least two popular, but inconsistent, ways of thinking about science, a close look at the scientific method reveals it relies on epistemic humility.

6. Can our feelings help us know?: as epistemic humility allows us to consider the full range of human faculties and how they contribute to knowledge, this article looks briefly at how our emotions can be important for knowing more.

7. Trains, Catwalks and Epidemiological Models: scientific models are central to a lot of modern decision making but we need to be clear about their epistemic status - how accurate are they compared to reality?

8. Has Reality always been a Game?: some short reflections on how we experience reality given cultural and worldview differences.

This post was last updated on 31 January 2023.

Photo by Cristina Gottardi on Unsplash