A year in review
Looking back on the first year of Humble Knowledge and some plans for the next
Happy New Year to everyone! It has somehow already been a year since the first Humble Knowledge post. I have thoroughly enjoyed the opportunity to write on these topics that I have been thinking about for many years and am grateful for the small, but dedicated, audience I have. Thank you all for reading along and especially for those who have commented regularly. I appreciate your feedback and insights.
I intend to continue writing on a similar pattern - posting roughly every fortnight with a clear focus on philosophical attitudes towards knowledge and the importance of humility. These epistemic attitudes shape how we live, who we trust and whether we can succeed with what we set out to do. To reiterate what I wrote in one of my earliest posts, one reason many of our societies are falling apart is that our epistemic attitudes are diverging wildly. Faced with the digital information tsunami, our grips on reality are also shakier as our epistemic practices are under stress.
A new epistemology?
The relevance of this topic was underscored by an unrelated conversation this year as part of my day job. I was chatting to someone who works in a large organisation and has a role to help improve its decision making. Without any awareness of Humble Knowledge, he commented that what was really needed to improve behaviour and decisions is a new epistemology. Existing habits and culture around what and how we know were misleading people and the organisation and, in his view, leading to poor outcomes.
Inspired by this, one of the themes for Humble Knowledge in 2023 will be building a new epistemology based on humility and limits. This may be a foolish quest - we cannot just build an epistemology like we might build a house. Genuinely new epistemologies are rare. However, I am not aware of rigorous epistemology that incorporates a principled humility and thorough-going acknowledgement of limits. As my surveys of the history of ideas have shown, philosophers have alternated between seeking certainty and accepting skepticism. The aim here is for something in between.
Modern science, such as work in psychology on cognitive biases and in complexity science, suggests that accepting humility and limits is necessary and can help us know more than we would otherwise. My goal is to explore what this might look like as a rigorous epistemology.
While aiming at rigor, my writing (hopefully) won’t be dry, technical and dense. This project will also not be linear. My writing here will continue to be more like painting a large picture than writing a story. Different posts are working on different parts of the picture. And some are sketches to fill in later while others focus more on details of a particular scene.
I will continue to be grateful for everyone following my writing and providing comments. And please do share with anyone else who might be interested.
My best writing so far
I did consider providing a summary of my writing so far, but the picture I am trying to paint here is not really formed enough to summarise coherently. You can find an updated overview at my Reading Guide if you want to review what I have covered over the past year. However, there have been a few stand out posts.
To start with, one post was clearly the most popular. It explored the role of emotions in the way we humans build knowledge. This is a topic that I will come back to, especially as a weakness of traditional epistemologies are that they typically exclude any positive role for emotions in knowledge generation. A coherent new epistemology needs to reflect the ways that humans function in real life, not rely on an idealisation of a perfectly rational knower. In case you missed this post, you can find it here:
Beyond that, there are two posts that I am most pleased with. In both cases, they took ideas that had been swirling around in my thinking for many years and crystallised into something coherent and persuasive. These are:
New features?
Substack (as a platform) has rolled out a lot of new features over the last twelve months and I am considering some of them. For a start, I would be interested to hear if there is demand for audio versions of my posts. Personally, I'm a reader not a listener but am aware that I'm increasingly in the minority.
I have also started a Twitter account to promote my writing. Feel free to follow and share if that is your thing.
While Substack makes it easy to do so, I do not intend to put any of my writing here behind a paywall. However, I may turn on paid subscriptions if people are keen to support this work. You can now pledge to support Humble Knowledge through Substack subscriptions if you are interested.
Finally, I’m always happy to hear suggestion for features, topics or try to address questions you might have. I’m looking forward to hearing from lots of you.