Meditations on the Politics of Limited Knowledge

Archive for the ‘Epistemology & Theory of Knowledge’ Category

On Piety Part 1 of 2

In Epistemology & Theory of Knowledge, Philosophy, Religion, Theology & Metaphysics on July 19, 2010 at 2:29 pm

This is a blog called “Humble Piety.” So what does “piety” mean anyway? In sketching out the range of some of the meanings that have attached and can attach to this term, we might gain better understanding of the project here. Following on this historical/etymological/theoretical overture, I will, in subsequent posts, lay out a notion of democratic piety and pursue more concrete investigations into creative expression of piety such as in wedding ceremonies I have recently had the pleasure to witness.

The word piety likely brings to mind religious images: pious acts of devotion to a religious faith. This was certainly in mind when I semi-ironically appropriated the term for a blog which is a project of devotion without necessarily being devoted to a project – at least not a fixed, predetermined project. I sought to devote myself to understanding with greater nuance the challenge of acting on knowledge that is inherently limited and of committing oneself to action without a free-standing criterion to validate one’s ends. Under the watch cry of “epistemic humility,” my hope was and is to articulate values that can serve a better democratic future by leaving behind their theistic analogues. Read the rest of this entry »

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How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic?

In Current Events, Epistemology & Theory of Knowledge, Science on June 25, 2010 at 3:20 pm

So I’m sitting at dinner and my host decides to spark conversation with a blanket denial of global warming. Needless to say, this is not a conversation that I am used to having. Then again, it is not every evening that I am sitting across the table from an extremely wealthy, elderly, intelligent, conservative libertarian bachelor with a flair for provocation and not-entirely-pleasant self-confidence. Maybe he was worked up from our squash games at the Union Club – the second-oldest private club in the United States – where he had to buy me a set of “whites” to wear before I could go on the squash court (my plebeian pink polo was not up to code). This fellow is an interesting character: heir to wealthy Southern Jewish investment bankers whose fortune stretches back to share cropping and Reconstruction, practicing lawyer whose clients have included post-Soviet oligopolies, and confidant of conservative power players and GOP leadership. His worldview rationalizes his social status: he unapologetically parks his beliefs at his own station.

While I had rather enjoyed our prior meeting and the hours of arguing about core political principles and ideological frames for analyzing policy that ensued over a dinner of coq au vin followed by cigars and cognac back at his Upper East Side bachelor pad (complete with burgundy-walled den with built-in hard-wood bookcases, studded-leather couch, chaise and bar), his challenge to climate orthodoxy made me cringe, roll my eyes and squirm in my seat a bit. I just didn’t know if I had the patience for such dialogue between bites of otherwise-delicious saag paneer. And frankly I immediately doubted the rationality of my interlocutor. He had seemed a learned man with a strident ideology with which I disagree. With one (pseudo)scientific conjecture he became a dogmatic anti-realist nut-job fundamentalist.  Read the rest of this entry »