A Proper Epistemology?

It occurs to me that a proper Epis­te­mo­log­i­cal foun­da­tion begins by acknowl­edg­ing the pre­mod­ern notion that all human knowl­edge is a sub-set of God’s knowl­edge, while at the same time per­mit­ting the post­mod­ern notion that no one has a God’s eye view of real­ity, truth, soci­ety, etc., and that, in effect, we all have rel­a­tive per­spec­tives (there are many “I’s”). I would rather con­sider this fol­low­ing mod­ernism through to its log­i­cal con­clu­sion, rather than deter­min­ing it to be a new phe­nom­e­non under the head­ing of post­mod­ernism. The rea­son being is that I believe we can know truth to a sub­stan­tial degree. That even if not exhaus­tively (omni­sciently), we can say we hold a true, know­able belief.

In sup­port of this I would turn to Karl Popper’s asymp­totic approach, which was devel­oped to explain knowl­edge acqui­si­tion in the field of sci­ence. The fol­low­ing dia­gram was also used by D.A. Car­son in his Becom­ing Con­ver­sant with the Emerg­ing Church (pg.119) to explain how we can know a thing with­out hold­ing omni­scient knowl­edge of a thing:

Car­son explains the above dia­gram as fol­lows. “If the x-axis mea­sures time and the y-axis mea­sure epis­te­mo­log­i­cal dis­tance from real­ity (i.e., how far one’s under­stand­ing of some­thing is removed from the real­ity of the thing itself), then the graph sug­gests that with time the knower gets closer and closer to the real­ity, though with­out ever touch­ing the line that would mark per­fect knowl­edge: we will never be omni­scient […] Omni­science is exclu­sively an attribute of God […] Of course, this curve is rarely smooth. Human under­stand­ing can go up and down, in the indi­vid­ual life and in any human cul­ture and in the race at large. But the graph fruit­fully por­trays that growth in under­stand­ing and in know­ing some­thing, and in improve­ment in get­ting closer to knowl­edge to what a thing actu­ally is, is pos­si­ble. (pg. 119–20).

What hap­pens, then, is that even though we view real­ity sub­jec­tively, each from our own per­spec­tive, what we’re view­ing and inter­pret­ing is objec­tive in nature (even if we’re inter­pret­ing every­thing). Our knowl­edge can­not be said to be omni­scient, but despite this, what we know comes so close to the line rep­re­sent­ing omni­science that we can say we know this thing, and we can say this in confidence.

Related posts:

1. Whose Epis­te­mol­ogy?