Essay presenting the epistemological system to be used in this work. Written 8-30-23.
‘What is truth?’ retorted Pilate…” -John 18:38, New International Version
Epistemology is the philosophical study of truth and knowledge. It asks basic questions like “what is knowledge?”, “what makes a statement true?”, “what counts as a reason to believe something?”, and “how can we produce, possess, and use knowledge?” (three forms of what is sometimes called “cognitive success”). In short, we want to know how to successfully know. As such, epistemology is the next step in the work of the alien, who wishes to ground their attempts to learn about and understand the world in which they find themselves so that they may be sure of what they discover.
First, we must define knowledge. The most common definition in modern anglophone analytic philosophy is “justified true belief” (JTB). This definition uses three terms and all three require unpacking.
First, what is a “belief”? A belief is a proposition which we have labeled with a truth value. Essentially, to “believe that P” is to hold the conviction or cognitive attitude that the proposition “P” has a truth value of “true” or, in our four-value logic, “true” or “true and false”, and to “not believe that P” or “believe that not P” is to hold the conviction that “P” has a truth value of “false” or, in our four-value logic, “false” or “true and false”. The astute reader will see two problems immediately:
Since our logic is four-value, this means that we are sometimes committed to simultaneously believing “P” and “Not P”, which means effectively that we do and do not believe that “P” at the same time, which seems difficult for many people and has historically been considered unacceptable in “western” philosophy. At the very least, we should expect resistance from others when we make claims that “P is both true and false.” and thus we should probably be ready to explain ourselves. Given this, how are we to explain our apparently contradictory beliefs?
If, in our four-value logic, some propositions are neither true nor false, then how are we to describe our state of belief in such cases? Put another way, if a proposition “P” has no truth value, and if “to believe that P” or “to believe that not P” is to hold the conviction that “P” has a particular truth value, how can we usefully describe our belief about “P”?
To the first problem I must simply point out the bare facts of reality: the existence of paradoxes (and some mystical insights) proves that there are meaningful propositions which are simultaneously true and false. This is a brute epistemological and logical fact of the world in which the alien finds themselves. Such facts are not avoidable by saying, as many logicians do, that we will only consider certain propositions and exclude the propositions that are paradoxical on principle because it makes it harder for us to do logic. They are not avoidable by arbitrarily avoiding certain axioms which otherwise fit our logical intuitions (such as the axioms of “naïve” set theory) because those axioms create paradoxes, or by including arbitrary axioms that are not actually intuitional into our logical systems ad hoc to similarly avoid paradoxes. Such piecemeal solutions are all “special pleading” (an informal logical fallacy where one cites an exception to an universal or generally accepted rule but gives no principled justification for that exception) and have no place in a thoroughgoing and honest inquiry of our world such as the one to which the alien is committed. The alien has only two starting places to work from: 1) the unavoidable intuitions that they possess naturally as features of their mind and 2) their phenomenological experience of the world. When the latter contradicts the former, it is the intuitions—such as the so-called “Law of the Excluded Middle” and “Principle of Non-Contradiction”—that must be jettisoned, not the observable facts of the world. I am aware that this is a controversial opinion that puts me in the margins of philosophy, but nonetheless I stand by my conviction: true contradictions exist and any honest, thoroughgoing logic must account for them.
To the second problem, I put forward the following solution: propositions which by their nature have no truth value shall be considered aesthetic rather than logical. The example I give in the section of this work on logic is “Radiohead is a great band”. This is still a proposition, as it is of the form “P is Q”, and thus as such it can still be evaluated logically. But this propositional form hides an implied aesthetic, not a logical or empirical, argument. One can still make normative claims in an aesthetic argument; I can tell you why I believe “Radiohead is a great band”, and those reasons are, like other reasons we use to support our beliefs, claims about the world. But aesthetic claims have different “truth-makers” than logical and empirical claims. Logically and empirically, the proposition “Radiohead is a great band” has no truth-value as it has no truth-maker, no fact or state of affairs either mental or physical that makes the proposition true or false. But aesthetically I can point to facts like the music theoretical complexity of their work, the relative balances between melody, harmony, and rhythm in their music, their stage presence, the breadth and variety of their work as a whole, and the overall originality of their songs to ground my argument. These facts then act like truth-makers, except for aesthetic claims instead of logical claims. This is how I shall handle propositions which have no a priori logical or a posteriori empirical truth-makers.
Now that we have defined and unpacked the idea of “belief” a bit, let’s move to the term “justified” in our definition of knowledge (JTB). What it means for knowledge to be “justified” true belief is for us to have good reasons for having the true belief. Accidentally true belief can’t meaningfully be considered knowledge.
Why is this? Well, let’s consider an example. Let’s say I guess, with no evidential reasons, that I have $1.50 in my purse, and it just happens to be the case that I, in fact, have exactly $1.50. Did I possess knowledge about the matter? No. I had a belief and the belief was in fact true; it had a truth-maker which is a fact about the physical world. But the way in which I formed the belief was by simply guessing. I had no reasons to believe it, I just randomly picked an amount and, by sheer coincidence, it happened to be accurate. Thus I don’t believe that it can truly be said that I “knew” how much money was in my purse.
Now, what can be considered a “reason” to believe that “P”? What counts as justification? This is hotly debated in philosophy and I don’t want to get lost in the deep and dark woods of the issue, as I am impatient (as I am sure the reader is) to get to the meat of this work and have no interest in debating the current issues in epistemology at this time. As in the section of this work on logic, this is not the place for a remedial course in epistemology or an arena to debate the various problems of that field. Instead I will merely list the things I will consider as reasons to believe something in this work and give a brief explanation of each.
Perception: While our sensory experiences can sometimes mislead us, they are also the basic building blocks of our knowledge about the world. We are forced to live and act based upon these experiences. Thus while we must move forward with trepidation and the knowledge that our sense experience can only form an imperfect picture of the world, we must in fact actually move forward.
Introspection: Introspection is our faculty of looking inward to our own mental contents, such as beliefs, motivations, states of mind, emotions, sensations, psychological and physiological reactions to stimuli, etc. Introspection is often considered incorrigible (meaning an outside party cannot correct your introspections) because it seems impossible for someone else to truthfully tell me e.g. I don’t have a headache when I in fact perceive that I do. However, is introspection truly incorrigible? Modern psychodynamic theories of psychology say no. The entire concept of a “subconscious” implies that a portion—perhaps the majority—of my mind is occluded to my normal introspection. I can, in fact, have motivations, reactions, feelings, perceptions, etc that I am not consciously aware of having. Indeed, one goal of psychotherapy is for the therapist, who possesses expert knowledge on the issue, to learn and reveal mental truths about the patient that are not normally available to introspection. However, just as with our perceptions, the alien is forced to use their introspections as a source of “reasons to believe that P” because there simply is no other choice. While our introspections may sometimes be incorrect or incomplete, they are what we have to work with.
Memory: As with our other “reasons to believe that P”, we know that our memory is not infallible, and it doesn’t even enjoy the possibility of incorrigibility that our introspections often seem to possess. We are often corrected about false memories or reminded about things we have forgotten. It is also the case that certain physical and mental illnesses, drugs, old age, injuries, or even the power of suggestion can cause memory loss or even induce false memories. However, as with our other “reasons to believe that P”, our memory is often all we have to work with.
Reason: The whole purpose for which we went through all that effort in the section of this work on logic to build a system of reasoning is so that we can trust the results of reason. This is the goal of logic, to create rules for our reasoning that will allow us to both speak and reason meaningfully and truthfully. However, even our best reasonings and attempts to describe the world are not infallible. We can fall prey to both formal and informal fallacies, we can fall prey to hidden psychological motivations or occlusions in our reasoning, we can be forced by circumstance to work with incomplete information, and we can just plain be mistaken. But again, often all we have to get us from what we already know to what we want to know is reason, so we must use it as well as we can.
Testimony: The reality of the world is that far more knowledge has been produced, recorded, and is in use than any one of us can discover or reason to on our own in a reasonable amount of time. There is no way to be an universal expert, even for the greatest polymath. This means that, despite the fact that we know that testimony can often be of limited use, we are forced to depend upon it. The best we can hope to do is to use rigorous testing of our sources of testimony in order to try to avoid believing false things. Epistemic procedures like citing and corroborating sources, peer review, preserving meticulous and extensive records and artifacts, and endeavoring always to be as truthful and forthcoming as possible allow us as a species to pass our knowledge down and educate ourselves and others about the world. This is especially important to practicing mages, mystics, and occultists of all kinds. Due to persecutions, censorship, and moral panics in the “West” since antiquity, our traditions have had to be recovered again and again from older sources and records, and to the degree that we have strayed away from the epistemic procedures listed above, we have allowed disinformation, pride, ambition, and deceit to flourish in our ranks. We must hold ourselves to the same epistemic standards as any other serious and earnest subject of study and practice. Magick is real, it causes real effects and has real consequences in the lives of real people, and thus we must take it just as seriously as we take medicine, physics, or history. It matters what is true, and it matters that we believe true things. And on that note…
Now that we have defined belief and gone through our sources of justification, that leaves one term in our JTB definition of knowledge to be discussed: truth. What does it mean for a proposition to be true?
First I wish to head off a few lines of reasoning. Some would argue that truth is about power, that those who have the power to dominate or manipulate others get to define what the truth is for those others. Sometimes, sadly, this is the case…if we define truth as “what most people commonly believe to be the case”. If we define truth in this cynical way and relate it to power over minds and bodies and the desire for that power, as we are invited to by Nietzsche, Foucault, et al, we end up at a view of truth that is basically meaningless.
Why is this so? Because what we, as beings capable of epistemic successes (learning, knowing, mastering, producing knowledge, accurately storing/reproducing knowledge, teaching, etc) and epistemic failures (misperceiving, misunderstanding, forgetting, failing to learn, failing to teach, failing to introspect, failing to reason, producing misinformation, failure to use knowledge, failing to preserve knowledge, etc) wish to gain from our epistemic successes is knowledge about what, in fact, is the case, not just what it suits those in power for us to believe is the case or what it suits our “will to power” to believe is the case. This is, in fact, what we mean when we say “epistemic success”.
When I say “what is the case”, I refer to those brute facts about the world that I have been calling “truth-makers”. A truth-maker is a fact or state of affairs, either physical or mental, in the world as it actually is, that makes a proposition true or false by means of a correspondence relation between the meaning of the proposition and the fact or state of affairs to which the proposition refers. This is often called the “Correspondence Theory of Truth”, and it is the theory I will be operating by over the course of this work.
Why do I subscribe to the Correspondence Theory of Truth? Because I believe that epistemology, like ethics, has certain defining teleologically defined virtues. It is implicit in the goal (τέλος) of producing, possessing, and using knowledge that we want that knowledge to be true not in the sense of “commonly believed by our community” or “what it suits those in power for us to believe” or any other similarly utilitarian and cynical view of truth; we want our knowledge to be “really true”. We want it to actually correspond with reality as it actually is, just as in Aristotelean virtue ethics we want “bravery” to actually correspond to real-life behaviors that exemplify the happy mean between cowardice and foolhardiness. In virtue ethics, we would not accept a definition of “bravery” that meant, e.g. “willing to cause harm on command by those in power” or “willing to cause harm to the socially unpopular”, etc. We would not accept a definition of “justice” that was “rewarding those favored by the powerful and punishing those out of favor” or “rewarding the socially popular and punishing the socially unpopular”. In fact, common criticisms of ethical failures throughout the ages and all over the world include these very issues. Thus we similarly should not accept a cynical definition of “truth” that depends upon power or the will to power or to social benefits of belief or on any other pragmatist or utilitarian definition of truth. The teleological goal of what we mean by “truth”, what we want out of knowledge when we say we want it to be “true”, is correspondence with a fact or state of affairs, either mental or physical, in the really real, really and truly, no foolies, world. Thus this is the definition of truth that I will use in this work.
Now that we have defined knowledge and defined the definition, in the next section we will move on to a key idea in our growing philosophy of magick: paradigms of belief and practice.