Epistemology | Kaelan

Epistemology is the study of knowledge itself. Not what we know, but how we know — and what justifies calling something knowledge rather than belief, opinion, or guess.

The questions: What counts as evidence? When is certainty warranted? Why do smart people believe false things? How do entire fields get stuck on wrong ideas for decades?

The central problem: you can’t step outside your own mind to check if your beliefs match reality. Every test of a belief uses other beliefs. Every observation is theory-laden — what you see depends on what you expect. There’s no view from nowhere.

This doesn’t mean knowledge is impossible. It means knowledge is hard-won and provisional. The map is never the territory. But some maps are better than others, and we can tell which.

Karl Popper’s insight (1934): beliefs aren’t confirmed by evidence — they’re not yet falsified. A thousand white swans don’t prove all swans are white. One black swan disproves it. Science advances by trying to break theories, not by accumulating support.

The replication crisis showed what happens when fields forget this. Psychology, medicine, and economics published thousands of studies that don’t replicate. The incentives favored positive findings. Journals rejected null results. Researchers p-hacked until something looked significant. The evidence was manufactured to fit the hypothesis.

Thomas Kuhn’s insight (1962): science doesn’t progress smoothly. It lurches through paradigm shifts — wholesale replacements of how a field sees its subject.

Before germ theory, doctors didn’t wash hands between autopsies and deliveries. Ignaz Semmelweis showed handwashing cut maternal mortality from 18% to 2%. The medical establishment rejected him. He died in an asylum. The paradigm wasn’t ready.

Plate tectonics was ridiculed for fifty years. Alfred Wegener proposed continental drift in 1912; geologists mocked him until seafloor spreading evidence accumulated in the 1960s. The resistance wasn’t stupidity — it was paradigm protection.

Within a paradigm, evidence that doesn’t fit gets explained away. Anomalies accumulate until the paradigm cracks. Then everything reorganizes around a new framework. What was obvious becomes invisible; what was invisible becomes obvious.

Why do smart people believe wrong things? Because belief formation isn’t about truth-seeking — it’s about coalition membership, identity protection, and cognitive ease.

Confirmation bias: you seek evidence that supports what you already believe. Disconfirming evidence feels like an attack.

Motivated reasoning: conclusions come first, reasons come second. The brain generates justifications for positions held on other grounds.

Social proof: if everyone in your field believes X, doubting X is costly. Tenure, grants, and reputation flow to believers. Heretics get ignored.

The Gell-Mann Amnesia effect: you read a newspaper article about something you know well and notice it’s riddled with errors. You turn the page and believe the next article, written by the same journalists with the same methods.

Practical epistemology asks: given these failure modes, how do you actually get closer to truth?

Make beliefs pay rent. A belief that doesn’t generate predictions isn’t knowledge — it’s decoration. Ask: if this were true, what would I expect to see? If false, what would I expect to see? If the answers are the same, the belief isn’t doing any work.

Update incrementally. New evidence should shift confidence, not flip conclusions. Bayes’ theorem formalizes this, but the intuition is simpler: strong claims require strong evidence; weak evidence warrants weak updates.

Seek disconfirmation. The natural impulse is to look for supporting evidence. Fight it. Ask: what would convince me I’m wrong? If you can’t answer, you’re not reasoning — you’re rationalizing.

Distinguish confidence from certainty. Confidence is probabilistic: “I’m 80% sure.” Certainty is binary: “I know.” Almost nothing warrants certainty. Treating high confidence as certainty is how paradigms calcify.

The map is not the territory. But without maps, you can’t navigate. The question is always: how wrong is this map, and in what ways?

Epistemology is the practice of noticing your maps.

Related: [[useful-fictions]], [[legibility]], [[tacit-knowledge]], [[models]]

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