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BB @ benjaminbarber.com
| Description | : | The Tyranny Of Pseudo Events & Illusion - epistemological deficit.
Epistemology signifies the "science of knowing" and expresses a civilizational conviction that truth, objectivity, science, fact and reason are fundamentally different from opinion, subjectivity, prejudice, feeling and irrationality. The science of knowing insists on the fundamental distinction made by the Greeks between episteme (true knowledge) and doxa (opinion or prejudice, a root of our word "orthodoxy"). The Greeks understood that there is a potent difference between knowledge claims rooted in reason, or in facts that reflect some version of a real or objective world, and the subjective opinions by which we advertise our personal prejudices. We may not always be able to agree on what counts as real knowledge rather than mere prejudice, but we can and must agree on the criteria by which the distinction is made. Indeed, our science, our society and our democratic culture depend on the distinction... The trouble is that when we merely feel and opine, persuaded that there is no possible way our opinion can be controverted or challenged, having an opinion is the same as being "right." Being right quickly comes to trump being creditable and provable, and we lose the core democratic faculty of admitting that we might be wrong, and that our views must be judged by some criterion other than how deeply we hold them... The Greeks used to say "right opinion" (orthodoxia). Aristotle was especially alert to the need for a kind of practical wisdom in the political sphere, when episteme was not available. He called it phronesis and was at pains to distinguish it from mere opinion... None of this means science is "absolutely true" or that belief is false. But what is true is that science is falsifiable and belief is not... Daniel Boorstin, a former Librarian of Congress, wrote, "We risk being the first people in history to have been able to make their illusions so vivid, so persuasive, so 'realistic' that they can live in them. We are the most illusioned people on earth." The tyranny most corrosive to democracy is not the tyranny of money but the tyranny of illusion. As Chris Hedges says in his book Empire of Illusion, "A populace deprived of the ability to separate lies from truth, that has become hostage to the fictional semblance of reality put forth by pseudo-events, is no longer capable of sustaining a free society." http://www.benjaminbarber.com/AmericasKnowledgeDeficit_TheNation_11_29.PDF GOTO Know-Nothingism GOTO GreekAdvice4TheHarvardKids GOTO ProudToBeHeretic GOTO DerWohligeIdealismusZustand |
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