An Organic Phenomenology of The Temporality of Epistemology (original) (raw)

The following essay was written in one (albeit long) sitting on May 24, 2015, from 9am to 11:57am. I chose to leave it as it was written because that is the only way for it to be consistent with itself. An Organic Phenomenology of The Temporality of Epistemology What can be said of the fact that logic is instrumental in that it is employed to communicate the logical sufficiency of a non-logical conclusion? No argument is truly fashioned without the end goal in mind. But that means that we are blindly swinging as it were. In order for this whole process to appear coherent to us, we must assume that a conclusion that is true, must have a logical story to be told about it. Paradoxically, we abandon this presumption when we come back to the most basic axioms such as the law of excluded middle or of non-contradiction, at which point we decide that these rules of logic are normative simply because the conscientious denial of them is cognitively uncomfortable. Debaters of epistemology can be divided into two main camps: there are the internalists and the externalists. The internalist view is that the justification of knowledge must come from reasons the reasoner has for his or her beliefs, while the externalist view is that beliefs should be justified by the external conditions in which they were formed. Notice that the externalist view includes the temporality of belief formation while the internalist view seeks a timeless justification. The internalist looks to the logical structure of his belief and the externalist looks back to the context in which it was formed. One might offer the generalization that the internalist is the rationalist and the externalist is the empiricist, albeit both adopt each other's perspective somewhere along the way. Inasmuch as I am interested in the temporal nature of how we come to believe things and how we construct, what I'll call, revisionist logical stories, I am an externalist. More and more work is being produced on how humans come to many of their beliefs. Justin Barrett is a representative figure in this field who finds that much of what we believe is produced automatically and unconsciously by the brain. This automatic process makes obvious sense in light of evolution, even if we avoid a straightforward conclusion that it is " adaptive. " The issue I focus on here is the fact that every logical argument is an ex post facto story of the coherence of a non-coherent belief. Notice, I do not say that human beliefs are incoherent by default, but that they are non-coherent in that they are produced in a realm unknown and unknowable to our conscious selves. Notice also that I speak here of beliefs being unconsciously formed and not