Toward a Demonic Epistemology: Part II

Belief is attributed to a person on the basis of his conformity with a dispositional stereotype; law is attributed to the world at large as an inhuman belief. Knowledge traverses the distinction between human and inhuman, signifying their attunement. But where a person knows something without believing it, the inhuman encroaches on the human without the person's consent. For example, when a person can cite the law of the land while refusing to obey it. Here, the world at large surpasses what the person believes, sometimes to the person's peril, and sometimes to its own. A person can disobey the law of gravity and plunge to his death; a state can legislate against a person's interests and be overthrown.

Toward a Demonic Epistemology: Part I

In the interest of "academic credibility," it might be worthwhile to examine a philosophical problem that has some traction among the tenured watchdogs of higher education. And since epistemology is still regarded among their breed as a respectable category of thought, I turn to my friend and former teacher Eric Schwitzgebel for raw material.

Eric has recently coauthored a paper, along with Blake Myers-Schutz, challenging the traditional assumption that believing something is a necessary condition for knowing that thing. Their argumentative strategy is straightforward: devise a number of thought experiments in which people's intuitions pull in opposite directions concerning the attribution of knowledge and belief to one and the same person. In each of those experiments, many people are inclined to attribute knowledge but not belief. The absence of consensus on the matter might be the product of ignorance concerning the purely technical definition of knowledge as justified, true belief, but instead of marking this as an occasion for indoctrinating the laity, Eric and Blake seize it as an opportunity to work toward a reformed definition of knowledge.

Their reformation derives from what they call the capacity-tendency account of the relation between knowledge and belief, according to which knowledge implies a capacity for truth not necessarily present in belief, while belief implies a tendency toward certain behavior not necessarily present in knowledge. Knowledge is truth-dependent; belief depends on fidelity to a dispositional stereotype for having that belief. But since dispositional stereotypes vary more than truth, it follows that there would be less agreement in the attribution of belief as compared to knowledge.

Having separated knowledge from belief, however, Eric and Blake stop short of accounting for its relative consistency. Moving ahead, knowledge reconnects with belief at a deeper level, where tendency spreads out and surpasses human behavior. For if humans have a tendency to behave according to dispositional stereotypes, the same can also be said about the world at large. One forms the basis for the attribution of belief, the other for the attribution of law. Law is nothing other than inhuman belief. Knowledge then emerges as attunement between inhuman belief, on the one hand, and a human tendency toward certain behavior that may or may not count as belief, on the other.

Killer Advice

What would Jesus do? No! Ask instead what a serial killer would do to pass as an ordinary human being.

Kuhn Dogging

Steve Fuller has written what may be the definitive book on Thomas Kuhn, whose reputation surpassed his own sense of propriety even within his lifetime. Definitive, because I can hardly imagine anyone else pursuing to such immoderate lengths the demons that possessed him, both named and unnamed - a veritable legion - bringing him back to earth, making him human again.

Fuller also fends off those demons that took Kuhn from behind and gave him a child that would be his monstrous offspring. But what is left is something even more monstrous. Unscrambling his genetic mutations reveals that he was already a freak.

Predetermination

Choice is retroactive to what "is" predetermined on the outskirts of consciousness. But predetermination is not necessity; it obeys no law. Predetermination flows from the demonic, whose retroaction reaches back to infinity.

Object of Becoming

Admittedly, the distinction between canonization and demonization is a precarious one. Let us say, tentatively, that to be canonized is to be located subjacent to an object of becoming - the Best Friend, for example - and that to be demonized is to be invoked as an object of becoming.

But the object as such is not inert. The canonized individual is possessed by it. The demonized individual possesses other individuals.