TRANSCRIPT

I’m Maggie Smith, and this is The Slowdown. 

How do you know what you know? When you say you know something to be true, how did you arrive there? The branch of philosophy that tackles these big questions is called epistemology. It focuses on the nature, origin, and limits of human knowledge. In other words, it explores how we investigate ideas and come to conclusions. Epistemology addresses what can be known, how knowledge is acquired, and what differentiates knowledge from belief. 

To have faith in something is different from having knowledge of it. Believing is different from knowing. But what’s the difference, exactly? Since Plato’s time, knowledge has been defined as justified true belief, but this leads us down another rabbit hole — or a network of rabbit holes! What qualifies as justification? As a kind of proof?

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, in times like these when we are so divided as Americans. Part of that divide isn’t just about beliefs but about knowledge. Facts. 

I’m sure I’m not alone in having family members whose source of news is very different from my own. The stories I read and hear about are not the stories they read and hear about. Or, if they are, the coverage — and the message behind that coverage — is very different. It used to be that we differed in our beliefs, but I always felt we at least had a shared understanding of the facts. We might interpret those facts differently, but facts were facts.

That, unfortunately, feels quaint now. We’ve seen video footage with our own eyes and then have not only news anchors but people in our own government, right up to the highest office, telling us we didn’t see what we saw. Gaslighting its own citizens. 

I’m a poet, so I’m all for nuance. I embrace ambiguity, and I’m flexible in my thinking. But I refuse to believe that we’re living in a post-factual world.

We might be tempted to call epistemology too abstract, too intellectual, too high brow, not relevant to the lives of real people. Who needs to know about this branch of philosophy when we’re just trying to get by, day by day? But if there was ever a time to think about what we know, and how we know it, it’s now.

The title of today’s poem includes an adjective related to epistemology. The word epistemic means “related to knowledge.”

Epistemic Distance
by Emma Bolden

The day all fevered & I flat 
out deserved it, o Lord, & I 

suffered heavily under its greens, 
under the blue of a sky that held 

birds under its tongue and insisted. 
It made no secret of separateness 

between the earth where I stood 
& the up where I'd been promised 

a God lived. I’d like to ask not 
where are you but why are you 

not here. The greens are pretty 
but they are not enough. Neither is 

everything I’ve been told about you. 
That the fact that I'm still reaching out 

& up should be enough, that faith 
is only faith when there's no proof. 

"Epistemic Distance" by Emma Bolden. Originally published in River Heron Review. Used by permission of the poet.