Stephen Colbert and Philosophy - Aaron Allen Schiller [49]
If you’re not sure about politics, the best thing seems to be to just stay home and watch The Colbert Report. Truthiness, however, gives us a way to act politically without having to live up to elitist, egghead ideas that knowledge requires boring old things like facts and evidence. Is this solution a good one? That’s an issue reflective members of the Colbert Nation ought to consider and I’ll get to it at the end. But first let’s think about philosophical theories of knowledge and the number one threat to knowledge: skepticism.
Do You Know the Stuff You Think You Know? No!
Epistemology, or theory of knowledge, is the branch of philosophy that investigates knowledge. It asks questions such as: What is knowledge? How do you get it? How do you convince people that you have it? Why should we bother trying to get it? Does anyone really have it in the first place?
The most amusing and accurate definition of epistemology comes from a recent book of philosophical jokes: “How do you know that you know the stuff you think you know? Take away the option of answering, ‘I just do!’ and what’s left is epistemology.”92 Epistemologists, or the philosophers who try to answer these and similar questions, are generally not impressed by appeals to truthiness. 93 If Stephen were to tell epistemologists that he “knows with his gut” the epistemologists will ask, “But how do you know that you know with your gut?” If Stephen replies, “I just do!” the smart-ass epistemologists will ask, “Do you have another gut to tell you that your gut is correct? Do cows, having multiple stomachs, know a lot more than the rest of us?” At this point Stephen would probably change the subject by accusing the epistemologists of supporting bovine affirmative action and putting human guts out of work.
In normal English, “skepticism” means something like “disbelief.” In this sense, Stephen was skeptical that global climate change is occurring, until of course Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth did well at the box office and he asserted, “The market has spoken. Global warming is real.”94 In the field of epistemology, skeptics are people who have a pretty dim view of whether people actually know much of anything in the first place. Philosophical skeptics don’t just deny that Stephen knows that bears are the number one threat to America or that there’s no need for the “wordinistas” over at Webster’s. Skeptics in epistemology usually take a much bolder approach and deny that anyone (even Stephen) knows anything at all, or at least we don’t know nearly as much as we think we do.
But why on Earth would anything think that? Surely we know some stuff: we know that The Colbert Report is on Comedy Central, that Spicy Sweet Chili Doritos are tasty, that Stephen’s portrait once hung near the restroom at the National Portrait Gallery and so forth. But do we know that stuff? Maybe it’s time to better know a skeptic and find out.
Better Know a Skeptic: A Four-Part Series
Many philosophers today stay in business by debating the correct interpretation of other philosophers and philosophical ideas with no end in sight. As soon as one of us comes up with a brilliant interpretation some other smart aleck philosopher comes along to show why it’s wrong (and gets published in the process, thus engendering another smart aleck to come along to show why that’s wrong). Stephen might say that the market has spoken against definitive, once-and-for all interpretations in philosophy.
This feature of philosophy infuriates many people who like to have cut-and-dried answers and