CI

Epistemology is one of my favorite areas of study. According to my dictionary, Epistemology is the investigation of what distinguishes justified belief from opinion. It is a theory of knowledge with regards to methods, validity and scope. I was tremendously confused when someone first tried to define this area of study for me. It's really a non-Western concept when you think about it. It's something before cogito ergo sum. Perplexed as I was, I struggled mightily with this subject until Professor Codevilla casually said to me, "It's just a fancy word for counterintelligence."

Counterintelligence can broadly divided into two sections offensive and defensive. Offensive CI is mostly about disinformation and feeding the enemy information we'd like them to believe. As a free society, we've never had much success at this. Defensive CI is about validating information and its methodology is indistinguishable from epistemology.

When faced with any bit of intelligence from a foreign source, CI encourages us to ask some very simple questions. How do I know that this is true? Do I have a particular inclination to believe this? Is so, is anybody aware of this inclination? Who stands to gain if I judge this piece of information as valid? What actions do they believe it will induce me to take? Who would benefit from those actions?

If you take this line of thought seriously, as epistemology asks you to do, you will find yourself soon without bearings. When it comes right down to it, what I know is very limited. Everything is a guess or based on someone else's word and I must judge how much validity to give it. Science is just that way. Unless you've done the experiment yourself, what is touted as science is just somebody else's opinion. It may make sense. It may be commonly accepted but that doesn't necessarily mean it true or valid.

Most people don't have the energy to engage in this type of disciplined thinking. It's not easy. It's also uncomfortable because at the end of the day, all you're left with is a big bunch of uncertainty. And most folks don't like that. It's far easier to believe that someone or something is working actively against you rather than facing the fact that you are totally insignificant to the Universe and its means and movements do not and will not ever take you into consideration.

But this is necessary. Because only after you force yourself to parse down your beliefs to what you actually know, first hand, can you start to separate your justified beliefs from opinion and hearsay. The bottom line is this, unless you have first hand experience with it, you don't really know it and if you don't really know it, you're hardly in the position to judge its validity. So ask yourself: what do you truly know? What do you truly believe? Subject these beliefs to epistemological rigor and if they survive, you'll truly have something worth believing. It still may not be right but you'll have done everything that could reasonably be expected.