The Long Walk, © Joseph Scott Gladstone, 2020
As we progress through the COVID-19 pandemic in the USA, I’m taking the time to look at this event as a health policy and leadership instructor. The pandemic is an excellent real-time case for those studying health policy and leadership.
To understand my approach to for teaching these topics, you need to understand my philosophical orientation; as well as your own philosophical orientation. This article introduces my philosophical approach to teaching policy and leadership. This article will also help you have some idea about where other people are coming from as they make proclamations about the pandemic and respond to those proclamations.
Philosophy In a Nutshell
All of us are in some ways philosophers. We philosophize when when we ask questions about our world and our existence within it, both alone and with other people. Philosophy is more than asking whether there is a god and if so, what is the nature of that god and how does that god determine our fate. Philosophy is about observing our world, our existence within our world, asking questions about our observations and existence and seeking answers to those questions.
To have a better understanding about what philosophy is, I introduce how the “study” of philosophy is organized by the types of questions it asks and by the way those questions are answered. In our human desire to organize things, philosophy is classified and organized into these broad categories: logic, epistemology, metaphysics, and axiology. It’s important to know that these are not absolute categories, as different authors have different classifications; for this and my future articles in this area, I will organize philosophy in these categories because that is how I learned them.
And, “how I learned them” falls within the epistemology domain, which I will describe below.
We understand the world about us based on what and how we are taught to know and understand
My most important lesson about philosophy is that we understand the world about us based on what and how we are taught to know and understand. I was taught that philosophy is sorted out and arranged around logic, epistemology, metaphysics, and axiology. This organization makes sense to me and it helps me understand what philosophy is about.
And what I just said above is a form of philosophy called American Pragmatism, an orientation in the four philosophical domains. I’ll get to pragmatism in a future article.
LOGIC
Logic is about reasoning. Some would call it common sense. I say that there is no such thing as common sense, since common sense is common only among those whom commonly experience a phenomenon sufficient enough to have a generalized common sense about it.
Yes, that was a convoluted statement, but people who have read my previous work or sat through my classes have the common sense to know (understand) what I just said.
Logic is about how we come to conclusions about things. How we determine that A leads to B, or how A causes B, or how B is an outcome of A.
Understanding logic is important for protecting yourself and others from misleading arguments. It’s also important for helping you create defensible arguments. Many times I have told my students that they just made huge leaps in logic when they argue that A leads to Z without considering B to Y in between. I have been told many times about my own fallible logic. Just recently I pointed out to somebody that they were using a "whataboutism" when they attempted to justify the forced relocation of American Indians by stating that he heard that Indians used to attack the Pilgrims. A "whataboutism" is simply a way to justify a bad act by saying that people I support were just as bad. That is, two wrongs do make a right. More about this (maybe) in ethics.
This is where logic is important. Being open and observant about how conclusions are made. Not just others, but your own. While common sense does reveal that A leads to be, or B will happen because of A, common sense is limited by your experience. It’s common sense to remove the corn husk before eating a tamale, but I’ve seen many people who have never seen a tamale simply start eating through the husk, and then complain that tamales are not good because the husk is too chewy. Likewise, more than once people ask how to eat a burrito. For me, removing a corn husk from a tamale is a common sense thing, and rolling back the paper to eat a burrito the same way one would eat a banana is simply common sense. But for those who have never seen a tamale or burrito, it’s confusing.
How many different ways can one eat a burrito?
And even though I know how to eat burritos, I have been told by others that I eat them wrong. My critics claim they know the proper way since they grew up eating burritos since childhood.
Here’s a question of logic for you:
What is the common sense way to eat a pizza?
That depends if you live in New York or Chicago.
Logic becomes challenging as you progress through a career requiring sound connections within arguments. In law it’s important to know logic when defending somebody accused of crime, while the prosecuting attorney is attempting to seek justice for the accused’s victim. Logic is a process to determine truth in the debate determine guilt, innocence, and the complex mess about false accusation through intent or error.
The film, My Cousin Vinny is a great example by the way.
Logic is also important in politics and policy. It’s important for arguing for rules that benefit often diametrically opposed interests. Who belongs in this country? Who is entitled free benefits? Who should be denied these benefits? Some can say that these are as much ethical questions as logical questions, and I agree that they are. But logic organizes thought processes that protect you from attempts to make your side appear ignorant and, worse, stupid. Red herrings, gaslighting, strawmen are all tactics used to create confusion in arguments. Logic protects you from these distractions to a debate and keeps you focused on the prize, the specific nature of the current issue.
Epistemology
While logic is the philosophy of coming to conclusions, epistemology is the philosophy of how we go about knowing things. How we find out truth. How we discover what is real.
Epistemological truth varies among people. For example, I have more than once seen this bumper sticker stating (to paraphrase): “It’s in the Bible, so God said it. I believe it. End of argument!” For all purposes in the world, the person bearing this bumper sticker absolutely believes that all truth comes from one book, and all other sources of fact are irrelevant.
By the way, I just made a leap in logic in that statement, but I leave it to you to figure out how. For now, I stick with my example that for some, a bible contains all the knowledge one needs to get by in life. A bible is absolute, undeniable truth.
Epistemology, our source of knowledge, can for some be gained from a single book. For others it is gained through other processes, such as empiricism and scientific method.
Empiricism (and Pluto)
Empiricism is about gaining knowledge through sense data. We learn about things by looking at things, by touching things, hearing things, smelling things, and measuring those thing we see, touch, hear, and smell. I teach this in class by using Pluto as an example.
Prior to its discovery in the early 1930’s Pluto was just a theory. People knew, based off existing knowledge about gravity and planetary motion, that something was way, way out there in space beyond Neptune, since according to gravity theory, Neptune’s orbit shouldn’t behave as it was then known to behave. Inspired by this theory, some people explored the skies (space) near Neptune seeking Planet X, which was theorized to be the large gravity source that affected Neptune’s orbit.
While Planet X wasn’t found during this search, Pluto was. For many decades after its discovery, all we knew about Pluto was that it existed. Using what we knew about math combined with gravitational and optic theories, we had an idea about how large Pluto was and its orbital path around the sun. What we knew about how different elements behave in response to light, we even had an idea about what Pluto was made of. But that’s all we knew about it. We had no idea what it looked like. And all we knew about its size and composition were simply very, very educated guesses.
Over the following decades our technology advanced to the point where we we able to determine that Pluto had moons. It took 85 years from its discovery until we had a detailed picture of the planet and its largest moon, Charon, looks like. Not only do we have photographic evidence detailing Pluto’s surface, we now have detailed knowledge about its atmosphere and composition. The latter knowledge coming from measurement devices on the spacecraft sent to explore Pluto.
Again, empiricism is built on sense data, things we can see, feel, taste, hear, smell. Pluto, today, serves as an example for sense data. This might not make sense since we cannot see Pluto with the naked eye, or even with a small backyard telescope. But our knowledge about it, today, is still built on sense data. We simply used tools to enhance our senses.
Pluto was discovered with 13-inch telescope. That is, the large end of the scope was thirteen inches in diameter. As an aside, common sense might say to some that the larger a telescope’s aperture, the larger image seen through it. That’s not correct. A large aperture allows more light to enter the scope, including the faint light from Pluto. Magnification is made by the eyepiece. But this is common sense among people trained in basic optics, which is another form of philosophy.
For many years, even the largest telescopes available, such as the 16-foot Hale telescope in California couldn’t see Pluto clear enough to make out its features. It simply was a larger, brighter dot in the sky.
Over time we were able to get a telescope closer to Pluto, the Hubble space telescope. Although it is half the size of Hale, Hubble is above the Earth’s atmosphere, so it’s image isn’t distorted like earthbound scopes. Still, the best we could make out of Pluto was a much brighter light . . . and it’s moon Charon.
Oh, Hubble simply confirmed that Charon existed, it was discovered in the late-1970’s by an astronomer who, while viewing highly magnified images of Pluto, noticed that the planet regularly varied from a pixilated blob to a pixilated blob with a bulge. Using logic, he was able to induce (not deduce) that Pluto was either peanut-shaped or had a moon.
Yet, despite knowing that Pluto and its moon existed, and what are their material compositions based on the knowledge about how light interacts with different minerals, Pluto and Charon remained just points of light. We still didn’t know what they looked like.
In 2006 we used our knowledge about space travel, mass, gravity, and velocity to launch a probe to Pluto. We used our knowledge about nuclear energy, vectors. optics, radio waves, computer science, and relativity (in the concept of time) to guarantee that the probe would cross paths with the Pluto-Charon system 9 years later and send back pictures. And that’s just for the pictures! The New Horizons probe also also explored the planet’s atmosphere, the solar wind around the planet, and even the space dust along the way.
Pluto is an excellent example of epistemology. By understanding the level of knowledge we have about Pluto, we are able to understand the concept of epistemology. Our knowledge about Pluto evolved from theoretical –that is we suspected that something like Pluto possibly existed based on only our understanding of astronomical theory– to practical knowledge, actually having pictures about it and environmental data to confirm theoretical propositions. Those theories that our new data confirms will be used to predict other things about space. Those theories that are shown as incorrect (not “wrong”) will either be tossed or adjusted depending on how far off the mark they are. I say “incorrect” rather than “wrong” because those proposing the inaccurate theory have new data to make adjustments for their propositions.
An aside: some theories are simply outright wrong. Such as turn-of-the-twentieth-century (late 1800s) theories that the more beans a human skull could hold, the more intelligent the person. Of course the esteemed anglo-european scientists of the day found that anglo-european skulls held the most beans, therefore anglo-europeans were the smartest people on the planet. As I wrote above, philosophy is grounded in your source of said philosophy. We know today that skull size is not directly related to intelligence.
And, yes, even today people debate that fact.
Back to Pluto. actually, to our advances in learning
It took 85 years from Pluto’s discovery for us to create the technology to enhance our vision well enough to see what it actually looks like. Yes. What we know about Pluto remains empirical sense data. We know about it by looking at through a camera attached to a space probe that was sent out to it. New Horizons used its camera to see Pluto, its sensors to touch it and measure it.
Epistemology is also about how fast we learn knew things.
Recall that Pluto was found while searching for a theoretical Planet X. It was found by chance by a young research assistant tasked with comparing images taken through a telescope about two weeks apart. More important, recall that it took 85 years to finally see Pluto.
On January 1, 2019, New Horizons snapped a picture of Arrokoth, a Kuiper Belt Object (KBO) that was discovered only a year before the probe passed Pluto. Arrokoth is tiny! Only about six miles across at its longest. And it’s a billion miles beyond Pluto. In a matter of less than five years, technology had advanced well enough that we could look into the skies for a small target along the projected path of a spacecraft already 3 billion (with a “b” billion) miles away from Earth, and have enough knowledge to command that spacecraft to literally use a puff of its thrusters to change course just enough to cross paths with that tiny rock at a known time and date four-and-a-half years later.
That’s what epistemology does for us. It builds our knowledge to levels that allow us to do amazing things that we couldn’t do 85 years earlier.
Metaphysics
In my conversations with others, it appears that metaphysics is the first thing that comes to mind when our chat is about philosophy, since metaphysics asks questions about the ultimate nature of all things, that is, what is the nature of reality. A classic metaphysical question asks, “are we real, or are we simply brains in jars and everything we see, touch, hear, and taste are just illusions?” The original version of the movie, The Matrix, is a classic example of this question. The movie begins with our hero, Neo, moving through the world as a hacker supporting a dark underworld of other computer hackers when he is contacted by a mysterious person writing to him through his computer. He later discovers that the mysterious person can follow his every move through his office, giving him directions to escape apparent government agents searching for him. Eventually Neo meets the person who called him, and this person Morpheus, tells him that the world he lives in is an illusion created by forces that want him trapped for their nefarious purposes. He offers Neo a choice, to remain in his illusionary world and its drudgery, or to escape and experience reality. Each is represented by a red and blue pill, red leading to freedom and blue sustains ignorance to truth.
Neo chooses the red pill and awakens to find himself in a pod within a tower of millions of other pods. Each pod contains a person who is hardwired to a vast computer matrix that feeds them the illusion they experience in their suspended animation, while their bodies act as batteries powering the computer system that actually inhabits and controls the world.
That is some heavy metaphysics, there!
Metaphysics is more than the classic brains-in-jars. It’s about reality. About what people define as real, and not real (as opposed to unreal). In their “Short Introduction to Philosophy”, Robert Solomon and Kathleen Higgins write that metaphysics gets into what is “most real”. Understanding metaphysics as “most real” is useful, since seeing this philosophy domain this way helps you understand values. For some people, God is most real. God created everything and everything we see, feel, experience, etc., is dependent on God. When a person’s reality is grounded in God as the most powerful, most real entity that exists, they would interpret world event, make decisions, and behave based on that reality.
Another view for “most real” is a scientific view. Reality can be examined by breaking things down to constituent elements. Real things are comprised of many parts, and particles. And knowing the nature of these things helps us understand what is “most real.” And knowing what is “most real” in this way allows us to predict and control our reality, whereas in the other view, we lack control of the true reality.
I’m not stating which view is correct. The lesson here is that different people have different views, and those views guide their decisions and behaviors. These views determine individual values. Values can be grounded through metaphysics, and expressed through aesthetics.
Axiology
Axiology contains two subdomains, aesthetics and ethics. Aesthetics and ethics are philosophies of values, and logically belong together.
Aesthetics
Aesthetics explores what we consider beautiful, attractive, pleasing to our senses (and we’re right back to epistemology, again, but in a slightly different way). It is the classic “art is in the eye of the beholder.” There are some people who find Picasso’s abstract work as masterpieces, while I admit, “meh, they’re okay; but they are no Neiman.” The same goes for Rothko. Some will find his works inspire deep reflection. Me, I say that if Rothko had painted a barn red and signed it, the side of that barn would now be worth millions. But had it been I who painted the barn and signed it, it would just be a red barn.
Aesthetics is important to know because, as is the common theme in this article, how we interpret something influences our perceptions, attitudes, and most important, our behaviors related to the objects we determine as pleasing or not. Like all philosophy, aesthetics changes with education and experience. It wasn’t until 1976 that I realized how my life was void of great music. It was while watching Saturday Night Live that I saw this great musical guest called Devo. My awareness of music changed for the better. Later in my life I discovered that Wall of Voodoo had more than one song (Mexican Radio) and they pretty much alone were the genre called cow punk. Some of you might disagree with my musical tastes, but hey, that’s aesthetics. Those with advanced education in music theory can tell me why cow punk is so great. And why hip-hop completely bites.
Ethics
Just how aesthetics explores how art is valued, axiology includes ethics, which is about values related to what is right and wrong, good and bad, just and unjust. Ethics is a very challenging subject to understand without at least a little understanding about philosophy, since like all philosophy, ethics is grounded on your experiences, your education, and even the experiences and education of those who have taught you ethical values over your lifetime. Ethics falls within aesthetics because ethics explores what is important to us in life. What really matters. What we are willing to give up to become better, or what we are willing to not give up to sustain that what pleases us
Let's Wrap this up for now
Philosophy is about observing our world, our existence within our world, asking questions about our observations and existence and seeking answers to those questions
We’ll go into ethics in a later article. For now, lets sum up philosophy as I have presented it in this article. Philosophy is about observing our world, our existence within our world, asking questions about our observations and existence and seeking answers to those questions. We observe our world and the way things work together through logic. Epistemology is about how we acquire our knowledge about the world around us through our senses, including using technology to enhance our senses. Metaphysics examines our existence, our place in this world, and even if the world is real or not. Axiology is about what we value, both in beauty (pleasure) and justice. It’s importance for you to know where you learned your philosophical orientations since those orientations will influence your perceptions and attitudes about things and other in the world outside of you, plus understand the sources of the perceptions and attitudes that others about things and other in the world outside of them – including you and people you agree with and advocate for.
