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Posted on 12/20/2001 10:20:25 AM PST by ramdalesh

While physicists work out the details of Unified Field Theory, philosophers and press people work out the details of popular epistemology.

Epistemology is our sense of knowing and understanding what we are talking about. When we talk about farming, oil, nuclear warheads, or Moslems there is usually only a sense of knowing what we are talking about.
Most of us haven't seen firsthand a conglomerate farm (not even so much as a tour of CalPoly Ag department).
Hardly anybody has ever seen a nuclear warhead up close, but most people believe in them and know that they exist. Some people can even tell you exactly how they work, without ever coming within a thousand miles of one.
Everyone who drives a car is pretty clear on oil because they have to put oil in the engine to get it to run. Many people have smelled an oil refinery, and most people know that gas comes from oil, but for millions of people there is only an abstract epistemology about oil that applys only to them.
Moslem is an abstraction that applys to any person who takes Shahada, but not always according to many moslems, and more or less applys only to the standards set up by the media for non moslems. For Example: All Moslems celebrate Ramadan,and/or all people who celebrate Ramadan are Moslems...another familiar fallacy of logic.

Language and Semantics is a problem even more terrible than epistemology. Not only are there over one thousand languages being spoken here in spaceship earth, but the perceptions from sense stimulus of a foriegn language fails at directing the attention (or our sense of knowing) to the thing that the word applies. Take for example the two dorky guys in the Del Taco commercial, standing in the parking lot in front Taco Bell with a bullhorn and a banner. Taco Bell says to them, "Yea we saw your sign, your standing in our lawyers parking space." Dorky guys run away afraid of taco bell lawyers. Why? This is one example of how semantics fails often at building an epistemology. In one case you have a stimulus argument..."We have better food.", and in the other case the stimulus arguement..."We have better lawyers." So the key to a communicable epistemology depends on the level of abstraction, and aparently Taco Bell, and Del Taco have different business "epistemologies". That is why there is aparently no communication taking place between them, even though they are both speaking American English. How then do we discuss our nuclear warheads? We can give an operational definition of what a nuclear warhead is exactly, and more or less agree on what it does. But it depends on your level of abstraction. On a multiple choice test we have many possible solutions a.)It exists b.)It doesn't exist c.)It influences politicians d.)It influences cockroaches e.)It influences religious zealots f.)It explodes g.)all of the above. That is why the problem of epistemology is not a multiple choice test. College students drink too much coffee, but they work with these types of philosophcal problems. Therefore we could say on the test h.)none of the above. And in a short sentance answer say: Nuclear warheads provoke college students to drink coffee.

The semantics breaks down when we consider all the levels of abstraction. This is why we don't have a Unified Field Theory that is generally accepted. Physics is not just for building nuclear warheads. It is a communication tool used by scientists and philosophers to convey to each other that they are both very smart, the coffee is really strong, or just simply to reaffirm that we are in a reality that cannot be easily communicated.

If we are working on the problem of epistemology in physics, then we must involve the Arabs,the Hebrews,the Germans,the Chinese,and the Japanese, and Persias and Indoos.
"What does nationality have to do with physics?"
"Not a thing friend, buy you a cup of coffee?"
"So what's wrong with weak force?"
"Its on the wrong scale. It is 1/1000 of the strong force, and we don't know why the force operates on that scale."
"What's wrong with that? The forces are still mapped into each other. We know how that works, right?
"We know that it works, but not why it works at that scale"
"Do you think that there may be other states of matter scaled to a higher or lower weak force?"
"Yea, 'sip' potentially, but relative to strong force, electromagnetism and gravitational constant how do the ratios interact?"
"We'll work on it."
"Where are we going to work on it? At Del Taco for crying out loud?"
"mbetcha!,...how's Paula?"

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