15.9. The Connection Between Phenomena, Ideas, Words...and Ethics

The study of the connection between words, ideas, and phenomena can be either pretty simple or intricately complex, depending on how deep you want to wade into the subject matter.

For the most part, ideas are internal, mental representations of particular life phenomena, including structures, relationships, encounters, and/or processes -- complications arise when we start to talk about dreams, myths, fantasies, fiction, goals, mistakes, lies, fabrications, cover-ups and ideas that do not reflect something that you can actually physically touch and or see).

Words, in turn, can be viewed as short cuts for ideas.

Putting these two sets of ideas together -- ideas can be viewed as abstractions of phenomena, real and/or not real, and words can be viewed as short cuts for ideas which in turn represent abstractions of phenomena, real or not real, touchable or not touchable, visible or not visible.

Now, for the technical philosophers amongst you, things get profusely more complicated when we start to get into the 'subjective/objective' problem -- a problem that has cursed philosophers for centuries. What is real and what is not real? What is true and what is not true? How do we know? What constitutes 'knowledge'? What is 'reality'? How do we account for 'mistakes' in perception, interpretation, and/or judgment? Much of yesterday's 'knowledge' is today's 'myth'. Culturally, historically, and individually many people believe different things. How do we account for these differences? How do we account for the problem that many, many people may believe something to be 'true' -- but still be wrong?

Epistemology (the study of knowledge) is intimately tied up to ethics, values, and judgments (the study of what is 'good' and 'bad'). How do we deal with the problem of 'bad epistemology' affecting 'bad ethics'. For example, let us say that the ruling government determines that 'vaccinations are good for you'. But a significant body of citizens may believe otherwise. Maybe they believe that 'some vaccinations are bad or dangerous', or that 'the risks of some vaccinations outweigh the possible benefits' or that 'the government is quite possibly being badly influenced by narcissistic drug companies who have no problem distorting the truth of supposedly 'objective scientific investigations' in order to make millions or billions of extra dollars'. In other words, 'knowing' that it is distinctly possible -- and indeed 'realistic' -- to assume that 'power', 'corruption', 'money', 'greed', 'narcissism', and 'conflict of interest' can distort 'truth' and throw all knowledge into serious doubt and disarray, what does this have to say about the problem of 'knowledge' and 'who supposedly knows what'? It is not always the people with the most power and/or credibility that can have the 'most' and/or the 'best' knowledge' but power and credibility can often 'dupe' people into thinking that they do. What do we do about the very credible 'knowledge' or 'evidence towards knowledge' that 'interpretively connects' many particular vaccinations with many very bad health outcomes such as cripplings and other life long serious negative health consequences. If the government says that 'we have to vaccinate our children' and one of our children experiences a very bad health consequence, is the goverment going to take responsiblity for this? Or deny the interpretive connection? What do yu think? The study of knowledge -- epistemology -- is not an easy subject at all when you get into its higher technicalities. However, the amount of potential and real ethical, evaluative damage stemming from people -- particularly people in serious positions of power -- making decisions with very serious consequences to peoples lives based on 'bad knowledge', regardless of whether they are 'honest mistakes' or 'mistakes of 'corruption, narcissism, greed, conflict of interest...' is far more than enough to say to all of us that epistemology -- and the sensory perception and language that gets us to epistemology, i.e, leads us to so-called 'knowledege' -- needs to be taken very seriously and studied very carefully.

This section is an attempt to address many of these problems -- the simpler ones, the more technical ones, and the potentially lethal ones that can and often do lead to huge ethical gaffes and human costs -- the inexcusable ones being the intentional ones based on the narcissism and greed of people in serious positions of power.

dgb, dec. 8th, 2007.