‘Epistemological Crisis has been with us since Aristotle’

I have been churning on this paraphrase of Dr. Marcia Whitehead’s September 7, 2021 presentation. I initially reflexively rejected what I thought the implication was. In my mind – the Epistemological Crisis is a current phenomenon. My own bias and self-centeredness blinded me to the crisis moments of equal impact in the past. The Black Death wiped out a third of the European population. The European invasion (‘discovery’) of North America led to a genocide which likely wiped out some 90% of the indigenous population. Holocausts and genocides frequently dot human history.

My presentation this week on the Stanford Prison Experiment forced me to confront the value which Le Texier’s historical analysis can bring to a topic – though I don’t share his conclusion, I appreciate the value of his contribution to the scholarship on the SPE.

I am incidentally confronted by two additional factors:

1. I am extremely bias (from Dr. Hocutt’s comment: “consider whether your assumption (that there is an epistemological crisis in the U.S.) may cloud your approach to the research”). I am not convinced that I will be able to properly (and meaningfully) suspend this bias, but more importantly, I don’t believe that I even want to. This alone would make contemporary direct types of research far more challenging. Knowing my own bias, and being so adamant against suspending to any degree that bias would negatively impact my own belief of the value of such research which is being conducted in such ‘bad faith’ (Sartre’s meaning of the phrase).
2. I have a skepticism about the value of direct types of research being polluted (epistemologically) by the very act of carrying out direct-subject types of research. The ‘observer effect’ – in that even the act of observation alters it. It seems like this will magnify the complications when researching something as both ephemeral and foundational (I know the appearance of the inherent contradiction of linking these two!) as epistemology.

While I think there is potentially tremendous value in an ethnographic research project for my field of study, I feel that my conducting such research would be too fraught – my own bias combined with attempting to disambiguate observer effect / my bias / outcomes to try and produce meaningful results.

I have far more confidence in my ability to dispassionately approach other people’s work. I recognize my bias, but because it isn’t my work, I believe I am better positioned to meaningfully contextualize biases (mine and the researchers’).

… Kenny