Sir? Step over here, please.

If a doctor (or inventor, or company, or whoever) invents a medical device to cure or treat some sort of sickness or disease or disorder, she can't use it, can't put it into practice, until she's proven that it does what she says it does.  Why aren't security professionals held to anywhere near that standard?  

I'm pretty sure stents for atherosclerosis weren't used on a patient in a hospital before somebody asserted to somebody else that those stents did something useful, and backed up that assertion with some kind of proof.  Did any similar process happen before airport security started demanding that we take off our shoes before we could board a plane?

Alethetropy

When I wrote about epistemic ethics, I talked about an attitude. The attitude which underlies the scientific method. The tendency to seek cognitive techniques which bring us closer to truth. I wanted to talk more about that attitude. I wanted to complain that we needed it to show up in more contexts than just the structure and activities of the scientific community.

But it's tough to talk about that attitude. Awkward. Hard to explain. Hard to refer to. I needed a word for it.

I couldn't find the right one. I decided it didn't exist.

So I made one up.

Aletheia was the Greek word for truth. It comes from lethe (λήθη) which means obscurity, concealment, or forgetfulness. The prefix a- (ἀ–) means not. Aletheia means not concealed.

Tropos (τρόπος) means turning. I remember in high school biology being delighted to learn the word heliotropism. It's just a neat word. It refers to the habit of some plants to turn to face the sun.

Alethetropy, then, means a tendency to turn toward the truth, or the act of facing the truth.

It turns out that I'm not the first to follow this etymological path; a variant, "alethetropic," is part of the title of an out-of-print book. So it's not really original. But it means something I want to say, so I'm going to start using it.

Now that I have it handy, it's a lot easier to express the following:

The scientific method is an algorithm for institutional alethetropy. What we need now are algorithms for individual alethetropy and cultural alethetropy.

Epistemic Ethics

It occurs to me that before I go on using these terms much more, I should write down definitions.

So, first: Epistemic Ethics. Epistemic ethics has to do with assigning moral value to how much one cares about the quality and provenance of one's knowledge.

The idea is that being skeptical (or credulous) can make you a good (or bad) person.

Let me put it in context: Nowadays you can go into a grocery store, and buy broccoli that the merchant assures you was grown in a garden without pesticides. In a country with fair laws. By farmers who weren't being oppressed. That's called provenance. How did it get to you, where did it come from?

Implicitly, you're a bad person if you don't care where your broccoli came from. If you buy your broccoli at the other store, the one across the street, you get a little twinge of guilt and fear that it might have been grown in toxic waste by slaves (which isn't far from the truth, maybe, but that's not my point).

And yet there's a section in the first store, the one with the happy ethical broccoli, that sells herbal supplements for improving various complaints of physiology. Most of them say what they're for. But if they do, they also have to say "These statements have not been evaluated by the FDA." But that's not a very strong warning, is it? Face it, we've all come to think of the FDA as a lumbering inept government bureaucracy (mostly because it's true). So if they haven't gotten around to finding out whether this particular flower or root will help me go to sleep at night, who cares?

But what the warning really should say, in most cases, is, "These statements have not been evaluated by anybody."

The FDA, flawed as it is, is an attempt to put into practice a particular attitude. It's an attitude that has evolved over the past few millennia, and has proven itself to help people in getting at the truth. It shows up in philosophy, it shows up in the US constitution, and it shows up in the scientific method. It's hard to articulate, and many people have done a better job of it than I could do here, so I will only try to sum up: it's an attitude of intellectual humility, and mutual honesty. It's epistemic ethics.

When the FDA requires a pharmaceutical company to conduct rigorous double-blind clinical trials, it's attempting to enforce epistemic ethics. You can argue, with good cause, about how it's implemented and how the system has evolved, but you must admit that it's done a good job at reducing how often people can get away with making stuff up. It's introduced disincentives for people to proffer to other people junk knowledge.

Western medicine has flawed standards of proof, and questionable motives, yes. But it sure beats no standards of proof, and obvious motives.

And yet people have turned away from the attitude that brought about the FDA. They're forgetting the motivation because they're angry at the implementation. They're forgetting the moral root of the situation. They're buying products that bear the words "These statements have not been evaluated" as a badge of honor.

So, when I see a flower in a bottle, one aisle over from the morally upright broccoli, it bugs me. It bugs me that I might be living in a society where you can be a bad person for ignoring where your broccoli came from, but you get a free pass to ignore where your knowledge came from.

And that's a problem of epistemic ethics.

Foundations

There is no relief from Descartes's deceiving demon. If I dig at the roots of my epistemic foundations, that is the bedrock I always find.

Given the deceiving demon, what does an individual possessed of reason take as a maxim of action? Reason itself, alone, is inert, and must be moved from without.

Even alethetropy cannot have an absolute foundation. I want to use it as my pedestal, but when I push against it, it shifts.

Alethetropy, then, must be taken as a guideline, a rule of thumb. It can serve as a moral basis, but like any other, must it be accepted on faith?

Turning

What's on my mind? My mind. It slurs, sloshes. It's troubled, but not by trouble. Just turbulent. Waves. Eddies. I knock on the glass, and within I answer back with a smile, and bubbles. And swim away, drifting loose in the bowl. I mouth the words. He shakes his head in reply. This is real, he says. This is us. We're happening.

But if nothing comes of it? So much disappointment. So much guilt, embarrassment at hopes forgotten, expectations not just unfulfilled, but denied the honor of regret.

Slow, slow. And one says that's the way, and one says that's nothing, that's void. Lack.

And I won't know. Even in the final accounting. So the question remains, as ever, what to do, when the answer will never be known. Alethetropy assumes return, not question alone. So if there is no answer, if the sum is never taken, what then? Then, then. Then there is no alethetropy. Only as an exercise, only the subjunctive. But the subjunctive is. Its referent absent, still it is, and gives power. So is alethetropy. It is not something we can have. It is a direction, not a destination. All we can do is cast the rope ahead, for the next. The best we can give them, is that we looked about, opened our eyes, and tried to discern the light, before we let go.