Monday, September 06, 2004

Headaches and finding my voice

I have been unable to post anything lately and I'm not really sure why. I've been thinking about a lot of things. I have been reading a lot of interesting things that I even started to post on. But then I can't articulate anything clearly and I give up.

I'm taking an epistemology class. I guess you could call it that, although technically it's a "communication theory" course. The amount of reading is insane...it took me an hour to get through one of the five readings (the "one" reading = five chapters from "Knowledge Puzzles" by Stephen Cade Hetherington) last night. Like a typical extrovert, I started reading it out loud to JBS to try to make sense of it.

One of the most interesting parts is the chapter on Belief. Specifically, does knowledge entail belief? And, is saying believing? Here is the little exchange posed at the beginning of this section:

You: I believe I'll get the job.
Friend: I believe you're wrong about that.
You: Do you think I won't get the job?
Friend: No, I think you don't really believe that you will.
You: You're wrong. And how can you know better than I do what I believe?
Me: But why can't your friend know this better than you do?

Do people always know how they feel and what the know? Should we equate saying with believing? If a person changes his/her mind everyday, are their beliefs changing everyday or should we conclude that they are confused and don't know what they believe?

After reading this, JBS and I had a conversation about our relationship. Sometimes he asks me things (i.e. what I feel or think about something) and as absurd as it sounds, I have no idea. Now, being an NF, I'd like to think I'm in touch with how I feel about things in general. But I realized that even if somewhere deep down, my feelings exist, that sometimes there is no space for them to surface. I'm so worried about making sure someone else is fine or abiding by some socialized role of mine that I have no idea what I would say if I sat myself down and honestly asked myself "what's up?" How do you make space for your own voice? How do you differentiate between what you want and what you're supposed to want or what you think others want or something like that? How can you be asked to only factor in your outcome, when others' outcomes affect your own?

This is puzzling to me. If I don't "know" what I believe about myself or how I feel or what I want, can someone else know better than I can? Well, the next section of the chapter goes on to say:

Maybe there are problems with the idea that someone can attribute a belief to another person. Might that be what sparks the puzzling questions in section 3.2? For example, perhaps no one else knows what your beliefs are? (Can only you know what it is you know?) Is belief "private" so that only you can know what your beliefs are and only I can know what my beliefs are? Do you believe that only you can know what it is that you believe?

If so, and if knowledge is a kind of belief, you can never know that another person has knowledge. For you can never know what it is that he believes. You know, at most, what it is that you know.

So can you ever know what another person knows, believes, thinks, feels? Is it fair to attribute beliefs to other people, based on our beliefs? We certaintly do it all the time. We make judgements about others and conclusions based on what they say and our perception of if they know what they are talking about. Should we always take words at face value even when we know that we say things we don't mean sometimes?

Should you take anything I have written here seriously, since I might say things I don't mean sometimes? Hmmm....

1 Comments:

At September 6, 2004 at 5:46 PM , Blogger Jodi said...

i dont know what else to say other than i feel like i totally know where you're at. it's like there arent enough words in the english language to articulate what you really feel or believe, or maybe there are too many. thats enough to get confused about.

whatever it is, as far as i'm concerned i suck at explaining myself in a logical way when it comes to what i believe, because i just DO. i guess that says something on its own. that if beliefs exist thats enough to say that they're "real". hopefully that makes some sort of sense.

in a way, having your beliefs validated by another makes all the difference, and when that's not there, who to trust is a coin toss. but you're always stuck in your own skin, so chances are, you'll trust your own beliefs. what else can we do? wouldnt the other way just be faking it?

that's about all i can give from another NF viewpoint! see ya rach

 

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