Notes from my Knapsack 4-14-22

Notes from my Knapsack 4-14-22
Jeff Gill

The epistemology of Easter
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Epistemology is just a fancy word for asking the question "how do we know what we know?"

I was at a program at Denison University with a panel of Pulitzer Prize winning journalists talking about how their discipline has changed, and how the means of delivering news has meant many changes in methods. But their emphasis was on the reality that we now can get information, news, data, from a wide variety of sources.

Online, many of those sources are questionable at best. So the panelists talked about how each of us, journalist or not, has to make decisions about what kinds of knowing count for us as knowledge. They discussed, in my words, not theirs, how we each have our own "mattering map" for sorting out the influx of ideas and information.

Most of us are perfectly aware in general that a fact or a story or a message can be shared into our social media feed by thousands of people, and still be wrong, incorrect, false. Mistakes get made, and especially in a highly stressful context, an error of fact can take on a life of its own: a misplaced identification, an assumption based on a particular video angle, a confusion of cause and effect.

One well-studied example is that in plane crashes, it is very common for eyewitnesses to report the aircraft was in flames before the fiery impact with the ground . . . even when videotape evidence can show clearly there were no flames until the moment of the crash itself. It's so common as to likely tell us something about how the brain processes and stores memories. And investigators know that eyewitness accounts of a plane in flames have to be taken into account very carefully.

The media angle here is that for many of us, there's the social media (Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, etc.) story, but until we see it in a mainstream or legacy media platform, like the Washington Post or CNN, we're not sure. Has Russia invaded Ukraine? Social media was flooding our feeds with information, but there's a point at which we can start saying "yeah, that really must have happened" when we see the same or parallel info in more traditional outlets.

Some spin or interpretation comes out about cultural events that we may, in Ohio, know little about if it begins in LA or Orlando or Europe. Did it "happen"? We check our sources, some of us have a preferred set of sources. I like to triangulate and check "National Review Online" and "Mother Jones," rather than believe one or the other. There's an epistemological triangulation we can do to pin down the intersection of fact and truth.

History can be as slippery as current events. Nations and cultures have agendas and shape how we look at slavery, western expansion, economic growth; how do we know what we know about what was right, who was correct, which group is honored?

Then there's 2000 years ago. Unlikely events catch our attention, inflame our imaginations: could someone have risen from the dead after a cruel execution? Whose account do we trust? On what basis do we decide which story we believe?

Easter is a story we have to make a decision about, an epistemological choice between alternative accounts. Either someone went from death to life, or it's always a one way journey the other way. How do we decide?

May light shine for you as we all ask ourselves these questions, every day.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's made his choices, and is simply inviting you to make yours. Tell him how you know what you know at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.