Epistemic Conflict
by Randy Ingermanson
Advanced Fiction Writing
Epistemology is a branch of philosophy that tries to explain what it means to know things, and how we know that we know what we know.
If that seems dull or weird or spacey to you, then I refer you to your favorite search engine to run a search on the term “fake news.” Fake news is false information packaged up to look like true news. And that’s a hot topic right now. Fake news is a failure in epistemology.
So I claim that epistemology matters in real life. If so, then it also matters in fiction.
I won’t be looking at fake news in this column. I have bigger fish to fry. Instead, I’ll be looking at something I call “epistemic conflict.” This will take some effort to unpack. Work with me for the next thousand words, and I think you’ll find it worth the trouble. You can use this technique forever in your fiction, and you’ll never run out of ideas.
Why Conflict Matters
Every novelist cares about conflict, because conflict is the gasoline in the engine of fiction. Conflict makes your story go. You need conflict, and one powerful way to create conflict is through a misunderstanding between your characters.
And that’s where “epistemic conflict” comes into play. “Epistemic conflict” is one very basic way to create a deep misunderstanding that will get your characters fighting like rabid dogs.
But before I explain “epistemic conflict,” I need another term, which is “epistemic status.” And what is that?
Epistemic Status
People say stuff all the time. Some of it’s true; some is false; some is neither. But it would be naive to think that all statements can be classified as either a “fact” or a “lie.” Because a lot depends on what people believe about the truth or falsity of the things they say.
So when I talk about the “epistemic status” of a statement, I’m thinking of two questions:
- Does the person who made the statement believe it’s true, or false, or neither?
- How certain are they in that belief?
Both of these matter. These two issues raise all sorts of interesting complications. Here are some examples of the many kinds of epistemic status that a statement can have:
- Facts are things you believe because you have first-hand evidence, and therefore you can know them with high certainty. For example, it’s a fact that the sky was blue outside my house yesterday at noon. I saw the sky. It was blue. The only way this fact could be wrong is if my eyes weren’t functioning correctly.
- Mathematical theorems are things you believe because you can prove them using logic, and therefore you can know them with high certainty. For example, I know the Pythagorean Theorem is true, because I have worked through the proof. The only way this theorem could be wrong is if my brain isn’t functioning correctly.
- Scientific findings summarize the results of experiments. A scientist considers a scientific finding to be provisionally true, based on the current data. A scientific experiment should always estimate the certainty of the result. Note that scientific findings sometimes change when more data comes in.
- Mathematical conjectures are guesses about potentially true theorems. Mathematicians consider them “not proven,” but they often have reason to think they might be true or might be false. Math happens when a mathematician tries to prove or disprove a conjecture. For a famous example of a conjecture, do a search on the term “Goldbach’s conjecture.”
- Scientific hypotheses are guesses about potential scientific findings. Scientists may suspect a hypothesis is true, or suspect it’s false, but they don’t know, and they know that they don’t know. As a very famous example, when I was a graduate student in physics, the Higgs boson was widely hypothesized to explain major parts of physics. But nobody had ever seen one in the lab. The Higgs boson was a hypothesis for 48 years, until it finally was detected in the lab. Then it became a scientific finding.
- Faith statements are statements that people of faith make about their religious beliefs, even when they know that no proof is possible. Generally, they don’t assign a level of certainty, because faith is not about certainty. As an example, one of the Thirteen Principles of Maimonides, the great Jewish philosopher, was, “I believe with perfect faith in the resurrection of the dead.” Believing this is an act of faith, not a claim of certainty. If anyone knew it with certainty, it would not be a faith statement, it would be a fact or a theorem.
- Opinions are things you believe to be more likely true than not. In some cases, the opinion holder may be very certain their opinion is correct, but the reality is that the correctness of opinions usually can’t be known with high certainty.
- Allegations are claims that somebody has made without providing evidence to back them up. Allegations are an interesting case because the person making the allegation usually claims a high level of certainty. But the person hearing the allegation can’t have that same level of certainty until they see the evidence. One thing they can know with high certainty is that the allegation was made. That makes allegations newsworthy, even when they can't be checked. Responsible journalists make it clear that they are allegations, NOT facts. They also look for ways to check them.
- Lies are statements that you don’t believe and you know to be false. The point of a lie is to convince other people that a false statement is true. Fake news is an example of a lie.
- April Fool’s jokes are a special case. They’re not the truth, but they’re also not a lie. When you tell an April Fool’s joke, you believe with certainty it’s false, but truth or falsehood is not the point. The point of an April Fool’s joke is to say something obviously false in a way that’s funny because it’s absurd.
- Satire is another special case. Satire is not intended to be either the truth or a lie. It’s intended to make people think by saying something you don’t believe in a way that highlights some important truth. A famous example is the essay, “A Modest Proposal,” by Jonathan Swift, published in 1729. Swift proposed that poor Irish families could sell their children to be eaten by the rich. This was not a real policy proposal, and probably few people ever thought it was. But it was not a lie, either, nor was it a joke. It was satire, and it made people think about their assumptions.
That’s not a complete list of all possible epistemic statuses. You can probably think of several more. But these are enough to now explain what “epistemic conflict” is.
The Payoff—Epistemic Conflict
So what do I mean by “epistemic conflict?”
“Epistemic conflict” is the special kind of conflict that happens between characters when they assign different epistemic statuses to a statement.
In the real-life case of a “fake news” story, some people claim that the story has the epistemic status of a “Fact,” while others claim that it has the epistemic status of a “Lie.”
But there are many ways to have epistemic conflict. Let’s look at a few possible examples that could arise in your fiction:
Example 1: Your character writes an April Fool’s Day blog post that they think is hilariously funny. But then they discover that hundreds or thousands of people mistook it for a fact, and now there’s trouble.
Example 2: Your character posts a tweet that is intended to be satire. But satire requires context, and people who don’t know the context think your character’s tweet sounds racist. It goes viral and now millions of people are angry at your character, because they mistook satire for an actual opinion.
Example 3: Two characters express conflicting political opinions, but each of them mistakes their own opinions as facts, and mistakes the other’s opinion as a lie.
Example 4: Two scientists publish their scientific findings, but they get opposite results. The scientists know that all scientific knowledge is provisional, and they see the conflict in their findings as something interesting to pursue. But a journalist mistakes these findings as facts, and writes a story claiming there is a “crisis” in the scientists’ field of study.
Homework:
- Here’s a challenge for you. Spend one whole day figuring out the epistemic status of everything you say or hear. You’ll probably have to define some new epistemic statuses, because the list of 11 that I gave isn’t the whole alligator. I suspect you’ll find this exercise exhausting but enlightening. At the end of the day, your reward is that you get to think about how to use all this in your fiction.
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