Whom Now to Believe?

Surviving Epistemological Crises in the Media Universe

While my fellow writers Peter and John wrote about how we come to know the natural law and how we come to know God, respectively, allow me to address what the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre calls the “epistemological crisis” in relation to the exponential advances in media technology. That is, how does the medium by which we come to know affect our knowledge?

MacIntyre believes that we navigate through the haphazardness of life by means of narratives or “schemata,” which he loosely defines as, “generalizations which…enable us to make reasonably reliable predications about…future behaviour.”^[1] ¹In other words, each of us lives by a construct, a set of principles about the world, through which we interpret our experiences, which further dictates how each of us responds in any given circumstance. (Naturally, it can be argued, some constructs are truer to reality than others.) In our current, globalized world, most of us engage with several of the competing grand narratives about the meaning, or meaninglessness, of life.

What role, then, does media technology play in relation to the epistemological process? At both the personal and communal level, it extends our epistemological self-consciousness into the world web and opens us to a floodgate of virtually represented (and misrepresented) schemata. Best known for his pithy phrase, “The medium is the message,” the Canadian philosopher Marshal McLuhan believed that all media—from books to radio to TikTok videos—are an extension of man’s physical and cognitive capabilities. Likewise, anything that extends these capabilities could be considered media (so the concept extends beyond simply news and social media). For the sake of argument, suppose that this is true. McLuhan argues in Understanding Media: The Extension of Man that the medium of writing, for example, is an extension of human thought across space and time; the TV is an extension of our eyesight, permitting us to view things across the world, albeit from a very limited and controlled perspective; the electronic age (e.g., the internet) is the extension of the central nervous system, and therefore, I would add, of human consciousness.

Extending our capabilities into the universe is a good thing, but the unintended consequences must also be considered. This of course is difficult since unintended consequences tend to be unforeseeable, but that should not stop us from making prognoses based on the symptoms that have already surfaced. It is clear to see that the invention and prevalent use of the smartphone, for example, has sabotaged fundamental areas of human society; we are now beginning to reap the unintended consequences that were hitherto unforeseen, such as dopamine overdosage and the dissolution of real human relationships leading to a major uptick in mental health crises among younger generations. The current state of media provokes and prolongs a sort of epistemological paralysis whereby we doom scroll social media and the news and then feel subsequently possessed to throw our phone across the room and raise our hands exclaiming “Whom now to believe?” We are flooded by propaganda from multiplying but notional narratives. This predicament has bred a generation of skeptics edging towards nihilism.

But while we may engage with each narrative in a notional sense, grasping it apprehensively at the rational level, we must actually live by one if, as MacIntyre believes, we are to live some semblance of a life at all. Allow me to clarify what I mean by “notional,” for which I will briefly turn to St. John Henry Newman in doing so. In his work A Grammar of Assent, Newman distinguishes two distinct forms of assent — “notional” assent and “real” assent. Before we assent to a proposition, however, we must first apprehend it. “By our apprehension of propositions,” writes Newman, “I mean our imposition of a sense on the terms of which they are composed.” In other words, how do we define our terms (e.g., what is our concept of “man,” of “faith,” or “binnacle”)?  Sometimes these terms, Newman writes, “stand for certain ideas existing in our own minds…sometimes for things simply external to us, brought home to us through the experiences and informations we have of them.” All things external to us are unit and individual, Newman asserts, yet the mind not only apprehends those unit realities but, by a gift of the human intellect, also has the power to create abstractions—generalizations based on real, individual things. Those things that are external to us are real, while the abstractions in our minds are notional. When we assent to propositions based on real things, we give real assent; when we assent to propositions based on merely notional things, which may be derived from real things, we likewise give notional assent.

Real assent carries much greater force, Newman argues, and it leaves a deeper impression in our mind. However, when it comes to the ever-expanding technological realm, that is, as the layers of media increase, we are left with only notional things, and notional things—ideas, complex languages, mere digital images on our screens—are much more vulnerable to manipulation and corruption.

The epistemological crisis occurs, then, when the present schemata that we engage with notionally begin to corrupt, when our trust in how and what we know begins breaking, and we are faced with competing narratives that appear mutually incompatible. Turning to Shakespeare, MacIntyre upholds Hamlet as the paradigm of the human agent embroiled in the epistemological crisis. As we see in the play, Hamlet arrives back from Wittenberg with his means of interpreting events jeopardized by competing schemata and he is thrown into a loop, whereby he faces the following predicament:

“There is the revenge schema of the Norse sagas; there is the renaissance courtier's schema; there is a Machiavellian schema about competition for power. But he not only has the problem of which schema to apply; he also has the other…problem: whom now to believe? His mother? Rosencrantz and Guildenstern? His father's ghost? Until he has adopted some schema he does not know what to treat as evidence; until he knows what to treat as evidence he cannot tell which schema to adopt. Trapped in this epistemological circularity the general form of his problem is: 'what is going on here?’”

Whom now to believe? This question introduces the heart of the matter, for MacIntyre believes that the epistemological crisis is, at root, “always a crisis in human relationship.” After all, constructing schemata must be a shared endeavor if one is to live in any human relationship or society. Think of the simple example of when one, as a child, first discovered one’s parents weren’t right about everything. To resolve the crisis, one must construct or adopt a new a narrative that makes sense of the present anomaly, and which also enables one to understand how one could have held and been misled by one’s previous beliefs. “The agent,” says MacIntyre, “has come to understand how the criteria of truth and understanding must be reformulated.” One becomes “epistemologically self-conscious,” which naturally leads to doubt.

To resolve the epistemological crisis, one must return to the primacy of the real—to the singular, the limited, and the concrete—to see which of one’s abstracted schemata remains in the least conflict with it. The expansion of our consciousness through media, however, threatens to make our return to the real increasingly difficult, because while we may get outside and physically “touch grass,” as the contemporary idiom goes, our mind tends to remain stuck in the rut of notional things. By rapid media expansion, we stretch the distinct but corresponding relationship between the notional and the real. This stretching further exacerbates a sort of dualism between the two in which the former dominates because that is where we increasingly spend our time. This epistemological dualism not only complicates the question of how we come to know, but it also raises serious questions about who we are. It would be best not to leave the latter to the prerogative of the notional realm alone.

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1. Alasdair MacIntyre, “Epistemological Crises, Dramatic Narrative, and the Philosophy of Science,” The Monist, Vol. 60, No. 4, Historicism and Epistemology (October, 1977), p. 453.