Windsocks and the epistemological/ontological distinction

Were I Queen of the Universe, no one could graduate from high school without being able to explain the difference between causation and correlation, and no one could graduate from college without being able to distinguish between an epistemological and ontological claim. (I have moments when I think that people should also understand the difference between eschatology and soteriology, but that’s a different post.)

Here, I just want to talk about the difference between an epistemological and ontological claim. That distinction is more important than you think. [1]

Earl Warren argued for the race-based mass imprisonment of Japanese Americans, and he provided evidence to support his claim that “the Japanese” must be engaged in nefarious activities. Among his evidence was a collection of letters from various police, sheriff, and other peace officer groups saying that they believed “the Japanese” to be dangerous.

An ontological claim is a claim about Reality. It’s a claim about the fabric of the universe, about what is Really True. Warren was making an ontological claim—that “the Japanese” were essentially and Really dangerous.

And he supported that claim with statements on the part of various (racist) people as to their beliefs. Epistemological claims are claims about belief. So, he was trying to support an ontological claim (“the Japanese are dangerous”) with an epistemological claim (“various (racist) people believe the Japanese to be dangerous”).

It’s like my saying that squirrels are evil (ontological claim) because my dogs agree that squirrels are evil (epistemological claim). They really do agree that squirrels are evil—that’s true. There is complete consensus on that point. They also agree that windsocks, plastic bags blowing down the street, that asshole labradoodle, and possums are all evil. Like Warren, my dogs make an ontological argument (windsocks are evil) on the basis of an epistemological claim (I am afraid of windsocks).

The difference, of course, is that the various people Warren polled had more prestige than my dogs, but did they have better judgement? Many people assume that if “good” people agree on a claim—if they all make the same epistemological claim, that’s an indication that the epistemological claim is also ontologically true. So, if everyone you value agrees on some claim–squirrels are evil–you think that claim has been proven. It hasn’t. All that’s been proven is that you’re loyal to your in-group.

My point is that the way that people decide who is “good” is just in-group reasoning, as in the case of Warren’s testimonies about “the Japanese” being dangerous. “The Japanese” also had beliefs—they had epistemological claims. But Warren didn’t worry about them. He took the claims of the police as reliable, and the claims of opponents as not worth considering. And how Warren assessed claims is the dominant way of assessing claims in our current culture–decide whether a claim is true on the basis of whether the person making it (or the media reporting it) is someone we think is “good.” In other words, whether they’re in-group.

That’s a bad way to think about reliability–it just pushes the question back one step. If everyone in my family agrees on something, every pastor I’ve known, everyone with whom I interact on a regular basis, the talk radio host or pundit I like, my group of like-minded friends, in other words, if my in-group agrees on a claim, then I take that agreement to be a sign the claim is a claim about Reality. And the–my claim is true because my in-group has perfect agreement on this point–isn’t something restricted to any point on the political spectrum, or even restricted to politics. I’ve had colleagues tell me that, although their claims are either non-falsifiable or actually falsified, they’re true because everyone in their discipline or sub-field (i.e., in-group) agrees that they’re true, and I must be wrong because they are an expert in that field (and, yes, I’m thinking especially of various economists, anglo-American analytic philosophers, and neo-conservative political scientists with whom I’ve been on committees).

We are in a world in which media–all over the political, cultural, and religious spectrum–hammer home to their audiences that we are fighting for our very ability to exist. We are about to lose it all right now. We are, therefore, in a state of exception when all concerns about the rule of law, fairness, accuracy. That’s an epistemological claim.

That everyone in the in-group agrees on a claim doesn’t mean it’s true. That the in-group feels threatened, that all the in-group media say we are threatened with extinction doesn’t mean we are.

The reason people should understand the difference between an ontological claim (about Reality) and an epistemological one (I am certain this is true) is that, as long as we uncritically take epistemological claims as proof about the world, we’re only deliberating within in-group beliefs. We’re Warren, who only took the epistemological claims of people like him as relevant to ontological conclusions.

We’re people banning windsocks because my dogs don’t like them.

[1] For the pedants in  the audience, I’m not saying that epistemology and ontology are, so to speak, ontologically different. I’m say that epistemological and ontological claims are rhetorically different–they have different standards of proof in an argument because they imply different rhetorical burdens.