Epistemology, or How Do We Know Bigfoot Travels the Stars – Silent Invasion
I have a fascination with systems of thought: philosophies, theologies, doctrines, ideologies, beliefs, superstitions, etc. I’m very interested in how people navigate reality and try to make sense of the world around them. This week on the podcast we discussed Silent Invasion The Pennsylvania UFO-Bigfoot Casebook by Stan Gordon. This book chronicles Stan Gordon and a team of like-minded paranormal enthusiasts on their quest to find evidence of aliens, cryptids, or perhaps both, in the woods of Western Pennsylvania from 1973-1974. I praised Stan Gordon for diligently collecting evidence without resorting to fakery or elaborate theorizing. As much as I enjoy speculating about the supernatural, a recurring problem I have with others who enjoy the hobby is that they move from speculating to “knowing” too quickly. In this blog post, I’d like to discuss how we know what we know and how can we be certain it’s true.
The simpler a concept is, the harder it becomes to define or prove. At first glance, the concept of “knowledge” seems fairly straight forward. Merriam Webster defines “knowledge” as “the fact or condition of knowing something with familiarity gained through experience or association.” This definition is a bit circular as it defines knowledge to be a condition of knowing. One could ask: What does it mean to know? For example, many people claim to “know what they saw” and yet eye witness testimony is a notoriously unreliable form of evidence. Our brains do not store and retrieve visual information the way a digital camera does. Many experiments have been done that show conclusively that people have a tendency to 1) Honestly believe that they know what they saw, and 2) Have distorted and changeable memories of the event. This distinction between experienced reality and objective reality is at the the heart of Epistemology.
Let’s assume for the sake of not getting too douchey that there is such a thing as objective reality. For a long time, many philosophers subscribed to a theory that stated that knowledge could be defined as a belief that a person holds that is both true and justified. This means that the person’s belief is in accordance with objective reality and that the person has good evidence that shows that this belief is in accordance with reality. For example, I have knowledge that the planet Earth is round. It is, in fact, round. I can offer a variety of proofs for this: images from space, shadows during a lunar eclipse, observations taken from different heights, etc.
Any douche philosopher worth their salt will already be formulating problems with this definition. Indeed, many philosophers have poked holes in this definition. Notably, Edmund Gettier provided counter examples in which a belief can be true, and our justifications for the belief seem well-reasoned, but are actually incorrect. We can never really be sure that our justifications are 100% correct. As a result, we can never claim to have True (capital “T”), objective knowledge of anything. The best we can do is attempt to gain subjective knowledge that has a high probability of being objectively true.
Gaining knowledge then becomes a contest of proof and counter-proof. The scientific method is very effective in this regard. The method goes something like this:
- Observe a phenomenon
- Form a hypothesis that explains the phenomenon
- Use the hypothesis to make testable predictions
- Perform detailed, repeatable experiments in controlled conditions to verify the predictions
Following this process gives us justifications for our beliefs that have a high likelihood of being correct. If a hypothesis can make verifiable predictions about phenomena then reason dictates that we understand what is going on. If a hypothesis makes mostly accurate predictions then reason dictates that we are on the right track, but that our justification for our belief remains incomplete and our certainty in our knowledge must be adjusted accordingly. If a hypothesis is untestable or performs no better than chance when tested, reason dictates that our justification is weak, and our certainty in our knowledge should be low.
But we do not gain the majority of our knowledge from direct engagement with the scientific method. No one has the time or energy to independently verify every belief with rigorous controlled study. Instead, trust is placed in scientific institutions to apply that method, and then verify one another’s findings, and then publish honest accounts of their experiments and the results. It then often falls on others to sift through the published studies and find effective ways to communicate them to a non-expert audience. From there we are increasingly seeing things picked up by amateur or hobbyist essayists (that’s me) and science-communicators to transform the merely accessible into the edutaining.
First hand accounts are more reliable than second hand accounts which are more reliable than third hand accounts and so on. With each step in the chain, the amount of certainty we have in our justifications must decrease. Their is a common and unhelpful reaction to this line of reasoning: “Do your own research.” This traps us in a loop. To do one’s own research properly becomes exponentially difficult with each new topic one needs to research. Inevitably, the phrase “do your research” comes to mean “read my preferred research.” The uncomfortable reality is that each of us has less justification for our beliefs than we would like to think. We must choose which precious few things we will develop deep knowledge on, and we must also choose to trust others with investigating the rest. This gets problematic when we leave the realm of pure philosophy and enter into the realm of biology.
Our brains aren’t designed to handle information in the forms, or at the scale, we are expected to process it in the modern world. Evolutionarily speaking, if a human thinks they saw a monster in those woods, it is better to act as if there is a monster in those woods whether there is compelling physical evidence that monsters exist or not. Not often, but often enough for superstition to survive, the evidence seekers get eaten by monsters. The brain has a built-in bias for lived experience over the relatively new biological phenomenon of “expertise”. We’re more likely to trust our own experience than someone else’s, and failing that, we are more likely to trust people we know than well-credentialed strangers. In an intellectual conflict between a charismatic leader we’re accustomed to seeing on television every day and a pathologist warning of a deadly new virus, it is easier to trust the person we think we know.
Paranormal researchers often operate at the crossroads of superstition and science, and they often adopt the trappings of science. There’s an extremely diverse range of belief among those interested in the paranormal. It ranges from the mystical and religious to the rigorous and scientific. And honestly, there are people who I have great respect for at both ends of this spectrum. I’ve been thinking a lot about what it is that I respect about these people considering that I think their ideas are fun, but have absolutely no value as knowledge-claims since the justifications for them are extremely weak. It turns out that what I respect is honesty.
I’m going to throw out another philosophical term here: “sophistry.” The sophists were a group of ancient Greek intellectuals who excelled at argument and debate. They drew criticism from the likes of Socrates and Plato for using their facility with language to make weak points seem stronger, and to talk circles around opponents with better arguments and ideas. These days calling someone a sophist means that you are probably a bit of a douche yourself, but also that the person you’re calling out is arguing for a position they know to be false just for the sake of winning. There’s a lot of sophistry in paranormal circles.
The term “mainstream science” gets thrown around a lot to imply a kind of uncritical groupthink on the part of established institutions. While it is true that there is no shortage of politicking in the scientific world, I would argue that scientific institutions do a pretty good job of weeding out fraud. At the very least, I would argue that they do a better job of weeding out fraud than the wild west of citizen-scientists that make up the paranormal community. Outright fraud is what loses my respect.
I don’t have a problem with a person who advocates for beliefs with weak justifications so long as they are honest about their justifications. As human beings, we can’t help but value our experiences, even if we know that our memory of those experiences is statistically unreliable. This doesn’t mean that we have to twist facts or make false arguments to justify our beliefs based on experience. We can acknowledge that our belief is based on weak justifications, but that we believe it none the less. This is especially acceptable in the absence of counter-evidence for the belief.
Stan Gordon has an interest in UFO’s and, as a result of his investigations, has developed an interests in cryptids as well. I sincerely doubt that Stan Gordon would be motivated to investigate unexplained lights in the sky if he thought they were explainable natural phenomena like ball lightning, swamp gas, or experimental aircraft. Stan Gordon, like basically everyone else, is interested in UFO’s because he believes there is a possibility that they are controlled by extraterrestrial intelligence. Epistemologically speaking, this belief is not knowledge. While Gordon may believe that aliens are out there and are visiting our planet, he cannot, in my opinion, justify this belief with arguments or proof. That is not to say that there is no evidence or logic behind this belief, simply that there is not enough evidence and logic to justify this belief as “fact.” The opposite is also true, of course. No one can say for certain that alien intelligence has never visited our planet. Though I would argue there are convincing logical arguments for why aliens visiting our planet it is more unlikely than likely, it doesn’t do anyone any harm to investigate the possibility.
What I respect about Stan Gordon is that he seems willing to concede all of this. He begins his book with an admission that he does not have satisfactory evidence to prove that either UFO’s or Bigfoot were in the Pennsylvania woods in 1973 and 1974. Stan Gordon has been forced to stop at the second step of our scientific method. He gathered observations. He formed several hypotheses. But he is not able to test his hypothesis, or use it to make verifiable predictions about UFO’s or Bigfoots. All he can do now is publish the observations that were made and hope that they may aid in future research. This demonstrates to me that Stan Gordon takes this seriously and while he may have some wacky ideas and beliefs, he is not willing to distort the truth to prove himself correct.
Compare this with someone like Zak Bagans of Ghost Adventures. Even among Ghost Hunters “orbs” are controversial as evidence of paranormal activity. Bagans will routinely declare that an orb, or “anomaly” as he calls them, cannot be light reflecting off of dust or an insect. He offers no evidence for why this anomaly these things, and moves on as if the matter is settled. Bagans also subscribes to a whole canon of made up mythology for the spirits and demons he claims to encounter. There is no explanation for how we got from trying (and failing) to gather evidence that ghosts exist to being certain that we’ve picked up a demonic “attachment.” Zak Bagans uses the aesthetic of science, with a lot of expensive technical equipment, to try to establish credibility. He does not, however, engage with the scientific method. All of his “evidence” is at step 1 in the method. There are no concrete predictions. There are no repeatable experiments with reproducible results confirmed by independent teams. In the absence of these things the evidence, no matter how much is gathered, remains unconvincing. In spite of this, Bagans will claim to have proof of the paranormal over and over again.
Stan Gordon in his Silent Invasion: The UFO-Bigfoot Casebook records numerous accounts of eye witnesses to strange phenomena. He attempts to give dates, times, and locations. He records the events in as much detail as possible. He tries, and most often fails, to find physical evidence to support this testimony. By the end of the book, all readers can be certain of is that Stan Gordon and his team interviewed many people who claimed to witness strange objects in the sky, and strange bipedal ape-like creatures in the woods. Gordon attempts to enhance the credibility of the witnesses by pointing out that most of these witnesses have no reason to lie and seem to be telling the truth. But even if we grant that every witness is being as honest as they possibly can, eye witness testimony is just not enough justification to add “bigfoot exists” to our pool of knowledge. That doesn’t mean that Stan Gordon failed. That simply means that interested parties will have to continue to observe the phenomena and gather evidence until we can develop a testable hypothesis that explains the phenomena. What is important, is that Stan Gordon realizes and admits this.
As social creatures, human beings have an instinct to appear correct. To be correct about important things leads to increased status within our tribe. To be wrong about important things means just the opposite. In our past, maintaining social status was a matter of survival. It’s not easy to admit when we’re wrong because there are real consequences to being wrong. It’s a similar problem with admitting that we don’t know something. If we don’t know, there is always someone willing to claim that they do know. There’s always someone willing to make bad arguments and fabricate evidence to exploit our need for reassurance.
I admire people who have wacky beliefs that earn them scorn and mockery from the tribe, and who, in the face of that scorn and mockery, refuse to engage in specious arguments. I admire people who can say that they don’t know, but that they’re going to try to find out. I also admire people who are willing to earnestly examine their own beliefs and their own supposed knowledge, and admit that they actually don’t understand things as well as they thought they did. All of this requires a certain degree of bravery.
In the book, Stan Gordon points out that he was reluctant to publish this material as it concerned both UFO’s and Bigfoots. The UFO community laughed at the Bigfoot community. The Bigfoot community laughed at the UFO community. Mainstream science laughed at them both. This may seem funny to an outside observer, but it represents a real problem and we’re all guilty. All of us identify with a larger group. All of our larger groups have beliefs that are treated as sacred. By this I mean that questioning those beliefs puts your membership in the group at risk. All of us participate to some degree in maintaining the sanctity of certain beliefs.
In the same way that we can never be 100% certain that our beliefs are true, we also don’t 100% choose our beliefs in the first place. Many of us have unexamined beliefs that we have inherited from our social groups, our culture, our religion, etc. Many of those beliefs are so fundamental that we would struggle to identify them as beliefs in the first place. It’s impractical to expect that anyone would sit down and examine their entire body of so-called knowledge and then adjust their certainty according to the strength of their justifications.
Instead, I think that the best any of us can do is try to be mindful of when we are taking actions, especially those which can have important consequences. In those moments, it might be a good idea to examine what it is that we think we know that is guiding our action. Is there room for improvement? When we’re being challenged in an argument should we maybe ask a question instead of making another statement? Do we understand the other person’s position as well as we think? Do we understand our own position as well as we think? Is this new belief a person is trying to convince me to adopt likely to be true and how strong is the justification for it?
Epistemology is a humbling pursuit. Truly, the deeper you go into anything, if you are honest with yourself, the more you will realize you do not understand. The more you realize that you will never understand. Beware the self-appointed guru in all facets of life. Those who claim to know everything are the least likely to know much at all. Examine what you read. Examine what you think. Act with caution, and always in the interests of the Truth, where ever it may lead. And of course, always remember, if your pursuit of knowledge should lead you to a star-trekking Bigfoot that leaves no physical trace…well…that’s gonna be an uphill battle come publishing time.
