10/4/2013 Welcome to the Satoyama of the Real

by Nathan Turowsky

     Epistemology is the branch of philosophy dealing with questions of how knowledge is acquired, identified, and justified, and hence the branch most closely appertaining to how one identifies what is or is not 'true' or 'real'. For most of us, this question comes up in daily life less frequently than one might expect, and when it does come up it is resolved through the notion that that which is observed or related on reliable authority is true insofar as it fits the manner in which we conduct our lives and solve our problems. Currently popular and dominant epistemologies in the West are for the most part either pragmatic in character or in some way reliant on a scientific episteme--the idea that science and the much-vaunted scientific method is, through some mechanism or other, the area of human inquiry to turn to for definition and delineation of truth and reality. It is of course taken for granted that something is either true or it is not, and it does not get truer or less true without some change in external circumstances equally ponderous and portentous as the change in truth-value.

     There are, however, certain areas of experience in which these kinds of models break down, one of which--the realm of religion and especially of folk religion and popular piety of the kind that has no real internally compelling reason to engage with or gauge itself against abstract philosophical concepts--becomes unusually salient in the Japanese village of Shingō. Shingō, a remote farming community in the mountains of Aomori Prefecture in the far north of Japan's largest island, claims to be the true burial site of Jesus Christ and has a detailed set of local stories and attractions expounding upon this. The Legend of Christ Museum, near the Grave of Christ in Christ Park, makes the arresting claim that 'the more times [the story as presented in the so-called Takenouchi Document] was repeated, the truer the contents became'. Obviously we cannot account for this sort of claim very easily in most epistemological models, mainly because it does not pass even the most cursory smell test--a professor of religion at Kyoto University has referred to the Legend of Christ as a prime example of 'fakelore', defined essentially as folklore that is transparently bullshit, and well may we say that it is transparently bullshit and does not present any real threat to conventional notions of truth. That does not, however, answer the question of why the people in charge of the museum--whose promotional literature seems to go back and forth between denial, scepticism, and belief sometimes within the same sentence--would choose to pursue this line in the first place.

     In this meeting, I hope to demonstrate that because of the somewhat circular nature of defining justification it is not nearly as easy to dismiss notions of truth based on consensus, repetition, belief, expectation, or desire as it may seem at first glance. We will also, to the extent possible, have a general overview of and debate on epistemological concepts, particularly that of the episteme and the idea of different types of institutionalised(as opposed to independent) structures of defining and storing truth and knowledge in different times and places. I hope to open a debate on whether or not independent apprehension of truth or reality is even possible, at least in a way that satisfies a demand for putative rigour and limitation to the natural universe.