Agnosticism and Ideology: A semi-technical microessay.
It has been my experience, after having practiced theological agnosticism for some time, that the application of agnosticism to epistemology in general can be extremely fruitful. Once it is understood that epistemic justification is merely grounds for making a commitment to a belief, the agnostic quickly apprehends that such a commitment is necessary only in those situations where it is called forth immediately, concomitant to some reflex action or some situation the outcome of which is important, but as yet undetermined. Even then – or so it seems to the epistemic agnostic – the commitment to belief can be released as soon and the immediate demand has exhausted itself.
Beliefs, like thoughts, come and go through a process which might be called “the stream of consciousness.” It is folly to think that we can predict the stream of consciousness; I have no idea what I will be thinking ten minutes from this moment.
However, beliefs differ from thoughts in the sense that we can cling to them like a drowning man to a life preserver; we can repeat them over and over until we become convinced that they are true. This is the process through which ideology is born, and ideology has been the source of every war, at least since the age of rule by “divine right” – which was also an ideology, but an ideology which was nearly universal.
Ideology defines the conditions of what will count as “true” or “false” or “meaningless”; in considerations of scientific method, ideology is manifest in what is referred to as “theory-laden observation,” and also as “the incommensurate-ability of communication between competing paradigms” [Kuhn et al]. However, even scientific paradigms are merely sub-ideologies in the overriding ideology of science itself. This is no less true, of course, of something like a “religious” world-view. It is pointless to concern ourselves about whatever “reality” or “truth” may lie beyond the reach of these ideologies, because without one ideology or another, we can neither speak nor think.
What Is and Isn’t an Agnostic ?
It follows, therefore, that even the epistemic agnostic must function within an ideology. What the epistemic agnostic does not understand, however, is why it is that she must be committed to a single ideology. Why just this one or that one or some other one – why only one? Why can’t the epistemic agnostic drift between them, examine them, come to appreciate how they work, what they can and cannot do, and flit between them like a firefly on a summer night as the need or the desire arises? Of course, the refusal to commit to a particular ideology does considerable violence to notions such as “truth” and “reality,” which are meaningful only within the context of some ideology or other.
An epistemic agnostic should not be confused with a skeptic, as least not in the traditional, philosophical sense of that term. A skeptic is someone who doubts, presumably in an effort to eliminate whatever is false and therefore – in some abstract, metaphysical sense – become closer to the truth. Nearer my God to thee.
An epistemic agnostic may use doubt as a tool, but her main task is translation between ideologies, in so far as this is possible. She remains epistemically non-committal, except in those cases where reflex or moral intuition might demand commitment; but even then, commitment is made on moral or practical or emotional grounds, not because it is epistemically, or know-ably, true.