In the movie Stranger than Fiction, IRS auditor Harold Crick (Will Ferrell) is asked by university professor Jules Hilbert (Dustin Hoffman) what his favorite word is.
“Integer,” is the reply.
Now, that isn’t a bad choice for an accountant.
I’ve often thought about how I might answer that question; I believe what I’d say is “epistemology.” It is a word with such lyrical quality and, additionally, has great meaning to me as an academic. Epistemology is the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature and scope of knowledge, asking such questions, “what does it mean to know?”
Of course, one does not have to be an academic, scientist, or philosopher to love that word or be concerned with epistemological issues. How it is we know, how we come to know, and what we count as knowledge, are concepts everyone deals with in everyday life, in our ordinary and not-so-ordinary interactions with others.
Naturally, what we know, or think we do, bumps up against the elusive, oft-debated, and intellectually-and-emotionally-charged notions of “truth” and “reality.” What is true? What is real? … are questions we do not typically spend a lot of time thinking about, mostly because we tend to take a lot of things for granted. But our differing beliefs about what we know as true and real, as individuals, groups, organizations and nations, are the source of immense miscommunication, angst and conflict in the world. Perhaps we could and should spend a little more time paying attention to how it is we know what we know.
As I write this, I am in the midst of a gigantic inner struggle about the nature of reality: about what I think I know. Over the course of the last couple of weeks or so, a significant person in my life has expressed a worldview about our shared experience that is hugely at odds with my own. In fact, where once there was some sense of shared understanding, and a mission of mutual purpose, it all seems now to have been replaced with confusion, defensiveness, anger and distance.
Our versions of reality are, to me, incomprehensibly disparate. They are, perhaps, totally irreconcilable.
So, here I sit with my thoughts: about the nature of reality. And relationship.
Breathing in and out, in and out. Alone. Confused. Finding myself, once again, in the middle of a life that’s stranger than fiction.