Friday Seminar Series: Truth and Belief, Part I

Dear Readers,

  Every Friday I write a piece that represents a "seminar" in my introductory Anachronism class, CHRN/AUG 100, to give you an idea of what our department does at the University.  This we

Image via Wikipedia

ek, I talk about the ideas of relative truth across different time streams, and how that affects both the episteme and techne of our work.

   Recently we've been working on the idea of different ways to connect the information obtained through Augury, but we haven't talked much about drawing conclusions.  The bottom line is this:  If you read a poem from Time Stream X, and that poem says that Anubis favored George W. Bush, which allowed him to win the War in Iraq, how much of that do you actually believe?  In that time stream, is there some prime arbiter named Anubis?  Did George W. Bush actually believe in him?  And was the War in Iraq won because of it?

  It can be quite challenging to separate the various reasons to believe something, and I do not believe that I can cover the entire topic in just one sitting.  There is a long history of philosophies of truth, many of which my colleague Professor Bacon is an expert on.  In our class, it is typically he who teaches this lecture, and I have to acknowledge Francis's help in writing this post.

  The best place to start is to look at the different sorts of information that one may obtain inside Augury data.  One I will call techne and the other episteme.  I am not using these words quite how your Ancient Greeks would have used them, however.

  When I look at a source, I think of the techne type of information to be day to day details about life in the time stream of origin.  As in, like the original definition of techne, I say this category contains the information on how one would go about the art of living and creating within the given time stream.  Until the recent attack on our University, I would have said that one could never really live in another time stream, but with the new technology we captured this may be possible.  At any rate, consider techne to be the kind of information that would help you write a tourist's guide to the time stream that you study.

  In the Anachronist's work, episteme refers to knowledge that a source expresses that betrays their physical and metaphysical understanding of their world.  Scientific texts, philosophical works, religious tomes, all of it is part of episteme, usually.  These pieces of information are vital to breathing life into a translation because they tell you the filter through which time stream contemps view their world.  Where the techne will give you the actual mechanical operations of a person, the epistemiological information tells you how they feel about it and what their worldview is; their inner struggle.  This is vital to writing an anachronistic narrative, just as technical information is vital to having a narrative to write.

  I will end here, since I wish to transition into this topic gracefully and none too quickly.  The story that I began this week will be concluded next week.  For those of you in this time stream who live in the United States, I hope you had a happy Thanksgiving and I hope to communicate with you again in the coming week.

  Always,

  Dr. John Skylar
  Chairman
  Department of Anachronism
  University of Constantinople