We have need of a supreme antidote to realism. "I am a rational person" — has a rational person ever believed this? Strictly rational or empirical theories of knowledge can’t even stand up to a laugh test.

And yet logic is all we have, and those who exalt revelation still ceaselessly try to rationalize what they claim is revealed. Man is not a rational animal so much as a rationalizing one https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1096449914790277120

At all times and in all places, a man says one thing and does another, his body is almost totally free of his mind's feeble machinations. https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1148682265393688576

Epistemology is the worst and dumbest form of philosophy. It’s founded on error, as with all philosophies, but epistemology’s great sin is to be boring on top of all that.

The error in the case of theories of knowledge is that Truth (capital T) exists "out there" when it really only exists 'in here", which isn’t to say that that it’s idiosyncratic to each person, but that it exists only and precisely at a human level of abstraction

When you attempt to zoom in or out on "The Truth", it seems to disappear, and because of this, idiots of all flavors conclude that truth or beauty or meaning or purpose don't exist

Don't believe the lies of anyone who claims to value knowledge "for its own sake". No one drinks from the cup of epistemology save to justify their Truth, but such justifications are always abortions, murdering that which they ought to deliver

All conundrums of epistemology stem from the failure to recognize the human mind as a knowledge machine. No one ever asks how a robot “justifies its truth”. It has sensors and they write to memory and an algorithmic model makes decisions using the data

The unlearned parts of the robot's executive function wholly determine the learned parts. Similarly, human knowledge accumulates in layers of culture and biology and is justified, not by logic, but by efficacy

The inner life of any one person begins and ends "in media res", which means "in the middle of things", which is why it's a fallacy to believe that Truth is contingent on argumentative justification

We'll come back to this in a moment. The question of how we know what we know dovetails nicely into a much more interesting question to me, which is the question of how we mean what we say.

We have seen how we made our descent into endlessly recursive irony, and how it was our undoing, because it set the stage for its antithesis, an even worse descent into endlessly maudlin sincerity https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1146881533724069888

But a common idea I see is that the discourse of the dissident right is "ironic" or perhaps "post-ironic". For example, does @owenbroadcast really think you should not eat tropical fruit? Calling this "new sincerity" is an outrage

So if the thesis is irony, and the antithesis is new sincerity, what is the synthesis? Recall the words of @bronzeagemantis: There is no irony here: I don’t do irony! Learn that I don’t understand the gay idea of “irony.”

Wat this mean?

Irony is finding a distance in a sign, it's when the signified contradicts the signifier, and it’s not merely insincerity; it's sabotage, it's lying to tell the truth. @TitaniaMcGrath is ironic, and it's a purely negative epistemology, an anti-knowledge

@robert_mariani explains post-irony: "Figuring out the intentions of the ironist is easy: whatever is being shown is being mocked. But the post-ironist folds over on his own sincerity with exaggeration, using the ironic...to enjoy the absurdities of what he genuinely appreciates”

This is good, but in fact the discursive method of the dissident right at its best is something beyond irony and sincerity. The answer lies in medieval hermeneutics

Dante wrote in his letter to Cangrande della Scala that his work should be interpreted as "polysemous" which means "in many senses", and he identified four possible readings of the Divine Comedy: literal, moral, anagogical, and allegorical

The literal reading of a text is just that; the moral reading pertains to a prescription for the reader; the anagogical reading pertains to prophecy, and in the allegorical reading, the signifiers point to metaphysical or spiritual truth

All of the nonliteral forms of reading may be called allegorical in a sense, and my contention to you is that the synthesis of irony and sincerity is allegory, in which signs contain distance (irony) and also intimacy (sincerity) in SIMULTANEITY https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1103346057142915072

The term "post-irony" is a clumsy attempt to grope for the concept of allegory. This concept is genuinely hard to understand; a capacity for polysemous reading is not the same as knowing the definition of polysemous reading

The allegorical style arose independently on 4chan in the discursive underworld of total anonymity, and it functions best in anonymity, and I note that medieval scribes also frequently shared fragments of text with no concern for attribution

We have lost many valuable treasures of the past; among them is the capacity for polysemous reading, a skill that we are slowly rediscovering, and a skill that I believe flourishes when we are unencumbered by the weight of our reputations

Allegorical reading requires a certain playfulness; one must sometimes distort the literal telling of an idea in order to approach its allgegorical content with the right gravity. To a "serious" person this seems ridiculous, to regard allegorical truth through the lense of jokes

Rather than persist in the folly of believing ourselves to be rational, can we formalize an honest theory of knowledge? Irony is of the brain; sincerity is of heart; ALLEGORY is of the STOMACH, and the stomach never lies. I call this gastro-epistemology.

Knowledge begins and ends "in the middle of things" and the knowledge of the stomach is precisely the knowledge of the middle.

To the foolish emanations of the brain, the stomach responds with emanations of its own. Nietzsche taught that man’s stomach prevents him from thinking himself a god

To the gastro-epistemologist, tastes that clash upon the tongue find their final destination is the same; this is the wisdom of simultaneity. Vexing puzzles of morality are dissolved in the stomach's acids, answering so many of life's moral quandaries with simple, honest disgust

One is exhorted often to overcome disgust for the sake of the moral intellect, so it becomes necessary to use allegory to express the truth. You can't reason your way out of nausea.