What does Plato has to do with Brexit? Everything.
According to the clever Greek philosopher, knowledge and critics are different.
Broadly speaking (I’m not good enough to do a Plato’s philosophy critic) knowledge is universal and should be achieved via inductive thinking. You can get it through logic and math because they have rules and principles that are always valid, no matter what.
By opposite, criticism is mostly reached through sense-perception.
However, when it comes to sense-perception, it can easily be influenced by so many variables that we can’t even image. To make it clear, let’s just think for a second about what the taste of a glass of delicious Italian Valpolicella red wine is after a rare-cooked steak compared to it after a sweet dessert. You may (should) have two complete different perceptions of the same wine.
This little and simple concept (that has been reviewed on the years, but that we can take as good for this purpose) works not only with wine tasting and other things, but also with thoughts and ideas.
As we said on my last post about society and how it influenced our vision of the world, we are constantly influenced by so many variables around us that most of the time we don’t even realise it.
And here is when Brexit gets in.
Why people voted leave? Why should they have voted remain?
Whatever the arguments are, fact and data based or just created to support a specific position (sophists have a long tradition in debates) people consider them according to their perception, and so, priorities.
With the media playing a megaphone role echoing our own ideas, everyone tends to get stuck with its position based on perceptions of what other with the same perceptions are saying and arguing.
So what should we have to do to be better people and try to pursuit a less perception-influenced vision of things?There are very different positions about it, but I’d like to give you my own view on it.
I think that the most important thing to do is, as always, doing the basics right.
In this case it means, be aware that we live in a perception-based world and that there is not right or wrong but just perceptions. We can have an argument that is more valid for the long run, but the priority of the long run is again a perception. We can say that collective is more important than individual but guess what, it is again the result of a perception.
So the outcome of this post is this: if you see yourself quite confident with a particular issue, while people around you (even one) don’t think in the same way, obligate yourself to understand what the perceptions that influence you and the others are.
We must not think that our sense-perception based ideas are timeless knowledge.
We are affected by time, society, and conceptual frame-works. We grew up in them, we give them for granted without even know how they influence us.
On the opposite, we must be doubtful about ideas and positions, and at the same time make other people doubtful about them. This is the only way to generate a constructive debate on a particular decision.
We don’t have knowledge about everything, we have perceptions.
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