Hello, my name is Brandon and I’ll be taking care of you here at the Bistro this evening. Thanks to Chef Robert for giving me this gig, and I hope I last long enough to earn my own doodle.

Ask me about our bottomless cup of despair. 

When I considered what to serve for my first post, the answer came to me quickly. It’s one of my favorite stories, involves a dear and sadly deceased friend, and teaches an important philosophical lesson about as memorably as one could hope. Unfortunately, the first title that occurred to me was “The Parable of the Panties,” which I thought might be working a little blue for my first shift, and could also lead to some amusingly disappointed Google searches. But the present title quickly took its place, so as soon as I locate the croutons and dribble a little balsamic vinegar on top, your appetizer will be right out.

Philosopher

My buddy Joseph Yeh died twelve years ago and I’m still mad about it. That’s not necessarily the most spiritual attitude to adopt, but most days I prefer it to my sadness over his loss. It was such an absurd way to go: jumping off a boat to take a swim, forgetting to set the anchor, and failing to make it to the nearest island after the boat blew away. After we heard the news, some of us took dark comfort in our realization that of all of our friends, Joe was easily the one most likely to fake his own death. Some days I honor Joe’s memory by imagining him somewhere in Central America, working undercover and waiting for the day he can step back into our lives right where he left off, starting by saying, “Funny story.” (In researching this story I learned that this fantasy is no longer operative.)

That would be the right way to begin, because Joe’s life was one funny story after another. He did not just tell them, he lived them. Many were merely delightful trifles. I’ll never forget wandering into the hall that held our college swimming pool and finding Joe and his friend Phil taking turns walking to the end of the diving board, delivering a rhyming couplet, then jumping in. After a minute or so of this I caught Joe’s eye. He just said, “Poetry in motion,” as if that explained everything, then dove in again. This sort of thing happened every day when that man was around.

Other stories had a deeper resonance. My favorite illustrates an important philosophical question: What counts as knowledge? One famous answer is that you know something when you have a justified true belief.

The main point of this definition is that it is not enough for your belief to be true for it to count as knowledge. You must also have adequate evidence. This is important because if this definition is right, then we know much less than we often say we know. We often use the phrase “I know” as if it were synonymous with “I’m positive.” But Philosophers would like you to keep in mind that your certainty is not in and of itself proof, even if it feels that way. (This is a good example of why Philosophers get invited to so few parties.) To test this definition we need an example – preferably a memorable one – featuring a true belief that seems to be justified but actually is not. That’s where Joe Yeh’s story comes in.

One year in graduate school Joe dated a woman I never had the opportunity to meet. Things became strained between them for a period without quite reaching the breaking point. During this time Joe had a brief affair. He felt bad about it, but apparently not bad enough to inform his girlfriend. Life went on as before, or so he thought.

Coincidentally, around the same time Joe helped organize and run a conference. Since the speakers were mostly other graduate students from out of town, the organizers all offered to provide them rooms if they had any available. Joe spent the night at his girlfriend’s, giving up his own bedroom for an incoming speaker who happened to be female. Later that week, Joe found a pair of women’s underwear in his room. It was the same brand and color that his girlfriend preferred, so he put it in the basket with other pieces of her laundry. Only much later would he find out that this underwear was not his girlfriend’s size.

Soon thereafter the semester ended and Joe and his girlfriend went their separate ways for the summer. She stayed with her family in the Seattle area, and shortly before the fall semester began Joe flew out for a visit. They got on a ferry to the island where her parents lived, at which point Joe’s girlfriend asked him if he had had an affair the previous spring. There was a brief pause during which Joe decided to confess. Before he could answer, however, she added that she knew he had because she had found the other woman’s underwear in her laundry pile at his place.

There are few prettier places in the world for an argument.

Joe laughed, which was the wrong reaction. Their relationship probably couldn’t have been salvaged at that point, as hinted at by the fact that his girlfriend waited until he had flown across the country and gotten on the ferry to her parent’s house before making her accusation. Still, if Joe had any chance of earning her forgiveness, he likely lost it with that laugh. But without defending any of his actions in this whole affair, I will say that I understand and sympathize with his laughter. Because you don’t expect your mate, in the process of charging you with having an affair, to present you with a classic philosophical conundrum. But that’s what happened.

I used to tell this story in my classes. There were usually a couple of people who couldn’t get past the word “panties,” which is one of the reasons I’ve largely avoided it here. But most others appreciated the problem. “Did she know he had an affair?” I would ask them. Almost without exception a majority would say, often fervently, that she did. She believed that he had an affair and he had, so that counted as knowledge. But the only proof she offered – or so Joe said in his anecdote, and so I assume for the sake of argument – was the pair of underwear that belonged to the graduate student speaker, with whom Joe did not have any inappropriate contact. Should we really count his girlfriend’s belief as knowledge, then?

Consider another example. As the cliché says, even a broken clock is right twice a day. But imagine that your clock is stuck on noon. A friend calls and asks you what time it is. You say that it’s noon, which in fact it is. Your friend says, “Are you sure?” You answer, “I know it is. I’m looking right at the clock.” Do you really know what time it was, or was that just a lucky guess?

Fall backward.

Or take the very different case of religious faith. Long ago I traveled to Philadelphia with a friend to stay with one of his friends, and we all met a young doctor who worked in an inner-city hospital that dealt with a high number of violent assaults. I remember him saying in a matter-of-fact tone that the area where he worked had a significantly higher homicide rate than Israel-Palestine, which in the early 90s was a striking claim. At some point after dinner the conversation took a philosophical turn when I wasn’t looking, and the doctor drew my attention when he suddenly beat his fist on the wooden table and shouted, “I know there’s a God.” It was a powerful claim, not least for the context he had developed all night with a stream of stories about the horrors he confronted every time he went to work. I remember the long drive back to Kentucky, looking out the window and wondering if that – whatever it had been – counted as knowledge, and if what that had been was conviction. (A couple of years later I would read the book On Certainty, which dealt with related issues in ways I found mesmerizing, which led me to declare Philosophy as my fourth and final major. But that’s another story.)

“Call me in the morning.”

Finally, imagine reversing the situation, so that instead of an unjustified true belief we’re dealing with a justified false belief. Supposedly, the Philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein attended a party one time.

Yes, I would love to hear more about your opinions.

I say supposedly, because it stretches credulity a bit already to imagine that cranky Viennese at any sort of social gathering, but let’s use our imaginations. Another attendee began ridiculing the pre-Copernicans who held the mistaken belief that the sun revolved around the earth rather than the other way around. “Wasn’t that positively stupid, thinking the sun went around the earth?” this man made the mistake of asking Wittgenstein, who replied with his standard icy stare, saying, “Yes. But I wonder what it would have looked like if it did.” Of course the sun would appear much the same in that case, like a golden chariot racing across the sky, and if the courses of the stars would seem different in a Ptolemaic universe, the alterations would be subtle enough to be missed even by most close observers. In other words, belief in geocentrism was justified by the available evidence. It merely had the misfortune of also being wrong, although it took Copernicus to prove it. So did the pre-Copernicans know that the sun revolved around the earth? It’s difficult to say that they did. But no more difficult than finding yourself accused by your girlfriend of cheating while taking a ferry across Puget Sound.

Who’s orbiting whom?

That’s today’s meal. If you saved room for desert, speak up and I’ll tell you about the time I recounted this story for a room full of police officers, who decided that the story was about me, not Joe, and refused to allow me to retract my “confession.” Thanks again to Robert for letting me serve you, and to Joseph Yeh for all the laughs and insights. Don’t forget to tip your wait staff, and please – don’t try the veal. Veal is evil.

Photo credits: N/A, Augusta Chronicle, Mark Parisi, N/A, Seattle’s Convention and Visitors Bureau, Salvador Dali, Titan, uncertain, Hameed at Deviant Art.