Quote Originally Posted by BigDave View Post
"epistemologically modest"? Or do you mean the understanding and incorporation of the knowledge that one's knowledge, no matter how developed, is woefully incomplete.
Yes, that. It hadn't occurred to me that it could be an insult, but I see that. But, I wouldn't use the word "woefully". Rather I would say the knowledge possible to us is sufficient, but the areas of certain knowledge are far less extensive, and far more pragmatically rooted, than any classical Western thinker would have admitted. And, I would say that the "woe" we feel is rooted not in need, but in arrogance.

It's a concept I've been working with, as I've tried think about what sort of knowledge is actually possible, if one recognizes the problems that led to "epistemological despair" (post-modernism), and acknowledges the "epistemological hubris" of the past, in both modernist and theological rationalism. Ironically, some of this was fleshed out, in my mind, over the past 2 years, as my younger son and I have worked with a group of teen Burundian boys, via Scouts and church. The struggle to communicate with them effectively, given their limited English and my absent Kirundi and Swahili. More than that, their conceptual poverty -- an idea I never encountered before I met it in individuals -- has reshaped, in very substantial ways, the manner in which I think about communication, and understand literature from the past.

The concept is related to CS Lewis' Mere Christianity, in both derivation and content, though what CS Lewis himself said about such things was usually only implicit.

Still, this is massively OT. I will probably be opening, after the 4th, a access-by-request-only section of the forum in which such things will not be OT.