Epistemological Humility.  I’m Just Saying.

By Daniel Rigney

I’m from The Sixties. In the sixties we had catch phrases like “far out,” “outta sight,” “man,” and the timeless “dude.” Far east, man. Out of state, dude. These were the linguistic bell-bottoms of my generation.

From my kids (now in their twenties), I have come to learn and enjoy a more contemporary lexicon of casual catch phrases, including “I’m just saying” and  “But that’s just me.”

In my day, phrases like “far out” and “outta sight” signaled our awareness that reality is far more complex and bizarre  than we conceive, or can conceive, to paraphrase Albert Einstein. “Far out” and “outta sight” meant that we were experiencing personal and cultural changes  that couldn’t  be easily encoded in the conventional terms of the past. They were oustside  our common experience.  They were really out there. Far out.  Out of sight.

Today’s catch phrases, such as “I’m just saying” and “But that’s just me,” send a different but not opposing message. They acknowledge that we're culturally diverse in our interpretations of reality, and that none of us has the final understanding of things.  They express a kind of epistemological humility.*  None of us has the bizarre complexity of the universe all figured out, but at least we know we don’t know. Reality “is what it is” (to invoke another contemporary catch phrase), but what it is and what we think it is may be quite different, and we’re realizing this. We could be deeply mistaken about reality, and we probably are.

Could we be entering an age of epistemological humility?  “I’m just asking.”

“Does that make sense?”

Far out. Out of sight. I’m just saying.

But that’s just me.

 *Since inventing this term several minutes ago, I've done a scoop search and discovered that several previous phrasemakers have coined the term before I got to it. Just sayin'.