Epistemology

Epistemology — the theory of how a culture knows what it takes to be true — is the load-bearing concept of Amusing Ourselves To Death. Postman’s recurring frame is that “every epistemology is the epistemology of a stage of media development,” adapting Nietzsche: as a culture moves from orality to writing to printing to televising, “its ideas of truth move with it.” Truth, on this view, is “a product of a conversation man has with himself about and through the techniques of communication he has invented.”

The book is explicitly non-relativist about this. Postman states he believes “the epistemology created by television not only is inferior to a print-based epistemology but is dangerous and absurdist,” and calls television “the command center of the new epistemology” — shaping all public understanding of politics, news, religion, and science through the biases of entertainment. The print-based “Empire of Reason” of the Lincoln-Douglas era is set against the new visual epistemology inaugurated by the photograph and telegraph, which displaces typography’s way of knowing.

Context: Epistemology is the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature, sources, and limits of knowledge — what counts as justified belief and how we can know anything at all. Postman’s media-ecology argument repurposes it to claim that the dominant communication technology of an age sets the terms for what that age accepts as “truth.”

Where this appears

• Amusing Ourselves To Death — the book’s central thesis: each medium (oral, print, television) carries its own epistemology, and television’s is hostile to rational discourse.