I often take for granted that there is something to be said about how we know things. For example:

In high school I took a class titled Theory of Knowledge that was a combination intro to philosophy course and applied epistemology workshop.
My friends are concerned with questions about how to ensure artificial intelligence learns human values and so want to understand how we learn values ourselves.
I am perhaps now among the ranks of existentialist philosophers of phenomenology.

So it’s probably unsurprising that I have spent a lot of time thinking about and trying to improve my ability to know.

One methodology I’ve found especially helpful has been what I, for a long time, thought of as literary criticism but for interpreting what people said as evidence about what they knew about reality. I first started doing this when reading self-help books. Many books in that genre contain plainly incorrect reasoning based on outdated psychology that has either been disproved or replaced by better models (cf. Jeffers, Branden, Carnegie, and even Covey). Despite this, self-help still helps people. To pick on Jeffers, she goes in hard for daily self-affirmation, but even ignoring concerns with this line of research raised by the replication crisis, evidence suggests it’s unlikely to help much toward her instrumental goal of habit formation. Yet she makes this error in the service of giving half of the best advice I know: feel the fear and do it anyway. The thesis that she is wrong because her methods are flawed contradicts the antithesis that she is right because her advice helps people, so the synthesis must lie in some perspective that permits her both to be wrong about the how and right about the what simultaneously.

My approach was to read her and other self-help more from the perspective of the author and the expected world-view of their readers than from my own. This lead me to realize that, lacking better information about how the human mind works but wanting to give reasons for the useful patterns they had found, self-help authors often engage in rationalization to fit current science to their conclusions. This doesn’t make their conclusions wrong, but it does hide their true reasoning which is often based more on capta than data and thus phenomenological rather than strictly scientific reasoning. But given that they and we live in an age of...