My Epistemic CoordinatesDraft

Last updated April 2026

One of my recent hobbies is exploring reflexology therapy videos on YouTube. Reflexology is the practice of massaging specific areas of the hands, feet, and even ears that allegedly correspond to other parts of the body to support their healing and relaxation. It's inspired by traditional Chinese medicine and acupuncture, and was popularized in the 20th century by an American doctor who found that pressing on certain areas of the hands and feet produced an "anesthetic effect" elsewhere on the body. In reflexology, for example, the head is associated with the big toe on the foot and upper earlobe on the ear; if you're having a headache, those points are good to massage.

In these videos, the practitioner often counts off the points they're touching. "This is number 5, the pineal gland... number 28 here affects the upper body lymphatics." I inevitably end up searching the web for the maps and diagrams, and I'm always surprised by how complex and intricate these systems are.

Yet instinctually, I’m not sure I believe them.

I'm not alone. Skepticism toward reflexology and its blurry parent group of "holistic medicine" is common. We live in a world where the scientific method is the paramount process of proof, and most intelligent people reserve their trust for knowledge that has been empirically provided for. Logical positivists and many modern analytic philosophers concentrate their intellectual careers on this empiricist, verificationist epistemology or approach to knowledge. They write off frameworks outside of this as pseudoscientific.

Clearly, empirical understanding is an indispensable way to learn about our world. It's associated with "progress," and for good reason: empirical experiments bring us to outer space, cure diseases, and transform our collective quality of life. However, because of this narrative, scientism also monopolizes general intellectual culture and diminish the value of non-empirical knowledge.

This narrative overpermeates how we evaluate information daily, in large part due to mechanisms that make science-backed knowledge beneficial socially, politically, and economically. For example, institutional credentialization is necessary to gate the practice of science, but it delegitimatizes alternative ways of knowing things. Secondly, the palatability of crude verificationism (think: those videos that flatten the art and philosophy of science into a strict hierarchy of facts). When the common understanding is that only what is true is meaningful, frameworks outside of this are written off as pseudoscientific, which is synonymous with being a waste of time.

verificationism as a theory of meaning

In my own questions and confrontations, I've learned that I lean more into the pragmatism of ideas.

However, I've found that my belief or disbelief in these systems don't make the systems less meaningful to me. I don't think they're invalid or a waste of time. I find them fascinating to learn about. This is because through the massage, I can engage the imagination and practice my mind-body connection to the associated points. It’s not the validity of the actual system that matters but my ability to suspend my disbelief and channel what could be true.

USEFUL FICTION

"that painting is delicious. that painting is scrumptious"

I think part of it is that these frameworks do not own the fact that they are indeed fiction. They have an internal ruleset that argues for its existence self-reflexively. "The big toe is the head, and since this is true, the neck is the knuckle."

Everything is a kind of fiction. It's a kind of worldbuilding attempt, a naming of what could be true. What Paulo Freire would call naming the world.

I feel the same way about astrology: whether or not the actual science of the stars is true does not change how I find it useful as an interpretative tool for life and personality. Years ago when I first moved to Cleveland I earned my level 1 reiki certificate and my teacher claimed how important it was for her to lead with the science of reiki and proceeded to show us in our lecture images of human energy releasing off the skin; they were some kind of heat map I suppose, but I can’t remember. I remember thinking: this does not convince me more to take this class—and I think skeptics will be skeptics. I am a skeptic, but that doesn’t dampen my enjoyment and learning.

He has decorated my mental scaffolding with some very odd images over the years. One of those is an inescapable labyrinth, and it sticks in my mind as a great visual metaphor for my epistemology, my approach to knowledge. He has a short story, "The Count of Monte Cristo," which is a postmodern pastiche of the novel The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexander Dumas (a funny concept in itself, but this is besides the point). In it, he describes the challenge of Edmond Dantes, the protagonist who is imprisoned in the Chateau d'If. While his fellow prisoners physically chip away at the walls in search for hidden exits, Dantes ruminates on creating a perfect mental model of the fortress. He reasons that if he can find the difference between his imagined prison and the actual prison—where the overlay of his map diverges from reality—he then has the solution space for his escape. Calvino extrapolates this to the challenge of creative production, namely writing. He writes:

"The decisive difference between the two books -- sufficient to cause one to be defined as true and the other as false, even if they are identical -- lies entirely in the method. To plan a book -- or an escape -- the first thing to know is what to exclude.

1. imagination can be stretchy and wild
2. what may or may not be true

where the imagination works ahead of proof

An imagined totality, a composition of "what if?, once layered onto a reality, reveals differences that can be meaningful from a systemic vantage point. Those differences illuminate the possibility for development holistically, for the making of a world that acknowledges or affords or subsumes those differences as part of its natural reality. The imagined map delivers what could be—the horizon line for escape—and therefore curates the direction of thinking.

they made it up in their minds

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