Humans have suffered three thousand years of philosophy now, and it’s time we took stock.
Explanations. A successful explanation decomposes a complex question into its constituent parts. You ask why blood is bright red in the air and the arteries and darker red in the veins. I tell you that arterial blood has more oxygen, which it collects from the lungs and carries it to the heart, than venous blood, which does the opposite circuit. Then I tell you that blood contains iron, which bonds to oxygen to form oxyhaemoglobin, which is bright red. I can demonstrate by experiment that these are facts. I have offered a successful explanation.
Of course it is incomplete. I haven’t told you how I know the blood circulates, what oxygen is, how chemical bonding works, or what makes red red. But I could tell you all of these things, and even if I don’t you know more about blood than you did when we started.
The explanation succeeds largely because the question is worth asking. You notice an apparently strange fact that you do not understand. You investigate, and if you are lucky and intelligent, maybe you get somewhere. Philosophers, by contrast, when they sit down to philosophize, forget, as a point of honor, everything they know. They begin with pseudo-questions like “Do I exist?” (Descartes) or “Does the external world exist?” (Berkeley and his innumerable successors), the answers to which no sane person, including Descartes and Berkeley, has never seriously doubted. Kant, the great name in modern philosophy, is the great master of the showboating pseudo-question. The one certainty about questions like “how is space possible?”, “how are synthetic judgments possible a priori?”, and, my favorite, “how is nature possible?,” is that you will learn nothing by asking them, no matter how they are answered. Kant rarely bothers to answer them and such answers as he gives are impossible to remember in any case.
Explanations would seem to be philosophy’s best hope, but its track record is dismal. There has been the occasional lucky guess. Democritus held, correctly, that the world was made up of atoms. Now suppose you had inquired of Democritus what the world-stuff was, and he told you “atoms.” Would you be enlightened? In any case he couldn’t prove his guess, or support it, or follow it up in any way. Atoms had to wait 2500 years for Rutherford and modern physics to put them to good use. If you asked Parmenides how a thing can change and remain the same thing, he would have told you that nothing changes. It’s an explanation of a sort. But would you have gone away happy? Grade: Two C’s, two D’s, and an F. Congratulations Kroger, you’re at the top of the Delta pledge class.
Predictions. To be fair, predictions have been the Achilles’ heel of many more reputable disciplines than philosophy, like economics. Human beings have a nasty habit of not doing what the models say they should, and most philosophers retain enough sense of self-preservation to shy away from prediction whenever possible. Still, a few of the less judicious philosophers of history, like Plato, Spengler, and Marx, have taken the plunge. Spenglerian cycles of history take a couple thousand years to check out, fortunately for Spengler, but Plato’s prediction of eternal decline and Marx’s of advanced capitalism preceding communism were — how shall i put this politely? — howlingly wrong. The very belief that history has a direction is a prime piece of foolishness in its own right.
Brute matter is more tractable. Einstein’s equation for the precession of the perihelion of Mercury, which Newtonian mechanics could not explain, is a classical instance of a successful prediction. Although the precession was a matter of a lousy 40 seconds of arc per century, Einstein wrote Eddington that he was prepared to give up on relativity if his equation failed to account for it. Ever met a philosopher willing to throw over a theory of his in the face of an inconvenient fact? Me neither. Grade: No grade point average. All courses incomplete.
Tools. OK, there’s propositional logic, for which Aristotle receives due credit. But really that’s more mathematics than philosophy, Aristotle’s version of it was incomplete, and it took mathematicians, like Boole and Frege, to make a proper algebra of it and tighten it up. With this one shining exception philosophy has been a dead loss in the tools department. Probably its most famous contribution is Karl Popper’s theory of falsifiability, which turns real science exactly on its head. Where real science verifies theories, Popper falsifies them. Most of us consider “irrefutability” (not “untestability,” which is a different affair) a virtue in a scientific theory. For Popper it is a vice. Mathematics, which is obviously not “falsifiable” and equally obviously “irrefutable,” supremely embarrasses Popper’s philosophy of science, and Popper takes the customary philosophic approach of never mentioning it.
Far from supplying us with tools, philosophers have taken every opportunity to disparage the ones we’re born with. According to Berkeley things do not exist outside of our mind because we cannot think of such things without having them in mind. According to Kant we are ignorant because we have senses. I cite these arguments not because they are bad, which they are, but because they are the most influential arguments in modern philosophy.
To modern philosophy in particular also belongs the unique distinction of making the ad hominem respectable. According to Marx we reason badly about economics because we are bourgeois. According to the deconstructionists we are racist, being white; sexist, being male; and speciesist, being homo sapiens. Grade: Fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life, son.
Advice. Moral advice from philosophers divides into two categories, the anodyne and the dangerous. Under the anodyne begin with Plato and “know thyself,” which is to advice what “nothing changes” is to explanation. Kant recommends that we treat our neighbor as we ourselves would be treated, which works well provided our neighbor is exactly like us, and sheds little light on the question of how we would wish to be treated, and why. Rand counsels “rational self-interest,” which might be helpful if she told us what was rational, or what was self-interested.
Under dangerous file Nietzsche’s “will to power,” just what a growing boy needs to hear. (Yes, he is tragically misinterpreted, and no, it doesn’t matter.) But utilitarianism, “the greatest good for the greatest number,” with its utter disregard for the individual, is the real menace. Occasionally some poor deranged soul actually tries to follow it, with predictable consequences. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the consistent utilitarian, the unblushing advocate of infanticide and cripple-killing, Mr. Peter Singer. The sad fact is that your moral intuition, imperfect though it is, gives you better advice than any moral philosophers have to date. G.E. Moore, confronted with this fact, responded with “the naturalistic fallacy,” from which it follows that the way we do behave has nothing to do with the way we should behave. Well George, natural selection, which largely governs our behavior, has seen us through for quite a long time now, which is more than I can say for moral philosophy. Grade: Zero point zero.
One loose index of the value of a discipline is whether it helped humanity out of the cave. Mathematicians, scientists, engineers, and even a few economists have all made their contributions. As for philosophy — we programmers have a term to characterize a programmer without whom, even if he were paid nothing, the project would be better off. The term is “net negative.”
Is it too late to start over? Tomorrow we will consider a better approach.
(Update: Bill Kaplan notes in the comments that I had the Einstein-Eddington story backwards, which reflects no credit on Einstein but, alas, none on the philosophers either. Umbrae Canarum comments. Colby Cosh wittily points up my debt to David Stove, to whom I owe some, though not more than 95%, of the argument. The original draft contained an acknowledgement of Stove, which was inadvertently omitted in the final version thanks to a transcription error by one of my research assistants. I recommend Stove’s The Plato Cult to anyone with even a mild interest in the topic. You skinflints can find a few of his greatest hits here. Ilia Tulchinsky comments. Jesus von Einstein comments. Ray Davis comments.)
1. People used Aristotle’s logic in perfectly productive ways (even Aristotle) long before mathematicians "tightened it up," my friend. That milestone was comparatively negligible and inevitable. Ask the Alexandrian scientistis of Hellenism, or Maimonides, or Aquinas, or even Galileo (who nominally hated him, but, as Professor Randall showed, used him mercilessly.) To give credit where it is due, I doubt the West would have advanced into (and from) the Renaissance without philosophy, specifically, Aristotle’s.
2. A philosopher much impressed with Aristotle’s empirical epistemology and focus on human nature, and who used these elements to great effect was John Locke. He had a little bit of a benevolent influence on history, too.
3. Nietzsche was a dangerous madman, sure, but his critique of altruism and Christianity will last the Ages.
4. Rand gave to ethics all of the substance that I for one need in my day-to-day life, thank you very much. To the extent that I recognize both the "rational" and the "self-interested," it is largely because of her guidance, thank you very much, once more. I see my self-interest in abstract (and rational) notions like "rights" only because of her. Perhaps you see it differently, but your shallow dismissal of her thought is worthy of an equally shallow dismissal, so I’ll stop.
One more thing: You "dis" other real achievements, too. True, Democritus did not find the ultimate constituents of matter (any more than our recent friends the quantum mechanics have), but he did prove, and PROVE, mind you, that the entities we see are comprised of smaller particles. His arguments for this were perfectly sound, even if materialism is not.
Godel struck the crucial blow for philosophy grounded in purely intellectual reasoning. Any such construct, no matter how carefully assembled, will be incomplete.
To have any chance at success, a world view must make claims that can be empirically corroborated. A complete attempt at explanatory power must be
– corroborative
– prescriptive
– predictive
– descriptive
This is not to say that purely intellectual efforts have been completely without merit. However, the approach relies too heavily on appeals to motives in place of the support of evidence.
Too often, philosophies concentrate on descriptive and prescriptive issues. Sure, we can adopt them as our own and even benefit from their insights and occassionally be right, but without explanatory power, we are left with our emotions, taste and fashion to guide us. Who is better at deceiving us than ourselves?
So you think philosophy has failed?
You got that idea from Hume, didn’t you?
Nice play on words of Boethius though.
Before using a term like ‘fail’ we need criteria.
Godel proved that the philosophies mentioned above can never succeed in creating a coherent world view.
Perhaps Hume made a case as strong as Godel’s but it was more likely an appeal to motive than a justification based on evidence. Further, there are equally compelling philosophers making the counterargument leaving us again at the whims of our tastes and fashion.
A reference to Hume’s position on the matter would be helpful.
As I understand it (IANAP), Thomas Aquinas is an exception to two of your assertions. His philosophy takes the physical world as a given; far from forgetting all he knows when he starts, he relies upon it. And as I understand him, when confronted with an inconvenient fact he’d have felt compelled to change his views.
Thanks, Will. St. Tom learned this sort of reasonableness from The Philosopher himself.
Mr. Bourbaki:
Hume’s life is evidence of his attitude toward philosophy. He was a noted philosopher in his time yet quit to do something useful, like write history.
Moreover, your statement,"Godel proved that the philosophies mentioned above can never succeed in creating a coherent world view"
wildly expands Godel’s argument. Godel merely proved that any axiomatic logical system must produce propositions that are undecidable. It was the undoing of Hilbert’s program and Russell and Whitehead’s work, but not of philosophy per se.
Aaron:
"Einstein wrote Eddington that he was prepared to give up on relativity if his equation failed to account for it. Ever met a philosopher willing to throw over a theory of his in the face of an inconvenient fact?"
Remember, however, that Einstein said that if Eddington’s expedition had not found light had been bent, that Eddington’s findings would be in error, not the theory. So much for Einstein’s willingness to discard theory in light of an inconvenient fact.
My defense of Popper will be forthcoming.
Aaron,
You sell philosophy far too short. The reason is that when philosophy makes real progress it tends to spawn a new field and we forget the genesis. Examples:
Mathematics was part of philosophy for, arguably, all of the classic era. Certainly Theodorus was a philosopher, and I believe Eudoxus and Archimedes were also so considered. I would be hard to find a mathematician who would deny he was a philosopher before Leonardo of Pisa (I can’t spell Fibionacci) in the thirteenth century.
Physics was also a part of philosophy (there can be no question about Aristotle) through the Greek era and at least until Galileo.
Logic was a part of philosophy when I was a student. Boole, probably, and Frege certainly were philosophers. Kripke, who, in my view, put modal logic on a firm mathematical footing in the early sixties, was and is a philosopher.
My candidate for the next field to split from philosophy and take its own independent place is philosophy of mind. Congnitive science (I know, if it calls itself a science it isn’t.) has already, in my view, made the conventional philosophy of mind that I learned completely obsolete.
I believe most scientists, when they think about philosophy of science at all, identify themselves as Popperians. Certainly almost all hold that any scientific theory, no matter how well established, is only tentative. Calling a theory unfalsifiable is the strongest sort of criticism, e.g. Freudian psychology. "Unfalsifiable" is the most severe charge currently being made against M-theory (string theory.) If "irrefutable," as you use it, means anything like unfalsifiable, then it is exactly what one doesn’t want in a theory. If "irrefutable" means just "not refuted yet" then it is a very strange choice of words.
Mr. Bourbaki (first name Nicholas?),
Godel proved that any consistent recursively axiomatisable logical system which contains arithmetic admits of non-isomorphic models, and so there must be a well-formed sentence such that neither it nor its contradiction is a theorem. The philosophical consequences of this theorem are much debated, but Godel and I have failed to come up with any.
Mr Kaplan:
What are philosophies but axiomatic systems?
How do they avoid Russell’s fate?
To be more precise, I was describing the consequence of Godel, not the actual wording of the proof. How are you delineating where Godel may be applied and how has that boundry been "wildly" expanded?
Mr. Aaron’s father
I can’t speak for Godel and, unfortunately, given his fear of being poisoned, he did not have all of his years to speak for himself.
As I see it, the upshot of his proof is that internally consistent axiomatic systems can never carry the day.
They must be compared in their ability to reconcile empirical consequences.
String theory will be relegated to philosophy until it is capable of making testable predictions that have greater explanatory power than that of the standard model.
"Godel’s great stroke of genius–as readers of Nagel and Newman will see–was to realize that numbers are a universal medium for the embedding of patterns of any sort, and that for that reason, statements seemingly about numbers alone can in fact encode statements about other universes of discourse. In other words, Godel saw beyond the surface level of number theory, realizing that numbers could represent any kind of structure"
–Douglas Hofstadter
(who might be able to speak for Godel)
The writer seems to be confusing actual philosophy with "the academics"… If he is interested in applicable philosophy, he should read, for example, Von Mises, who did a very good job integrating ethics with economics.
Oh, and I second the comments about Aristotle, Locke, Nietzsche and Rand.
I’m a pretty big philosophy skeptic generally, but I’m just amazed at what I’ve seen here. Anyone who claims falsifiability turns real science on its head must have a pretty bizarre understanding of the scientific method. As I suspected from the long hiatus, Aaron has been killed and now his body and his blog is being used by the pod people.
Mr. Bourbaki:
Except for Spinoza, Leibniz and Wittgenstein I cannot think of another philosopher that does create an entire system with explicit axioms. Godel’s proof is therefore of limited applicability.
Since others have defended Popper I’ll just add the following: One should read a Richard Dawkiins book with falisibility in mind. When Dawkins says something like, "The fossil record is incomplete, but Darwin has taught us…" one begins to question whether Darwinism is not science, but rather plausible religion.
"Know thyself" has quite a bit more to recommend it than you suggest. Wisdom doesn’t begin from scratch. We begin by trying to become self-conscious of what we understand the world to be. If we accomplish that, then we can ask if this understanding holds up to scrutiny.
To take Democritus, for example, there are two basic issues. First, is the world fundamentally continuous or discrete? Second, is it fundamentally mechanical or organic? Before we have a full-blown theory to answer such questions, we have opinions, some of which are inconsistent. Self-knowledge helps us to find the right questions and directs us towards the evidence that we have been using to draw a conclusion.
Mr. Kaplan:
With neither the discipline of axiomatic logic nor the corroboration of empiricism you’ve relegated the rest of philosophy to the Ebert & Roeper’s of reality–critics that make it up as they go along.
That’s an even less flattering picture than the one Aaron painted. What tools do the rest use to guide their enquiry and where may I fetch a good price for my excess chicken entrails and coffee grinds?
I am curious. Those of you who are disagreeing with Bourbaki, to what philosophical system or set of coherent ideas in philosophy can you point that satisifies his defintion for epistemic usefulness (and perhaps epistemic certainty) of corroboration, prescription, prediction and description? Is there, for example, a *single* moral philosophy that can satisfy these without eventually relying on intuition or the eventual brute assertion of first principle which must be accepted. In other words is there a moral philosophy that satisfies CPPD?
As far as philosophy, physics and mathematics being cross-disciplines, this strikes me as somewhat misleading. Did the great ancient Greek philosophers et al make strides in and examine physics and mathematics – yes. Is there crossover of interest in the fields today? Naturally there are philosophical questions that are asked in physics and discoveries in physics that impact what questions in philosophy make sense to even ask. But if it comes to discovery, to getting at the truth of things I’ll take Planck, and Maxwell and leave Kantian metaphysics for those interested in the history of philosophy. Philosophy does not satisfy CPPD and when it does it is because it has employed the tools and discoveries of fields that do, such as, once again, physics and mathematics. If these discoveries were done by philosophers they were either far afield of the modern meaning of the term or were characterized as such as that was was the title given to all who sought such answers and performed such investigation.
Which incidentally is fine by me. Satisfy CPPD and I don’t care where you came from or what your stated profession is.
To the Popper people: Sir Karl chose virtually every example of a "falsifiable" theory from the history of physics, which makes him popular with the physicists. But there are other sciences undreamt of in Popperian philosophy. How would one "falsify" the theorems of plane geometry? How would one falsify a perfectly respectable scientific statement like "all men are mortal"? How would one falsify the explanation I gave of why venous blood is dark red? Since Popperism retains adherents in spite of these counter-examples, I reluctantly conclude that the statement "all scientific theories are falsifiable" is not falsifiable. ("Irrefutable," incidentally, as a term of condemnation, is his word, not mine.)
To the historians: It is true that "philosophy" used to subsume mathematics and what passed for natural science. For the past three hundred years or so it has referred mostly to metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and aesthetics, and this is how I use the term. If you wish to substitute those disciplines for "philosophy" throughout, that’s OK with me.
To the Aristotelians: Everything in Aristotle’s science is wrong, interestingly not because he was anti-empirical quite the contrary but because mere observation, in physics especially, is likely to mislead. There is a plausible argument that his authority held the Scientific Revolution back a century or so. Under the heading of anodyne moral philosophy I could certainly have included his "golden mean" were it not for space constraints. Formal logic is one of the great achievements of the race, but I credited him with that already.
As for his disciple, the angelologist Aquinas, his careful observation of the world just happened to lead him to conclusions identical with Catholic doctrine. Funny how that works.
I never worked seriously at a job until I read Atlas Shrugged, and for that I will always owe Ayn Rand. She preaches honest work, and "rights," as Jim Valliant points out, by which he means that one ought not to steal from people or punch them in the mouth, and I agree. But really, is this anything you couldn’t have gleaned from your grandmother?
Eddie Thomas puts in a good word for Plato and "know thyself." OK, we have to know what we believe before we can test it. But testing it what counts. Savages have quite a good idea what they believe: they believe in voodoo, and tree gods, and magic sticks. Has this self-knowledge got them out of the jungle?
Finally, people who, like Jim, believe Democritus "proved" the existence of atoms ought to acquaint themselves with the standard model of quantum physics, which, for all its difficulties, is far and away the most accurate predictive model of the physical world ever devised. Rutherford’s alpha scattering experiment explained more about the nature of matter than all Greek philosophers put together.
May I suggest to those that want to take stabs at the weak spots of modern physics or genetics by labeling theories in these fields "religious" to perhaps cite something specific?
Knowledge has value in a specific context. Change that context and the knowledge may no longer be true. The context of a billiard ball collision is accessible to us. The context of a black hole event horizon or an electron–not so much. But we can build tools to get us closer.
Forgetting pop references to Dawkins for the moment, is there any specific assertion of modern genetics that seems to require faith and suspension of investigation?
Forgetting all that we’ve learned from the standard model, does our inability to explain everything in every context, including the core of a black hole, point to a failing in the process or simply to more miles on the journey?
Since when did omniscience become a standard by which to measure world views? And since when did our incredulity qualify as counterargument?
"…How would one falsify a perfectly respectable scientific statement like ‘all men are mortal’?"
By producing one who wasn’t?
"By producing one who wasn’t?"
-Colby Cosh
Ha, that was what I was going to say.
And yeah, maybe you just chose bad examples, but everything you suggested could have different explanations which can indeed be falsified.
There are certain things which are ill-suited to that modus operandi, but off-hand all of the examples I can think of are pseudo-questions like "Do I exist?" or "Does Mathematics exist?", the class of which we had already thrown out, as I understood it.
Aaron,
I await your next installment with interest. I am particularly interested to see if you can defend an alternative to philosophy without making use of philosophical argument yourself.
And for those of you with your favorite epistemic methods, CPPD or otherwise, I ask you what kind of defense you can offer for your method. The method gives a standard for what counts as knowledge, but what validates the method? Surely it cannot be the grounds for itelf. Every method therefore depends upon unmethodical reasoning.
We have ways of doing things and thinking about things, and then moments where we call those ways into question. I would hope that we could all agree that these questions are important. The history of philosophy may have its embarrassments, but the history of people who think they have the one sure-fire way of finding the truth is even more embarrassing yet.
Mr. Bourbaki:
"With neither the discipline of axiomatic logic nor the corroboration of empiricism you’ve relegated the rest of philosophy to the Ebert & Roeper’s of reality–critics that make it up as they go along."
You would be correct if these were the two choices available, but they are not. Most good philosophy is a stew of perception, logic, intuition and genius.
At the moment, my favorite philosopher is John Bell (yes, he is fundamentally a philosopher, not a physicist). In case you don’t know, he created a mathematical method of determining which of two opposing world-views of quantum mechanics, EPR or the Copenhagen Interpretation was justified. To me, this is a towering triumph of thought. It is neither axiomatic, although its assumptions are open to review, nor entirely empirical. It is really quantitative philosophy. I highly recommend the link below.
http://olympus.het.brown.edu/~danieldf/papels/physics/dbjbp.pdf.
Mr. Thomas:
The only way I know to expose those who believe they have a sure fire way of finding truths is to demand explanatory power from their techniques. What new capabilities does this new world view afford us that was beyond our reach previously?
If our previous limits of explanation have been surpassed, I am sure you will demand a *description* of how they were exceeded and a *prescription* of how to *corroborate* the *predicted* results.
For example, at the quantum level, where people enjoy pointing out randomness and unpredictabilty, certainty does exist in the form of weak solutions i.e. solutions expressed as probability distribution functions.
generalized functions [mathworld.com]
So although Heisenberg places limits on our ability to transfer the context of billiard balls to quantum scales, our measurements of the distribution function are extremely accurate and reproducible.
Mr. Kaplan:
Your colorful description of Mr. Bell’s stew leaves me hungry.
Let’s remove your inclusion of logic and perception because you assert there is something more than that.
We’re left with intuition and genius. These are too qualitative for my tastes as justification for an idea. Note, I am making no comment on the ingredients of creativity–only their product.
And although I do not want to discourage Mr. Bell’s efforts, unless he can provide CPPD, his musings, like much of philosophy, are best left off the menu.
(BTW, I can not comment on the article due to a broken link.)
When you two wiseguys produce an immortal man, how will you know?
And do I really have to explain the difference between "does mathematics exist?" and "could one falsify the proposition that the angles of a triangle sum to 180 degrees?"
"And do I really have to explain the difference between "does mathematics exist?" and "could one falsify the proposition that the angles of a triangle sum to 180 degrees?""
If you don’t mind, I would like you to do so more thoroughly.
Asking for alternatives to the proposition now after the proofs have been conducted seems to be nothing more than word games to me. What is in question here? The definition of triangle, the definition of degrees?
Obviously that the interior angles of three end-point connected lines (a triangle) must form angles totalling 180 degrees is a tautology to us now.
At the time of that proposition it was not, however, since we are not omniscient and we do not immediately know all information that follows from fundamental assumptions. That we may know in retrospect that the alternatives we considered were impossible, does that mean that we knew in foresight the conclusion? If so, I congratulate you on your apotheosis.
Mr. (.)
I fail to see the point in attempting to treat everything as though we just emerged from the cave, ignorant of all that we’ve learned since then. Some concepts are fundamental and will not lend themselves to further subdivision.
Without history or tools to help us, we resort to wild guesses and sometimes we are right.
Of course there was a time when the concept of a triangle was beyond us. But we’ve made a great deal of progress since then.
Has philosophy?
Aaron,
I have produced several immortal men, but they have all died on me.
Aaron,
You attack Aristotle’s science when I thought that the only science in question here was philosophy. Nice switcheroo, but it reflects the damaging influence of your Dad (see below). Your dusty cliches about Aristotle "holding back science" are best left to Francis Bacon and Galileo who have long since been refuted on that score… Whatever his errors, Aristotle’s science is not ALL wrong and I urge you to consider the work of Gotthelf, among many, many others. Galileo got his method straight from the Master via Padua, etc. Do you recall what Darwin thought of Aristotle? Do you recall how the Christians and Platonists misread him? I’d like to see how (and if) science could have ever developed at all without the ideas of Aristotle. Someone would have had to do what he did, or no dice… As for Democritus, did I say that he had the definitive understanding of the atom? Even close? He still proved the existence of smaller component particles to observed matter, which is all I said. On that, he was as conclusive as that proof needs to be, and one certainly does not need advanced models of the quantum realm to get there. If one did, no one would ever come to know anything about the very small!! Geesh! Dad’s damaging effect is widespread, isn’t it? Well, back to the subject, philosophy.
Philosophy IS a big ole waste of time unless it is addressing the basic (and genuine) issues of life on earth. (Godel is not even close.)
Dad,
Gee, with friends like you, philosophy needs no enemies, does it? Philosophy isn’t the primitive form of everything else. Ethics and the basic questions of epistemology (and political philosophy and esthetics) are distinct disciples and will always be. We have made distinct advances in ethics, for example, the rules against murder, the development of the concept of rights, etc. We may still be in a primitive state, as we are, but it is a valid science that doesn’t use numbers, believe it or not.
The higher order conclusions of mathematics and science completely rely on the truth of the more basic field of epistemology–not vice versa. Nothing in quantum mechanics can have any bearing on basic questions of human knowledge, for example, without trashing the very premises that make quantum mechanics possible or even definable. Advanced math could never get off of the ground, its premises could never even form a comprehensible question, unless some basic truths are already in place. Those truths are logically prior to any advanced science of any kind.
People really do need philosophy and they even use it on a daily basis in a wide array of ways, including forming the basic premises of science and deciding upon basic values. If these issues can never be properly resolved, then there is no such subject-matter as math, no subject as physics, etc., etc.
Aaron,
Reducing Rand’s ethics to what "grandma taught" us is beneath you. You are simply not that stupid, I refuse to believe it! Grandma could not convince me why murder is not in my self-interest, or why and under what circumstances it is o.k. to kill. Grandma, at least mine, had me reading the Bible, becoming an intrincist (i.e., dropping context as is so common in ethical questions, even with philosophers), mired in a theory-practice dichotomy, etc., and she left me with a stew of ethical problems Rand ALONE was able to solve for me. Why should I adhere to prinicple? Why should I even bother with ethics? What is the fact-basis for value questions, indeed, for the concept of "value"? (And about a gazillion more little questions like that.) These are the kind of issues that grandma left me with and which no philosopher before Rand solved to my satisfaction. (And which most "philosophers" today do not even consider.)
You really didn’t ever "get" Rand, did you? But did you ever really read her? I wonder now…
We are all guilty of intellectual parlor tricks from time to time. But, as I mentioned above, we’ve learned a little from the various successes and failures of the past and have managed to make great progress in areas where we’ve established some core principles and discipline.
Physics and mathematics have flourished under the constraint of unifying principles. And yes, I believe physical laws are honored even without our conscious consideration of them. Chemistry benefited greatly from the unifying work of Mendeleev. Biology has advanced under the principle of natural selection and genetics. Even economics, the butt of countless jokes, has its time value of money and some very useful applications of modern probability via quantitative finance.
An artist’s aphorism asserts, "Form is liberating."
The worst buildings, movies and engineering projects are those whose budget was too great for the purpose to be served. In philosophy, the generality of statements (see above), the preoccupation with personalities over principles, and the preponderance of 50 cent words leaves me with the impression that modern philosophers haven’t lived up to the enormous potential promised by their progenitors.
The work is important–I’m just not convinced that fashion, emotion and taste haven’t been substituted for progress and CPPD scrutiny.
Mr. Bourbaki,
Was my last comment "the above" you refer to as a "generality"?
Our host’s assertion was the unfair "generality" about Rand’s whole philosophy, not my short-hand reaction to it, don’t you think? It was he who was doing the unfair hit-and-run, no?
I was merely listing a few of the things that he overlooked. I would not regard my comments as demonstrating anything to anybody, just reminding someone I thought knew better. Maybe I’m wrong.
50 cent words are always to be distrusted and the "unifying principles" of a subject are always the goal. But real world problems and applications remain the essence of philosophy and are never a "parlor game."
Making sure that we don’t destroy the actual meaning of the words we depend upon is also not a parlor game. No, it’s allowing our concepts to be "stolen" that is the game. I refuse to play it.
Bourbaki, I’m not sure what you’re on about. I agree with (or seem to agree with) you.
That the interior angles of a triangle sum to 180 degrees is not an immediately apparent property of a triangle. I think it’s important to acknowledge that it’s not when discussing the methodology of arriving at the conclusion [that all IA sum to 180].
Mr. Valliant:
Just as important as having ideas is being able to throw them away.
For starters, perhaps you might specify these truths of epistemology upon which everything rests? My impression is that these truths are consequences of corroborated observation, not deep philosophical thought.
Ak posed some ideas and Mir agreed. Until one day when Nog asserted otherwise due to conflicting *evidence*. Back to the cave wall or off to kill Nog.
Further, could you demonstrate or point us to a specific exercise in Rand’s philosophy that escapes the consequences of Godel?
I can not even conceive of how one would carry out such an exercise without bridging assertions to conclusions using logical reasoning but I humbly admit that my mind can only follow pedestrian paths.
Mr. Bourbaki,
I am curious as to your CPPD.
First, how did you validate and/or arrive at this as your criteria? What are they ‘criteria’ for: truth, knowledge, or what? Absent ‘strict CPPD scrutiny,’ as you put it, what is the status of our simple knowledge like, ‘there is a table here.’ That doesn’t seem to need your CPPD anymore than direct sense-perception does. When is it really necessary and why?
To be valid, must all knowledge be ‘predictive’? If so, doesn’t that assume that everything is predictable? Same with ‘prescriptiveness,’ do we need to know the policy-implications of an item of knowledge before we are certain of its truth?
You don’t take this as the standard of truth, do you? If so, aren’t some "meta" principles needed to tell me when I have sufficiently ‘corroborated’ something or even adequately ‘described’ it?
Let’s push it back further: what constitutes ‘corroboration’ of something in the first place?
Where can I repair to get these answers?
Mr. Valliant:
On a side note, apologies. When I said see above, I meant everything rather than your specific contribution.
Sorry about that.
Mr. B.,
‘Deep philosophical thought’ is definitely NOT required to get at the basic premises implied in all knowledge. Check.
I urge you to read Leonard Peikoff’s Objectivism: the Philosophy of Ayn Rand. This is all explicitly laid-out there, without wasting Aaron’s space…
Forgive me, but my last post was being written while you were posting your last entry, so we’re out of step here.
My inquiry there still stands.
Mr. Valliant:
Ah, turning the tables. Fair enough, we’ll leave poor Ayn alone for now. I will waste Aaron’s space because it’s cheap (no offense, Mr. Haspel–I’m referring to disk space and network packets) and I won’t burden you with another book to read. I think a curious student needs his book list culled not expanded–but I can provide references if what you find here is insufficient.
I am not looking for "truth" because "truth" is incredibly context sensitive and absolute–and often emotionally charged.
CPPD rests on two tools of investigation:
– empirical causality
– axiomatic logic
More generally than "truth", with CPPD we seek explanatory power. If we have a model of the world and it conflicts with empirical evidence, we must refine our model. And no one has devised a model from which the fundamental physical laws can be derived so we are bound to both tools. As I understand Godel, the intellectual model alone will not carry the day. Too bad for me because I hate doing experiments.
Loosely, empirical causality manifests in sensory description and corroboration while axiomatic logic manifests in abstractions that give us prediction and prescription.
If you note my response to Mr. Eddie Thomas above:
If our previous limits of explanation have been surpassed, I am sure you will demand a *description* of how they were exceeded and a *prescription* of how to *corroborate* the *predicted* results.
This is an iterative process–not an absolute one–there’s no need for a false dilemma that requires us to discard all the steps along the way. Each attempt provides us with some piece of information that we can use to refine our views. We compare our steps by their proximity to that goal. Direct sense perception is not dismissed in CPPD–it plays a direct part in corroboration. But we are all aware of how easily it can be fooled.
So when you ask what constitutes corroboration I would respond that you, Messrs. Haspel and Thomas along with everyone else and their collection of tools provide it. If there is a better source, please share it with us. My private perceptions could use all the help they can get!
To possess explanatory power, your model must be predictive. If it is not predictive, you must articulate why–as Heisenberg did. If you don’t know the prescriptive efficacy of your actions, I would argue you do not possess explanatory power. That’s fine–I am not making a case for omniscience. But I am also disqualifying incredulity and ignorance as counterargument.
I am interested in explanatory power. If you can provide me new capabilities, I will be most grateful. But for discussions of genius, beauty and importance, I prefer to leave that in the far more capable hands of Ebert and Roeper.
Let me say that I agree that "explanatory power" is the essence of both defining concepts and finding causal principles in science.
Let me also say that your take on Godel makes it seem to me that Rand eschewed what you would call an "intellectual system" altogether. For her, observation and experiment were always necessary, like it or not. For her, there was no a priori anything, and we always have to keep empirical tabs on everything, even axioms. But, then, I may have misunderstood you.
Furthermore, your four principles are an excellent go at what might be called "high-end" scientific justification, and they may even describe much of the less self-conscious but nevertheless valid reasoning at the "lower-end." But knowledge is a big thing. The knowledge we use on a
daily basis would fill mighty volumes. Thus, I speak of things like "truth" and use many other useful concepts that people cannot seem to do without. I think, validly use them, too.
And hidden "meta" premises and metaphysical assumptions–galore! But, from what I can so far detect (and my foundation is still quite
limited), I think that I agree with most of your latent philosophy. If I may be so bold, I suspect that you need to draw it out a bit. That scary realm of metaphysical reasoning is out there and a mind like yours is fully capable of being its master.
Forgive me if I sound patronizing. You’re really probably way smarter than I am, too.
How certain are you that the vast knowledge we use on a daily basis is not a continually refined collection of heuristics tuned to our normative environment?
High-end scientific justification is expensive. Organisms that employ an 80-20 heuristic (or some such ratio) probably enjoy a significant advantage. Social organisms that share those heuristics probably enjoy a greater advantage still.
Consider something as simple as my "true" assertion that
1 + 1 = 2
You could point out that I implicitly invoked context in assuming we were working in base10. In base2, you point out that
1 + 1 = 10
If truths be our aim, we’ll be drowning in legalese to account for every contingency that affects the brittle validity of our assertion.
I think we can avoid that fate if we change the game to capabilities. As far as I can tell, there are only two sides to that game. If you choose abstraction, you must let me play empiricism and vice versa. And we should probably switch sides regularly to keep our game honest. Most importantly, we’ll actually be playing for something we can use.
Gosh, I hope I am "continually refining" a good many of my ordinary concepts–all are subject to refined definition over time, with very few exceptions. This does not make them "heuristical," and I’m a little disappointed at the 50 cent word here. For if most of my ordinary concepts are mere heuristry, then terms like "corroboration," "prediction," and "explanatory power" (and "heuristic"!!) are still more hopelessly speculative, and I don’t have a prayer at discussing things like any "evolutionary" advantages to "heurism." Nor would I even have a clue as what could possibly be "useful" or simply what that means. Not if my words are mere subjective "guides." (The order of concept-development is not always arbitrary and we cannot pick and choose those concepts which suit us–or that we might find "useful"–without considering the entire context of their origins and meaning. Indeed, nothing is so "useful" as the development of clear concepts. But perhaps you use "heuristic" in a unique way, and correct me if you do.)
As to the your example. It causes me no trouble or even concern to note that base10 is the context always assumed unless otherwise specified. Much of our jargon is just the same: it assumes a certain context unless otherwise noted. This is not the slightest problem for my concepts or any ordinary language. There is nothing "brittle" to the first assertion, since it is up to the asserter to tell us when he is in a unusual context, like base2. The unique context requires some legalese and saying one and one makes ten is just the WRONG answer, unless, in a certain context, the base is open to question. Concepts are "contextual" in this sense.
Most ordinary language does not require any such legalese at all, such as the first assertion: one and one make two. C’mon you can provide a more compelling example of how "brittle" my language is, surely…
That was hilarious Jim.
Mr. B.,
The concept of "beauty" and the concept of "importance" are far more basic than many of the concepts you routinely use. They also relate to IMPORTANT features of the real world. What a barren world-view that would treat these as lesser ideas. Don’t you think?
Mr. Valliant:
I see you prefer the blunderbuss (I owe you a dollar now). Lets dispatch with more of Mr. Haspel’s disk space and bandwidth.
So we’re on the same page:
heuristic
adj : of or relating to or using a general formulation that serves to guide investigation [ant: (algorithmic)]
n : a commonsense rule (or set of rules) intended to increase the probability of solving some problem [syn: (heuristic rule), (heuristic program)]
Apologies on throwing out ‘heuristic’. I’d be happy to break it down further. By ‘mere heuristics’, I meant ‘good enough’ solutions that help us make forward progress instead of twirling.
To quote Kodos, "My fellow Americans. As a young boy, I dreamed of being a baseball, but tonight I say, we must move forward, not backward, upward not forward, and always twirling, twirling, twirling towards freedom."
Let’s begin with biology. DNA is constantly being damaged and repaired and one would think there was much precision in the process. It turns out that in some situations (eg thymidine dimers) a proper repair can be made but in others, the cell resorts to random substitution. Is it advantageous to have the cell develop a 100-0 solution to this problem rather than employ a ca. 80-20? Well, as with all things re. truth, it depends. We need to take into account the cost of such a solution and compare it to the advantage over its current implementation.
Let’s move on to economics. Messrs. Black, Scholes and Merton had a brilliant insight into taming randomness in the money markets. Problem was that they, too, resorted to a heuristic for they knew that intrinsic features of randomness are not necessarily random. This led to a brilliant tool in the form of the Black-Scholes-Merton equation that provides a non-anticipating strategy for dealing with Gaussian randomness i.e. where higher order moments are zero. The smart folks on Wall Street who tried to "perfect" this by trying to incorporate Poisson randomness–and deluded themselves into thinking they had– lost a ton of money.
Finally, take a look at a typically unix system. It’s a collective hodge-podge of good enough solutions. It has survived over many years, outlasting "to be perfect" solutions like Copeland and Taligent because it, too, focuses on capabilities first.
I don’t see how we lose CPPD in any of these cases–we simply accept that there are limitations. And our minds are very good at making context implicit which is why we suffer such great confirmation bias.
As far as the perils of metaphysics are concerned, Godel helps us there too. The iterative abstractions to meta, meta-meta, etc. will all lead to some truth that is not derivable within the system. At that point you tap the ball over the net to empiricism. I’m not convinced we can separate the two–nor refine either to perfection.
I think you overstated how smart I am. I tried to be smart once but I discovered I wasn’t very good at it and the pay stinks. I prefer a simple "what can we do now that we couldn’t do before?"
If you are completely self-aware of all your implied context and are able to precisely articulate it when necessary, I recommend exploring a career in software. For someone with that degree of clear thinking, the pay is unlimited.
Finally, if the Randroids have crystalized truth in its perfect form, please let me know when you’ve poured off all of the supernatant. I don’t have boots high enough to wade through it.
Mr. Valliant:
What a barren world-view that would treat these as lesser ideas. Don’t you think?
I believe you’ve got your endocrine system in my line of reasoning. Or is it the other way around?
In either case, I don’t think they taste well together. My emotional resolve is even weaker than my intellectual resolve. With appeal to motive like that, you’ll have me genuflecting and renouncing my sins in no time.
Mr. B.,
I suspected something like this.
Well, as cruddy a source as Webster’s Abridged is, here’s their definition: "of or pertaining to a usually speculative formulation serving as a guide to the study or solution of a problem." Your definitions do not appear, but "problem solving" techniques or applications in computer science and education are definitions #2 and 3. In philosophy class with Prof. Thomas Nagel of NYU, he rejected the use of this term with regard to the already proven or established. The standard understanding among philosophers, in my experience, is just that: a guide, a convenience (kinda like Wittgenstein), but less than the definite or that which has clear boundaries.
If all that you mean is "helpful," then the term still does an grave injustice to the precision of concepts and knowledge, something clear from your context.
I am sure that you did not mean to suggest that the implied context required to program a computer is the same thing as the implied context to an item of human knowledge. That’s just silly. To get my computer to do something is an entirely different kettle of fish than what I need to know before I can know something else, i.e., is X necessarily implied in Y within my context of knowledge.
Logic, I provided first: you commit yourself to a serious context of knowledge by using the words that you do, a context you so far seem totally unaware of.
Emotion, I provided second: the result is unpleasant.
I did not confuse the two as you seem to suggest. Perhaps if you did not dismiss concepts like truth and beauty, you would see the importance of doing BOTH, as well as the importance of not confusing the two. Ideas have consequences and we shouldn’t ignore them.
"Randroid" is just an irrelevant insult, right? Neither Rand nor I ever claimed to have (what you would call) "perfect" knowledge. That, too, is an insult and nothing either of us ever said.
I stop when this stuff starts.