Tal Bachman wrote:[color=darkblue][size=14]Hi Tarski
Good luck trying to get Runaway Dan to offer up anything coherent...I'm sure he knows better than to try that.
Anyway, about your comments and me "figuring this stuff all out". I don't think I have figured out every last question in epistemology; I don't think I've figured out much at all. I do think, though, that I can show that Kuhn, Popper, Hume, et al, in addition to maintaining a number of effective contradictions in their own philosophies, fail to give an adequate account of "the growth of scientific knowledge". I even think that is easy. You can tell me if I am wrong or not. And I doubt I would ever think of you as a loser, Tarski. I reserve that designation for flight-prone, buck-naked mini-emperors :P.
You wrote:
Personally, I am not so quick to dismiss all the ideas of Kant, Hume and Kuhn. I don't think that we have discovered a rock solid foundation for knowledge in the way that classical epistemology sought and seeks to do.
This sentence seems to me to contain an implied non sequitir, so I want to begin by pointing out that logically, we can find epistemic arguments by Kant, Hume, Kuhn, Rorty, and Popper defective, without having to claim that "we have discovered a rock solid foundation for knowledge". In fact, we may have no idea how to construct an adequate epistemology, but we may very well have an idea of how not to construct one, or why certain attempts don't work (we might be able to figure out that the sum of two and two is definitely not three, but not know it's four yet). So in my own comments here, I want only to point out how the epistemic arguments of those mentioned (I'll call them "The Gang" from now on) fail.
I agree with most of what you suggest esp. that "we may very well have an idea of how not to construct one"
However, I object to you calling them the gang. I see them as sufficiently different to militate against lumping them together.
Especially Kant and Rorty! Have you perhaps read "Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature?
Perhaps there is a thread connecting them that is your target but I would ask that you explain that thread before lumping them together.
Part Two: The Gang's positions either explicitly, or by logical extension, require the denial of K. Therefore, they must be defective.
This is the prima facie argument. I can now elaborate if you want...but...
I was just thinking, Tarski - do you want me to go on, or are your eyes glazing over already? I'll go on if you want, just not sure how much you really care what some songwriter might think.....(?)
Okay, I'll go on then. Just tell me when you want me to stop.
About your comment, yes I know there are important differences between all of them, and perhaps with your permission I can leave Rorty until the end. Why I lumped them together, just to explain, was because their positions all incline them to deny (K).
Let's see....where was I....?
Uhhhhhhh...(blushing)....ummmmmmmmm..............................uhhh.......(I feel like everyone's looking at me now.......Hey, does everyone mind not reading this anymore so I can relax? I have performance anxiety here.............................).
Okay....(cough)...let's take Kuhn, Popper, Kant, and Hume first. One attempt at a lecture coming up.
(crickets chirping)
Okay.
On my earlier post, I mentioned that Kuhn, Popper, and Kant to my mind make critical errors, which are the result of them having accepted a defective argument of David Hume's. What is that argument, and how is it flawed?
First, I suppose I should say that on many occasions, Hume expresses boundless confidence in the power of science to discover truths about the world. Just one quick example: while even most political scientists these days have some concern over whether the study of politics can really ever be described as a "science", Hume announces in his essay "That Politics May Be Reduced To A Science" that “politics admit of general truths, which are invariable by the humour or education either of subject or sovereign”. These truths, he says, are “eternal”, even serving as “universal axioms”, and easily allow for the study of politics to be properly regarded as a “science”. He even says that “consequences almost as general and certain may sometimes be deduced from (the force of laws and particular forms of government), as any which the mathematical sciences afford us” (!).
But there is another Hume which emerges after a certain philosophical muddle which he was prone to getting caught in, one radically skeptical (I prefer incredulous) and despairing, and it is that Hume, and one unfortunately influential, flawed argument which he makes, which ends up siring certain flawed arguments by, among others, Popper and Kuhn. To explain:
Hume, on the question of science, begins by rejecting a rationalist tradition begun by Plato, and which most recently had been taken up by thinkers like Descartes, Leibniz, and Spinoza. (Rationalist thinkers of course posited that knowledge - even about the physical world - was discovered through a deductivist process founded on premises available to pure reason, or in other words, self-evident principles). Funnily enough, while the great selling point of rationalism was its promise to yield certainty, rationalist thinkers ended up "certain" about all sorts of contradictory things (which obviously meant at least that "certainty" wasn't synonymous with "knowledge" - perhaps something to keep in mind for devout religionists).
For example, after some super-duper introspection, Descartes concluded that the universe had been created by an intelligent, interventionist God, and was composed of two substances: non-physical, conscious minds, and physical, non-conscious matter (still not even as radical as Dave Chalmers, with his conscious thermostats!). Spinoza, also beginning with “self-evident” axioms, concluded that the entire universe was composed of a single, infinite, conscious, and three-dimensional substance governed by laws, all of which could justifiably either be called “God” or “nature”. Leibniz, for his part, announced his own discovery (after the required introspection) that in fact the universe was composed of an infinity of immaterial material, the units of which he cheerily dubbed “monads”.
A mess, right?
In The Treatise of Human Nature, Hume complains:
"Principles taken upon trust, consequences lamely deduced by them, want of coherence in the parts and of evidence in the whole, these are everywhere to be met in the systems of the most eminent philosophers...There is nothing which is not the subject of debate, and in which men of learning are not of contrary opinions. The most trivial question escapes not our controversy, and in the most momentous we are not able to give any certain decision. Disputes are multiplied, as if everything was uncertain; and these disputes are managed with the greatest warmth, as if everything was certain".
In the interests of brevity, let me just say that Hume's solution to a situation in which Descartes's virtual hallucinations were often granted as much credibility as a possibly true account of the world, as were the (testable) theories of a Newton, was a zealous empiricism. So, he says things like:
"...The only solid foundation we can give to this science itself must be laid on experience and observation..."
and
"And though' we must endeavour to render all our principles as universal as possible, by tracing up our experiments to the utmost, and explaining all effects from the simplest and fewest causes, 'tis still certain we cannot go beyond experience".
and the most entertaining:
"If we take in our hand any volume of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance, let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames, for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion."
That is, knowledge about the world, for Hume, comes through a science of "experience and observation". But how do experience and observation work? Here Hume gets into the other half of his characeterization of science, which is that it must be primarily concerned with the human mind, since it is the human mind which records experiences and processes observation.
(Don't leave yet, I'm almost to the good part).
According to Hume, the human mind engages in two different kinds of reasoning: demonstrative reasoning, which covers non-contingent propositions (such as pure logic or mathematical equations), and which is deductive; and moral reasoning, which deals with "real world" issues, or as Hume puts it, "matters of fact and existence" (contingent propositions).
What is crucial about this last type of reasoning is that it takes place a posteriori, as opposed to the a priori nature of demonstrative reasoning; and whereas demonstrative reasoning would be necessarily fundamentally deductive, moral reasoning would be fundamentally inductive.
And this is where the trouble begins.
I need a glass of water.
I'm just going to keep going now NO MATTER WHAT, TARSKI! No one can stop me now!
I hope Tal decides to continue. Where would we be without risky ideas?
Part Two: The Gang's positions either explicitly, or by logical extension, require the denial of K. Therefore, they must be defective.
I think all the members of the gang explicitly believed that we know more know than what Moses knew. I can't imagine any of those you listed believing otherwise. I can imagine Wade and Pahoran believing otherwise, however.
Edit: I got distracted and did other things before hitting "submit". After submitting, it turns out Tal already continued...
(What follows is based mostly on Hume's Enquiry and Treatise)
So, just to recap:
1.) Hume thinks there is only one means whereby knowledge about the world can be acquired: science;
2.) He thinks of science as a method of discovery based on experience/experiment and observation (as an empirical enterprise);
and
3.) He thinks that inductive reasoning underlies this method.
The trouble begins when Hume undertakes to examine the worthiness of induction to serve as the basis of scientific discovery.
He reasons as follows:
Every inductive argument, he says, has an unstated, but no less crucial for that, premise. So, take the following inductive argument:
Premise 1: The sun has always risen in the morning; Conclusion: The sun will rise tomorrow morning.
This argument should be recast, in Hume's view, as follows:
Premise 1: The sun has always risen in the morning; Premise 2: Nature is uniform (i.e., these past observed sunrises are the result of physical laws which will never cease operation);
Conclusion: The sun will rise tomorrow morning.
Hume claims that Premise Two, the proposition that nature is uniform – let's call it (NU) - is present and required, though unstated, in all inductive arguments. As he puts it, “all inferences from experience suppose, as their foundation, that the future will resemble the past”; and again, “all probable arguments are built on the supposition that there is...conformity between the future and the past”.
This seems to bug Hume, and he wonders what reasons there might be to believe (NU). He first considers whether the already-mentioned demonstrative reasoning can be of any help, and concludes that it cannot, giving two main reasons for this conclusion. First, as we might expect, Hume concludes that (NU), being a contingent proposition, can in no way be known in the absence of experiment or observation, nor can it be deduced validly from an experiment showing the past uniformity of nature, even if such an experiment were possible.
Second, Hume considers whether (NU) could be true by being definitionally or necessarily true. This would require that “nature” inherently, as a term, entail “uniformity”, in the way that the term “bachelor” entails being adult, male, and unmarried (or, say, the term "rock drummer" entails being nuts, or "interior decorator" entails being gay as a French trombone...). Hume addresses this question by asking whether there might be something inherently contradictory about the idea of “non-uniform nature”, just as there is in the phrase “married bachelor” (or "exciting Richard G. Scott talk"). He notes that specific and derivative hypotheticals such as “all the trees will flourish in December and January, and decay in May and June”, do not comprise contradictions-in-terms, and concludes that “it implies no contradiction that the course of nature may change”. He therefore concludes that deduction provides no justification for (NU).
If deduction provides no justification, what about induction? Hume's answer to this question is easily anticipated. Think of what an inductive argument for (NU) would look like, given Hume's contention about the necessary premise of (NU) in all inductive arguments:
Premise 1: All past observations of nature have observed it to be uniform; Premise 2: Nature is uniform (i.e., future observations will continue to confirm that nature is uniform); Conclusion: Therefore, nature is uniform.
Because the second premise begs the question, Hume concludes that no non-circular inductive argument is available to provide reasons for believing (NU); and for this reason, no justifiable inductive argument is available for induction itself either, for it could only take the following shape (containing once again a question-begging second premise):
Premise 1: Induction is valid if, and only if, nature is uniform; Premise 2: Nature is uniform; Conclusion: Therefore, induction is valid.
Hume concludes
"We have said that all arguments concerning existence are founded on the relation of cause and effect; that our knowledge of that relation is derived entirely from experience; and that all our experimental conclusions proceed upon the supposition that the future will be conformable to the past. To endeavour, therefore, the proof of this last supposition by probable arguments, or arguments regarding existence, must be evidently going in a circle, and taking that for granted, which is the very point in question."
The plot thickens!
More to come when I have a moment...
No life (obviously),
Tal
Last edited by NorthboundZax on Fri Jul 13, 2007 7:53 am, edited 1 time in total.
Tal Bachman wrote:Part Two: The Gang's positions either explicitly, or by logical extension, require the denial of K. Therefore, they must be defective.
I don't get this summary.
Well, I can see why people take Kuhn as moving towards some kind of 'relativist', 'we have no real knowledge' type senario (although I certainly don't read him that way).
But Popper? How can you even read that into anything that he said?
Discussing (what they would see as) historical scientific 'mistakes' isn't the same thing as saying 'We don't know more now than we did 500 years ago'.
...is it?
There's a lot to read, so I'll take some time and soak it all in. But that's my initial reaction...
Tal Bachman wrote:I'm kind of surprised a topic this boring is attracting some interest!
Some of us like boring stuff. Takes all kinds...
Yeah, well, unfortunately (and God knows I have a lot of admiration for Karl), they kind of execute themselves.
Well - I do like a man with ambition. When someone says they are about to 'take down' one of the most eminent scientific philosophers of the modern age, I'm taking notice!
I do have a few comments on what you've said already, but might be best if I wait and see where your going with this...