Scientific faith vs Religious faith

9.0 Final Thoughts

2010-09-07T22:06:00.000-07:00

Throughout the course of modern history, science and the scientific method have contributed substantially to the ever shrinking scope of religious claims about the world as well as the scope of religious authority. Science has done far more to both explain the world around us and help us improve our condition than millennia we have endured religion. It's not surprising that some religious believers resent this view, and among their response is to deny that science is any different from religion.

An important aspect of this flawed tactic is to insist that science doesn't really provide objective knowledge about the world and that it doesn't utilize a consistently reliable or proven method for acquiring knowledge. Instead, science is supposed to be based on guesswork, "theories," and false beliefs which are all inferior to "true" religions, like Christianity, and their revelations from God, as described in the Bible.

There is a curious contradiction here because people who argue for this myth end up involved in two efforts which should be recognized as contradictory: first, they have to denigrate science and argue that it really isn't as good as its defenders claim; second, they have to argue that science is actually a type of religion which relies on faith, not unlike their own religion uses faith (a false accusation, and a "tu quoque" fallacy, all in one). This argument denigrates science, and by implication their own religions by essentially arguing that they both are "merely" faith-based, rendering them both rather inferior methods of obtaining knowledge. It would be far more persuasive and clever to argue that one's own religion is as good as science, and then that science is also a religion.

However, we have seen in previous sections that science lacks the major characteristics of religion, so even going down this path is a waste of time. We see that religions and other mystical belief systems always fail when trying to obtain the objectivity and reliability of science. The reason is that the advances made by science, the benefits of science, and reliability of science cannot be matched at any level by any religion. Religions have claimed for all of human history that they have received special information from gods, but at no point did any of those gods explain how to utilize electricity, how to improve sanitation, the origins of disease, the building blocks of matter, and so forth. Much of this discovery was already well underway even during the earliest stages of modern science — they didn't even require a fully developed scientific method or scientific community for much progress to be made.

To be fair, it can be argued that a certain amount of "faith" exists with how average person accepts what science says. Few people are in a position to confirm the results of modern scientific experiments so they have to accept what others say based on their experience and authority. Unlike with religion, however, anyone can, in principle, confirm those experiments on their own — and the ability of others to repeat experiments to make sure they are right is one of the most distinctive attributes which defines the scientific method.

Moreover, most people can observe the practical impacts of what science says and thus don't need to conduct experiments to confirm that scientists are right. Not everyone is able to understand the theories behind how electricity operates, but everyone is able to witness the obvious and dramatic effects of electricity at work — both good and bad.

Some religious believers might claim the same on behalf of their god(s), but there are many believers from many religions claiming the same about many different gods. Not all of those gods can exist, so not all of the claimed "effects" can be attributed to real gods. For every god who blesses Israel, there is another god who is failing Canaan. Everyone, however, uses the same electricity and sees the same effects of electricity. There aren't alternative denominations of "energy" with competing claims about what the "real" source of energy is. Thus the claims about gods and their effects do have to be taken on faith, but the claims of science — for example the science of electricity — don't need to be taken on "faith" in the same way.

Lastly, I would add that religions don't re-evaluate their basic tenets. They don't put themselves and their doctrines on trial as part of their fundamental operation, as does science. They are not evidence based. Their knowledge is revealed, not discovered empirically, and is offended by criticism. To paraphrase an exchange heard during a evolution/creation debate, the creationist quipped that “his textbook was cheaper”. The evolutionist struck back with, “perhaps, but that’s because we update ours occasionally”.

It ultimately boils down to this: when it comes to obtaining knowledge about the universe, are you going to trust empirical methods and logic, or revealed knowledge? Which will you rely on? Which do you rely on when crossing a busy street or when looking for your lost keys? Keep in mind that even when people from different cultures and eras use the former (empirical) method, their findings all agree. But there are thousands of different and conflicting versions of revealed knowledge. This stark difference: consistency and agreement vs. inconsistency and incompatibility should be very compelling.

7.0 Social postulates / values of science

2010-06-26T20:58:00.000-07:00

In a 1942 article on the ethos of science, Robert K. Merton described the scientific ethos as “that emotionally toned complex of values and norms which are held to be binding on the man of science.” He was interested in studying the interactions between social and cultural structures and science. He arrived at a list of ideals and values that are dictated by the goals and methods of science, and which are binding on scientists operating in the wider scientific and social milieu.These ideals and virtues, widely accepted as desirable by most members of the scientific community, are so widespread as to be treated alongside the other fundamental assumptions of science discussed in this chapter. Scientists’ behaviors are strongly influenced through these norms by sanctions and rewards and “are in varying degrees internalized by the scientist”. As with the philosophical postulates regarding reality and inference, these values cannot be proved or disproved, but are built into functioning of the community of scientists:

Communalism
Scientific knowledge is public knowledge; freely available to all. The results of research do not belong to individual scientists, but to the world at large.

Universalism
There are no privileged sources of scientific knowledge; the laws of science are the same everywhere and are independent of the scientists involved.

Disinterestedness
Scientists are unbiased; science is conducted in order to further human knowledge. They have no personal stake in the acceptance or rejection of data or claims.

Originality
Science is the discovery of the unknown; all scientific work must be novel, continually adding to the body of scientific knowledge.

Skepticism
Scientists take nothing on trust; knowledge, whether new or old, must always be scrutinized for possible errors of fact or inconsistencies of argument.

8.0 Why Science is not a religion

The corollary to the accusation that science relies on faith to the same degree as religion is that science IS the new high-tech religion of the 21st century. This facile criticism is easily countered. The following retorts are taken from “Science is Not a Religion: Why Science and Scientific Research are not Religions” by Austin Cline, on About.com

Belief in Supernatural Beings: The most common and fundamental characteristic of religion is belief in supernatural beings - usually, but not always, including gods. Few religions lack this characteristic and most religions are founded upon it. Does science involve belief in supernatural beings like gods? No - many scientists are themselves theists and/or religious in various ways while many others are not. Science itself as a discipline and profession is godless and secular, promoting no religious or theistic beliefs.

Sacred vs Profane Objects, Places, Times: Differentiating between sacred and profane objects, places, and times helps religious believers focus on transcendental values and/or the existence of a supernatural realm. Many scientists, godless or not, probably have things, places, or times which they consider "sacred" in the sense that they are venerated in some way. Does science itself involve such a distinction? No - it neither encourages nor discourages it. Some scientists may believe that some things are sacred, and others won't.

Ritual Acts Focused on Sacred Objects, Places, Times: If people believe in something sacred, they probably have rituals associated with it which are also sacred. A scientist who holds something as "sacred" may engage in some sort of ritual or ceremony. As with the very existence of a category of "sacred" things, however, there is nothing about science which either mandates such a belief or excludes it. Some scientist participate in rituals and some don't; there are no scientific rituals, godless or otherwise.

Moral Code With Supernatural Origins: Most religions preach a moral code which is typically based upon whatever transcendental and supernatural beliefs are fundamental to that religion. Thus, for example, theistic religions typically claim that morality is derived from the commands of their gods. Scientists have personal moral codes which they may believe have supernatural origins, but those are not an inherent part of science. Scientists also have professional codes which have purely human origins.

Characteristically Religious Feelings: Perhaps the vaguest characteristic of religion is the experience of "religious feelings" like awe, a sense of mystery, adoration, and even guilt. Religions encourage such feelings, especially in the presence of sacred objects and places, and the feelings are typically connected to the presence of the supernatural. Most scientists experience such feelings; often, it's a reason why they got involved in science. Unlike religions, however, these feelings have nothing to do with the supernatural.

Prayer and Other Forms of Communication: Belief in supernatural beings like gods doesn't get you very far if you can't communicate with them, so religions which include such beliefs naturally also teach how to talk to them - usually with some form of prayer or other ritual. Most scientists believe in a god and therefore probably pray; other scientists don't. Because there is nothing about science which encourages or discourages belief in the supernatural, there is also nothing about it which deals with prayer.

A Worldview & Organization of One's Life Based on the Worldview: Religions constitute entire worldviews and teach people how to structure their lives in relation to their worldview: how to relate to others, what to expect from social relationships, how to behave, etc. Scientists have worldviews, and there are common beliefs among scientists in America, but science itself doesn't quite amount to a worldview. It provides a basis to a scientific worldview, but different scientists will arrive at different conclusions and incorporate different elements.

A Social Group Bound Together by the Above: A few religious people follow their religions in isolated ways; more often than not religions involve complex social organizations of believers who join each other for worship, rituals, prayer, etc. Scientists belong to a variety of groups, many of which will be scientific in nature, but not all the same groups. What's important, though, is the fact that even these scientific groups are not "bound together" by all of the above. There is nothing in science which is even remotely like a church.

And from the Counter Creationism Handbook, by Mark Isaak come these counter arguments. Although originally phrased in the context of evolutionary biology, the same rebuttals are equally meaningful for any science:

No faith is required. Scientific knowledge is based on evidence that has been observed.

"Faith" in religion is different that "faith" in science. The two uses of the same word are not equivalent. Religious faith is better called "gullibility" (believing with no evidence and no logical backing). Religious faith is on the same footing as faith in Bigfoot, Leprechauns, UFOs, and ESP.

Religion explains ultimate reality and moral purpose. Science describes how things and processes work and creates theories that predict outcomes of future events and new discoveries.

Religion describes the place and role of humans within ultimate reality. Science does not attempt to make these types of value judgments.

Religions include reverence for and or belief in a supernatural power or powers. Science does not. In the words of the great scientist, Laplace, to Napolean when asked about his famous discourse on the variations of the orbits of Saturn and Jupiter, "I had no need of that hypothesis".

Religions have a social structure (priests, deacons, congregation) built around their beliefs. No such social structure is built into science. Although there is a social element to science, it is no more nor less than in any other profession.

Religions impose moral prescriptions on their members. Science does not. Science has been used (and misused) as a basis for morals and values by some people (Hitler’s eugenics, justification for slavery, etc). These views, though invoking science, are themselves not science. Science cannot be held responsible for its misapplication.

Religions include rituals and sacraments. With the possible exception of college graduation ceremonies, there is nothing comparable in scientific studies.

Religious ideas are highly static; they change primarily by splitting off new religions. Ideas in evolutionary biology change rapidly as new evidence is found.

How can a religion not have any adherents? When asked their religion, many, perhaps most, people who believe in evolution and the scientific method will call themselves members of mainstream religions, such as Christianity, Buddhism, and Hinduism. None identify their religion as science. If science is a religion, it is the only religion that is rejected by all its members.

Science may be considered a religion under the metaphorical definition of something pursued with zeal or conscientious devotion. This, however, could also apply to stamp collecting, watering plants, or practically any other activity.

Calling science a religion renders the term, "religion", effectively meaningless. If "religion" is to retain anything resembling its common definition, it should be clear that science falls far short of having the requisite properties of a religion. It does share several traits with religion, but so do political parties, sporting fandom, and many other social organizations. Among those common properties are:

Evangelism (but this is a feature of politics, economics, sports, and many other social systems)

Meetings, hierarchies, orthodoxy

Occasional fanaticism

Dogmatism (sometimes)

Membership in organizations

But again, just because some elements are shared with religion, science does not share the key attributes (belief in a supernatural deity, faith without proof, rules for morality, holy books and legends, and all the rest). To extend the definition of religion to include science, political parties, sports fans, etc would so dilute that term as to render it practically meaningless. By that definition, avid stamp collecting would be a religion.

6.7 Does Science Reveal or only Model Reality?

2010-04-27T22:03:00.000-07:00

Some critics of science argue that it can't teach us about "ultimate reality", the absolute nature of all things. Instead it can offer only a thin, limited, and truncated view of a wider reality which they claim is accessible only through other means - revelation, mysticism, emotion, faith, social movements, or drugs. They claim that their epistemologies teach deeper and more fundamental truths than those imparted by a rational and empirical study of the world. Whether the source is the Holy spirit, religious ecstasy, Nirvana, Enlightenment, LSD experimentation, or Cosmic Consciousness, members of these groups each say they have personal, deep, and moving direct experiences of what they believe is some kind of Truth or Ultimate Reality. They believe that this reality underlies that everyday common reality which is available to the senses. We can stipulate that reality, itself, is not mind-dependent. But, by definition, our perceptions of it are. For this reason, we are forever separated from the world as it really is, because we are limited to know only our perceptions of it, the phenomena we experience. Though we can never really know ultimate reality directly, and are limited to what our experience and perception contribute to it, we can at least know that, somehow, “things in themselves” really do exist “out there”. “Things in themselves” exist wholly outside our experience, and all we can say is that they exist. William Blake wrote,

”If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite".

This is an expression of this transcendental sentiment. No doubt people are having intense and moving spiritual experiences. They are certain they really are in communication with some fundamental essence that escapes us in our normal daily pursuits. For many, these experiences define their being and their humanness. They can feel as real or realer than any other experience.

However, there are several problems with the claims these people make.

First, each of these types of claims can't be shown to be anything other than personal mind-altered experiences. In fact, there is strong evidence that that is exactly what they are. Recent revelations in neuroscience demonstrate that the mind can deceive itself in strange and wonderful ways. This deception can be triggered by drugs, electrical stimulation, sensory deprivation, the power of suggestion, schizophrenia, dissociative disorder, hormonal imbalances, disease, tumors, emotional stress, seizures, brain injury, social influence, and bio-chemical malfunctions. Brain researchers can induce comas, trances, out-of-body experiences, false memories, anger, pain, joy, ecstasy, and a host of other cognitive/emotional experiences that appear utterly real and meaningful to the patient. Neuroscientists have identified brain regions that are responsible for making us feel as if we are in our bodies and that we are separate from the universe around us. If these regions are disrupted, it will result in a sensation of floating outside one’s body, or perhaps a sensation of being one with nature, or the universe, or some higher power. A strong feeling of God's presence, seeing into past lives, interacting with alien races, or experiencing the seeming unity of all things is a psychological/neurological experience - not an objective one. But, these experiences are still valuable to the person having them, and are probably quite important in the evolution and maturing of individual human consciousnesses. Simply naming a human experience doesn't explain it, nor does explaining it make it vanish. But understanding it for the neurological and psychological event that it is helps put it in context and aids in making sense of it in relation to other, similar phenomena that we do understand. Realizing that a person in the throes of religious fervor at a tent revival is participating in mass hysteria instead of actually talking to God is instructive, and it does nothing to reduce or dampen the experience of the participant. It does, however, bring the event back down to Earth.

Second, to say that science doesn't achieve a goal it sets out for itself - showing us the "true reality" - is mostly a straw man argument. The assertion that science even attempts to teach this is certainly not shared by all scientists, and in fact, is not even a dominant view. It is true that Scientific "Realists" do think that there is an ultimate reality underlying what science describes and accesses - that if there is such a thing as ultimate reality, then science is capable of getting to it and describing it. But a large majority of scientists (if they were even to consider the question) would probably fall into the camp of scientific "Instrumentalists". The Instrumentalists don't concern themselves with philosophical questions of ontology, "being", and ultimate reality. For them, science is just the tool they employ for obtaining knowledge and explaining how the world works. In fact, it is the only methodology capable of doing that. It does not aim at or seek "truth", but is only instrumentally useful in providing increasingly accurate descriptions of the world. To them, science studies "phenomena", and does not attempt to deal with "Noumena". The term, "phenomenon", came into its modern philosophical usage through Immanuel Kant, who contrasted it with noumenon (for which he used the term "Ding an sich", or "thing-in-itself"). Noumena, in contrast to phenomena, are not directly accessible to observation. For the purpose of this discussion, the Noumena would correspond to that inaccessible ultimate reality.

Third, the term "ultimate reality" is not even agreed upon by those who use it. As mentioned in the previous paragraph, those who subscribe to the philosophical principle of "Noumena" think that there are "things-in-themselves" that exist beneath the level of common perception or the "phenomena" of the every day world. They believe that what is observed of the world is only a surface description of some deeper reality that humans, perhaps, can't ever access. This view is, and has been, debated since the time of Kant. To assert that there is some fundamental essence that transcends what we observe is a philosophical exercise that is a matter of taste. By definition it can never be measured, because by being so it transforms into the concrete world of phenomena. But simply to say that it exists is not to prove anything. In other words, to ask what exists beneath the observable might not even be a meaningful question. "Ultimate reality" may be a fantastic concept that doesn't refer to any actual part of our universe. This term is carefully crafted to be unapproachable by scientfic inquiry, thus making argument about it somewhat moot, except for the philosophically inclined. However, there is no prospect for near term resolution of any outstanding differences of opinion on it.

Fourth, it is true that science only reports on what it can study, which is the natural world. It discovers facts, looks for patterns among those facts, establishes connections between phenomena, helps us derive theories, and allows us to make useful, correct predictions. It proves itself again and again as the best way to obtain knowledge about the universe. But, simply because it recognizes and acknowledges limits regarding what it can study does not mean that faith, superstition, magic, or revelation can do better. In fact, they all perform quite terribly in this capacity. At most, their primary power is in deceiving their practitioners into believing things that are not true, as history has shown countless times. Undoubtedly, those who subscribe to these intuitive ways of gaining knowledge "feel" that they have gotten in touch with a deeper reality, but there is a tremendous distance between strongly feeling something to be true and that thing actually being true. Simply experiencing the sensation of certainty does not actually make you certain.

William of Ockham, who gave us the valuable Ockham's Razor, believed that the world was composed of simple unrelated objects on which we impose order through mental abstractions. Wittgenstein echoed this when he wrote that what we call “Laws of Nature” are nothing more than an artificial order imposed by man on nature - they are not given by nature to man. He said, "at the basis of the whole modern view of the world lies the illusion that the so-called laws of nature are the explanations of natural phenomena." In his view, science works out conceptual schemata or "laws" to describe some aspect of nature. In nature we find loose and unconnected facts. Metaphorically, the schemata resemble a grid we draw on a rough surface which is the "reality" we are attempting to explain. The rough surface contains the “facts” of that reality. Our imposed grid can only approximate the true complexity of the surface. Given a knowledge of how the grid is set up, we can deduce other parts of the grid, but we cannot deduce any surface features. We use experimentation and empirical methods to derive our grids of understanding, and one of several grids may actually fit a surface (these would correspond to competing theories). Occasionally one grid is thrown out and replaced with another, which occurs during a scientific revolutions or paradigm shifts. The laws of nature which were supposed to describe the way nature had to work did not really describe nature at all, but just the framework or grid we impose on nature. In fact, laws of nature are just necessary conditions which must exist if our grids are to provide fruitful scientific theories. The grids are not "true", a priori, existing in nature and outside of our arbitrary grid. We never see "the picture" (i.e., reality), but just “the frame” (our language which describes the picture). To Wittgenstein, reality is composed of simple objects thrown together to form a ”state of affairs”; of everything which ”is the case”. All "states of affairs" in the world are totally independent. You cannot infer one state of affairs from another. There is no logical law of cause and effect. To his mind, no causal nexus exists in nature. Cause and effect may be useful to us, but are not provable or even necessary. Induction (accepting the simplest law that can reconcile our experiences) has no logical justification, but a psychological one. In other words, we would go insane without laws of nature.

So, Wittgenstein is saying in a slightly different way that we humans cannot experience "ultimate reality", but only can create a language that "points" to reality. He is highly critical of scientific explanations, saying that not only do they fail to approximate "reality", but that they only have value in supporting each other. Our laws of nature cast the form that any description of the world must take. They tell us nothing about the world. We can infer some things about the world from the fact that it is more easily described by one explanatory system than another. But we are forever separate from direct experience of it.

Not all philosophers agree with Wittgenstein. For example, Francis Bacon, who helped introduce what we now call the scientific method, wrote, "Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed." He knew that in order to command nature, one must act according to its rules. His statement, "Reality is Absolute", recognizes what is called the "primacy of existence". This means that reality is not subject to wishes, whims, prayers, or miracles. If you want to change the world, you must act according to reality. Nothing else will affect reality. To him, reality was what we dealt with every day, not some abstract ineffable conception.

It should be pointed out that that the best that philosophy, religion, and mysticism were able to do in regard to the task of revealing Ultimate Reality was to divide the world into the Classical Elements of Earth, Air, Fire, Water, Quintessence ("the fifth element"), with a little "Spirit" to complete the mix. This was as far as they could take the project of discovering how the universe was constructed and what its constituent elements were. It was a primitive effort, and it missed the mark by a wide margin. Science has discovered deeper and deeper insights into levels of actual reality. Regardless of whether it exposes some loosely defined "ultimate reality", it does disclose much more about common reality than any competing religion, philosophy, or mysticism ever has. Extending the limitation of human senses with scientific instruments has given the human race what amounts to collective ESP. We can see across the universe and back in time, visualize individual atoms or entire galaxies, listen to the Earth vibrate, examine the surfaces of stars, talk to someone across the world, fly to other planets, and look at creatures swimming at the bottom of the deepest ocean trench. Technology and science have led to the discovery of living cells, molecules, DNA, the true elements of the periodic table, atoms, subatomic particles and every other aspect of reality that no philosophy or religion ever dreamed of. This should be an embarrassment to those who argue that their non-scientific approaches will show us a reality that science missed. They had their opportunity, and all they offered was Classic Elements and a lot of talk about some other ineffable substance called "ultimate reality" that was poorly defined then, and is still as murky as ever, even after several millennia.

If we had left it to these competing epistemological systems, our deepest understanding of reality would be the same as they were in Babylonian times. Science, indeed, may be near the discovery of whatever might be meant by ultimate reality. It is already at the point of dissolving subatomic particles into pure energy - it may well be near the limit of reductionism when the very substance it studies vanishes in a flash of light. It is not armchair philosophy or meditation that will eventually reveal the true nature of reality, but the Large Hadron Collider or one of its descendants.

Science and technology will not help us learn life lessons that make us better people - how to love our wives and families, to approach life with equanimity, to be generous, joyful, peaceful, and kind. These are lessons learned from other sources. But if the questions involve questions of fact, of what "is", the revelatory forms of knowledge will always fall short.

6.5 John Oakes’ Assumptions of Science

2010-03-20T17:14:00.000-07:00

These ideas were aggregated from a series of presentations that can be found at http://www.grossmont.edu/johnoakes/, the website for John Oakes at Grossmont College in El Cajon, California. He, I am sure, is not the originator of this list. But he did a very good job of compiling them into a single presentation which I summarize here. In his view, they express the core set of basic assumptions that both science and rational empiricism embrace:

The rules of logic are valid tools for learning and understanding.

The world is real. The physical universe exists.

Human senses are reliable.

The real world is knowable and comprehensible.

There are laws that govern the real world. The universe is orderly, having regularity, pattern, and structure. Laws of nature describe that order.

Those laws are knowable and comprehensible. The principles that define the functioning of the universe can be discovered. Nature is understandable.

Those laws don't radically change according to place or time, since the early stages of the big bang. They are universal.

All phenomena have natural causes. Scientific explanation of human behavior opposes religious, spiritualistic, and magical explanations.

Language is adequate to describe the natural realm

Mathematical rules are descriptive for the physical world

Unexplained things can be used to explain other phenomenon (e.g. gravity is thus far unexplained but it is used to explain the movement of planets and the bending of light)

Observable phenomena can provide information and knowledge about unobservable phenomena (induction)

All ideas are tentative, potentially changed by new information. This harkens back to Newton's fourth of his Rules of Reasoning in Natural Philosophy:

"Propositions deduced from observation of phenomena should be viewed as accurate until other phenomena contradict them.” Unless proven otherwise, the best theory that successfully explains the facts should be accepted, keeping in mind that all theories are provisional, subject to revision given new evidence.

Nothing is self evident. Truth claims must be demonstrated objectively.

Knowledge is derived from acquisition of experience, empirically, through senses directly or indirectly.

6.6 Norm Levan Panel on Intelligent Design

When you compare the list in the previous section to this next one, you will notice quite a lot of overlap. Even after examining the assumptions presented in just these two sections, one can see a common thread emerge: With the use of empiricism, informed by logic and rational thought there appear to be few if any blocks that to acquiring an understanding of the universe. The Norm Levan Panel is part of a secular humanist research facility based in Bakersfield CA. It investigates issues related to Intelligent Design, Evolution, and the conflict between religion and science. These assumptions were presented during a forum held at Bakersfield College on April 21, 2006:

There is a reality independent of us or our viewpoint

Nature follows fundamental rules and laws

Humans have the ability to figure out rules of nature

Peer review is critical to filtering out human biases

Objective observational experiences are necessary for advancing knowledge of reality

Scientific method combines rationalism's deductive logic with empiricist's inductive logic based on observational experience

Invoking the supernatural is dead-end to further inquiry. Science cannot test supernatural explanations, since they are unfalsifiable, unverifiable, and can be altered to fit any situation post-hoc.

I cannot completely agree with the last of the bulleted items. There is nothing inherently untestable about supernatural claims. What is untestable are supernatural causes if they are presented as such. Claims of ESP or faith healing can certainly be tested. But supernatural causes that can transform to fit any outcome, which elude falsification, or defy testing are, by definition, unscientific and fall outside the realm of the scientific method. They may be true or not true, but science is not equipped to find out.

So, the elements in these catalogs of assumptions underlying the scientific method and empirical inquiry revolve around assertions that reality is objective and consistent, that humans have the capacity to perceive reality accurately, and that rational explanations exist for elements of the real world. These assumptions are based in naturalism, logic, and empiricism, which provide a framework within which science can be performed.

Biologist Stephen J. Gould included two additions that augment these lists: 1) Uniformity of law and 2) uniformity of processes across time and space--must first be assumed before you can proceed as a scientist doing science.

6.4 Falsifiability vs Verifiability

2010-02-20T15:17:00.000-08:00

Karl Popper, the well-known modern critic of Logical Positivism, wrote The Logic of Scientific Discovery. In it he promoted the revolutionary idea that the Logical Positivists' requirement of verifiability was too strong a criterion for science, and should be replaced by a criterion of falsifiability. The Positivists held that statements about the world are meaningless and unscientific if they cannot be verified. Popper, on the other hand, argued that verifiability was more a requirement for "meaning" rather than science. He explained that there exist meaningful theories that are not scientific, and so a criterion of meaningfulness is not the same as a criterion for demarcation between science and non-science. Popper proposed that that falsifiability was the appropriate rule for this use because it did not invite the philosophical problems inherent in verifying via induction. It allowed for statements from the physical sciences which seemed scientific but which did not meet the more stringent verification criterion. In other words, it is more difficult to construct strictly verifiable hypotheses than it is to devise falsifiable ones. If verifiability were the criterion, then the targets which science could address would be far more constrained.

However, just because something is "falsifiable" does not mean it is false. Rather, it means that if it is false, then this can be shown by observation or experiment. Popper used falsification as a criterion of "demarcation" to draw a sharp line between those theories that are scientific and those that are unscientific. It is useful to know if a statement or theory is falsifiable, if for no other reason than that it provides us with an understanding of the ways in which one might assess and test the theory. One might at the least be saved from attempting to falsify a non-falsifiable theory, or come to see an unfalsifiable theory as unsupportable.

Popper claimed that, if a theory is falsifiable, then it is scientific; if it is not falsifiable, then it is not open to falsification and therefore not a meaningful scientific issue. This puts most (but interestingly, not all) questions regarding God and religion outside the domain of science. Falsifiability also circumvents the debate over whether the domain of science only encompasses the "natural world" as opposed to the "supernatural". Instead it frames science within the bounds of a methodology - science deals with hypotheses that can be falsified.

Falsifiability certainly ranks as one of the most important elements in the modern conduct of science. Its dominance over verifiability results from fact that no number of positive experimental outcomes can ever absolutely confirm a scientific theory. But a single counter-example is decisive. It shows that the theory being tested is false, or at least incomplete. Instead of saddling scientists with the impossible task of providing absolute proof, a theory was considered to be tentatively “true” if ample opportunity and means were proposed to disprove it, but no one was able to do so.

Popper demonstrated his position with an example of the rising sun. Although there is no way to prove that the sun will rise every morning, we can hypothesize that it will do so. If only on a single morning it failed to rise, the theory would be disproved. Barring that, it is considered to be provisionally true. The longer a theory retains this provisional status, and the more attempts are made to test it, the greater its claim to firm truth. The “sun-will-rise” theory has been well tested many billions of times, and we have no reason to anticipate that circumstances will cause it to stop happening. So we have a very good reason to believe that this theory represents reality. This argument has some weaknesses (primarily that it is not deductively ironclad). But because no stronger proof suggests itself, and this is pragmatically useful. It is a very good operating theory.

However, critics have legitimately pointed out practical problems with the straightforward use of falsifiability to test theories. The basic idea that Popper proposed is that a scientist proposes a theory, and researchers test the theory in an attempt to find confirming and/or contradictory evidence. If it can be falsified by reliable and reproducible experimental results, that theory must be abandoned.

Thomas Kuhn argued that science doesn't follow this type of pattern at all. He pointed out that in the history of science, there have been several famously incorrect conclusions reached by applying this standard. For example, when it was discovered that the orbit of the planet, Uranus, did not follow the path predicted by Newtonian mechanics, it appeared to falsify Newton. However, the desire to retain Newton's laws was so strong (after all, it was coherent with so many other theories), that post hoc explanations were introduced to save it - in this case another planet was posited even further out than Uranus. This actually turned out to be the case (Neptune was discovered some years later). A similar problem was encountered by Lord Kelvin in his attempt to falsify claims of great antiquity for the Earth's age (he didn't like Darwin's new Theory of Evolution). The planet could certainly not be older than the sun. And he thought that if the sun were made of even the highest grade coal, it could have been burning at its current rate for only a few thousand years, thus falsifying Evolution, which takes millions of years. Of course, if we altered the assumption concerning the source of heat for the sun (e.g. from coal to fusion), it would allow a far greater age for both it and the Earth. To Kelvin's credit, he did recognize this when he wrote,

"inhabitants of the earth cannot continue to enjoy the light and heat essential to their life for many million years longer unless sources now unknown to us are prepared in the great storehouse of creation."

The question is, though, how many times are we allowed to move the goalposts and alter theories after they have failed? The addition of ad hoc, "auxiliary propositions" can weaken the original theory by erecting a shaky scaffold of special cases around it. But even Popper admitted that the "naive falsification" he proposed has to be flexible enough to bend with necessity:

"Some genuinely testable theories, when found to be false, are still upheld by their admirers—for example by introducing ad hoc some auxiliary assumption, or by reinterpreting the theory ad hoc in such a way that it escapes refutation. Such a procedure is always possible, but it rescues the theory from refutation only at the price of destroying, or at least lowering, its scientific status."

I question his assertion that introduction of ad hoc assumptions must always weaken or lower the status of the theory. In the cases of both Uranus and the sun's age, above, the addition of new considerations into the theories enriched them and eventually led to a clearer understanding of the solar system. The modified theories were actually stronger than the original ones.

6.3 Ockham’s razor and the Law of Parsimony

2010-02-08T21:44:00.000-08:00

I have made several appeals to Ockham's razor so far in this paper. It is one of the most widely referenced basic principles of science and reason, being one of the few that people who don't actually study this field are familiar with. It is a heuristic principle that has been shown to be immensely valuable in the long history of science. Also called the "Law of Parsimony", it is succinctly expressed as "entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity". In modern English, "the simplest explanation tends to be the correct one". This is not a mystical revelation, but is a guideline that has been borne out in case after case. We observe that “that Nature does nothing in vain, and more is in vain, when less will serve; for Nature is pleased with simplicity” (Isaac Newton). Simply stated, nature tends to solve problems using the least energy and complexity that will suffice, taking the shortest and most direct path available. Just as water flows downhill, and Uranium splits into new atoms that have the lowest stable energy level, all physical systems trend to the state of lowest energy following the path of least resistance. All of these phenomena, summed up, seem to promote the overall tendency of nature to "prefer" (pardon my anthropomorphizing) the simplest course.

6.2 Aristotle’s Laws of Thought

2010-02-07T19:10:00.000-08:00

Aristotle's "Laws of Thought" date back to the earliest days of Western Philosophy. They shape the basic structure of Western philosophy, science, and its overall worldview - the worldview that can so puzzle many non-Westerners. Many philosophers who followed Aristotle, such as Locke, Leibnitz and Schopenhauer, have modified and enhanced his principles. However, the initial intent has remained the same. These laws are fundamental logical rules, with a long tradition in the history of philosophy, which together define how a rational mind must think. To break any of the laws of thought (for example, to contradict oneself) is to be irrational by definition. These three classic laws of thought were fundamental to the development of classical logic. They are:

Law of identity - an object is the same as itself: “A is A”

Law of noncontradiction - contradictory statements cannot both at the same time be true, e.g. the two propositions "A is B" and "A is not B" are mutually exclusive.

Law of excluded middle - Everything must either be or not be. There is no in-between.

These are self-evident logical principles - axioms that cannot be proved (or disproved), but must be accepted (or rejected) a priori. Other postulates could be substituted for them, and in fact have been in other traditions such as Buddhism, which celebrates contradiction. Even Greek philosophy before Aristotle (and Parmenides, who proposed similar laws) did not always embrace these concepts. But practically everything we know of traditional Western Philosophy and Logic embodies these principles. Preceding Aristotle by over a century, Heraclitus believed that contradictions were necessary - that their existence was essential to a thing's identity:

"Not only could it be stated that identity is the strife of oppositions but that there could be no identity without such strife within the entity."

He argued that because all things change, they must have already had in them "that which they were not". Only the existence of such contradictions could account for the change we see in the world. For example,

"Cold things grow warm; warm grows cold; wet grows dry; parched grows moist."

The defenders of Aristotle’s three laws of thought quickly learned that they had to establish the context for the application of these laws, because they were frequently assailed with counter-examples that seemed to violate them. It became clear that the laws could not be employed loosely or in poorly defined conditions. So, they began to require a “definite logic” model. In this model, the terms and the expressions formed from these terms must be clearly definable and knowable. But this ideal is rarely achieved in the real world, and we are forced to make assertions about things in less than precise, fuzzy terms. Not until the creation of Mathematical Logic by Boole in the 19th century, and later Russell and others, was logic able to refine its expression with mathematical, perfectly clear terms and operations.

This development in logic admirably suited the predispositions of the Western mind. Western philosophy to a very large extent has been founded upon the Laws of Thought and similar ground rules. We believe that our thinking should strive to eliminate ideas that are vague, contradictory, or ambiguous, and the best way to accomplish this, and thereby ground our thinking in clear and distinct ideas, is to strictly follow laws of thought.

In spite of how dominant these laws of thought have been, they have not been without their critics, and philosophers from Heraclitus to Hegel have leveled powerful arguments against them. But the issue does not seem to be whether the laws are applicable or not, but where and when are they applicable? Certainly, the laws of thought have a place, but what is that place? As Walt Whitman wrote in “Song of Myself”:

"Do I contradict myself?
Very well, then, I contradict myself.
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)"

Also as Nagarjuna, one of the fathers of Buddhism, wrote in "Verses on the Middle Way":

"Everything is real and not real.
Both real and not real.
Neither real nor not real.
That is Lord Buddha's teaching."

The time to abandon strict laws of thought arises when we are beyond the realm to which ordinary logic applies, or as when “the sphere of thought has ceased, the nameable ceases.” A similar sentiment is expressed by Wittgenstein's assertion in the Tractatus,

"what can be said at all can be said clearly, and what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence"

It would be very narrow minded, indeed, as well as barren and joyless, to try to apply these or similar laws to every human experience. However, in the narrow, modest realm of science, whose goal is merely to explain how things work and of what they are made, this type of restricted and disciplined thought is a perfect fit.

6 Assumptions of Science

2010-01-10T13:45:00.000-08:00

None of the philosophical questions we have explored are resolved, or else (obviously) they would not still be considered philosophical questions. The controversies and different points of view surrounding the nature of reality, the problem of induction, and the necessary assumption of a uniform universe still stir debate as to what scientific naturalism represents, what are its limits, and how well man can actually know the world. Having said all that I can on the subject, I must now leave it and bubble up one level to describe assumptions that science makes based on these convincing, but admittedly unresolved, principles.

6.1 Rejection of Magic

No one has addressed primitive beliefs in magic and superstition as well as Sir James Frazer, author of The Golden Bough. This was the first definitive description of the myriad explanatory techniques and coping mechanisms that pre-scientific people used to make sense of their world. Rather than using empirical methods of observation, hypothesis, test, and measurement, the long standing unsophisticated, intuitive methods they used to explain how the universe worked invoked what would today be called magic. These people found patterns in the world based on associations of ideas in the mind, either through similarity or proximity. According to Frazer, “the order on which magic reckons is merely an extension, by false analogy, of the order in which ideas present themselves to our minds.” Primitive societies, succumbing to this way of reasoning, relied on what he called “sympathetic magic” to explain events in the world. Two sub-categories of these phenomena subsumed the bulk of primitive magical thought:

Law of Similarity (“like” produces “like”). This is the basis of voodoo, images, effigies, idols, and holy statues. Charms based on the Law of Similarity may be called Homeopathic of Imitative Magic. The Mandrake root, which resembles a man's form, is supposed to have magical properties. Rhinoceros horn, which bears a striking resemblance to a body part of virile male, is used as an aphrodisiac. Primitive cave paintings depicting of successful hunting scenes were thought to insure a successful outcome to the real hunt. Mistletoe was used in pre-modern times as a cure for epilepsy. It does not fall to the ground because it is rooted on the branch of a tree. It would seem to follow as a consequence that an epileptic cannot fall down as long as he carries a piece of mistletoe. Such a train of reasoning would probably be regard even now as reasonable by a large portion of humanity.

Law of Contact (or Contagion) is based on the idea in which things that have once been in contact with each other continue to act on each other at a distance after the physical contact has been severed. Charms based on the Laws of Contact are called Contagious magic. Our abhorrence at the idea of wearing a piece of clothing previously worn by a mass murderer, or receiving a blood transfusion from a violent criminal are demonstrations of this law at work. Relics of saints, or fragments from the “true cross” can supposedly transfer spiritual energy. A lucky shirt or lucky ritual such as crossing your fingers invoke the Law of Contact. Charms made from fingernail clippings, hair and other discards from a target of magic are frequently used.

Magic is a spurious system of natural law as well as a fallacious guide of conduct. It is more akin to a false science than a false religion. Magical systems attempt to express, explain, and exploit causality through an association of ideas – the first through similarity in form, the second in similarity of position. Magical thinking commits the mistake of assuming that things which resemble or were near each other are somehow the same or have some unseen but real connection and causal relationship. The magician believes he can produce an effect merely by imitating it (law of similarity), or that whatever he does to a material object will affect equally the person with whom the object was once in contact (law of contact).

There are countless examples of sympathetic magic in primitive and not-so-primitive societies – far too many to list here. But here is a sampling from The Golden Bough:

Among the Esquimaux boys are forbidden to play cat’s cradle, because if they did so their fingers might in later life become entangled in the harpoon-line... Here the taboo is obviously an application of the law of similarity... as the child’s fingers are entangled by the string in playing cat’s cradle, so they will be entangled by the harpoon line when he is a man and hunts whales. Again, among the Huzuls of the Carpathian Mountains the wife of a hunter may not spin while her husband is eating, or the game will turn and wind like the spindle, and the hunter will be unable to hit it. Here again the taboo is clearly derived from the law of similarity… In some of the East Indian islands any one who comes to the house of a hunter must walk straight in; he may not loiter at the door, for were he to do so, the game would in like manner stop in front of the hunter’s snares and then turn back, instead of being caught in the trap. For a similar reason it is a rule with the Toradjas of Central Celebes that no one may stand or loiter on the ladder of a house where there is a pregnant woman, for such delay would retard the birth of the child ... Malays engaged in the search for camphor eat their food dry and take care not to pound their salt fine. The reason is that the camphor occurs in the form of small grains deposited in the cracks of the trunk of the camphor tree. Accordingly it seems plain to the Malay that if, while seeking for camphor, he were to eat his salt finely ground, the camphor would be found also in fine grains; whereas by eating his salt coarse he ensures that the grains of the camphor will also be large … The chief product of some parts of Laos, a province of Siam, is lac. This is a resinous gum exuded by a red insect on the young branches of trees, to which the little creatures have to be attached by hand. All who engage in the business of gathering the gum abstain from washing themselves and especially from cleansing their heads, lest by removing the parasites from their hair they should detach the other insects from the boughs. Again, a Blackfoot Indian who has set a trap for eagles, and is watching it, would not eat rosebuds on any account; for he argues that if he did so, and an eagle alighted near the trap, the rosebuds in his own stomach would make the bird itch, with the result that instead of swallowing the bait the eagle would merely sit and scratch himself

The list of examples goes on and on. In Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, there is a scene where one of the soldiers objects to having his drawn likeness captured in a sketchbook. He rejects being compared to a superstitious native, but cannot otherwise account for his extreme reluctance. The implication is that, like the "savages" they are pursuing, he feels danger from sympathetic magic associated with a book containing his picture over which he has no control.

In our own lives, we subscribe to many superstitions and magical belief systems. Recently, the system called “The Law of Attraction”, popularized in the motion picture, “The Secret” encouraged visualization of desired outcomes to cause the outcomes to occur. This is more than just positive thinking – it is literally magic. The Law of Similarity, again, is at work here: a mental image of a thing is somehow similar to the thing itself. Also, we use homeopathic medicine when we believe water retains a “memory” of a curative agent that once was in it - this is the Law of Contact at work. And how many of us, normally rational in most of our decisions, continue to take large varieties of supplements and herbal remedies based on a recommendation or foggy personal recollection, and refuse to stop taking it in the face of proof that they don't work?

Science avoids magical explanations in favor of empirical observations, hypotheses, and experimentation. But we all seem to have weak areas where we let primitive magic drive our decisions.

5.3 Is Nature Uniform and Predictable?

2009-12-23T18:48:00.000-08:00

The previous chapter, How can we have confidence in our inferences, investigated Inference and the Problem of Induction. Predictability and continuity from past to future, from the known to the unknown, from the small to the large, and from the near to the distant underlie our ability to make meaningful statements about the world. Out of necessity we assume that our knowledge about that which we can access tells us something useful about that which we cannot access due to distance, time, speed, size, or practicality.

But can we really make these assumptions? The principles of uniformity, homogeneity, and isotrophism (for which we have no deductive proof) are foundational principles underlying our ability to make warranted and defensible universal statements about nature. Without them, we can only talk about what we directly experience, and must leave as utterly unknown and unknowable that which we have not yet experienced.

As we have seen, there is no deductive proof of uniformity or for the inferential process which requires it. But for all the reasons presented so far, the existance of a uniform and predictable universe is very likely to be the case. Whether we choose to defend this assertion with foundational axioms, coherent and mutually supportive lines of evidence, acceptance of an infinite series of increasingly more subtle explanations, relaxing of the requirement for a firm deductive proof, or inference to the best explanation, rejecting the basic principle of uniformity requires a far greater effort than accepting it.

Uniformitarianism is the principle and belief that the natural processes operating in the past are the same as those that can be observed operating in the present, and by extension, the same as those operating throughout the universe. This principle postulates that laws of nature that apply on Earth function the same throughout the universe. Its methodological significance can be summarized in the statement: "The present is the key to the past." This concept was introduced into modern thinking by Charles Lyell, James Hutton, and centuries before, by Avicenna and others. Although Lyell, Hutton, and Avicenna restricted their argument for uniformitarianism to geology, it quickly found application throughout all of natural philosophy. James Hutton wrote,

“If the stone, for example, which fell today, were to rise again tomorrow, there would be an end of natural philosophy, our principles would fail, and we would no longer investigate the rules of nature from our observations.”

This means that for us to be able to draw conclusions about the past, we must assume the invariance of the natural laws we see in operation in the present. Mere position in space or time cannot by themselves be relevant to whether some phenomenon occurs or not.

We start from the premise that the universe is homogeneous and isotropic, meaning that it is the same everywhere and of roughly the same distribution. At all times and everywhere, the laws of the universe behave exactly the same. Every observation ever made supports it, and none refute it. The light we see in our homes is the same as that we see from distant stars (as in Newton's “the light of our culinary fire and of the sun” from his Rules of Reasoning). We have measured light generated billions of light years away, and it is the same as the light generated by our refrigerator bulb. Countless observations support uniformity of the laws of nature across the universe. We see stars and galaxies just like our own as far as the universe stretches. We have recently discovered extra-solar planets with atmospheres circling some of those distant suns not dissimilar from our own. We see light, gravity, physics, and chemistry behave just as it does on Earth no matter where (or when) we look. I say “when” because much of what we see happening in distant space happened billions of years ago. Despite centuries of looking out into space since Galileo first viewed the moons of Jupiter, there is no evidence to support an argument against natural uniformity. Instead, there is overwhelming evidence in its favor. The standard caveats regarding physics at the boundaries of our experience (at the sub atomic level and at the galactic level) apply. The laws of nature at the human level do differ in kind from those we have discovered at these two extremes. But that is not an indictment of uniformity. Instead it is simply a widening of our understanding at these two scales. It is true that the behavior of quarks and leptons, and of dark matter and black holes, differ from what we experience in our daily lives. But we have strong reason to believe that these behaviors are retained at these levels no matter where (or when) in the universe we look.

Uniformitarianism was such a successful paradigm that, not surprisingly, it was eventually overplayed. It received such wide acceptance as a result of Hutton's influence that legitimate catastrophic theories such as volcanic eruptions, climatic changes, asteroid impacts causing mass extinctions, and of plate tectonics were rejected as being contrary to these principles. It got in the way of the acceptance of quantum physics, and erected barriers to the possibility of undiscovered dimensions and the possible infinity of time and space. These misapplications of the principle of Uniformity help us realize that it is a guideline, not a universal law. Uniformity was not “discovered” as the speed of light or the mass of a star can be discovered. It is a generally good assumption that allows us to make inferences about the parts of the universe we don't have immediate access to. But it is not always proper to employ it. It cannot be dogmatically and mindlessly applied.

Isotrophism and Homogeneity are concepts often paired with Uniformitarianism. They are the two legs of the Cosmological Principle which says that no matter where we look in the universe, we will see the same types and distributions of objects. Bound up in this principle is the idea that the shape, substance, and consistency of the universe in our local area is roughly the same as elsewhere. There is nothing priviledged about our frame of reference, as both Galelio and later Einstein showed. There is nothing unique about “here“ vs. “there“, no matter how distant. This is a truth that man has come more and more to realize. In pre-history, each tribe probably considered itself at the center of the universe (as they knew it). Among Earth's major historic cultures existed the symbol of the Axis Mundi, or “axis of the earth” which expressed their view that they inhabited a unique place at the hub of the universe. The Copernican revolution and expanding exploration of the Earth's surface literally widened Man's horizons, showing both that Europe was not at the center of civilization, and that our planet was not at the center of anything, but one of several planets (and a minor one, at that) in the solar system. Our universe grew even larger when Galileo's telescope showed there to be countless thousands of other stars like our own in our island universe, the Milky Way. In the 1700's Herschel added shape and texture to this fact by constructing the first accurate model of our galaxy. The next step came with Hubble's proof that Andromeda was not just another nebula, but a sister galaxy to our own. During the following years, many other galaxy's were discovered. It is currently estimated that there are about as many galaxies in the visible universe as there are stars within our own galaxy. Further, there may be much more to the universe than the mere 13.7 billion light years worth of stars that we are able to see – the universe may be expanding faster than its light can reach us.

As far as we can tell, the universe is both homogeneous (has similar structure everywhere) and isotrophic (has a similar appearance in all directions). On the small scale, we don't have homogenieity – the universe is full of “clumps”. Earth differs from Mars, our sun differs from other stars, the our galaxy differs from the surrounding magellenic clouds and the other galaxies in our local cluster. Our local cluster differs from other galactic clusters. However, on a large enough scale, even larger than this, you do get homogeniety. An analogy would be a sponge cake filled with raisens. If you stick a pin into the cake, you may pull out nothing, or you might get a raisen. On the scale of a pinhead, the cake is not homogeneous. But on the scale of a slice of cake, you always get roughly homegeneous slices with about the same amount of cake and raisins in each slice. On the scale a billion of light years, we observe homogeneous structure in the universe.

But for the purposes of understanding the universe we live in, there is no need to go that far to look for similar structure. The structure of the objects and phenomena that scientists study in their laboratories have the same structure, consistency, and substance of similar structures and phenomena we know exist outside the lab. There is no need to go to the ends of the universe to be able to make that assertion.

5.2.8 Denying the consequent

2009-11-22T21:11:00.000-08:00

There is a valid form of logical reasoning called “denying the consequent” (aka “modus tollens”) which can be used to show that induction is a valid and fully warranted methodology that we may rely upon. The form of the argument is:

If P, then Q.
Q is false.
Therefore P is false.

Following this logical form, the use of inference from real world experience is justified by the following sequence:

If (P) induction from sense experience to make inferences about the world is invalid and unjustifiable, then (Q) science (which relies on inference) has no hope of working.

However, (Q is false) science does work! There are countless examples of the progress that it has introduced, discoveries that it has made, and new technologies it has spawned. There are no counter examples to its success.

Therefore, (P is false) our inferences from the real world ARE justified and valid.

Obviously if there was significant evidence in support of the claim that drawing conclusions through the scientific approach was invalid, then opponents would have a case. But such evidence is entirely absent, and there is overwhelming counter-evidence. Nor is there any competing theory as to why science tends to produce correct, useful, consistent, predictive, and informative results. Barring the existence of a competing explanation that accounts for its success (trickery by Satan to test our faith is one such untestable explanation, as is Solipsism), it’s plain, obvious, common sense to accept as fact that inference from the real world is valid. It would require agonizing logical contortions to explain away the falseness of statement “Q” above (i.e., “science has no hope of working”) using some other argument. The rule of Parsimony would indicate that the obvious explanation, above, is the correct one.

We should not become over excited by the fact that an established formal argument supports the use of induction. Language can be slippery, and we have seen earlier in this document a case where the cousin of modus tollens, modus ponens, was used to prove both that reality IS an illusion and later that reality IS NOT an illusion. So be careful with these simple techniques, they can be misused.

5.2.7 Foundationalism and Coherentism

2009-11-21T21:58:00.000-08:00

After a slight divergence to study Postmoderism (a late addition to the 5.1 chapter which covered Faces of Idealism), we come back to the topic in section 5.2 - How Can we have Confidence in our Infererences.

Induction attempts to justify scientific statements by reference to other specific scientific statements, and these are frequently more basic or fundamental statements. We have seen how this can lead to an infinite regression of assumptions, each of which must be proved. Hume, among others has written about this problem. To avoid this problem, the concept of Foundationalism was introduced, initially by Descartes, built up by Hume, and given modern form by Newton, Russell and others. This concept says that basic, self-evident, foundational beliefs exist and that these require no proof. These, then, serve as the basis for derived beliefs. Foundationalism may seem like a cop-out because it seems to say that at some point, you can’t have any more proof. But logically, there is no good alternative regardless of your preferred metaphysics. No matter how much your system can explain, there will be something underlying your system that is unexplainable. This is true in geometry, calculus, and physics as much as in religion and mythology – that is the nature of explanation in all its contexts. This is called the Regress problem, and some people are uncomfortable with it. In the search for certainty, to have to resign after several deep iterations is unsatisfying. But the alternative (an infinity of ever more refined explanations) is unworkable.

Foundationalists responds to the regress problem by claiming that these most basic beliefs do not themselves require justification by other beliefs. Such would be the case with Russell's Five Postulates and Newton's Rules of Reasoning in Natural Philosophy (both described elsewhere in this document). Sometimes, these “foundational” beliefs are characterized as beliefs of whose truth one is directly aware, or as beliefs that are self-justifying, or as beliefs that are infallible. According to one particularly permissive form of foundationalism, a belief may count as foundational, in the sense that it may be presumed true until defeating evidence appears, as long as the belief seems to its believer to be true. Others have argued that a belief is justified if it is based on perception or certain a priori considerations. In any case, it can appear to detractors as philosophical hand-waving.

Coherentism is a competing solution to the problem of induction – infinite regression. This model of knowledge asserts that scientific statements can be said to be valid if they fit cleanly into an existing coherent system of other known facts or beliefs. In other words, if they form part of a coherent whole (such as the existing body of science), they can be said to be correct. In this view, there is no requirement that scientific statements always be supported by more fundamental statements, instead they can be said to be provisionally “true” if they successfully serve their role in a network of mutually supporting scientific disciplines. Similarly, the fundamental statements that support more complex concepts in several disciplines are buttressed by their repeated successful application. For example, it is not possible to “prove” Newton's theory of gravity:

Every particle of matter in the universe attracts every other particle with a force that is directly proportional to the product of the masses of the particles and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them.

But it plays such a consistent and predictable role in so many situations that it is considered as true as any scientific principle can be (leaving relativity and quantum gravity aside...). Supporters of this way of looking at scientific statements include Willard Quine and E. O. Wilson who popularized another word for this concept: consilience. However, it was not Wilson who came up with the concept. William Whewell coined the term in 1840 when he said, "The Consilience of Inductions takes place when an Induction, obtained from one class of facts, coincides with an Induction obtained from another different class. Thus Consilience is a test of the truth of the Theory in which it occurs." Stated differently, Consilience is an assertion of the truth of the Theory in which is occurs. However, when a new observation conflicts with the existing body of knowledge, either the observation can be said to be incorrect, or the body of knowledge (e.g. existing theories) need to be modified. This is exactly what has happened with Newton's theory in the face of Einstein's discoveries.

Innumerable scientific observations from many disciplines support each other and provide confirmation and support for each other in very convincing ways. For example, Eddington's observations of light bending during a 1919 solar eclipse is considered the first evidence to provide solid support for Einstein's theory of General Relativity. This support didn't come from physics, per se, but from astronomy. Other astronomical phenomena (gravitational redshift of light) have provided equally compelling support.

Genetic research and the discovery of DNA supported and explained a mechanism for Darwin's theory of Evolution. Plate Tectonics explained how mountain ranges formed, which is coherent with much earlier discoveries of submarine fossils atop the peaks of our tallest mountain ranges and fossil similarities on the east coast of South America and west coast of Africa. Other coherent discoveries in geophysics involving magnetic field orientations in rocks on formerly adjacent plates have added additional support.

The chief criticism of foundationalism is that it can lead to the arbitrary or unjustified acceptance of certain basic beliefs. If we can all use personal preference to arrive at our unproven axioms, then strange and divergent belief systems can, will, and do emerge. The criticism of coherentism is that it is basically circular: A explains B, B explains C,and C explains A.

The only other alternative that is generally suggested is to accept the infinite regress and move on. These three choices (foundationalism, coherentism, and infinite regress) bear a close resemblance to the three legs of Münchhausen's trilemma (so named because Baron Münchhausen supposedly pulled himself out of a swamp by his own hair). Simply put, the trilemma factors all possible proofs for a theory into three categories:

The circular argument, in which theory and proof support each other (coherentism)

The regressive argument, in which each proof requires a further proof (infinite regress)

The axiomatic argument, which rests on accepted precepts (foundationalism)

5.1.1.9.3 Postmodernism and science

2009-11-02T22:12:00.000-08:00

The Postmodernism argument runs that economic and technological conditions of our age have given rise to a decentralized, media-dominated society in which ideas are “simulacra” and only inter-referential representations, mere copies or echoes of each other, with no real original, stable or objective source for communication and meaning. Globalization, brought on by innovations in communication, manufacturing and transportation, is often cited as one force which has driven the decentralized modern life, creating a culturally pluralistic and interconnected global society lacking any single dominant center of political power, communication, or intellectual production. Scientific publications, whose conclusions change from year to year demonstrate (in their opinion) that there is no solid basis to scientific investigation - that scientists publish to boost their individual reputations and to secure grant money, not to advance a solid body of knowledge.

Given the antipathy of postmodernism to reason, logic, and science, what is the basis of its attack? Fundamentally, it consists of an attempt to reduce science to yet another belief system supported by cultural norms and biases – no better or worse than any other, and on a par with religion, political dogma, or historical tradition. The Postmodernists, radical skeptics of all knowledge, claim that science is a mythic narrative - one among many others. It is just one other way of looking at the world, subject to its own faith claims, with its own priesthood, just like a religion.

Susan Haack, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Miami, admits that it is true the science has some figures that are regarded with some deference, and it has its share of jargon which is practically impenetrable to the lay person. But it is not just one of many legitimate ways of figuring things out. All of use, every day engage in various kinds of empirical inquiry. You might try a variety of routes to get to work, finding some that get you there faster than others. What is it that makes one route superior? Fewer stop signs, faster speed limits, less traffic? The inquiry of science is continuous with this sort of ordinary every day inquiry. As Thomas Huxley wrote, science is more careful, it's more detailed, and it's more scrupulous. But even though its language is difficult to master, it is not impenetrable at its core. It is an extension of how we all, everyday, get through the world. It is continuous with an activity with which each of us is familiar: ordinary, everyday, empirical investigation. Ordinary common sense is continuous with science. The practice of science is not different in quality from the normal empirical activities we exercise every day during our normal interactions with the world, as we test the environment around us.

However, it should be emphasized that scientific knowledge does not always resemble common sense knowledge. In many ways, the presently accepted scientific theories of the world are very unlike what we think of as common sense beliefs about the world. On the contrary, they frequently defy common sense. The argument that the methods of science are like the methods of everyday life is not a claim about the body of currently accepted scientific theories, but is rather a claim about how scientific inquiries proceed. What distinguishes the sciences in this area is that they have developed an enormous array of techniques and tools for conducting their inquiries that make them much more powerful - mathematics, computers, statistics, measuring tools, instruments of observation that extend our unaided senses, and a centuries old expanding and self-correcting body of knowledge. Science has organizational methodologies that allow enormous amounts of information to be cataloged and made sense of. However, given all these advantages over commons sense, we should keep in mind the quote from Einstein, "science is a refinement of everyday thinking".

The postmodernist argument also misses the important point that science is an open system of inquiry that is subject by its very methods to outside falsification – even from external reality itself. Faith and dogma, on the other hand, are closed belief systems reliant upon authority or revelation. Stanley Fish, a Postmodernist apologist, argues,

“But what about reasons? Isn’t that what separates scientific faith from religious faith; one is supported by reasons, the other is irrational and supported by nothing but superstition? Not really.”

He asks this rhetorically, because the article in which this quote appears attempts to show that the rea-sons for trusting rationality and evidence are as arbitrary as the reasons for trusting any other non-rational explanatory system.

This perfectly expresses the core misunderstanding of Postmodernist criticism of science. Although there is plenty of “reason” to have confidence in the explanatory structure which is science, it is not this set of reasons which separates science from faith, but rather, it is methodology. Fish paints a picture of science as a game of inventing reasons to explain specific beliefs (the context of discovery) in something of a post hoc manner. Rather, science is much more about testing those reasons against reality and previously elaborated theories (the later justification which follows discovery). This second, often overlooked, aspect of science is utterly lacking from faith-based belief systems. The glamour is in the discovery, but the bulk of the work is in the painstaking justification, cross-checks, tests for consistency, and confirmation exercises that follow.

Postmodernists also counter scientific falsifiability by attempting to argue that science picks and chooses convenient sources for what it would consider adequate falsification, just as any other belief system would. For example, they might ask,

“Is there something that would falsify a religious faith in the same way that some physical discoveries would falsify a scientist’s belief in natural selection? As it is usually posed, the question imagines disconfirming evidence coming from outside the faith, be it science or religion. But a system of assumptions and protocols (and that is what a faith is) will recognize only evidence internal to its basic presuppositions. Asking that religious faith consider itself falsified by empirical evidence is as foolish as asking that natural selection tremble before the assertion of deity and design. Falsification, if it occurs, always occurs from the inside.”

This is consistent with Thomas Kuhn, who wrote that paradigms can only be judged from within the paradigm itself, not falsified from the outside. And when one paradigm shifts to another it happens for quirky and subjective (i.e. cultural) reasons. Kuhn and Fish miss the whole “later justification” thing that is central to scientific methodology. They miss that science itself is not a set of beliefs but a set of methods. Yes, culture plays its role as it does in every human endeavor. But it is not the driving force, and (in a free inquiry) science does not reach its conclusions to achieve social goals.

Two common Postmodernist critiques of science runs like this: “Because of the subjectivity of the human object, anthropology, psychology, and other human studies, cannot be science; and in any event the subjectivity of the human subject precludes the possibility of science discovering objective truth of any sort. Second, since objectivity is an illusion, science subverts oppressed groups, females, ethnics, third-world peoples" (Spiro 1996). These objections are self contradictory . They purport to make some sorts of truthful statements about the world. Any argument that is based on the assertion that “Everything is subjective." runs into immediate problems. This idea is nonsensical. Anti-postmodernist Thomas Nagel has written, "for it would itself have to be either subjective or objective. But it can't be objective, since in that case it would be false if true. And it can't be subjective, because then it would not rule out any objective claim, including the claim that it is objectively false."

The imminent analytic philosopher, Willard V. O. Quine, maintains that scientific reality is indeed a somewhat arbitrary social construct. He says:

Physical objects are conceptually imported into the situation as convenient intermediaries not by definition in terms of experience, but simply as irreducible posits comparable, epistemologically, to the gods of Homer . . . For my part I do, qua lay physicist, believe in physical objects and not in Homer's gods; and I consider it a scientific error to believe otherwise. But in point of epistemological footing, the physical objects and the gods differ only in degree and not in kind. Both sorts of entities enter our conceptions only as cultural posits.

Sokal and Bricmont, in their book Intellectual Impostures — Fashionable Nonsense, highlight the rising tide of cognitive relativism, the belief that there are no objective truths but only local beliefs whose truth value is relative to the social group or individual which holds the belief. They draw attention to the abuse of concepts from mathematics and physics, such as:

Using scientific or pseudo scientific terminology without bothering much about what these words mean.

Importing concepts from the natural sciences into the humanities without the slightest justification, and without providing any rationale for their use.

Displaying superficial erudition by shamelessly throwing around technical terms where they are irrelevant, presumably to impress and intimidate the non-specialist reader.

Manipulating words and phrases that are, in fact, meaningless. Self-assurance on topics far beyond the competence of the author and exploiting the prestige of science to give discourses a veneer of rigor.

Relying as it does on deconstruction, postmodern analysis is built on questioning the assumptions underlying any text, “deconstructing” its meaning. The problem is, it’s rare that a postmodernist critique of anything doesn’t consist of some of the densest, most impenetrable verbiage in existence. These sorts of arguments often claim that rationality, logic, and empiricism are nothing more than a hegemony of the dominant power structure being imposed upon the very definition of “data” or “reality,” the implication that it is the “dead white males” whose hegemony is being served. Ironically, it is Postmodernism itself which commits this intellectual crime in the most flagrant manner.

5.1.1.9.2 Whats Wrong With Postmodernism?

2009-11-01T07:05:00.000-08:00

The several examples of beneficial Postmodernism in art, architecture, literature, science, and anthropology given above show it to be a mind opening, cobweb clearing, refreshing way to look at old issues from new and creative directions. What’s wrong with that? What’s wrong with being creative, free from dogmatism, and open minded - with seeing things from new perspectives and thinking outside-of-the-box?

No doubt during the mid 20th century there was an excess of conformity and conventionalism. Of course the historic “certainty” of Western Civilization in their religions, history, political systems, art, and culture was highly chauvinistic and ill-informed. That supposed superiority was concluded in ignorance of the rich and varied alternatives from other parts of the world and other times in history. But the West had no monopoly on cultural bigotry – the same sort of provincial thinking was common to most isolated cultures, as we have been for most of our existence in the West. It continues today. Stories of racism, bigotry, violence, and condescension in countries with highly homogeneous and uniform populations in eastern Asia, the Middle East, northern Europe, and Africa abound.

Clearly, taking off blinders to the cultural, historical, artistic, and philosophical riches available from other cultures and civilizations is a good thing. But Postmoderinsm has taken this good thing too far, and it has already begun to consume itself. What started as a movement to discover new and personal meaning, to broaden horizons, expand thinking, and to break stifling limitations on creativity became a license to reject all established meaning, value, and significance – a total repudiation and revolution against the history of acquired knowledge - destruction of the old, sweeping it away to introduce the new. In tune with the disposable society of the late 20th century which values "newness" as implicitly good and the what has gone on before as passe, Postmodernism struck a chord with the rebellious sentiments of the 1960’s and 70’s.

The Postmodernist approach has helped writers, artists, and scientists break through barriers erected by tradition and established “wisdom” to go on to achieve radical and innovative breakthroughs. However, there is another saying of uncertain origin: “keep an open mind, but not so open that your brain falls out”. This succinctly encapsulates the pitfall into which Postmodernism and Deconstruction have fallen. It is one thing to sweep out old, musty truisms, stodgy conventions, and outdated theories, but not at the expense of discarding all accumulated wisdom and knowledge to make room for some brave new world. This philosophical/literary system lacks a clear central hierarchy or organizing principle, while embodying extreme complexity and celebrating internal contradiction, ambiguity, and diversity for diversity's sake. To those first discovering it, it may seem either intoxicatingly liberating or, on the other extreme, a parody or satire of itself - sheer intellectual fraud.

Dr Alan Bloom, the author of The Closing of the American Mind, was a conservative Humanities scholar at the University of Chicago. During the 1960’s and 1970’s he became increasingly distressed over the direction in which the academic Left was taking Humanities studies at American universities. He believed that the Civil Rights movement, the Anti-War movement, the Women’s movement, and the Third-World movement, all of which help foster the concept of multiculturalism were leading to a paralyzing cultural relativism. The worst thing that a professor could do in academia during this era was to actually come to a conclusion about anything. Instead, what was required was to retain a perpetually open mind - so open, that, in fact, they become closed (thus the title of his book). This paradoxical statement meant that by remaining open to everything, by refusing to apply reason and logic to judge and discriminate among choices, such as whether Shakespeare was a greater writer than Agatha Christy, or indeed if Shakespeare could be judged superior to Australian Aborigine story tellers, then you become mired in indecision. This indecision is based on the belief that we have no right to judge one over the other, to use discrimination (a word which has been much maligned recently) to evaluate relative quality. When we do that, we deny the critical power of human reason. If the University System has any one purpose, it is expose young minds to ideas, and then show them how to use their wits, their intellects, available information, evidence, and human reason to come to informed decisions about things. He worried that this was no longer happening at universities because of the emerging view that all ideas were of equal value. Although Bloom was alarmed only at the erosion of the integrity of the Humanities, we see a similar relativistic attack on the sciences by Creationists and New Age proponents who claim that their brands of alternative science should have an equal footing with traditional science.

To them, western science is just one among many equally valid "narratives", not to be privileged in its competition with native traditions. They maintain science and reason, as a means to discovering the universe, is an arbitrary and uncompelling approach to understanding - no better or worse that any other epistemological preference.

Although considered a fairly recent philosophical movement, Postmodernism really began with Kant's assertion that we cannot know things in themselves and that objects of knowledge must conform to our faculties (i.e., categories) of mental representation. Postmodernism takes this further by claiming that all we know, and all we can know, is filtered by our political and socio-economic preconceptions. Unlike other branches of philosophy, whose proponents assiduously, but often vainly, strive to describe and illuminate, Postmodernism keeps its opponents off balance and disoriented by refusing to submit to definition - in fact rejecting the constraints of definition altogether. It protects itself from criticism by being especially slippery. Just as Solipsism erects logical barriers around itself that effectively stifle criticism while doing nothing to demonstrate its validity, Postmodernism creates similar obstacles by preemptively disarming all external attacks first by refusing to submit to characterization or description, and then by holding to the position that growth and change can only occur from the inside, not from the outside. In their view, critiques originating from outside its domain have no legitimacy. This strategy poisons the well against useful critique and blocks any possible rebuttals.

In their view, religion can criticize religion, science science, history history, and literature literature. No change comes from outside. Each person and each discipline must look into itself for meaning and to discover its problems and to determine its own future. By this standard, no disparagement originating from outside the structure of Postmodernism need be taken seriously. This argument may sound vaguely familiar, as it is the partial basis for the argument that in American society, “dead white males” have no authority to advise minorities, women, or anyone else on their social agendas, philosophies, or world views. This cliché derives from that origin. More than any other branch of philosophy or culture examined in this paper, Postmodernism has successfully framed itself in such vague and indescribable terms that any attempt at definition is rendered nearly impossible. There is practically no assertion one could make that could not be disputed endlessly by well-versed Postmodern apologists. They typically condemn classification and description of their discipline as excessively confining and stereotyping, as an attempt to usurp power by imposing definitions from outside rather than allow it to develop as it chooses and to define itself.

Although the movement’s current incarnation traces back only as far as the late 1960s with the publication of several books by Jacques Derrida in 1967, Michel Foucault in the 1970s, and several other writers of that time, it received a tremendous political and spiritual boost from the Afro-Asian Conference in April 1955 in Bandung, Indonesia. Hosted by President Sukarno, it launched the modern “Third World” movement, heralding the end of the dominance of the West, with its “rapacious capitalism” and overbearing colonial hegemony. It trumpeted the beginning of a new world order, a pacific, non-aligned, virtuous utopia, free from the colonial past and from white, Western dominance. These ex-colonial states were inherently “righteous” by the fact of their history of victimization. This shared experience united the new non-aligned nations under the flag of oppression. As Modern Times author Paul Johnson satirically wrote, “a gathering of such states would be a senate of wisdom”. But its first order of business was to engineer the escape from the political, historical, artistic, and intellectual shadow of western culture. It would accomplish that in two strokes - by demolishing the icons of that culture, while simultaneously promoting its own. The traditions and culture of the West were roundly condemned, not for any lack of merit, but merely for being associated with a repugnant, oppressive past. This would not have been the first, nor the last time an individual or group adopted a belief system whose primary charm was its tremendous potential to materially benefit its believers. This movement ushered in an era of unprecedented influence and prestige for the previously dispossessed of nations. Perhaps the Postmodernist accusation that “all institutions, creations, artwork and moral values are expressions of a primal will to power; the enforcement of one person’s ideology on another” is more projection and description of its own value system than a fair analysis of the values and institutions of those it condemned.

But, aside from being intellectually dishonest and devious, are there any structural/logical problems with this philosophy? The writer, Pauline Rosenau, identified seven contradictions in Postmodernism:

Its anti-theoretical position is, itself, essentially a theoretical stand.

While Postmodernism stresses the irrational, instruments of reason are freely employed to advance its perspective.

The Postmodern prescription to focus on the marginal is itself an evaluative emphasis of precisely the sort that it otherwise attacks.

Postmodernism stress inter-textuality but often treats text in isolation when it is convenient.

By adamantly rejecting modern criteria for assessing theory, Postmodernists cannot argue that there are no valid criteria for judgement.

Postmodernism criticizes the inconsistency of modernism, but refuses to be held to norms of consistency itself.

Postmodernists contradict themselves by relinquishing truth claims in their own writings.

In short, if they held themselves and their theories up to the same analysis that they direct outwards, their theoretical framework would be in tatters.

There are countless examples of twisted logic and crazed rationales in modern society that all have a similar underlying essence of unreality. On one level they seem to not break the rules of logic, and at another level, their conclusions are seemingly insane. In George Orwell’s 1984 we have a compelling description of how the so-called Ministry of Truth which used “Newspeak” to brainwash the people of Oceania. The party slogans were: "War is peace; Freedom is slavery; Ignorance is strength". Through crafty manipulation of language, throwing out conventional definitions and re-framing reality in line with the party view, outright lies became self-evident truths. This lexical legerdemain turns words on their heads, robbing text of meaning, equating sense and non-sense, undermines logic and reason itself as simply alternative narratives that we repeat to ourselves.

Postmodernists behave like the stereotypical unscrupulous lawyer trying to win the case: truth and justice aren’t the point; instead using any rhetorical tool or trick that works is the point. Sometimes contradictory lines of argument work, your audience’s desire to belong to the in-group can be played upon, or appearing absolutely authoritative works to camouflage a weak case. Sometimes condescension works. It relies on rhetoric rather than substance.

We can see this occur in current events: religious cults or other minority groups which have long been victimized by bigotry or racism, grab the opportunity when the tables turn, to become bigots and racists themselves, providing a rationale supported by their doctrine. However, a typical postmodernist justification which explains all this away is that it is impossible for a minority to be bigoted or racist, since these traits are expression of power, and minorities have no power (Education & Racism, National Education Association. 1973). This is modern Newspeak postmodernism par-excellance. This very argument is frequently used in modern culture, for example, by Troy Davis in his Whyaminotsurprised blog: “In other words, the very social construction of "race" itself was the act of White oppressors for the purpose of exploiting and dominating people of color...consequently, I (and I am not alone here) don't believe that it's possible for a person of color to be a racist.”

So, reason takes a backseat to the intent of the message. Foucault shared these sentiments, claiming “reason is the ultimate language of madness,” suggesting that nothing should constrain our beliefs and political preferences, not even logic or evidence. Frank Lentricchia, another left-wing theorist, said the postmodern movement “seeks not to find the foundation and conditions of truth, but to exercise power for the purpose of social change.” And Stanley Fish has argued that theorizing and deconstruction “relieves me of the obligation to be right … and demands only that I be interesting.” There is a pattern here. The common goal is to simultaneously remove the supports of conventional wisdom by redefining truth and falsehood, right and wrong, reality and illusion, while also promoting themselves as the fresh arbiters of a new form of insight and authority. It is a bald power-play to enfranchise the previously disfranchised, to dethrone reason and replace it with a social subjectivism that, they believe, has suffered much reduced prestige at the hands of science, reason, and technology.

5.1.1.9.1 Deconstructionism

2009-10-27T20:54:00.000-07:00

The last element in the bullet list above, deconstruction (or deconstructionism), began as a literary analysis practice popularized by Jacques Derrida in the 1960s and 70s. It is based on the idea that meaning is always uncertain, is non-objective, and that it is not the task of the literary critic to illuminate meaning in a given text – each individual can determine what something means for himself. In other words, meaning and value are subjective and relative. It exemplifies the cliche, “beauty is in the eye of the beholder”. This is tame enough, and even justified and empowering, when not taken to extremes. But with Derrida, all external meaning becomes irrelevant, if not altogether non-existent. Derrida began with the established concepts of “the signified” and “the signifier”. An idea (the signified) is represented by a sign or word (signifier), and the signifier can never be the same as the signified. Derrida extended this, introducing an infinite series of signifiers referring to other signifiers, none ever settling on a firm "signified" entity. Because deconstructionism questions order and certainty in language and what language attempts to represent, its opponents view it as an intellectually obscure, negative cultural and philosophical critique – it tears down, but does not build anything to replace what it destroys. Initially considered elitist, nihilistic, and subversive to humanistic ideals, deconstructionism has been much debated in academic circles. It has gained more widespread acceptance, although it still remains, to an extent, a radical and controversial way of analyzing texts. Its critics deride it as being intentionally abstruse and recondite, full of obfuscation, and riddled with pretentious blather.

In one famous incident (the "Sokal affair") a physicist intentionally submitted a confusing and garbled scientific article to a Deconstructionist periodical and had it published. The author, Sokal, revealed that his fake article was "a pastiche of left-wing cant, fawning references, grandiose quotations, and outright nonsense", which was "structured around the silliest quotations [he] could find about mathematics and physics" made by postmodernist academics. This event demonstrated that practically any kind of politically / socially “correct” balderdash is acceptable to the Postmodern elite, independent of its intellectual quality.

Many literary critics detest practice of deconstruction, believing that deconstructing a text robs it of meaning and ultimately destroys the value of anything it touches. To those who defend its use, the answer to this criticism might be: “How does one define value? What is meaning?” So, the rebuttal is to challenge the very question itself, and attempt to demonstrate that the question is meaningless. Instead of answering the criticism, the criticism itself is shown to be flawed. But the critics persist. They convincingly claim that deconstructionism is nihilistic, that authors like Derrida attempt to undermine the ethical and intellectual norms vital to the classical conceptions of knowledge and wisdom. They accuse Derrida and his kind of denying the possibility of actual knowledge and meaning, creating a blend of extreme skepticism and solipsism, which these critics believe harmful. Under Derrida, Postmodernism took a decidedly destructive and non-productive turn.

A major criticism leveled at deconstructionism is that its proponents seldom attack their own work in the same way; why not deconstruct deconstructionism, itself, for instance? Heaven forbid! There are also obvious limitations to which texts can be deconstructed: although some think it can apply to anything, it is hard to see how it can address mathematical or (some) scientific papers without the knowledge of these areas that most deconstructionists lack or without tackling the philosophical problems associated with them first.

5.1.1.9 Postmodernism and Deconstructionism

2009-10-25T22:33:00.001-07:00

Here is a new section that I really should have added back there just after the chapter on "Omphalos". It is a form of Idealism that is so difficult to talk about intelligently and coherently that I didn't really know how to approach it. The very difficulty I have in describing this phenomenon is part of what gives it power. This will be a multi-part entry. Sorry that it's out of order. But here goes:

What is Postmodernism?
Creative individuals from many disciplines popularized this political / philosophical / literary / artistic movement in post WWII Europe and America. Although influenced by Nietzsche and Heidegger’s arguments against pure objectivity, it became a significant movement only after the war.

This movement gave us Dada art, surrealism, and abstract expressionism. In music, Philip Glass’s minimalist composition, Frank Gehry’s and Rem Koolhaus’s architectural responses to “glass box” skyscrapers, literary creations from Vonnegut and Burroughs all contain strong postmodernist elements. Historian Howard Zinn helped us see our mistakes in Viet Nam. It revels in iconoclastic attacks on blandness, the status quo, conventional wisdom, ultimate “Truth”, and the accepted norm. It strongly encouraged “thinking outside the box” and finding new and personal meaning instead of accepting established explanations. Postmodernist thinking has helped usurp established common knowledge in anthropology and archeology where prejudice, dogma and tradition have historically taken tenacious handholds and have been difficult to dislodge. As convincingly argued in the book, 1491, by Charles Mann, the new evolving consensus on the arrival and culture of indigenous people in the Americas has strongly depended on revolt against established norms and accepted doctrine. James Burke's The Day the Universe Changed ends with a postmodernist chapter celebrating the uncertainty of science and knowledge. For those of us who grew up in the last third of the 20th century, we may recall our English teachers urging us to discover anew the meaning in the classics of history, rather than regurgitate the Cliff notes. Rebellion and non-conformity drove and energized it, frequently resulting in stunningly beautiful and important works, creative new insights, and introducing many new concepts and phrases into our modern lexicon (“paradigm shift”, “authenticity”, “deconstruction”, “multicultural”, “post colonial”, “cultural relativism”, "speak truth to power", etc).

So what is it, anyway? Charles Upton in The System of Antichrist wrote, “Postmodernism is the name for the general quality of our time. It holds that all worldviews are constructed by historical processes, by culture and religion, so postmodernism sees those worldviews ('tall stories') as a function of power rather than truth.”

In this context postmodernism is the notion that all ideas and beliefs can be best understood as subjective human storytelling – narratives dominated by culture and bias with no special relationship to the truth. Philosophers of science have already rooted out the flaws in such reasoning (in philosophical parlance, postmodernism confuses the exciting context of “discovery” with the context of later labor intensive “justification”). When applied to science it negates the implication of methodology and reduces all scientific research to a cultural narrative.

Without delving to how it differentiates itself from “Modernism”, and after attempting to reconcile many divergent and conflicting descriptions, it is possible to trace the outline of its tenets, though it is fundamental to Postmodernism’s nature to resist and reject all such attempts:

There is no objective truth or reality.

Reality is constructed by our minds and mental representations (as Kant would have it). It is only as we choose to configure it. The only reality is chaotic potential.

All comprehensible worldviews are oppressive, and as such should be deconstructed (i.e., overturned).

“Truth” is plural and ultimately subjective. Meaning, truth and morality do not exist objectively; rather they are constructed by the society in which we live.

All institutions, creations, artwork and moral values are expressions of a primal will to power; the enforcement of one person’s or group's ideology on another.

Reason is thrown out and therefore there is really no basis for debate. Fulfillment comes from submerging one’s self in the larger group and developing a radical openness to existence by refusing to impose order on life.

Revolutionary Critique of the Existing Order – The old ‘modern’ society from the enlightenment period with its rationalism and unitary view of truth needs to be replaced with a ‘new world order.’

“Deconstruction”, an analytical method used extensively in postmodernism, is the progressive pulverization of reality with the goal of pursuing the meaning of a text or assertion so as to undo the oppositions on which it is founded, and to show that that same foundation is fatally unstable and impossible.

I group this movement with the other instances of idealism because many postmodernists dispute the prevailing conceptions of reality. Jean Baudrillard, one of its founders, maintained that there is no such thing as reality. Everything we consider real is only a simulation, or “simulacra”. This very statement, like many others they make, reflects an internal logical inconsistency. It would require he have access to the “true” reality so as to compare it with the “simulation” to even be able to make this assertion. But if he can indeed do that, then his initial statement is false. And besides, even if there were such a thing as “true” vs “simulated” reality, who is Jean Baudrillard to tell us which is which? He would have to possess a perceptual ability that enabled him to see through the simulacra and simulations to the underlying reality so that he might compare them with such a reality, discern differences and distinctions, and thus have empirical grounds to make his pronouncements concerning them. And if he can do this, why can not we all?

5.2.6 Wesley Salmon and the Problem of Induction

2009-05-05T21:40:00.000-07:00

Wesley Salmon was a 20th century philosopher who took up the study of how causality functions and why the transfer of information from one spatio-temporal location to another serves as its fundamental mechanism. He continued the investigation into questions of inference, induction, and the scientific process.

According to Salmon, we all believe we have knowledge of facts that extend beyond what we directly perceive. Our view of events is severely limited by both space and time. Based on our limited experiences we presume to predict future events. Take this hypothetical situation: suppose that you have drawn a number of balls from an urn and discovered them to all be black in color. You might infer, therefore, that all the balls from the urn will be black. This is an "ampliative" inference: the conclusion asserts something that is not found in the premises – nothing in the past record of choosing only black balls implies anything about the color of balls you will draw in the future. Some black balls have been drawn from the urn - therefore can one conclude that they will be black as we continue drawing? No, not at all, because in this sort of “non-demonstrative” logic, it is perfectly possible for the conclusion (all future balls will be black) to be false even if the premises are true (all the balls so far were black). Although this example is contrived, that is exactly the kind of judgment we make about the prospects for a sunrise each morning.

A related form of this scenario is called the “Black Swan” problem – it may be that all swans you have ever seen before are white, but you would not be on firm logical ground to conclude that all swans in the world are white. Even a single black swan (which was finally seen by Europeans when they first visited Australia) would invalidate your premature conclusion.

Hume and many others have noted that such inferences would be valid if we could have recourse to some sort of principle of uniformity in nature. If we could prove that the course of nature is uniform, that the future will be like the past, then we would be justified in generalizing from past cases to future cases - from the observed to the unobserved. We have found by experience that nature has exhibited a high degree of uniformity and regularity so far, and we infer inductively that this will continue. Even though we all have many beliefs about unobserved worlds, and in some of them we place great confidence, they are without a solid rational justification. By habit, we assume an intrinsic uniformity in the processes of nature. Such a belief seems easy to rationalize - these inferential methods of both common sense and science have proved themselves by their results. No other method can claim a comparable record of successful accomplishment. Consider the amazing technological and scientific discoveries that have been made using these techniques. However, it is easily shown that this is a circular argument, and once again we arrive at the necessity of making an assumption – the world is regular and, within limits, it conforms to predictable and regular patterns.

The universality, uniformity, and predictability of nature are concepts that make their appearances in all debates involving inference and induction. It seems that for inference from past experience to be a valid way of reasoning about future events or current, but unseen events, we must believe that the future will be like the past. This implies a uniformity that spans time and space. But is this a good assumption? If we allow ourselves to be trapped in the circular explanation, it is not good enough.

But why should we limit ourselves in this way? Isn't predicting the sunrise substantially different than predicting whether the next ball will be black or not? We know almost nothing about the unseen balls in the urn, but we know an enormous amount about how the sun and earth are related. Thanks to Newton, we understand orbital mechanics. We can trace the history and describe the structure of the solar system, and the laws of gravity and angular momentum are well-known. Even more, we can apply our knowledge of the Milankovitch cycles that describe the 41,000 year cycle of Earth's precession, and even bring in General Relativity to describe the subtle changes in the precession of Mercury's perihelion. All these facts and theories support the modest contention that tomorrow the sun will rise. Combining the findings from the sciences and many other disciplines to form a network of supporting evidence is the essense of "Coherentism", discussed in the next section. It is a hopeful alternative to the tautology we are trapped in when we use induction to prove induction. The next section describes this concept.

5.2.5 Russell’s Postulates for Non-Demonstrable Inference

2009-04-23T20:16:00.000-07:00

Among the many ideas Bertrand Russell explored was the problem of showing how we can use non-demonstrable (or non-deductive) inference to draw legitimate conclusions about the world. Take two examples:

If at one moment you see your cat asleep by the fire and later you see it in a doorway, you are confident that it has passed through intermediate positions from the fire to the doorway, although you didn’t see it doing so. Because you were not a witness of the movement, there is no form of deductive logic that would prove that it is the same cat – it could be a completely identical duplicate. Common sense tells us that this is highly unlikely.

Or suppose you are walking along and you notice a shadow following you. You jump and it jumps. You stop and it stops. A reasonable inference is that it is your shadow, but it could equally be a dark spot on the ground with an independent existence that is following you around.

Surprisingly, we must make some assumptions that allow us to trust our inference that the cat walked from the fire to the doorway and that the dark spot is, in fact, only our shadow. The inferences we use in our daily lives and in science are of this sort. But what are the principles underlying this activity? What must the world be like for these non-deductive inferences to be warranted? What grounds do we have for believing that what simply must be true is indeed the case? What extra-logical principles must be true if we are not mistaken in cases like these? Regarding the cat, there must be some principle of endurance or constancy of objects that we assume without any more basic supporting evidence. In the case of the shadow, there must be some concept of causality (our body causes the shadow) in nature on which we can depend.

To provide support for making these types of common sense, but non-deductive inferences from “hard data” (external facts) to “soft data” (derived or inferred interpretations of the facts), Russell provided five postulates. In fact, it was this set of postulates that motivated me to put together this entire blog – the rest grew up around it. They support conclusions we make about our experiences that, although highly likely to be true, cannot be absolutely proven by the use of these or any other postulates. They are self-evident assumptions unaccompanied by proof, which he considered necessary to justify the kind of non-demonstrative inferences about which none of us typically feel any doubt.

Why is something like this needed? Why can’t science prove all its assertions using more basic facts, laws, and theories? If every justifiable belief could be justified only by reference to some more basic belief, there would have to be an infinite chain of such justifications. Because such a chain of proofs cannot reasonably go on forever, the only way to stop it (Russell argued) is to define a set of beliefs that are not proven by any references to more fundamental assumptions. Such are these postulates. They exist a priori and are non-demonstrable, though extremely reasonable. They are foundational postulates and serve as the bedrock upon which all other demonstrable inferences are based.

There is no weakness in resting on postulates. Every branch of mathematics has its first principles that shape the proofs and theorems that arise from them (e.g., in plane geometry: “through any two points, there is exactly one line”). It only makes sense that behind every “proof” is either another set of proofs, or some unproven and unprovable first principles (just pick up any calculus book). It can’t go back to infinity, nor can it loop back on itself or else it becomes tautologous. Postulates do not imply weakness – in fact, they are required. They are not “faith”, but are the required building blocks from which any system of empirical knowledge is constructed.

Although Russell asserted that these postulates were required to keep science from being mere “moonshine” his chief support for them was that they were biologically advantageous. That is, they conveyed survival benefits. He didn’t have great confidence in these precise postulates, but came up with them out of a sense of necessity. Without them, the inductive principle cannot be logically justified:

quasi-permanence - There is a certain kind of persistence in the world, for generally things do not change discontinuously (a kitten becomes a cat, but is still the same entity). Given an event, "A", it is likely that in a neighboring time, and at a neighboring place, there is an event very similar to "A" (pertains to continuity of time, space, and events).

separable causal lines - There is often long term persistence in things and processes. From one or two members of a series of events, we can infer something about the other members of the series. This postulate covers our experience of physical motion. It replaces the concept of a thing changing its position by that of a related series of contiguous events. This principle enables us, from partial knowledge, to make a probable inference. The most obvious examples are such things as sound waves and light waves. It is owing to the permanence of such waves that hearing and sight can give us information about occurrences. It is only on the basis of the idea of causal lines that we can infer distant events from near events.

spacio-temporal continuity - Denies action at a distance. When there is a causal connection between two events that are not contiguous, there must be intermediate links in the causal chain such that each is contiguous to the next, or (alternatively) such that there is a process that is continuous.

structural postulate - Allows us to infer from structurally similar complex events ranged about a center to an event of similar structure linked by causal lines to each event. That is if you see several similar events arranged about a center, there is something in the center that has causal lines connected to those distributed events.

analogy - Allows us to infer the existence of a causal effect when it is unobservable (where there is smoke, there is fire). If there is reason to believe from previous evidence that A causes B, then when you see A but no B, you can assume that there is a B somewhere hidden. Or if you see B but no A, there is probably an A somewhere hidden.

Paraphrasing Russell, “The inductive principle is incapable of being proved by an appeal to experience. Experience might confirm the inductive principle as regards the cases that have been already examined; but as regards unexamined cases, it is the inductive principle alone that can justify any inference from what has been examined to what has not been examined. All arguments which, on the basis of experience, argue as to the future or the unexperienced parts of the past or present, assume the inductive principle; hence we can never use experience to prove the inductive principle without begging the question. Thus we must either accept the inductive principle on the ground of its intrinsic evidence, or forgo all justification of our expectations about the future. If the principle is unsound, we have no reason to expect the sun to rise tomorrow, to expect bread to be more nourishing than a stone, or to expect that if we throw ourselves off the roof we shall fall. All our conduct is based upon associations which have worked in the past, and which we therefore regard as likely to work in the future; and this likelihood is dependent for its validity upon the inductive principle."

"The general principles of science, such as the belief in the reign of law, and the belief that every event must have a cause, are as completely dependent upon the inductive principle as are the beliefs of daily life. All such general principles are believed because mankind have found innumerable instances of their truth and no instances of their falsehood. But this affords no evidence for their truth in the future, unless the inductive principle is assumed."

Wittgenstein didn’t see it this way. He outlined in Tractatus that you cannot infer one state of affairs (elements of reality) from one another. There is no logical “law” of cause and effect. No “causal nexus” exists in nature. Cause and effect may be useful, but are not provable or even necessary. Similarly, induction (accepting the simplest law that can reconcile our experiences) has no logical justification, but only a psychological one. We would go quite insane with out laws of nature. The facts that constitute the world are utterly disconnected. There is no internal, necessary, organic bond between them. He essentially rejected the postulates that Russell proposed. So, as clearly and carefully as Russell laid out his postulates, there is no unanimity of agreement as to their soundness.

5.2.4 The problem of induction

2009-04-21T22:24:00.000-07:00

How shall we deal with the intractable problem of induction? As a means of predicting future events, it can’t be proved either deductively or inductively, which essentially exhausts opportunities for logical justification. Hume’s solution was to say that it was habit, experience, and custom that allowed us to rely on inference. We continue to use it because it is the most reliable technique available, despite having no ready proof.

Pragmatic approach
Pragmatists agree with Hume that there is no epistemic justification for induction. Instead, they present a practical explanation of why one is justified in using this method of inference. For one thing, it works better than any alternative, which is a primary selling point for most pragmatic positions. Even though the future cannot be known, we can’t avoid having expectations about it. We would be wise to choose a method that would lead to success. One simple way of conceiving of the problem is in a truth table: The world either is uniform or it isn’t. And we can choose to use induction to predict future events or choose not to. Expanding on this exercise, we have six possibilities:

Nature really is uniform and regular:

induction would be a very reliable method for predicting future events.
using some method other than inductive reasoning would be ineffective.

or, nature is “somewhat” uniform, and frequently (but not always) evinces a pattern or connection between past and future:

induction is of some help, and works as a tool as often as nature chooses to be regular.
Non-inductive inference is as reliable as a wild guess.

or, nature really is not uniform at all, and there is no significant pattern or connection between past and future:

induction is of no help at all.
Non-inductive inference is also of no help at all.

Thus, the non-inductive method is useless no matter whether nature is always uniform, somewhat uniform, or chaotic. As for induction, it will certainly be helpful at least in the case when nature is uniform or mostly uniform. Thus, it is rational for us to prefer this method of inference since it is the only one that has any chance at all of being correct.

Avoiding Induction
Karl Popper attempted to resolve the question of induction and inference in science by abandoning the troublesome problem altogether. He had no issue with our inability to conclusively “prove” the validity of the inductive method. If scientific hypotheses (or even less formal everyday hypotheses) are stated in ways that allows them to be falsified, then we can use deductive techniques rather than induction to test them. This technique employs the logical form called “modus tollens”, which was discussed in the section, Moore’s Proof of an External Reality. Knowledge is gradually advanced as tests are made and failures are accounted for. A typical deductive formation of this argument would be along these lines:

If (some hypothesis is true), then (we will observe some effect)
We do not (observe some effect)
Therefore (some hypothesis is true) is proven wrong

Applied to the sunrise, we would say, “If sunrises follow nighttime, the sun will rise tomorrow morning. We do not see the sun rise in the morning. Therefore our sunrise theory has been disproved”. As long as we continue to see sunrises after night has passed, we are wise to continue having confidence in our theory. This is the essence of “falsifiability”. Popper’s seemingly simple argument has not gone unchallenged, though. Among the professional philosophers of science, his view has never been taken as a serious alternative to the consensus theory of probabilistic induction (which takes into account the relevance and weight of evidence, Bayesian probability, and other mathematical representations originated by Carnap and others).

The primary element to consider in Popper’s view is that he believed that focusing on induction, or characterizing our generalizations about the future as exercises in induction was fundamentally mistaken. With finesse worthy of Wittgenstein, he “disappears” the problem instead of solving it. Statements about how the future will unfold, according to Popper, do not actually employ induction, but instead rely on a technique that only superficially resembles it – the use of tentative hypotheses about future outcomes of our everyday experiments. We conduct an experiment of this sort every morning we look out the window expecting to see the sunrise. When we see it appear over the horizon, we can’t conclusively state that our theory about sunrises is true, but we can say that it has (once again) passed a well-constructed, though informal, test – that our theory can be retained as tentatively valid, useful, and worthy of further testing. We have strong confidence in it because of the countless confirmations of its predictions, and because it is never disproved. It has high verisimilitude, meaning, it correlates strongly with reality.

Like all scientific theories, it cannot ever be completely verified, but it can be quickly falsified. This may appear to share the structure of induction, but it stops short of the end result of induction in that we don’t use the results of this process to construct a general rule from individual outcomes. Instead, we simply can say that, once again, the theory has been corroborated - that it is a very useful and productive theory. We may also construct other theories that have similar logical structure to it regarding moon rises, the rising of Venus, etc. As they are verified, they each help to validate each other and boost our overall confidence in the set of interrelated theories. Popper referred to this as the “Method of conjectures and refutations”. If the sun were to stop rising and not resume its daily circuit across the sky, we would eventually abandon our theory of sunrises as having been falsified. In his view, we can’t accept any theories about the world as absolutely true, regardless of the amount of confirmation they have accumulated. But, those that are consistently corroborated can be made use of because of their eminent practicality and utility, keeping in mind that those same theories may need to be discarded if “eliminative evidence” accrues against them. Although this may seem like a facile manipulation of emphasis, it isn’t – this is exactly how scientists treat all scientific theories, no matter how well established.

Inference to the best explanation
Just as Popper got around the problem of induction by simply dismissing it, others circumvent its difficulties by getting around the issue in other creative ways. One such argument involves “inference to the best explanation” which was first introduced in the chapter on Modern Philosophy of Science. In this view, when one considers all the possibilities for how the future could unfold based on how the past and present events are manifested, the conclusion that the future will resemble the present requires the fewest assumptions, inventions, and stretches – employing Ockham’s Razor – to select the most likely explanation among any of several possible candidates. For example, if one sees a wet sidewalk it is reasonable to assume that it either rained or that the sprinklers were turned on, and less likely that a wave of water suddenly soaked it. Given experience and our knowledge of cause and effect, we can confidently make predictions (using inference) as to past causes of current events and current causes of future events. Drawing other conclusions would require greater leaps of improbability and would stretch credulity. Those who hold this position assert that it is imminently rational to assume that there is order and structure to the universe and that laws of causality actually work, and it would be highly impractical and wildly irrational to assume otherwise. Given the available choices, reliance on induction is the only one that makes any sense.

In making these types of inference, we infer from the fact that a certain hypothesis would explain the evidence, to the truth of that hypothesis. In general, there will be several hypotheses that could potentially explain the evidence, so we systematically consider each one and reject all the least likely ones, leaving one remaining. In this manner, we are able to infer from the premise that a given hypothesis would provide a "better" explanation for the evidence than would any other hypothesis, to the conclusion that the given hypothesis is true.

Relax the burden of deductive proof
Another technique for dismissing the inductive problem is to admit and concede that using the strict rules required for deductive logic can’t be applied to induction, which is a fundamentally different and looser form of reasoning. The truth-preserving nature of deductive reasoning doesn’t work when used to justify a reasoning process in which the conclusions are, by definition, not certain. The conclusions of inductive arguments exceed the content of their premises – individual cases when used to construct a general rule necessarily go beyond themselves. However, with deductive arguments the premises contain everything necessary to systematically arrive at a definitive conclusion – the conclusion is inescapable. According to this argument, it is simply inappropriate to impose the tough standards of deduction on the fuzzier process of inductive logic.

As we have seen, inability to disprove a proposition does not render it true. For example:

Although the Omphalos and Solipsistic positions are immune from disprove, all reasonable people agree they are beneath consideration.
Russel's celestial teapot and the Flying Spaghetti Monster (blessed be his name) cannot be successfully defeated through argument. But, all satire aside, they are not really out there.
The many varieties of supernatural mythology all create beings or histories or forces that are beyond the means of science to disprove. This doesn't make them real.
There is an astronomical number of other incredible claims that bear similar logical structures to the above examples that also are unsusceptible to the power of logic. They are not, therefore, all true.

Likewise, no one can disprove this claim: "Reliance on induction is unwarranted". That does not automatically render this proposition true. If we can't disprove that "induction is groundless", reliance on induction is not, therefore, groundless. In fact, it is "probably true".

So, as with all assertions about the future (which are what both scientific theories and the inductive process concern themselves), they are beyond positive proof, though their conclusions (when supported by much confirming evidence) are well worth relying on. Interesting.

Probabilistic approach
For all of human history and as far back in time as we can collect evidence, the laws of cause and effect and the uniformity of nature have existed, unchanged. It is completely true that we can't use that past run to make conclusive statements about the future continuation of this consistent track record. However, it would be a gigantic leap of faith to assume that all of this will suddenly change as soon as I finish typing this sentence... See, nothing changed! If these laws were going to change at some time, and that time has not occurred in the last several billion years, there is not a shred of evidence that indicates that it is going to occur in the next few seconds, years, or centuries. From a purely probabilistic framework, the odds of everything being turned topsy-turvy exactly right now are very very very slim when measured against all of the opportunities for change that came and went in the past. For this reason it would be rational to assume the present trend is likely to continue, and highly irrational to assume it will not. For all practical purposes, for all of us, for the rest of our lives and the rest of humanity's existence, the chances of something like this that has never ever occurred and shows no sign of occurring now, are not likely to suddenly happen. Although we can't prove that the continuity of past/present/future will persist, a betting man could reliably count on it.

People still debate the many ways of viewing the inductive process and its legitimacy. There are complex mathematical and probabilistic arguments too intricate to try to try to explain here. However, it is fairly clear that there is no clear cut and unambiguously convincing logical argument in its favor. We are left with one of several responses – to agree with Hume that there is no no legitimate rule of inference as induction, and rely either on habit and experience, or with Popper that we are mistaken in calling what we do induction, with those who argue that requiring a proof of the validity of induction is not needed, requiring a less rigorous proof of a process that itself is less than purely rigorous. It remains an interesting, and still unsolved, problem.

5.2.3 David Hume and Induction

2009-04-18T13:03:00.000-07:00

The study of how induction and inference were involved in the acquisition of knowledge was a cornerstone of Hume's epistemological research. He believed that reliance on induction was fundamental to to making determinations about things when they go “beyond the present testimony of the senses, and the records of our memory”.

We all act as if we believe the world behaves in a consistent and regular manner; that past patterns of behavior will persist into the future, and into the unobserved present. This persistence of regularities is sometimes called the Principle of the Uniformity of Nature, which is discussed later in this document.

Hume wrote that we could not conclusively prove the principle of uniformity in nature, because justification comes in only two varieties, and both of these are inadequate. These two types of reasoning are commonly called deductive (or a priori) and inferential/inductive (or a posteriori). The uniformity principle cannot be deduced because past regularity in nature is no guarantee of future regularity, no matter how probable we may think it is. There are no general principles inherent in past events that compel belief in the orderly progression future events. It is conceivable that nature might stop being regular at any time, as it has on rare instances in the past (consider the occasional, uncommon meteor strike, supernova, or earthquake). We can’t logically maintain that nature will continue to be uniform because it always has been up to now, because this way of reasoning uses induction to prove that induction is valid. This is circular reasoning (discussed in the Infinite Regress Problem section earlier in this document). Thus no form of logical justification will rationally warrant our inductive inferences. Yet we still believe in them.

Hume’s solution to this problem was to say that natural instinct, rather than reason, explains our ability to make inductive inferences. It is our natural instinct that allows us to connect this intuitive series of propositions together:

In our past, the sun has risen every day
Based on what we know about how sunrises work, there is no evidence to suggest that this will not continue to be the case
Therefore the sun will rise tomorrow

Our expectations about such things are depend on the relation of cause and effect. It is our common sense about this relation that tells us that depending on tomorrow's sunrise is reasonable expectation. However, if all matters of fact are based on similar types of causal relations, and if all of these causal relationships depend upon induction, then we must somehow demonstrate that induction is valid.

Hume uses the fact that induction assumes a valid connection between a proposition like "today the sunrise followed a long period of darkness" and the proposition "tonight's darkness will be followed by a similar sunrise." We connects these two propositions not by reason, but by induction.

Probably the first modern philosopher to exhaustively study the problem of induction, Hume was followed by many who tried to address the problems he posed. But they still continue to puzzle us. He argued that it is just as possible to conceive of a contrary proposition to the sun rising:

"That the sun will not rise tomorrow is no less intelligible a proposition, and implies no more contradiction, than the affirmation, that it will rise. We should in vain, therefore, attempt to demonstrate its falsehood. Were it demonstratively false, it would imply contradiction, and could be distinctly conceived by the mind."

In other words, just as we can’t prove the sun will rise, we can’t prove it won’t rise. Of course, everything we know about how orbiting objects work tells us that it would be quite an unlikely feat to stop this well understood phenomenon from happening. But how do we really know that these same physical laws will persist, that the future will resemble the past? This reasoning has to be either a priori or a posteriori. Hume contended that it couldn’t be a priori (deductive). If we were to see the sun rising for the first time we would never discover from that event alone what produced it, just as a child can't use reason to stop himself from touching a flame for the first time. Only after having experienced the pain does the child learn the relation. Knowledge of such causal relations must come only through experience of the relations between objects – therefore our reasoning must be a posteriori (inferential).

Our expectations of the future matters of fact lies in the relation of cause and effect, say both Hume and common sense. "By means of that relation alone, we can go beyond the evidence of our memory and senses". The only way we could obtain knowledge of causality would be to infer it from our past observations of regularities. Our prediction of future events based on the past observations is not a rational activity, but just a matter of habit and an intuitive sense of probability – the odds of the sun not rising are infinitesimal. When we project findings about these relations into the future, we must use an intermediate premise, the uniformity of nature, which is risky, because it can change at any time and be proven false. The chicken thinks that the human will always bring it grain until the day he comes with a hatchet. According to Hume:

"It is impossible, therefore, that any arguments from experience can prove this resemblance of the past to the future; since all these arguments are founded on the supposition of that resemblance. All inferences from experience, therefore, are effects of custom, not of reasoning."

5.2.2 Isaac Newton’s Rules of Reasoning in Natural Philosophy

2009-03-27T19:53:00.000-07:00

Religious people are fond of pointing out how deeply pious Newton was. In fact, in his own non-conformist manner, he was. He was also an alchemist and serious student of Biblical prophesy, forecasting the end of the Earth in the year 2060. The economist, John Maynard Keynes came into possession of Newton’s research papers on alchemy. After studying them he concluded in an oft repeated quote, "Newton was not the first of the age of reason: he was the last of the magicians." He may well have spent more effort in his religious studies and publication than in scientific works (though it is only his contributions to science that are considered memorable today). That surprising fact needs to be considered in the context of the time in which he lived (late 1600’s). This was before most discoveries in biology, medicine, astronomy, geology, physics, and chemistry had been made. Many of today’s modern sciences had not even been invented. The gaps in knowledge were deep and wide, and there had been a long uninterrupted history of allowing God to fill those gaps. There was no viable competing theory to the traditional theistic one. Essentially everyone was a theist and a creationist. Only a few decades earlier, England practiced persecution and torture of those who disputed church doctrine (and on rare occasion, execution).

Newton, although very devout, had no tolerance for what he called “occult causes” both because he saw them as unnecessary and unhelpful. They had no explanatory power, but were simply excuses for explaining away what we didn’t yet understand. In his day, the nature of magnetism, electricity, gravity, cohesion, friction, thermodynamics, fermentation, cell biology, and other natural phenomena were not well understood. He envisioned that from the confusion that then reigned, laws of nature would emerge to resolve those mysteries. He criticized the Aristotelians for ascribing occult causes to incomprehensible natural phenomena by correctly observing that “such occult qualities put a stop to the improvement of natural philosophy, and therefore of late years have been rejected. To tell us that every species of things is endowed with an occult specific quality by which it acts and produces manifest effects is to tell us nothing”. Even so, he himself subscribed to two seemingly occult entities – the invisible force called “gravity”, and the luminiferous ether through which he believed light traveled.

However, it is important to keep in mind that he lived on the historical edge of the scientific revolution. During his lifetime, there was not a clear distinction between chemistry and alchemy, between the natural and the supernatural, between science and magic. He helped to refine those distinctions in many ways, not the least of which was an often reprinted work of just a few pages called “Rules of Reasoning in Philosophy”. It was a simple guide to help thoughtful observers make sense of their experiences in the natural world.

He enumerated four rules for understanding real world “natural philosophy” (i.e., science) problems as follows:

“1. We are to admit no more causes of natural things such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances. To this purpose the philosophers say, that Nature does nothing in vain, and more is in vain, when less will serve; for Nature is pleased with simplicity, and affects not the pomp of superfluous causes.”

This is his somewhat anthropomorphized, teleological version of Ockham’s Razor - “do not multiply entities beyond necessity”. Just as the Golden Rule shows up again and again in different religions, Ockham’s Razor has a way of reappearing in different forms in Science. It also goes by the “Law of Parsimony”. Briefly, it means - the simplest solution that explains the phenomenon is to be preferred. Experience shows that this principle has surprising explanatory power and leads to the correct answer much of the time.

“2. To the same natural effects we must, as far as possible, assign the same causes. As to respiration in a man, and in a beast; the descent of stones in Europe and in America; the light of our culinary fire and of the sun; the reflection of light in the earth, and in the planets."

In other words, causality is universal – the light from our candle is the same as the light from the sun, which is the same as the light from a distant galaxy. A falling rock follows the same laws as a planet falling in orbit around the sun. Without evidence to the contrary, we can justifiably infer that the same types of causes produce the same types of physical outcomes.

“3. Qualities of bodies are to be esteemed the universal qualities of all bodies whatsoever.”

The qualities and characteristics of objects we can experiment on should be considered the same as similar objects that we have never touched. Principles derived from clear evidence are valid, beyond doubt. We should have the discipline to follow the evidence and not turn our backs on facts in favor of a belief that may be more comfortable or familiar. Look to nature for guidance and let it direct our research rather than let our theories blind us to the evidence. The third of Newton’s rules presages later, similar restatements of the same concept such as the “Cosmological Principle” and the “Principle of Uniformity”.

“4. Propositions deduced from observation of phenomena should be viewed as accurate until other phenomena contradict them.”

Unless proven otherwise, the best theory that successfully explains the facts should be accepted, keeping in mind that all theories are provisional, subject to revision given new evidence. Acknowledging that new discoveries were possible, he cautioned that future discoveries might lead to improvements of existing theories. Going back to the quote, “the light of our culinary fire and of the sun”, at that time there was no theory of nuclear fusion. Now we know that a candle flame is not the same as a nuclear reaction. This last rule embraces improvements and changes to theories to accommodate new discoveries of this type.

These guidelines have been modified, recycled, enhanced, and restated in many different forms since Newton first proposed them. They were among the first of many attempts to provide a philosophical framework and justification for the process of drawing conclusions from what we see happening around us, and extrapolating that knowledge to the greater universe beyond.

5.2.1 The Infinite Regress Problem

2009-03-25T21:58:00.000-07:00

In The Logic of Scientific Discovery, Karl Popper explored what is called the “Problem of Induction”. This phrase describes the question of whether inductive inferences can be justified, and under what circumstances they are. The problem has two facets: (1) you can’t logically deduce that the inductive process is valid, and (2) using inductive logic to prove itself is “begging the question” (circular reasoning). Even though inference and induction seems to work brilliantly, this paradox continues to haunt us.

One of the larger questions we are trying to answer is, on what assumptions are science and rational empiricism based? If those assumptions could be enumerated, it would then be reasonable to ask why we believe those assumptions - how they can be justified. Given some more thought and analysis, it might be possible to provide good justifications for those assumptions by presenting more fundamental justifications. But then they come under the same kind scrutiny – why would we believe them, ad infinitum. This “infinite regress” is intuitively unsatisfying, because it means that at some level, some unprovable postulates just have to be accepted, or even that rationality is based on just as flimsy a framework of unproven assumptions as any other faith-based belief system. If either of these is the case, then skeptics of rationality would argue that since its most basic beliefs cannot be justified, we don’t really know anything, absolutely. We are left with only one certainty – that there are no certainties.

Although this does represent a perplexing problem, it has not stymied attempts to overcome it – in fact, there have been many attempts to defeat the infinite regress problem. Some have responded that it is perfectly acceptable to let the justifications roll on to infinity. I have a hard time seeing how that would actually work, though. It is easy enough to just say that regress is not really a problem, but I am hard pressed to imagine a scenario involving more than just a few levels of justification before getting to the very atoms of logic and experience, impossible to go any deeper. The “why / because” back and forth dance can only go so far before it becomes tedious and meaningless.

Another alternative is Foundationalism, which overcomes the infinite regress argument by proposing that some core beliefs are self-evident and obvious, neither requiring justification nor even being capable of justification. A later section of this document goes deeper into this concept. A very similar response is Coherentism, which allows for explanatory circularity involving cross-referencing of justifications. If a diverse, interrelated system of different lines of evidence and belief is consistent, non-contradictory, and mutually supportive of the entire structure, the overall system and the theories that comprise that system gain credibility. In this model, beliefs are like pieces in a puzzle or clues in a murder mystery. They become more believable as they fit with more and more of the interrelated beliefs, facts, evidence, and theories that already are on firm ground. For example, the theory of Evolution gained more credibility and relevance as subsequent discoveries in organic chemistry, molecular biology, geology, paleontology, zoology, botany, anthropology, and archeology showed strong confirmation for it, and even helped advance and deepen the original theory. As a system of beliefs, the theory of Evolution is coherent with the rest of science. The same is true of all the other major branches of science.

Science relies on the principle of induction. This principle allows the inductive process to be put into a logical form capable of providing a basis for the legitimacy of scientific endeavors. Hans Reichenbach wrote, its absence would “mean nothing less than to deprive science of the power to decide the truth or falsity of its theories. Without it, clearly, science would no longer have the right to distinguish its theories from the fanciful and arbitrary creations of the poet’s mind.”

5.2 How can we have confidence in our inferences

2009-03-25T21:41:00.000-07:00

I won’t profess to have demonstrated in any conclusive way that an external world exists. Like all interesting philosophical problems, it defies proof – if it were provable, then it would cease to be an issue at all and there would be no reason to continue writing about it. Many of the world’s greatest thinkers have lived and died without resolving the question. I have given many examples of where they stood on this issue. But it does seem reasonable to assert that only if there is something in the world besides our individual minds does it become worthwhile to try to discover what it is and how it works. The drive to learn about the world is more important to those who advance the body of science than any philosophical issues related to the meaning of that activity.

I will develop the rest of this presentation assuming that there is an external world that exists when we are not around to observe it. Given that, this section discusses if and how can we draw reasonable inferences about that world from our experiences of it. This section defines some of the postulates and assumptions that must be accepted to make it possible for people to operate in the world, and for scientists to learn about the world. They are not based on faith, but on a mixture of evidence and reason: carefully crafting theories, gathering evidence, collecting consistent support from countless observations, and a generous application common sense.

As Bertrand Russell wrote, "the general principles of science are believed because mankind have found innumerable instances of their truth and no instances of their falsehood. But this affords no evidence for their truth in the future, unless the inductive principle is assumed." This great man was unable to arrive at a conclusive,deductive proof of induction. But his contributions to the analysis of the problem, and the contributions of many other famous individuals make interesting reading.

5.1.3 What are we to conclude?

2009-03-25T21:34:00.000-07:00

Practicing scientists generally assume what non-scientists do – that whatever the answer to this question really is, we all must proceed as if the world is as it appears. So, we assume that the physical world has a metaphysical/ontological reality independent of human experience – that a falling tree does make a sound if there is no one there to hear it – that stars are born, burn, and then die without any humans bearing witness.

The corollary to this assumption is that human beings can experience that external world to the degree that our senses and our instruments allow it. By no means do all philosophers accept this view, and perhaps some scientists would not completely accept it. But for the practice of science to succeed, those who “do” science have to behave as if it were so. I will not complicate matters by delving into the challenges to this conceptualization of reality that Quantum Mechanics brings to the table, but it does introduce some difficulties (such as the inconvenient violation of the law of non-contradiction by the wave/particle duality of light). But at that small scale, as well as at the cosmological scale, concepts and words that have clear definitions at the macro level cease to have the same meanings.

If we can stipulate, then, that we can accept reality at face value, what do we do with that information? As we experience the world, can those experiences translate into and inform our explanations about how it functions, how it has functioned, and how it will in the future? In other words, can we have confidence in what we believe we are learning from the world? Is an epistemology based on interactions with nature reliable?

5.1.2.9 Modern Philosophy of Science

2009-03-24T21:12:00.000-07:00

Finally we come to the 20th and 21st centuries, where we find no single Modern Philosophy of Science. Neither today, nor in the past has there has ever been a unanimous philosophical consensus. Adding to the diversity of outlook, scientific specialization and the rapid pace of discovery in the last century have driven each of the sciences to catalog its own set of non-scientific issues and individual philosophies with which to grapple. We live in a results-oriented age, and pragmatism plays a large part of any modern scientific endeavor. The concern is not so much “what meaning does science have?” as much as “what conditions and ways of thinking and acting make it possible to do science well, to do it fast, to make rapid innovations and breakthrough discoveries?” So, the bottom line is that performance matters, and philosophy takes a back seat. Delivering the goods is at the front, not introspection.

However, 20th and 21st century science produced many new and crucial non-scientific questions. There are so many that that they displace the comparatively uninteresting metaphysical questions related to the nature of existence (unless existence itself is fundamental to the research area as in Cosmology or Particle Physics). Any time for armchair philosophizing is given to considering immensely important issues like the morality of research in nuclear energy, the ethics of genetic modification and stem cell use, impact of science and technology on the environment, limited natural resources, unequal distribution of technology, the whole gamut of green issues, spread of disease in 3rd world countries, famine, birth control, the nature of consciousness and “the mind”, free will vs. determinism, what differentiates life from non-life, and countless other concerns. Some of these issues could be considered philosophical, but for the affected people they can mean life and death.

Of course, we can’t forget the never-ending ideological battles between the metaphysical naturalists and those promoting mystical or religion based “origin” explanations. These range from debates over evolution to cosmology, teleology, the “fine tuned universe”, and consciousness. Little time is spent speculating on non-controversies such as the possibility that the reality we see is not actually there, or is there in some other form.

If one term could encapsulate the current scientific view – “Scientific Realism” is the dominant theme in 21st century science. This doctrine descends, with modification, from the Logical Positivist movement initiated by Wittgenstein, Carnap, and others earlier in the 20th century. It takes the real world as an adequate working hypothesis – that what we see is what we get. When we perceive the world, we perceive what is actually there. Additionally, it promotes the idea that the objects of science that cannot be directly observed (atoms, black holes, gravity, electricity, sub atomic particles, magnetism, etc) have real existence that is just like that of objects that can be seen and directly experienced. Even though the objects of the micro-world are invisible to human senses, they are predicted by theory, detectable by our instruments, and transformable into data that can be observed. One way of thinking about it is that humans have built artificial sense organs that can see into the distant past, the future, the very fast, the hidden, the invisible, the very slow, the very far, the very small, and the very large.

No other way of considering reality would allow as reliable a path to achieving the goals of facilitating the discovery process, publication, and theoretical progress. Realists maintain that a very good reason for subscribing to their view is that it has an unsurpassed record of success and achievement, and no record of being wrong. The theories produced by this worldview and practice both explain the existing state of affairs and predict future outcomes with unequaled power. The cumulative set of theories and facts from all the sciences demonstrate extremely high coherence and mutual support that could only be explained by their being correct. Scientific Realism has a remarkable track record that attests to the extremely high probability that it is the right way of viewing the world.

Individual theories may be disproved, but the overall body of science is fundamentally “right”. Its theories are able to explain what we currently see, to anticipate events that will occur in the future, and to predict discoveries about what occurred in the past (as in geology, astronomy, and paleontology). Its epistemological basis is nature itself, rather than mythology, tradition, or revelation. The increase in knowledge that results from its application passes through the rigorous filter of the scientific method. It is coherent, consistent, reliable, and it makes continual progress and theoretical refinement. Further, there is no compelling reason to disbelieve it. No competing acceptable explanation has been proposed. This doesn’t constitute irrefutable proof, instead utilizing “inference to the best explanation”, meaning that among the only set of available explanations Realism is by far the strongest.

As has been mentioned, the modern view also incorporates Scientific or Methodological Naturalism as its core epistemology – there is simply no other way of gaining knowledge about the world that can compete. However, these terms, themselves, can generate debate even among those who practice them. This debate, though, may be more semantic than substantive.

The first view is that Naturalism is a necessary component of science itself, that Science can only investigate the Natural and can say nothing about the Supernatural. Only by linking empiricism to a naturalistic research framework can we gain knowledge about nature. Because of this, the Supernatural is inaccessible to science. It may or may not exist, but it is outside the purview of science.

Alternatively, some believe that science, as it is practiced, does not need to make a distinction between the Natural and the Supernatural. In this view, insisting on Philosophical Naturalism is putting the cart before the horse. Science doesn’t limit itself to studying natural phenomena – it studies what it can study, and by definition that domain of phenomena and entities is called the “natural world”. The scientific methodology doesn’t assume in advance anything about what is or is not “natural”, but only what it can address. If we apply it to the verification of entities, processes, or phenomena, those that we can detect, measure and describe with science end up being what we call “nature”. Science precedes Naturalism, rendering the Natural/Supernatural distinction moot. So, it would be incorrect to say that science can only deal with natural phenomena. More correct is that what we call “natural” is simply the collection of everything that science studies. So, some phenomena that were previously considered supernatural could be effectively moved to the natural if they could be investigated by science. As described in http://www.naturalism.org/science.htm,

“Science needn’t define itself as the search for “natural” or material causes for phenomena. In actual empirical fact, in building explanations and theories, science proceeds quite nicely without any reference to the natural/supernatural distinction. Science is defined not by an antecedent commitment to naturalism (whether methodological or ontological), but by criteria of explanatory adequacy which underpin a roughly defined, revisable, but extremely powerful method for generating reliable knowledge.”

The term “explanatory adequacy”, as used here, involves the standard set of criteria that surrounds the scientific method and scientific proof:

There should be good evidence for the phenomenon.

The phenomenon being studied should have some minimal level of “prior probability” (i.e., be considered potentially probable even before the collection of new confirming evidence).

A hypothesis for the phenomenon must be proposed that is testable, and it must be capable of falsification.

If a theory, it should have both explanatory and predictive power.

The theory should either propose or lead towards a mechanism for the effect being studied.

The explanation should be consistent with previous knowledge, or if not, provide a convincing explanation why it is not.

In the generally accepted 21st century model for science, there are several factors that must be exist for one to confidently assert the establishment of a new scientific phenomenon:

The investigation must have been conducted using good methodology, where any artifacts are weeded out, confounding factors are eliminated, and extraneous variables are controlled for.

The results must be statistically significant.

The results must be capable of replication at other labs and by other researchers.

The size of the effect must be well above the “noise” level.

Further, we need to see all of these factors occur at the same time. It is not enough to see just one or two, but all together. Replication with poor methodology proves nothing, as do studies with good methodologies but small effect sizes, or studies with strong statistical results but with murky methodologies.

Methodological naturalism is sometimes (incorrectly) used synonymously with philosophical naturalism. In fact, they are subtly different. As previously described, methodological naturalism is an epistemology and is the heart of the protocols used in scientific research. Philosophical naturalism describes a metaphysical point of view. Methodological naturalism is agnostic towards the ultimate metaphysical realities of the universe which are intrinsic to philosophical naturalism.

Modern science does not reject out of hand supernatural causality or explanations. It does not assume philosophical naturalism, which excludes in advance all supernatural explanations. It does not restrict its inquiry only to naturalistic explanations for phenomena. Methodological naturalism is not a choice or preference, as is philosophical naturalism. It is a necessity for the practice of science. We do not limit the types of answers that we are willing to consider to those that conform to an a priori naturalistic paradigm. We only limit the questions that science asks to those that can be addressed by the scientific method. If the question is posed in such a way that it cannot be falsified, then it simply can't be addressed by science - it is not a scientific question. If a testable hypothesis involving supernatural agents can be constructed, then science can address that hypothesis. This has already been attempted in tests to see if prayer will cause amputated legs to re-grow, and in double-blinded studies to test if appeals to God on behalf of sick persons will hasten their recoveries, homeopathic medicine studies, and ESP experiments. None of the results of these types of investigations were statistically compelling.

Karl Popper led the movement to embrace falsifiability, just mentioned, rather than verifiability, which was a fundamental tenet of the Logical Positivists. Popper was one of the most influential philosophers of science of the last century. Falsifiability certainly ranks as one of the most important elements in the modern conduct of science. Its dominance over verifiability results from fact that no number of positive experimental outcomes can ever absolutely confirm a scientific theory. But a single counter-example is decisive. It shows that the theory being tested is false, or at least incomplete. Instead of saddling scientists with the impossible task of providing absolute proof, a theory was considered to be tentatively “true” if ample opportunity and means were proposed to disprove it, but no one was able to do so. Falsifiability became Popper’s criterion of “demarcation” between what is and is not genuinely scientific: a theory could be considered scientific only if it were also falsifiable. This emphasis differed from that of Logical Positivists, who focused instead on verifiability – testing the truth of statements by showing that they could be verified.

Popper demonstrated his position with an example of the rising sun. Although there is no way to prove that the sun will rise every morning, we can hypothesize that it will do so. If only on a single morning it failed to rise, the theory would be disproved. Barring that, it is considered to be provisionally true. The longer a theory retains this provisional status, and the more attempts are made to test it, the greater its claim to firm truth. The “sun-will-rise” theory has been well tested many billions of times, and we have no reason to anticipate that circumstances will arise that will cause it to stop happening. So we have a very good reason to believe that this theory represents reality. This argument has some weaknesses (primarily that it is not deductively ironclad). But because the theory has never failed, no stronger proof suggests itself, it is pragmatically useful, and is statistically unlikely to be disproved, it is a very good operating theory.

5.1.2.8 Wittgenstein

2009-03-07T18:16:00.000-08:00

Ludwig Wittgenstein is the “triple threat” of modern philosophers. For any of three separate accomplishments he would be famous. Although he was born a generation after Moore and Russell, they all contributed to the rebirth of modern Analytic philosophy (which uses precise, sometimes mathematical language to analyze issues). He laid down the precursors of what would become Logical Positivism, though he never considered himself a member of that school of thought. And, he led the way in defining modern Linguistic and “Common Language” philosophy, which is a dominant movement even today. Even the other Greats of his time considered him to be uniquely brilliant.

One of the richest men in Europe, he volunteered in the Austrian army during WWI, and spent many years as an elementary school teacher and gardener. From time to time he lit intellectual fires that radically reshaped 20th century philosophy.

His contributions fall into two periods marked by the publication of Tractatus, followed after his death by Philosophical Investigations. He is extremely difficult to interpret, and as many times as I have waded through his work and others’ analyses of it, I have emerged feeling like I just experienced something very important, but baffled by just exactly what it was. I will not try to do a comprehensive summary of his positions, but only to relate them to the question at hand – what is the external world and how does our perception of it function?

He was not a metaphysician, and in fact rejected metaphysics as a legitimate focus of philosophical speculation. He actually had very little to say about the nature of reality. It is his silence on the subject that makes him important to this discussion. For one of the giants of modern philosophy to regard it as an uninteresting question itself is interesting.

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
Wittgenstein's goal with this work was to define a logically perfect language, building on Russell's earlier efforts, with which to discuss philosophical issues. All complex domains (physics, math, dance, art, architecture, sports) have specific, highly tailored language that is used only in the context of describing the elements of that domain. But philosophy has traditionally used language and concepts from everyday life in incorrect and misleading ways to complicate issues that could and should be dealt with completely differently. Difficult philosophical problems result from abuse of language when it is misappropriated from normal, everyday use into an unfamiliar and shaky metaphysical environment.

He intended to develop a language appropriate to the task of discussing philosophical issues, and to delineate exactly what could and could not be discussed meaningfully using that language. Kant attempted to distinguish what could be known from what was forever unknowable and inaccessible. Wittgenstein's parallel task was to distinguish what could be said from what was unsayable and inaccessible. The point of this work was to draw a strong connection between language and the world (i.e., reality). He believed that when people attempt to gain certainty or to convey it to others by making controversial, confusing, or debatable propositions they are engaging in confused thinking and semantic nonsense that hinders understanding instead of helping it.

He laid out an approach that had these elements:

The world is comprised of atomic, independent "facts" which constitute the elements out of which larger hierarchies of facts are built.
These larger groupings of facts have logical forms defining their relationships.
The human mind contains thoughts (logical pictures) which represent the external “facts” comprising the world.
For those mental pictures to faithfully represent the external world, they must have the same logical form as those facts.
That logical structure is built from language propositions which he expressed in a highly structured and tailored manner.

These propositions share a "pictorial form" with the reality they represent. They are correct or incorrect to the extent that they faithfully model the logical form of that reality. If the world were differently structured from the forms of our logic, we would not be able to express it in language at all. They express in a scientific way the experiences of sense data (impressions of the world). Other types of statements involving math and logic convey no new information, but are only tautologies. That is the limit of what can be expressed with any certainty or meaning – everything else is beyond our ability to speak sensibly. Only "true propositions" about the world are sensible and meaningful.

In his words, “most of the propositions and questions to be found in philosophical works are not false, but nonsensical. Consequently we cannot give any answer to questions of this kind, but can only point out that they are nonsensical … it is not surprising that the deepest problems are in fact not problems at all”. In other words, much of what is debated in philosophical terms is nothing but impressive, but empty, verbal gymnastics. He showed the limits of what could be discussed, leaving the rest to just be regarded in awe and mystery – the realm of poetry, religion, theater, relationships, and emotions. He did not denigrate those disciplines and experiences, but strongly believed that logical, philosophical thinking could not deal with them at all. The region of the inaccessible is important. It contains much of what we value in life. In fact, to him, these were the most important aspects of human life. However, philosophy has its limits, and his job was to define and clarify the bounds of what could discussed within its sphere. "What cannot be said maybe can be shown, and what can be shown cannot be said".

Much to the dismay, and sometimes delight, of other philosophers, he constrained and limited the range of issues to which their discipline could add constructive value. Instead, philosophy should be used to organize collections of propositions which represent the existence and non-existence of “states of affairs” in the world. This set of statements constitutes the entirety of natural science.

The founders of Logical Positivism (chiefly Carnap) took this to mean that only empirically verifiable sentences were meaningful, and on these grounds eliminated metaphysics, aesthetics, and ethics from their curriculum. This philosophy rejects metaphysics, instead emphasizing that the goal of knowledge is only to describe the phenomena that we experience, which we can observe and measure, and to attempt to do nothing beyond that.

Not only were earlier philosophers in error by confusing logical and grammatical forms, they were also trying to say the unsayable. The activity of philosophy should be to show the limits of what could be said by saying some things very clearly, then stopping, and pointing towards the mystical that goes beyond the sayable. He criticized Hume’s extreme skepticism. “Doubt implies a question, questions imply answers, and answers imply that something can even be said about the issue. “ Hume tried to talk about the unsayable (God, value, skepticism). The solution to the nagging existential problems of life was the vanishing of both the question and the answer. There can be no answer to life, when there is really no question that can be meaningfully asked. As complex as his writings were, the overall gist of them were that he attempted to rigorously prove that certain things could not be conclusively described or decided using language, among them ethics, aesthetics, all things mystical, and metaphysics. So, the question of “is there an external world or not” is simply one that he would dismiss from the realm of philosophy. Is is not a question, but is built into his very first assertions in the Tractatus:

The world is everything that is the case.
What is the case (a fact) is the existence of states of affairs.

He concludes with a thought that encapsulates the entire book and is often repeated in other contexts, “what can be said at all can be said clearly, and what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence”. So, after much difficult propositional calculus and highly structured statements, he advised us to stop trying to talk about things that we will never be able to decide. Some things must simply be observed in awe and admiration. The metaphysics of reality falls into that category – in his view, philosophy had nothing to say about it.

Philosophical Investigations
By the time this later work was published Wittgenstein has changed his mind about much of what he earlier said in Tractacus, in particular the part concerning the need for a precise philosophical language. This was the beginning of his foray into “Ordinary Language" philosophy. Tractatus showed an isomorphism could exist between the "real" world and some ideal language. Philosophical Investigations showed that the quest for an ideal language and isomorphism is doomed. He had come around to the conclusion that there need be no isomorphism between words and reality - all that was required was that the words help the parties to a communication achieve whatever social goal they intended. He elaborated many other novel concepts regarding a new linguistic approach to thinking, but most of them don't bear on our central question here.

What is relevant is that he expounded the view that conceptual confusions involving our use of language are the cause of most problems in philosophy. “Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language”. He no longer held the view that a highly tailored language would be needed, but that common language would do. By eliminating the confused tangle of mangled language, he was able to make philosophical problems just vanish. Words can trick us into miscategorizing things. The grammatical form of the sentences in which philosophical questions are formed hoodwinks us into believing problems exist where there are none.

He cleared the table of philosophical double-talk by dismissing the majority of philosophical questions as simple misuse of language. He saw a human tendency to become trapped in the language we use to describe our ideas to such a degree that the ideas become more important than the reality that they may or may not actually refer to. In many cases, associations of ideas in the mind that seem to have meaning, significance, and import don’t refer to entities in the real world. But the strength and vividness of the false ideas are just as strong as that which would accompany coherent and meaningful ideas. Confused use of language disguises the underlying logical form, and renders most philosophical questions into perplexing nonsense and obscure linguistic puzzles. He felt that he had shown that most philosophical problems were caused by linguistic errors and general faulty use of language, that when resolved cause the original question to vanish (for example, how much energy was wasted in scholastic debates exploring the question of how many angels could dance on the head of a pin?) When extended to the question of the existence of reality, the question itself doesn’t make sense. Simply because a question has legitimate syntactical form does not require that it actually have meaning and be capable of receiving a response. In other words, the logical form of the thoughts inspiring the question may not be isomorphic with any actual "state of affairs" in the world.

"Meaning just is use" — that is, words are not defined by reference to the objects or things which they designate in the external world nor by the thoughts, ideas, or mental representations that one might associate with them, but instead by how they are used in effective, ordinary communication. Language arises in social contexts and is oriented to achieving different social goals, depending on the situation. Language is meaningful if it accomplishes the goals of those involved in using it. To require precision and exact definitions in language is to become involved in a whole nest of philosophical problems whose origin is in the neurotic search for certainty. So, when one asks “does reality exist”, both “reality” and “exist” have the common meanings that the asker and the asked ascribe to them. We don’t require concrete definitions of them as long as all parties to the communication understand each other. For example, when I describe the color "blue" to you, we both understand it to be the color of the sky, though we each have our own personal interpretations of that sense experience. It doesn't matter if they are or are not identical to each other, as long as we both agree on what is meant. In fact a private "definition" of blue would be utterly useless - we could not share it or talk about it.

Philosophers had obscured this simplicity by misusing language and by asking meaningless questions. For example, one might ask “what is the meaning of life?” as if that were a question with an answer. One might instead ask, “what is the meaning of this stone?” What type of answer would satisfy such a seemingly simple question? Merely asking a question does not imply that a useful answer is forthcoming. If we can't describe the "meaning" of a stone, how much further are we from describing the "meaning" of life?

Regarding reality, Wittgenstein might respond, “not how the world is, is the mystical, but that it is at all.” As with all mystery, there is nothing meaningful that philosophy or even language can say about it other than to simply point to it in awe. He fully accepted reality, but concluded that all we can experience of it is the "framework" erected by the language and the mental models we use to understand it. We "see the picture through the frame".

5.1.2.7 Evolutionary Philosophy

2009-02-25T18:35:00.000-08:00

This novel approach to the question of reality uses the findings of evolutionary biology to draw conclusions about the nature of the external world and our ability to conceive of it accurately. Compensating for a relative lack of strict logical rigor found in purely philosophical approaches, it brings new and interesting scientific discoveries to the discussion. According to this approach, as evolution drives biological and behavioral adaptations, it causes them to conform to reality.

Consider this analogy: the shape of the water in a pool conforms to the contours of the hole that it fills. The "interface" between the volume of water and the hole which it fills are perfectly suited to each other - the water conforms to a reality which the contours of the hole constrains it. Just as the water fills a hole, our species and the individuals in our species fill an ecological niche, or a "hole" in the macro environment. Our behaviors and perceptions, which form our "interface" to the environment, conform to the reality into which they fit in a manner similar to how the shape of the water conforms to the hole that contains it.

Using the principles of evolution (and a generous amount of speculation) the adherents of this approach deduce facts about the world as it existed long before modern man came on the scene. Animal life evolved behaviors that were accommodations to the many eons of pressure exerted by the demanding physical environment, and the details of those evolutionary accommodations must refer to the real external environment that shaped them.

Therefore, the mind’s concept of reality is strongly isomorphic (i.e., well matched) with that reality for the following reasons:

Reality impinges on all living creatures, as the theory of evolution describes

Living creatures compete for survival, utilizing whatever natural talents and tools they have to gain advantage

More than any other type of creature, humans utilize their physical environment (tool making, planning, building, organizing) as aids to their survival

For humans, especially, increased knowledge of and ability to model and manipulate the physical environment give strong survival advantages. Perhaps these are their most valuable survival mechanisms

Due to competition, individuals with more accurate and effective mental representations of reality will have better chances of survival. For example, humans who correctly see the lurking wolf, the gathering storm, the hidden fruit, or the receptive mate will survive at the expense of those who incorrectly perceive these elements of the environment

Therefore human evolution has probably imbued us with accurate (isomorphic) understanding of reality, at least within the bounds and physical capabilities of our biological senses.

This dynamic and precarious exchange between the world and individuals results in a close correspondence between physical reality and our perceptions and ideas concerning it. This accommodation is not limited only to humans, but to any adaptive living organisms capable of responding to the demands of the environment. For example, the fact of photosynthesis in plants proves that the sun has been shining on the earth for many millions of years in a manner similar to how it shines today. The seasonal migrations of birds, the winter hibernation of bears, and the changing coat colors of some rabbits and foxes are examples of adaptations that imply that the Earth’s orbit around the Sun has followed a pattern much like we see today. The Sun now shines and has shined, the Earth now moves and has moved. Living creatures’ behaviors and genetic adaptations supply proof that as it is now, it has been for a long time. Using evolution as a premise, the reality of the Solar System in which we live can be deduced.

As Michael Dahlen wrote in an article published in 2011,

If a professional baseball player saw “things in a limited and distorted way,” that is, if his perception of the movement and location of a baseball was something other than what it actually is, then he would not be able to consistently hit ninety-five mile per hour fastballs. If a cardiac surgeon’s mind had a built-in disposition toward illusion then he would not be able to successfully perform a coronary artery bypass surgery. If a pilot’s knowledge of his airplane, its controls, and its location in the sky did not correspond to reality, then he would not be able to lift his airplane off the ground, fly it across a continent, and safely land it at his targeted destination. If science could never penetrate to things as they really are, then the great innovators of our time would not have been able to create all the marvels of modern technology. For that matter, if reality is inaccessible to human beings and if our perception of reality did not at the very least resemble reality itself, then we would not be able to perform even the simplest of activities such as eating, walking, reading, or brushing our teeth.

Of all creatures, we humans have the most highly developed ability to form abstractions and accurate models of the world. Ironically, we alone fall victim to outrageous self-induced delusions and misperceptions of that same world. The cognitive biases to which we are heir may have their origin in the same muscular mental faculties that give us our acute, correct perceptions. Only we, who could imagine a distant future and remote past, could also envision imaginary spirits, demons, and other malevolent agents that inhabit those strange regions. Some of these distortions may result from evolutionary pressure and, in fact, have adaptive properties.

The “just world” phenomenon helps us persevere against the odds in the face of adversity.

The “authority bias” causes us to have undue respect for what we perceive as authority, helping keep tribal order.

The “ostrich effect” allows us to ignore bad news and focus on the positive.

Pareidolia (the tendency to see patterns where there are none) causes us to flee from imaginary tigers as well as see the image of Mary in a piece of toast. However, it is far better to run from an imagined danger than to fail to evade a true one. Evolution has shaped us to act on the dictum, “discretion is the better part of valor”.

A species-wide preoccupation with assigning supernatural "agency" to unexplained phenomena. Anthropological, archaeological, and historical evidence shows that throughout our history, and probably into pre-history, mankind has ascribed the power to create and influence events in life to non-corporeal, supernatural beings. Whether these were conceived of as animistic elemental or organic spirits, deceased ancestors, multiple gods for multiple purposes, or a single monotheistic god, spirits appear to have haunted human experience since the beginning of time. This misperception of reality, as crippling as it seems it should be, might be a strange side effect of our large brains and ability to form abstractions and mental models. For better or worse, it has tagged along with our culture for millenia.

Each of these (and many, many others) is a clear deviation of our perceptions from what is in the “real world”. This is a real strike against the foundations of the evolutionary approach to reality. If we can be so wrong in so many areas, how many more incorrect concepts are inherent in our relationship with the world?

Some small comfort might be taken from the fact that experts in these sorts of cognitive biases have exhaustively studied these odd phenomena and explained them in great detail. And rigorous, scientific approaches to their study show them to be what they are – incorrect, ingrained, and intuitive responses to the world that, in the modern times, lead us astray more than help us cope. To quote the late Perry Deangeles:

“Thinking critically is a chore. It does not come naturally or easily. And if the fruits of such efforts are not carefully displayed to young minds, then they will not harvest them. Every school child must be implanted with the wonder of the atom, not the thrall of magic.”

Some have taken a position opposing Evolutionary Philosophy for theological reasons. Most famous of these is Alvin Plantinga in his book, Warrant and Proper Function. Plantinga, who Time Magazine named "America's leading orthodox Protestant philosopher of God”, sees no reason to assume a positive correlation between “true beliefs” and survival if evolution is driven purely by natural forces. Only if God directs evolution would the evolved beliefs and behaviors of man have a chance of being “true” (i.e., isomorphic with reality) because God would somehow want us to see reality as it really is. If only driven by natural processes, the driving force would be survival, not a "true" perception of reality. Somehow he neglects the very important consideration that "true" beliefs about the world DO have survival benefits. His position is so audacious, far fetched, and in violation of any semblance of parsimony that I will let him speak for himself. He presents a hypothetical caveman, “Paul”, who sees a tiger and runs away from it (as we would expect). However, if evolution is a natural rather than a supernatural process, caveman Paul's reasons for running away include every explanation EXCEPT one involving a realization of the imminent danger the tiger poses for him:

Perhaps Paul very much likes the idea of being eaten, but when he sees a tiger, always runs off looking for a better prospect, because he thinks it unlikely the tiger he sees will eat him. This will get his body parts in the right place so far as survival is concerned, without involving much by way of true belief... Or perhaps he thinks the tiger is a large, friendly, cuddly pussycat and wants to pet it; but he also believes that the best way to pet it is to run away from it... Clearly there are any number of belief-cum-desire systems that equally fit a given bit of behavior.

This type of shamelessly tortured logic is frustrating and quite irritating. It shows that the leading opponents of naturalism, rationality, and empiricism will stop at nothing to defeat them. They don’t aim at gaining actual knowledge or in increased understanding, but only in inventing post-hoc explanations to defend their established dogmas through any means available.

Still, as closely as our mental models fit the world of common experience, we continue to be troubled by persistent misperceptions - superstitions, inability to make sense of probabilities and statistics, and difficulties conceiving of quantities and sizes on the extreme micro or macro scale. We have evolved no intuitive sense regarding physical realities outside those we experience in our daily living. Until the last few hundred years, we had no idea of how reality was structured at levels outside the normal human scale - at the very small, very large, very fast, very slow, very near, and very far. We had no idea of the micro world of bacteria, cells, molecules, and atoms. Theories of the structure of our planet, the solar system, and at the cosmic scale of other stars were naive and completely wrong. Physical processes operating at the snail's pace of geology, or at the relativistic pace of light were either misperceived or not perceived at all. Understanding of these things had no survival benefit during most of human history. Our intuitions had been adapted to the environment we evolved in. This environment did not include relativistic speeds, massive gravity, galaxy sized objects, or sub-atomic scales. There had been no selective pressure from our environment to adapt to these aspects of reality that fell outside our experience. Because these mismatches between our intuition and reality all involved things that were not part of our evolutionary history (e.g., we don't live near the speed of light) we evolved no natural understanding of them. The scientific and technical tools we use to understand them don't come naturally - science is not an instinct, but is an attempt to overthrow instinctive misperceptions.

These deviations from the isomorphism that Evolutionary Philosophy promotes are troubling and are possibly not adequately answered. They leave wide open the doors to objection - if we are wrong in these areas, we could be wrong in other areas that we believe we understand and perceive correctly.

However, humanity has shown itself capable of rising above its evolutionary limitations. As counter-intuitive as some aspects of reality may be, we are able to move past our historically ingrained prejudices against them and embrace them as true when the evidence is overwhelmingly in their favor. The tools of modern civilization are allowing us to perceive and understand aspects of reality that were never even imagined in previous generations.

5.1.2.6 Moore’s Proof of an External Reality

2009-02-16T21:52:00.000-08:00

That Idealism violates the tenets of common sense is its most glaring weakness, and G.E. Moore attacked this weakness relentlessly. More than anyone else, Moore recognized the deficiencies and logical problems associated with the forms of Idealism built into Berkeley’s claim that the external world didn’t really exist. He also took issue with Kant’s and Descartes’ theses that even if it did exist, we could never directly experience it, but instead constructed ideas or categories of understanding to interpret it. He countered Kant’s Idealistic position through a reaffirmation of objectivity and a revival of philosophical Realism. Although the scope of his writings goes far beyond the nature of reality, his contributions in this area are profound.

In his system, external objects are things whose existence is independent of our experience. These had been referred to before as “things in themselves” or “noumena”. They exist before us, continue to exist after us, exist when we are not looking, and exist when we are not aware of them at all. His goal was to demonstrate the existence of even one such object. By doing so, he would have proved the existence of an external world with that one object in it. If there is even a single external object, this opens the door for any number of external objects, and therefore an entire external universe of full of “things in themselves”.

Much of Moore’s work was in answer to Kant’s earlier work in Transcendental Idealism. It is a testimony to Kant’s tremendous range and influence that Moore dedicated himself both to overturning his Idealism, and also to finishing the work Kant began to establish the existence of an external reality that exists beyond our perceptions.

He famously re-invigorated the idea of “common sense” with respect to realism and gave a powerful common sense argument against Idealistic skepticism by raising his right hand and saying "Here is one hand," then raising his left and saying "And here is another". He concluded that since there are at least these two external objects in the world, he therefore knew that an external world existed.

To understand what Moore was trying to say, it’s important to differentiate between two very different issues. On the one hand is the issue of “the existence of an external world”, and on the other hand is “whether or not we can directly know that external world”. His demonstration of the raised hands addressed only the first of these two questions, leaving the second purposefully unanswered. In fact, he never successfully addressed the latter question.

Moore strongly believed that muddled thinking and imprecise language confused our thinking about reality. He thought that a combination of common sense and precise language were sufficient to address most philosophical questions. Because of the laxness in the use of language when addressing complex issues, philosophers exacerbate the complexity and create problems out of nothing.

His argument for reality utilizes the "denying the consequent" (AKA, "modus tollens") form of argument, which is a transposed version of the the modus ponens argument presented in the previous “Skeptical argument against reality” section:

If a person doesn't know that reality is not an illusion, then that person doesn't know that external objects really exist

That person knows that external objects really exist

Therefore, that person knows that reality is not an illusion

What about the second premise above? Doesn’t it seem circular? Does it assume the conclusion in order to prove the conclusion? Not at all – He defended criticism of his argument in these words:

"I knew that there was one hand in the place indicated by combining a certain gesture with my first utterance of ‘here’ and that there was another in the different place indicated by combining a certain gesture with my second utterance of ‘here’. How absurd it would be to suggest that I did not know it, but only believed it, and that perhaps it was not the case! You might as well suggest that I do not know that I am now standing up and talking — that perhaps after all I'm not, and that it's not quite certain that I am!"

There is also another common sense, pragmatic explanation, although Moore did not use this argument: In the above example, he sees his hands extended. Everyone to whom he is demonstrating sees the same hands. They are all unanimous in their observations of the extended hands. Unless they are simultaneously dreaming the same dream, they are witnessing two real hands extended in actual space. It would be an enormous and highly unlikely coincidence if the dream explanation was correct, whereas it would be no leap at all to conclude that what common sense tells us is the right answer.

Moore’s most famous attack on Idealism occurred in an essay entitled "A Defense of Common Sense". In it he contended that the Idealistic skeptics could not give good reasons for us to accept their arguments. The defenses that the Idealist could muster were far less plausible than the reasons that could be presented to accept the common sense claims about our knowledge of the real world. In other words:

There are only two options being considered:

there are no external objects or

there are external objects and reality is real

Exactly one of (1) or (2) is true, but not both

The arguments for (1) are very weak, and the arguments for (2) are very strong

Therefore, (2) should be believed over (1)

5.1.2.5 A Practical, Pragmatic View

2009-02-16T21:43:00.000-08:00

There is a practical way of looking at the problem. Instead of asking the question in the way we have been posing it, instead ask, “Of what use is a real world versus an ideal world?” Formulated this way, it is less important to determine the factuality of existence than to determine its utility. Pragmatists do not require that beliefs must accurately reflect reality to be true. Instead they hold that the validity of beliefs depend on how helpful they are in action and inquiry. Simplistically, the large questions revolve around “what works?” rather than “what is true?” They emphasize practical outcomes and consequences as the most important element of their philosophy. As the name implies, it is an eminently practical philosophy, not overly concerned with metaphysics, unless there is some useful advantage of one metaphysical position over another.

As with all the other positions and opinions discussed in this “Revolt against Idealism” section, Pragmatists concern themselves with many more issues than with questions related to reality, but they do generally take a stand on this question.

Descartes (who was not a Pragmatist) began his investigations with absolute doubt. Not accepting this starting point, pragmatists don’t insist on wiping the slate clean at the beginning of their inquiries to find a neutral and supposition-free starting-point. Not requiring skepticism regarding every aspect of the universe, Pragmatists instead watch for something to be sincerely doubtful of and send their investigations in that direction. Reality is not one of those things.

C. S. Peirce, one of the several creators of modern Pragmatism, utilized this way of approaching problems to help refine the modern outlines of the Scientific Method. He popularized the concept that claims of scientific knowledge can only be held to be true provisionally, as there is always the possibility that some future discovery will alter them or prove them to be false. According to his doctrine of Fallibilism, the conclusions of science are always tentative. Science does not demand absolute certainty in all its conclusions, but instead relies on the usefulness of its discoveries and on its inherent self-corrective nature. Science can detect and correct its own mistakes, and by doing so evolve toward greater understanding.

With respect to the notion of Reality, Peirce’s empirical method presumed that the objects of knowledge are real, that the properties of those real objects are independent of our perceptions of them, and that all persons who experience those real things will have basic agreement on the content of their experience. The classic “is the chair really there” problem is not of any interest to Pragmatists, unless some compelling reason emerges to doubt its presence. No special revelation or personal traits give one person an advantage over another – anyone can see that the chair is really there. The chief interest of the Pragmatists was not in exploring the nature of Reality. Because there was no convincing reason to doubt it, they accepted it as a given. The onus of responsibility, in their view, would be for others to disprove it.

5.1.2.4 Kant (again!)

2009-02-16T21:18:00.000-08:00

Hume and Kant were the philosophical giants the mid 1700's. Of Immanuel Kant, who figured prominently in moving Idealist philosophy forward, one could never say that he was in "revolt against Idealism". He was a "Transcendental Idealist", believing that one's experience of things is much more concerned with how they appear to that person than how those things are in and of themselves.

Even so, unlike Berkeley, he steadfastly affirmed the existence of real objects behind the phenomena of perception; that is, he never accepted Subjective Idealism. Although he emphasized mental processes and ideas over that which was being perceived, his philosophy cannot be characterized as a form of Subjective Idealism.

He never denied the existence of things-in-themselves, but instead exerted much effort in demonstrating that a world independent of perception really existed. However, he believed that a perceptual and cognitive barrier prevented man from seeing these things-in-themselves, allowing him only to experience a “sensuous manifold” organized internally by the categories of sensibility. We cannot experience the "noumena" of the external world, but only the "phenomena" which our minds synthesize from the input we receive from that world. In other words, what we call “reality” is determined by transcendental (a priori) categories of reason and forms of understanding, such as causality, unity, space, and time.

Kant used what he termed "transcendental arguments" to prove the existence of an external world separate from the individual. This type of reasoning follows this pattern:

Begin with universally accepted premises about how our experiences are structured

Show that certain external entities must exist for these experiences to occur

Conclude that these other entities do, in fact, exist.

An example of such an argument follows: Kant believed that for one to be aware of himself, it is necessary that there exist entities which are not "himself". It would be impossible to be aware of one's own existence without presupposing the existence of things separate from one's own self. Only if that were the case could one distinguish himself from anything else. He concludes that if one is self-aware, then that implies things that are "non-self" to serve as contrast.

Kant popularized this type of reasoning, and it is still in use today. But in my opinion this is a little complex and possibly too clever - it almost seems facile. It is typical of the kind of argument, though, that was being produced in the 1700's.

Further, if supporters of Kant argue that experience and reason cannot grasp reality, they have reached this conclusion by means of experience and reason. And that is a self refuting statement. Its content contradicts the very method it purports to be relying on. One cannot rely on reason to demonstrate that reason is invalid because doing so presumes that reason is valid.

5.1.2.3 Hume

2009-02-15T16:44:00.001-08:00

For David Hume, the ultimate entities comprising the universe are loosely related, mostly separate objects with a real external existence. Basically agreeing with Descartes, if the mind only knows its own states, then those are all it can know. Because of this limitation, we cannot reliably infer the existence of any external objects at all. We can see the color and form of external objects, but not their “noumena” (the things-in-themselves).

So far, it doesn’t look like Hume is any great supporter of a materialist or realist view of the universe. Why are we enlisting Hume as a champion of Reality? Although this may seem like he is a denier, this position actually helped the advancement of science tremendously, in that it inspired an attitude and practice of empiricism – not assuming causes through armchair Rationalist deduction as had been the fashion, but by looking for clues of found in actual events.

Hume’s philosophy involved the existence of mental “impressions” and “ideas”. Impressions are actual vivid perceptions which bring with them conviction or positive belief in the existence of a corresponding objective reality. “Ideas” are derived from impressions, and hence are less vivid than the latter. They are copies that the impressions leave behind. Hume distinguished between the act of seeing his surroundings - the tapestry in the room where he was sitting and the objects on his table - and recalling those images from that perception and to contemplate the idea of those images. In Hume’s theory of mental processes, ideas are naturally linked together and tend to call each other up to form group associations. Ideas are naturally associated with one another and form larger groups, and those groups in turn are related, to form still larger groups.

He believed that behind these groups of ideas there was a reality which corresponded to them – that the ideas actually denoted real entities, and that those physical objects were governed by the same natural laws that controlled the world of ideas.

5.1.2.2 Newton

2009-02-15T14:18:00.000-08:00

Despite his numerous religious and occult publications, Isaac Newton had little interest in searching for ultimate meaning behind experience. He and several others developed and popularized a mechanistic explanation for how the universe functioned that specifically avoided occult, supernatural, and mystical influences (which made discussions of how the newly discovered gravitational force was propogated rather difficult). Newton found that the new natural laws that he and others (such as Robert Boyle) were discovering had such tremendous explanatory power that looking for other principles that were more fundamental was not necessary nor nearly as interesting. He admitted that hypotheses of these types might have value by providing representations that would help in understanding the relations of things. This reluctance, however, didn’t stop him making the occasional foray into speculation as to the meaning of existence. He expressed this very briefly in his Rules of Philosophizing, which is discussed later.

5.1.2.1 Descartes and Dualism

2009-02-15T11:53:00.000-08:00

Rene Descartes’ principle of Dualism divided the universe into thought and all other external entities. In his philosophy, there is an external world, but humans are separated from it by an unbridgeable gap. We really know only what is in our own consciousnesses, which divides us from that world. We are immediately and directly aware of only our own states of mind. Because of this, all of reality is reduced to an idea or picture in our minds. Therefore, it is possible to doubt the reality of the external world as consisting of real objects.

This is the problem/paradox with Cartesian dualism – if we are only aware of our mental states, how can we be sure they represent anything outside our minds? Although Descartes didn’t solve this problem, many who came after him have provided convincing arguments that appear to overcome his doubts. Brentano’s theory of “directed attention”, Moore’s proof of reality, Wittgenstein’s, Moore's, and Russell's dismissal of many philosophical problems as word games and misuse of language, Correspondence theories of reality, coherence among the difference sciences, and Logical Positivist overall dismissal of this as even an interesting problem make it hard to take Descartes doubts seriously as they once were regarded.

Descartes started his investigation by doubting everything except his own thought process, and then tried to re-establish and derive everything else from that. Whether or not that was a wise starting point is not universally agreed upon (for example, the Pragmatists only chose to doubt concepts that seemed doubtful, reality not being one of them). Despite his doubts, though, Descartes was convinced that our conception of reality was close to being correct. The purely Rational (i.e., deductive) process he used to arrive at this conclusion started with an ontological proof of God’s existence, along with a proof that God is good. Ontological proofs of this type have since been severely criticized by Hume, Kant and others and shown to be structurally flawed, though they continue to be used occasionally even today. Anyhow, according to Descartes, because of God’s demonstrated benevolence, we can trust the account of reality provided by our senses. God created the world, and He gave us functioning minds and reliable sense organs. He would not attempt to deceive us and would never engage in such a malicious deception. This would be incompatible with his fundamental goodness. Therefore, what we perceive really exists.

Interestingly, Evolutionary Philosophy uses a modified form of this same argument. In that view, it is not God who gave us reliable sense organs, but natural evolutionary processes. This is covered more completely in a later section.

So, he initially only accepted the reality of the mental realm and doubted physical reality, along with everything else. However, at the end of his analysis, Descartes comes down on the side of the realists, in that he believed he proved that there was an external reality and that there was no reason for the rest of us to doubt what we were seeing really existed.

5.1.2 Revolt against Idealism

2009-02-15T09:14:00.000-08:00

The phrase, “Revolt against idealism” originated in a movement started by Russell and Moore as a response to what they perceived as an unproductive and misleading trend in philosophy. Even though they both arrived only recently in the history of philosophy, their analytic approach crystallized and focused the conflict between idealism and realism. For this reason, this section bears the name of the movement begun in their time as a result of their work. Many others joined in the battle, including other Analytic philosophers and Logical Postivists. This section highlights individuals, movements, and philosophical schools that emphasized interaction with and recognition of the reality of the physical universe. It doesn’t attempt to fully define those systems of thought, but only to focus attention to the elements of each that asserted the existence of an external reality and our abilities to experience and understand it.

5.1.1.8 Omphalos and “Last Thursdayism”

2009-02-13T22:05:00.001-08:00

Omphalos means “navel” in Greek. It consists of the idea that the universe and everything in it was created with the appearance of age and history in Biblical times. Adam and Eve were created with navels (thus the name), mountains came into existence pre-formed, seas already vast, caves already deep, stars already distant, and buried fossils having the appearance of great age. Because of God’s skill, his creation is indistinguishable from a truly ancient universe billions of years old. He is either tricking us or testing us.

A modern version of Omphalos is “Last Thursdayism”, which takes a more extreme position – the universe was created just last Thursday, and we were all created with implanted memories of fictitious events that we only believe occurred before that. In fact, it all may have just begun five minutes ago, as Bertrand Russell described in The Analysis of Mind,

“There is no logical impossibility in the hypothesis that the world sprang into being five minutes ago, exactly as it then was, with a population that "remembered" a wholly unreal past. There is no logically necessary connection between events at different times; therefore nothing that is happening now or will happen in the future can disprove the hypothesis that the world began five minutes ago.”

There is a near infinite number of different claims that share a similar structure with Omphalos and Solipsism, and they are equally irrefutable and just as strange. For instance, I could claim that an invisible leprechaun sits on my shoulder who created the universe, while you could claim that a invisible angel on yours deserves that distinction. Neither can be disproved. Every person on the planet could make a similar type of claim. They can’t all be true, and through the logical technique called “Overloading Objections” it can be shown that none are likely to be true. This technique doesn’t disprove these silly arguments. It just shows that if Solipsism and Ophalos can be true, then so can billions of other similarly formed assertions.

So, Omphalos shares with Solipsism and the infinity of parallel barren positions the trait of being invulnerable to criticism and disproof – and that is all they have. They are rhetorical tricks, not sincere philosophical statements.

5.1.1.7 Solipsism

2009-02-13T21:42:00.001-08:00

Solipsism is Idealism taken to its extreme “logical” conclusion. Denying the existence of a material world, it also denies the existence minds other than the “agent” or person experiencing their own thoughts and existence. It takes the position that knowledge of anything outside the mind of the thinker cannot be proved or justified. This doctrine opposes all forms of realism and materialism. It is so extreme that it also rejects most other forms of idealism because many of them grant some measure of existence to other minds or to a physical world.

Solipsism is difficult to argue against, because it effectively poisons the well against all opposition. It makes it impossible to distinguish between actual reality and a thought that looks like reality. Because it rebuffs all counter-arguments with this trick it can never be proved or disproved, which makes any discussion of it fundamentally frustrating and pointless. This immunity from attack is its main charm, without which it would be utterly empty.

Despite its seeming invulnerability, it does have several weaknesses, two of the most damaging being:

If solipsists creates the reality they experience, how can they create things they have never thought of such as new scientific discoveries, geography, history, poetry, art, or dance they themselves are incapable of conceiving or performing. It seems ludicrous to say that the solipsistic agent can mentally fabricate entities which are far superior, more intelligent, beautiful, deep, interesting, and skilled than the agent himself. If this were possible, why does not that agent give himself those skills?

However the most compelling case against it is its philosophical sterility. It is completely empty and without power or content. It preemptively destroys any attempt to refute it and can be neither falsified nor proved. It shares this property with many other weak philosophical positions such as Omphalos (described next) and similar Special Creation arguments.

Simply because a philosophical position is difficult to attack does not grant it any depth or strength. Adherents of this peculiar brand of thinking have only shallow satisfaction. They are left with a philosophy that has no use, no applicability, no morality, no ethics, no metaphysics, no aesthetics, and not a single interesting problem to solve. This paucity of substance, which immediately terminates any discussion, does not necessarily discredit the philosophy, though it leaves one wondering what possible use it has.

5.1.1.6 Western Spirituality

2009-02-13T21:35:00.000-08:00

The doctrines of most forms of the three big Western religions (Christianity, Judaism, and Islam) include a belief that God preceded the existence of matter. God either created the material universe, or is a necessary element as its sole perceiver prior to Man. The existence of an omnipresent and omniscient God implies that the physical universe is the object of at least one conscious being – God. So, one might argue that the major Western religions are somewhat idealistic in that “mind” precedes “body”, where “body” is the material world, and that without the original Mind of God, there would be no universe.

Various modern synthesized religions and spiritual organizations have adopted smatterings of mystical content from Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, Native American traditions, and 19th century “mind cure” philosophies. Included in these are “New Thought” variants such as the Unity Church with its “Course in Miracles”, Science of Mind/Religious Science, the Church of Divine Science, and “The Secret” with its Law of Attraction. These do not uniformly and specifically deny external reality, but treat it as something that one’s mental attitudes, meditation, and committed belief can alter, through undefined mystical mechanisms, to the benefit of the believer.

5.1.1.5 Eastern Mysticism

2009-02-12T22:54:00.000-08:00

Views similar to those of Berkeley’s modern Immaterialism have appeared much earlier in some, but not all, forms of Buddhism. These stressed the sole reality of consciousness. Generally, Buddhism emphasizes that the world of change that appears real to us is illusion. Similarly, some forms of Hinduism tend to view reality as the expression of an all-encompassing divine mind. To be fair, the mainstream viewpoint in both of these religions is that, minimally, there exists a sort of dualism that includes both a physical and a spiritual reality.

5.1.1.4 Kant’s Mental Constructs

2009-02-12T22:41:00.000-08:00

Like Newton (discussed later), Kant sought to show that inference from hard sense data (from the exter-nal world) to soft data (inside the mind) are warranted, and that empiricism agreed with claims to knowl-edge about nature. According to Kant, the mind perceives an external world full of independent objects (noumena) that are actually there and synthesizes experience (phenomena) from those perceptions. Re-ality, itself, is not mind-dependent, but our perceptions of it are. For this reason, we are forever separated from the actual world as it really is, and are limited to know only our perceptions of it - the phenomena we experience. Though we can never really know ultimate reality, and are limited to what our experience and perception contribute to it, we can at least know that, somehow, “things in themselves” really do exist “out there”. “Things in themselves” exist wholly outside our experience, and all we can say is that they exist. They are beyond our full understanding, due to the limitations of our perceptions and mental constructs. This is a “Constructivist” philosophy, meaning that the mind’s thoughts create the perceived world. Any philosophy of reality in which mental categories play a large role has a constructivist element.

Unlike Locke, who believed that the human mind was a “tabula rasa” or blank slate, Kant argued that the human mind was pre-wired to form categories of understanding and meaning that are inherent in our makeup such as our understanding of substance, causality, anticipation, analogy, possibility, necessity, existence, etc. So, although Kant was not a “reality-denier”, he did claim that our ability to understand it directly was not possible.

5.1.1.3 Subjective Idealism

2009-02-11T22:17:00.001-08:00

Bishop George Berkeley introduced the theory of Immaterialism in the mid 1700’s. It proposed that the material world does not exist independent of our minds; that the only reality is mind and ideas. Berkeley summarized his theory with the motto "To be is to be perceived". This concept was his attempt to defend a spiritual world and prove God’s existence, against Newton’s mechanistic and materialistic science. It was his revolt against Materialism, and it continues to epitomize pure Western Idealism even today. Berkeley thought that the world and the objects in it exist by being perceived in the mind of God. They then come into existence for us as God decides to reveal them to us. God’s omnipresence provides the needed universal observer - He in whose mind the universe exists.

The main point of Berkeley's philosophy is that there is no such thing as matter. It doesn't exist. There are only minds, and ideas that occur in those minds. All the things we perceive are ideas; the fact that we perceive them means that we are ourselves essentially minds. This is the source of the traditional Philosophy 101 activity involving a lively class discussion debating the question: “is this chair really here?”

Berkeley’s theory attempted to refute the idea that matter could exist independent of mind. If he or another person saw a chair then that chair existed. If no one saw the chair then it could only continue to exist if it was in the mind of God. The idea that objects exist independently of a mind or the mind of God is not testable or provable by the scientific method, because all objects we would need to examine must enter our awareness in order to experiment on them. Because the mere act of investigation as to whether object can exist outside the mind must be conducted using the mind confounds the whole attempt to research it.

The logical conclusion of such a philosophy, taken further than Berkeley ever intended, is that reality, being known only through the mind, also exists only in the mind. This amounts to solipsism, the position that nothing exists except for my perceiving self, a view that has rarely, if ever, been seriously considered in the history of philosophy.

To be fair, modern some aspects of Quantum Theory in physics lend some support to the argument that perception does affect reality (Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, quantum entanglement, Bell’s theorem, and others). But this would not be the first aspect of Quantum Theory that doesn’t apply at the macro level.

5.1.1.2 Classical Idealism

2009-02-11T21:42:00.001-08:00

In traditional Platonic idealism, abstract concepts such as mathematical entities, geometric shapes, ideas, and universal “Forms” possess the highest and truest type of reality. Material reality is only a projection into our experience of these more perfect and fundamental entities – the idea of a square is more perfect and “real” than any specific manifestation of an actual square object.

This school of thought addressed reality by treating change and material objects as entirely real, on a par with universal Forms. For them, reality consisted of “matter” which had “form”, which was suited to its “purpose”. They were not promoting the absence of a physical world, but instead arguing for the existence of some non-material ideal concepts, exemplars, and archetypes called “Forms”.

These ancient idealists, however, would not be considered Subjective Idealists or Immaterialists (described later). The accepted a real world, even if they thought that man’s ability to perceive it was extremely limited, as described in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave in which the prisoners in a cave can only see shadows of the outside world (i.e. true reality).

5.1.1.1 Skeptical argument against reality

2009-02-10T21:19:00.000-08:00

To start with, what is the fundamental reasoning in support of Idealism? There are several justifications, but one of the simplest is this. Using the formal logical structure called “affirming the antecedent” (AKA - modus ponens), skeptics of claims about an external reality pose this argument:

If we don't know that reality is not an illusion, then we don't know that external objects really exist

We don't know that reality is not an illusion

Therefore, we don't know that external objects really exist

Its formal structure is:

If P, then Q

P is true

Therefore, Q is true

Although it seems sound, similarly formed arguments can resolve to a completely different conclusion (see Moore, later in this paper). In particular, the second premise (we don't know that reality is not an illusion) is the basis of the entire debate - it cannot be simply assumed.

5.1.1 The Faces of Idealism

2009-02-10T21:16:00.000-08:00

Idealism is the metaphysical view that mind supersedes reality, that the ultimate nature of reality is based upon ideas, thoughts, and forms. It holds that the real world is inseparable from or meaningless without consciousness and perception. It is the philosophical opposite of Naturalism, Materialism, and Realism. Idealism is not based on an empirical evaluation of fact. Instead, it is grounded in an intuitive interpretation of perceptions and the derivation of meaning from experience.

Not all forms of Idealism dispute the existence of a physical world. However, they all insist that the apparent self-sufficiency of the natural world is deceptive. To the Materialist mind, Nature appears to be self-sufficient and to go its own way, independent of our involvement in or perception of it. Nature gives the appearance of being eternal, operating according to its own laws with no need for a creator or outside intelligent agent to initiate and sustain it. But idealism relies on Mind, Spirit, and Idea for its power and its meaning. It draws a strong distinction between reality and appearance. Subjective Idealism considers the physical universe to be either non-existent or in some way, less “real” than our mental constructs of it. There are other forms of Idealism that are less severe, that don’t deny reality. But our focus here will primarily be on those that do.

The range of Idealism spans Platonic ideal forms through Eastern Mysticism, all the way a “Matrix” world-view where all of life is just an implanted dream, or in 21st century-speak, some sort of “hologram”. This section describes the more common forms of Idealism. The various Idealistic schools of thought are conveniently both unprovable and unfalsifiable. Any techniques used to examine their propositions would involve postulating “real” tools of research, which beg the original question being investigated, “what is real”. Among other reasons, this accounts for its longevity and frequent re-occurrence in both ancient and modern thought.

5.1 How “Real” is Reality?

2009-02-10T19:28:00.000-08:00

Scientists undertake their studies as if a real universe exists and that the measurements and observations they make have true significance, a strong relationship to, and a high correspondence to that world. Most science and engineering degree programs don’t require philosophy courses, and the majority of people in those professions don’t give much more thought to ontology (what it means to “be”) than people in any other profession. But acceptance of an external reality is one of the implied beliefs tied up with how science is conducted. It is an assumption, and one that has been argued about for centuries.

It’s hard to imagine how anyone could question reality’s existence, which is close to questioning existence itself. But they are out there: solipsists who doubt all existence, and even doubt that minds other than their own exist, Idealists, some mystical eastern religions, and adherents to fringe pseudo-religions like the “Course In Miracles” who at least agree that we all have minds, but that the physical world might be an illusion. One could wisecrack that this tendency to deny reality might have been bred out of the human race over time if there were a genetic component to such beliefs - that they would have stepped off the curb in front of a car (or chariot, or saber toothed tiger). But I imagine that even these people look both ways before crossing the street. Samuel Johnson was said to have responded to Berkeley’s theory that the universe exists only in our perceptions with, “I refute him thus!" and kicked hard at a stone.

This section explores a few of the better known and more influential approaches to this question, especially those that bear directly on the central question of this paper - “is Science based on faith?” Although I was tempted to present a full survey of competing theories of reality and man’s experience of it, the main emphasis of this section will be to distinguish those that deny an external reality (or deny our ability to experience it directly) and those that propose that we can have direct interaction and experience with the external universe. Some fairly big names of weighed in on both sides of this issue. The remainder of this section will lay out their cases.

5 Philosophical background

2009-02-09T21:42:00.000-08:00

Much has been written about the questions underlying both everyday experience and the more formal process of how we gain knowledge through scientific and empirical investigation. We take for granted so much of how we interact with the world that when we lay open the assumptions we must make regarding that world they seem excessive, sometimes even ridiculous. This section deals with some philosophical questions that directly relate to the question of scientific faith. They are questions dealing with Reality, with inference and induction, and with the uniformity and universality of nature.

The theories regarding how much we can trust our experience to teach us about the real world boil down into two major types: some form of common sense acceptance that there is a real world worth learning about vs. a variety of complex and tortured semantic, linguistic, and logical or sophist-tinged abstractions that question common sense experience and frequently strain the imagination. Most of us just take for granted that our experiences mean something and can be taken at face value instead of being some devious trick that is being played on us or a lifelong hallucination. To put it in the context of this paper, belief in reality is one of the major elements of the “faith” that underlies science.

The attackers of science don’t typically question assumptions that science makes about the fundamental nature of the external world. These people generally agree that we exist as parts of a greater universe that has an existence apart from us. But this point has actually been much debated over the years. Science does begin with some first principles about the nature of reality, and they are worth exploring in this section to determine if they are based on faith or are founded on something more substantial.

We also explore an equally controversial issue: assuming we can accept that there is a reality “out there”, can we use our experience in it to make predictions about future events? In other words, can we legitimately use induction to infer general rules from our specific and limited experiences?

To answer that question, we must also look at the predictability and universality of the “laws of nature”. Is there a basic uniformity of cause and effect across time and space? Will the future resemble the past? Did the past look like the present? Are the phenomena we see here of the same type we see across the expanse of the universe? Is Hume’s assertion, “From causes which seem similar we expect similar effects” valid? If we can’t answer “yes” to these questions, how can we conclude that events tomorrow, or even 10 seconds from now will have some relation to what has just happened? How can we be confident that the sun, which has risen billions of times, will rise tomorrow one more time?

4 What is Rational Belief?

2009-02-09T21:26:00.000-08:00

Rational thought processes, decision-making, and behaviors govern how living creatures interact with their environments and with each other. Extended and formalized, it constitutes a large part of the foundations of science.

4.1 Basic Rationality

Belief based on logic combined with empirical, concrete evidence is not at all like a faith whose first principles are inscrutable deities, personal revelations, mystical, myth-filled text, cultural traditions, strong personal emotions, or priestly admonitions. The objects of rational belief – the real world entities to which those beliefs refer - do not reveal themselves only to the privileged few. They are not matters of taste, opinion, tradition, and custom. The truth of these beliefs is easily demonstrated and reproducible by anyone who cares to test them. If specialized education is required to comprehend some of the more arcane topics, anyone with the aptitude, intelligence, resources, and interest can obtain the training and experience that knowledge, firsthand.

The use of the term, rationality, here should not be confused with the Rational Philosophy of Descartes and Leibnitz, where all knowledge could be reasoned out through purely logical means independent of experience. Another sense of rationality, the one used here, is: reasonable, sensible, sane, in accord both with logic and experience.

Even primitive creatures, which have no consciousness or what we would call thought, behave rationally. They do what they do for their survival and self-interest. Evolution enforces rationality – those who work against the reality of their environments, historically, were eliminated from the gene pool. Humans, who developed the capacity to intellectualize this process call it rationality. Somehow in our pre-history, we alone also evolved the ability to be irrational.

In everyday life, in our jobs, and in our relationships we have expectations about how events and outcomes evolve, about how certain things cause other things to occur. We see these expectations borne out again and again. Based on our experience, we form models of how the world works and come to have trust in our models. In science and technology we build theories that explain how things behave now and will behave in the future, and we rely on these theories as a basis for further work. We can conduct those complex enterprises without have to return to the basics and prove them each time again from scratch. They have been proved and, barring the introduction of evidence that contradicts their predictions, they don’t need to be revisited. We combine fundamental, proven beliefs with new phenomena and experiments to build more comprehensive and complex models, which in turn become the fundamentals of other, even higher level hierarchies of explanations. We believe these things because we trust the evidence of our senses and our experience. As Phil Plait wrote, “Trust is when you accept what well-sourced evidence tells you. Faith is believing in something despite evidence to the contrary.”

Again, Richard Dawkins from “Is Science Religion” - “There is a very, very important difference between feeling strongly, even passionately, about something because we have thought about and examined the evidence for it on the one hand, and feeling strongly about something because it has been internally revealed to us, or internally revealed to somebody else in history and subsequently hallowed by tradition. There's all the difference in the world between a belief that one is prepared to defend by quoting evidence and logic and a belief that is supported by nothing more than tradition, authority, or revelation.”

The fundamental difference between the two kinds of faith we are discussing (and it’s this difference that gives rationality its power) is that rational faith (or belief) has the capacity to change itself when new evidence challenges old assumptions. Whereas non-rational approaches see patterns where none exist and assign causality to unrelated phenomena, rational approaches can test those patterns and investigate the proposed causality, rejecting what fails to meet its standard.

4.2 Rationality in Science

In section 3, we discussed faith and differentiated it from rational, evidence-based belief. Here we look more closely at rational belief and at its use in science. As Dr. Barnhardt said in the original version of the movie, The Day the Earth Stood Still, “it isn’t faith that makes good science Mr. Klaatu, it’s curiosity”. I would add a few other attributes to curiosity, but fully agree with the exclusion of faith from the recipe.

Methodological naturalism and scientific naturalism are terms that refer to the view that explanations of observed effects are meaningful when they invoke only natural causes. They are formalizations and extensions of the everyday rational/empirical process we use to live our lives. Methodological naturalism takes the position that the scientific method (hypothesize, experiment, measure, analyze, interpret) is the only effective way to investigate reality. It doesn’t (typically) study the supernatural realm, does not invoke it to explain events, and finds no need to hypothesize its existence or effects. This methodology doesn’t take a hard stand on defining the “true” nature of the universe from a metaphysical point of view. Perfectly good science can be done by "bracketing", i.e. deferring, that question indefinitely. The act of "doing science" doesn’t require that one have a particular philosophical opinion – only that a particular approach to the conduct of science be taken. Rather than trying to uncover the "truth", it discovers how things work and the processes that govern the phenomena being studied. Nevertheless, the discoveries of science map closely to our experience of the universe. They are consistent with that universe, consistent among themselves, and are very useful, if not necessarily and absolutely “true” (whatever “true” means in this context).

As with methodological naturalism, the scientific method also extends the everyday common sense we use to make it through life. The simple techniques we use to gain knowledge about the world as we move through it are extended and rigorously applied in science. For example, if you hear a knocking sound on your door, you hypothesize that someone is at the door. You perform an experiment by going to the door and opening it. By looking outside, you gather evidence. You evaluate the evidence (compare what you see to your hypothesis), and interpret the results (e.g., your friend is visiting you). There is no faith involved - this is the way we humans interact with and learn from the environment. Anyone can duplicate this discovery process – there is no privileged class that alone can experience it. As Albert Einstein said, “The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking”. Just as apt, a quote from T.H. Huxley (Darwin’s bulldog) - “Science is simply common sense at its best--that is, rigidly accurate in observation, and merciless to fallacy in logic.”

Even among philosophers of science, there is no common agreement on the definition of science. Most of them can recognize the difference between science and non-science, but differ on the exact nature of science. No single unified account of the difference between science and non-science has been widely accepted by philosophers, and some regard the problem as unsolvable or uninteresting, although Karl Popper had a technique for making this distinction, called the “criterion of demarcation”, discussed later in this paper. The fact that good science still occurs without agreement about this issue highlights the fact that it is not a philosophical or metaphysical enterprise, but a practical one, straddling the chasm between the physical world and theoretical constructs. There is more or less unanimous agreement among its practitioners as to how it should be conducted (encompassed in the term, methodological naturalism). But for those who do care to debate what lies beneath science, there are conventionalists, who believe humans devised “laws of nature” and organize their experience of the world according to these laws. The inductionists (Bacon, Russell) gather information from the physical world and use induction to create theories that explain the phenomena that are observed (this is probably what most people would intuitively agree with). The deductivists take the opposite view – that there is no valid inductive logic, since general statements can never be completely proved from specific cases. On the other hand, a general statement can be disproved by even one contrary particular instance. Therefore, a scientific theory can never be proved but it can be disproved. The role of an experiment is, then, to subject a scientific theory to a critical test. Thus, all theories are tentative.

While on the topic of belief systems surrounding science, but not intrinsic to it, there are philosophical naturalists, similar to philosophical materialists, who insist that the world is entirely natural (in the sense of being devoid of the supernatural). This is a belief that many choose, but is entirely a personal choice. Certainly science has, as yet, not required supernatural entities to explain the many processes and phenomena it has helped illuminate. Philosophical naturalism is not required for science to work. It stands in opposition to deistic or theistic beliefs. However, it cannot be emphasized too strongly – despite the similarity of the terms, philosophical naturalism has nothing at all to do with methodological naturalism, which defines the practice of science.

Science develops theories through inductive logic (from the specific to the general) and then tests theories by generating predictions through deductive logic (making specific predictions from a general theory) and empirically verifying those predictions. Science explores the natural world and makes predictions about the future, and creates theories explaining discoveries that reveal the past. Unlike practically every other endeavor, especially faith-based enterprises, it constantly attempts to falsify itself in order to grow and strengthen – the “no pain/no gain” approach. Religions, New Age spiritualism, Mysticism, never attempt to refute their fundamental tenets or falsify their basic dogma – those who do are deemed heretics. For example, Christians accept on faith that various assertions about God – he created the earth, he visited various saints and prophets, sent his son, and then took his son back. None of that is tested, nor it is testable – we cannot question the mind of God. Although it is perfectly good theology, it is not science.

James Frazer, author of The Golden Bough sums it up well: “but while science has this much in common with magic - that both rest on a faith in order as the underlying principle of all things, readers of this work will hardly need to be reminded that the order presupposed by magic differs widely from that which forms the basis of science. The difference flows naturally from the different modes in which the two orders have been reached. For whereas the order on which magic reckons is merely an extension, by false analogy, of the order in which ideas present themselves to our minds, the order laid down by science is derived from patient and exact observation of the phenomena themselves. The abundance, the solidity, and the splendor of the results already achieved by science are well fitted to inspire us with a cheerful confidence in the soundness of its method.”

3 What is faith?

2009-02-08T21:23:00.001-08:00

The accusations which I quoted in section 2 all share one misconception – that the type of faith which backs up religious or superstitious belief is the same sort of conviction that serves as the foundation upon which rational, scientific knowledge is based.

The word, “faith” has several similar meanings, but with very different ramifications. You can consult any dictionary to get a listing of its many different definitions. We are concerned with only two senses of the word here:

There is religious faith, which is a strong spiritual conviction in the absence of, or even in contradiction to, external evidence.

And then there is rational faith – a belief, which is built on inference from past experience, material evidence, repeatable observations, and a trust in fundamental logical principles.

These two meanings of the word are not only different, but the exact opposite of each other. It is disingenuous, misleading, and consciously deceptive to conflate faith in the reality of miracles, resurrections, angels and fairies with belief in an external world, evidence from that world, and logical rules for processing that evidence. This confused use of the word consolidates all of these non-empirical concepts into one category and one definition of “faith” – a belief that cannot be deductively proved. Instead, it would be more correct to put religious faith in the same category as belief in superstitions, ghost stories, leprechauns, and other myths and delusions rather than to associate it with the type of belief that underlies science.

Faith, in the traditional sense, is a very powerful force. Like many powerful concepts it has the potential to produce very good or very bad results. Faith can help people through uncertain and troubled times. There are some studies that indicate that it actually helps people recover from injury and disease. It is behind many great acts of kindness, charity, strength, and generosity. It can bring divided communities together. Faith can also have less beneficial outcomes - it can lead a nation to believe that their race should dominate the world, or that everyone should convert to a particular religion at the point of a sword. It can divide communities into those who share the faith and those who don't, who become targets of ostracism and punishment.

This document in no way will attempt to denigrate or belittle religious or spiritual faith. It has its place in peoples’ hearts and in the world at large. I only take exception to the characterization of science as being fundamentally a faith-based enterprise.

As Paul Davies wrote in Taking Science on Faith, “The term ‘doubting Thomas’ well illustrates the difference. In science, a healthy skepticism is a professional necessity, whereas in religion, having belief without evidence is regarded as a virtue... Science has its own faith-based belief system. All science proceeds on the assumption that nature is ordered in a rational and intelligible way. You couldn't be a scientist if you thought the universe was a meaningless jumble of odds and ends haphazardly juxtaposed. When physicists probe to a deeper level of subatomic structure, or astronomers extend the reach of their instruments, they expect to encounter additional elegant mathematical order. And so far this faith has been justified.”

Dr Davies view of faith, and the view taken by the others quoted previously, is problematic several ways:

It is factually wrong that science relies on faith.

At first, this may simply appear to be an attempt by the non-rational side to bring science down to the their level – i.e., having no firm and provable basis for belief. But it is more than that. It is the first step in a process of the destruction of the scientific/rational worldview. The next shoe to drop would be to show that scientific faith is weak and lost without reliance on God; that it is an inferior form of faith. Next would be to persuade the scientific minded to abandon their principles and join the “saved” and those who subscribe to the “true” faith.

Even if it had any truth in it, it still doesn’t undermine the scientific criticism of religious faith. Simply asserting that the basis of science is as unjustifiable as that of religion and superstition does not strengthen the position of the irrational. That is an irrelevant argument and an example of the “Tu Quoque” (i.e., "you too") fallacy. Rather than argue for the merits of their irrational worldview, they resort to a “pot calling the kettle black” argument, which doesn’t address the underlying issue of whether the “pot” really is black.

Last, and certainly not of the least importance, this is a “fallacy of equivocation” – purposely using the same word (faith) in two very different ways. As described before, religious/superstitious faith is belief without evidence or even in the face of evidence and is based on hope and tradition. The beliefs that scientists come by are based on logic, evidence, and valid inferences from diverse experiences that all work together to confirm and support a common, consistent framework of understanding. This distinction is described in greater detail at the website, http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2005/8/12/4294/44070.

As Richard Dawkins said in his article, "Is Science a Religion", “Religious faith not only lacks evidence, its independence from evidence is its pride and joy, and is shouted from the rooftops.” All evidence-free faiths are based on dubious written accounts, oral tradition, ancient rituals, and long-established cultural norms whose origins fade into antiquity. There is no way to prove their claims. In fact, adherents of these faiths frequently discourage attempts to introduce proofs into their realm. Just as often, faiths of these types, which have survived to our day, have been self-selected precisely for their opacity and immunity from proof or disproof.

2 The accusations

2009-02-07T20:51:00.000-08:00

For years I considered my interest in the axioms underlying science to be an interesting hobby that had no real importance, just an indulgence – a dabbling in epistemology, positivism and pragmatism. But more recently numerous organizations and individuals have come out with attacks on these premises by trying to demolish their significance and relevance. One need only briefly search the internet, or visit the sites of any of several fundamentalist “think tanks” and “research institutes” such as the Discovery Institute or Answers in Genesis to discover that the ranks of the anti-science and anti-reason factions are numerous and vocal. Several examples:

A September 28, 2008 article in Wired magazine questioned if science is becoming a religion (Artist Builds Temple of Science)

H.M. Morris in “Scientific Creationism” (1985) asserted that Evolution requires a much faith as science and that science is becoming a religion because it encompasses views of values and ultimate meanings.

Warren Chisum, a member of the Texas House of Representatives, published a memo to all members of the Texas House of Representatives saying, “Indisputable evidence - long hidden but now available to everyone – demonstrates conclusively that so-called ‘secular evolution science’ is the Big-Bang 15-billion-year alternate ‘creation scenario’ of the Pharisee Religion. This scenario is derived concept-for-concept from Rabbinic writings in the mystic ‘holy book’ Kabbala dating back at least two millennia.”

In “What's wrong with science as religion” – Salon.com July 31, 2008, Karl Giberson writes, “Impressive scientific progress has spawned these new preachers in the centuries since crowds sat spellbound under the judgmental voice of Edwards. Like their traditional counterpart, the new preachers speak with great confidence that their religion -- science -- contains all the truth we need to know and all the truth that can be known. They call us to worship at the altar of science, a summons of which I am skeptical, to say the least.

Jonathan Barlow in “A Reformed Response To: Is Science a Religion?” says, “Confidence in the law of non-contradiction could be said to be faith. There is no direct way to prove the law of contradiction except that it must be presupposed in order to learn anything or differentiate anything from anything else. Likewise, the principle of induction, which states that the future will be generally like the past, is what makes possible the formulation of scientific laws and theories. We cannot test the truth of this principle scientifically, for we would be assuming the truth of induction to try and prove it.”

In “Intelligent Design Revisited” (2005), David Limbaugh writes, “isn't the Darwinists' presupposition that life began without design unscientific? At the very least it requires as much faith as ID could conceivably require.”

From “Delusions of Scientific Adequacy” (Aug 22, 2008), Dan Peterson writes, “But which requires more faith: the conclusion that the design evident in our universe (the only one we know to exist) is actually the product of a designer. Or the assumption that there must be a gigantic, unseen, universe-generating machine, with a colossal number of universes completely unlike our own bubbling into being, and that we just happened to win the lottery against stupendous odds?”

In “The Devil's Delusion”, Princeton PhD, David Berlinski pillories the intelligentsia's new-found faith in atheistic scientism as shallow and exclusionary. "Like any militant church," he says, "this one places a familiar demand before all others: Thou shall not have any other gods before me."

“Everyone, scientist or not, must start their quests for knowledge with some unprovable axiom—some a priori belief on which they sort through experience and deduce other truths. This starting point, whatever it is, can only be accepted by faith; eventually, in each belief system, there must be some unprovable, presupposed foundation for reasoning (since an infinite regression is impossible).” From http://www.answersingenesis.org.

Richard Dawkins wrote in "Is Science a Religion", “I find it ironic that, whenever I lecture publicly, there always seems to be someone who comes forward and says, ‘Of course, your science is just a religion like ours. Fundamentally, science just comes down to faith, doesn't it?’”

In her anti-science, anti-liberalism book, Godless: The Church of Liberalism, Ann Coulter assaults evolution by arguing that evolutionary biology is a false and godless religion with Darwin as its prophet and the school teachers as its priests: “Liberals love to boast that they are not 'religious,' which is what one would expect to hear from the state-sanctioned religion. Of course liberalism is a religion. It has its own cosmology, its own miracles, its own beliefs in the supernatural, its own churches, its own high priests, its own saints, its own total worldview, and its own explanation of the existence of the universe. In other words, liberalism contains all the attributes of what is generally known as 'religion.'" She is referring, of course, to scientific explanations for cosmology, worldview, existence, etc.

Louisiana, Texas, Kansas, Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania and several other states have all recently battled or are currently battling anti-evolution, pro-Creationism factions bent on diluting and redefining the teaching of science in the public schools. These conflicts have taken the form of so-called “Academic Freedom” Laws, calls to ban the teaching of Evolution or Cosmology, and attempts to loosen the definition of Science to such a degree that astrology and religion could qualify as legitimate science class content. This is an ongoing struggle in which the pro-science side has recently been scoring significant victories. But the attacks keep coming.

From “Feedback: Is Any Scientific Research Free from Presuppositions?” by Dr. Georgia Purdom, AnswersInGenesis, July 11, 2008: “Snelling, however, stated that all scientists have certain beliefs that are reflected in their data interpretation. ‘Every scientist has to make assumptions or has beliefs about how the evidence all fits together … If it’s legitimate for [evolutionary biologists] to have their belief system on which they base their science, it’s just as legitimate for a Christian to have the Bible as their belief system for which they base their science.”

“Like Religion, Science Is Grounded in Non-Provable Beliefs”, by Nicanor Austriaco, Jr. “Most people would agree that religious faith is grounded in truths that cannot be demonstrated empirically using the scientific method. For the Catholic, these beliefs of faith are justified because they are accepted as true on the revelation and authority of God, who can neither deceive nor be deceived. What is not obvious is that scientific knowledge too must be grounded in essential, non-provable beliefs about the nature of the universe.” He goes on to give several examples that illustrate science’s unprovable reliance on parsimony and Ockham’s razor.

“Science is the atheists' religion for the modern world, like Christianity or Islam, except that it is more superstitious and less refined. Atheists' belief in science requires faith like religion, but atheists don't recognize and accept its reliance on faith.” - //atheism.about.com/od/atheismscienceevolution/a/ScienceFaith.htm

“Clearly, then, both religion and science are founded on faith — namely, on belief in the existence of something outside the universe, like an unexplained God or an unexplained set of physical laws, maybe even a huge ensemble of unseen universes, too. For that reason, both monotheistic religion and orthodox science fail to provide a complete account of physical existence.” – Dr. Paul Davies, "Taking Science on Faith," New York Times, Nov. 24, 2007

These mischaracterizations of science deserve a rebuttal, which is what the remainder of this paper attempts to provide.

1 The questions

2009-02-06T20:57:00.000-08:00

Science studies the physical universe – observing, measuring, categorizing, experimenting, and theorizing about whatever is in or has an affect on that universe. I have always had an interest in ideas concerning the assumptions that one must adopt that make science possible and meaningful. Scientists and philosophers have debated what assumptions underlie science and provide the framework that allows us to take it seriously. Irrespective of the pleasant and convenient fact that it works very well at explaining our world, some valid questions can be asked:

What justifies our confidence in science as a methodology and approach to understanding the world?

Is science ultimately based on pure faith or on something more substantial?

Is science itself just a new modern religion?

Many thoughtful people have approached these questions from different religious and philosophical positions. Those from a particular viewpoint - the anti-scientific, sometimes fundamentalist, post-modernist, or mystical camps - frequently denigrate the underlying postulates of science as being just as unprovable as faith in an all-powerful creator or other unprovable explanatory concept. I see this transparent attack as an attempt to put science in the position of “a pot calling the kettle black”. If these aspersions could be made to stick, then by what right would so-called “irreligious science” advocates have to accuse the religious or mystical of blind faith when they are just as guilty of resting on the same foundation?

These issues are not being debated in science circles. Most scientists are generally not also metaphysicians. They have as little need of it as plumbers or dentists. They can do their job independent of the answers to these questions because science is primarily a methodology rather than a philosophy. It is possible to be a good scientist while having either no opinion of, or even unusual opinions of the underlying philosophy. The accusations of groups like the Discovery Institute, Answers in Genesis, right-wing pundits, new age advocates, post-modernists, alternative medicine proponents, and others go mostly unnoticed by those actually contributing to the advance of knowledge. But the mischaracterizations and semantic sleight of hand from these groups are damaging to the public understanding of science and to the overall intelligence of our society. They deserve a response.

This paper will explore the “faith” that underlies science – or better expressed, the first principles that are either implicitly or explicitly accepted in its practice. These involve belief in the existence of a real world, belief that humans can experience that world, and the belief that they can draw valid conclusions from those experiences. It will examine the approaches that well-known and influential writers have taken to addressing some problems related to the concept of faith/belief in science:

What is faith?

How does faith differ from rational belief?

What is reality?

Can humans have meaningful experiences of reality?

Can we draw inferences and conclusions based on our experience?

What are the basic, underlying assumptions of science?

On what basis can we have confidence in these assumptions?

Is nature uniform and predictable?

What values does science embrace?

Why is science not a religion?

I’m not a scientist, but an avid science supporter. I sit on the sidelines and cheer on the various contributors. Having had a long interest in the philosophy of science, I hope to help clarify the confusion generated when adherents of many anti-reason, anti-science faiths make the false equivalence between their faith and the assumptions which underpin the scientific process.

Note: The following text borrows heavily from a number of sources, which I list in the references. With apologies, actual footnotes are not included in the body of the text. When in doubt, you may assume I have borrowed ideas and phrases from other sources, though I attempted in all cases to express ideas formulated by others in my own words. I don’t claim to have originated the all of the concepts outlined here, but only to have presented them in my own manner.

2009-02-06T20:45:00.000-08:00

So, here is the table of contents for a paper I am writing that is going to form the body of this blog, at least at the beginning. I'm part way through it right now, and as I finish pieces, I'll publish them here. Obviously, since I'm not really finished with it the TOC is subject to change. But this is just to give you an idea of what is coming.



               Scientific Faith vs. Religious Faith
                                Or
                Is Science Just Another Religion?

Contents

1 The questions
2 The accusations
3 What is faith?
4 What is Rational Belief?
   4.1 Basic Rationality
   4.2 Rationality in Science
5 Philosophical background
   5.1 How “Real” is Reality?
      5.1.1 The Many Faces of Idealism
         The skeptical argument against reality
         Classic Idealism
         Immaterialism and Subjective Idealism
         Kant’s Mental Constructs
         Eastern Mysticism
         Western Spirituality
         Solipsism
         Omphalos and “Last Thursdayism”
      5.1.2 Revolt against Idealism
         Descartes and Dualism
         Newton
         Hume
         Kant
         A Practical, Pragmatic View
         Moore’s Proof of an External Reality
         Evolutionary Philosophy
         Phenomenology of Husserl and Heidegger
         Wittgenstein
         Realism
         Modern Philosophy of Science
      5.1.3 What are we to conclude?
   5.2 How can we have confidence in our inferences
      5.2.1 The Regress Problem
      5.2.2 Isaac Newton’s Rules of Reasoning
      5.2.3 David Hume and Induction
      5.2.4 Bertrand Russell’s Postulates
      5.2.5 Wesley Salmon and the Problem of Induction
      5.2.6 Avoiding induction altogether
      5.2.7 Foundationalism and Coherentism
      5.2.8 Denying the consequent
   5.3 Is Nature Uniform and Predictable?
6 Assumptions of Science
      6.1 Aristotle’s Laws of Thought
      6.2 Ockham’s razor and the Law of Parsimony
      6.3 Falsifiability vs Verifiability
      6.4 John Oakes’ Assumptions of Science
      6.5 Norm Levan Panel on Intelligent Design
7 Social postulates / values of science
8 Why Science is not a religion
9 Final thoughts

Hello

2009-01-26T18:43:00.000-08:00

I'm John. As a home project and semi-obsession, I started working on a document outlining, for just myself, all the reasons why I thought that the "faith" (more appropriately called trust or belief) that people of reason have in how the world works is different than the faith that is tied up with religious, supernatural, new age, and other non-rational beliefs.

Since college many years ago, I have been running into people off and on who would try to equate the two, claiming that science was the "new religion of the 21st century", or that as traditional religion faded (I didn't know it was fading!) that a new technological/scientific religion would or should take its place. I don't see it that way. For starters, I'm not sure that superstition and other non-rational belief systems are fading at all. At best, we occasionally trade one form of irrationality for another. Although church affiliation may possibly be declining, we begin yoga, take homeopathic cures, believe in ESP and the paranormal, watch TV shows about ghost-hunters, buy books about Angels, and keep a sharp eye out for miracles. Secondly, I don't see Science and rationality as being a follow-on act for religion in any way. Science won't be the new religion any more than Plumbing or Accountancy will be. It seemed like a complete non-sequitur to me.

Another motivator for this blog - during the first Viking landing on Mars back in 1976, I was enthusiastically expecting that life would be discovered (it wasn't). A devil's advocate friend fully expected we would find nothing alive, and we didn't, darn it, though I don't think that mission was equipped to detect it, anyways. He argued that we had no reason to believe that anything on Mars was the same as on Earth - that chemistry might be completely different. He challenged me to prove otherwise. I discovered I couldn't since we had never been there before - it actually might have been different. I had just assumed it would be roughly the same. He claimed that only my unjustifiable "faith" in science made me believe that!

That has really stuck with me and has bothered me ever since. It has served as one of several inspirations for me to put this together. It turns out that there is good reason to believe claims like "Chemistry on Mars is probably like chemistry on Earth" and other assertions of the same kind. That is one of the things I will be delving into in this blog.

Anyhow, my project got bigger and bigger, and I started bringing in more and more material. I went back through old notes I took from various philosophy books I had read. I gathered information from other books I had around the house, from science and skeptical blogs, and from various online references, encyclopedias and wikipedia style sites. I found mystical/spiritual/religious/deconstructist websites that contained the exact type of thing I was irritated by. So, I combined this information with ideas I already had and kept on writing. After a while I began to wonder how I could share what I was doing with others. At first, I decided to try to link to it from my facebook page, but that didn't seem really like what I wanted to do or how I wanted to do it (maybe I don't want my little niece to read this stuff, anyway). So, then the blog idea was suggested to me.

I will probably introduce my ideas and writings in installments - segments/chapters/sections and see how it evolves. Because of the way blogs unfold, the structure of what I am presenting is in reverse order - the initial thoughts and sections at the very bottom, and the conclusions, final thoughts, and all the most recent installments at the top. I guess that's just how blogs work - the beginning (which I type in first) comes at the very end, and the end (which I type in last) comes at the beginning! I hope this doesn't confuse anyone.

Anyhow, thanks for reading and commenting -

John