Epistemology cont.
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For Locke, we are born with a blank slate, a "tabula rasa." [4] Our lives are basically the constant input of source material into our minds. Experience writes on the whiteboard of our minds, and we know stuff.
In the 1600s and 1700s, the rationalists and the empiricists vied with each other for prominence. On the rationalist team, you had Descartes, Baruch Spinoza (1632-77), and Gottfried Leibniz (1646-1716). On the empiricist team, you had Locke, George Berkeley (1685-1753), and David Hume (1711-76).
David Hume would prompt the next step in the debate. Hume was the empiricist to end all empiricists. He noted that Locke and others were sneaking in some patterns that weren't actually part of experience. [5] For example, I can experience the moment when a fist starts coming toward me. I can experience all the individual moments as the fist comes toward my face. I can experience the fist hitting my face and the pain that accompanies it.
However, Hume argued that I cannot experience the law of cause and effect that, in my mind, connects that fist with my head lurching backward. (I am making up the fist example. His example was a billiard ball.) In fact, he would argue that I cannot experience time itself -- I only experience an individual succession of moments.
He was also known for what we call the fact-value problem. I can experience the fact of pain because you hit me. But I can't experience that it is wrong for you to hit me. There is a distinction between the fact that murder or someone stealing something from you or your spouse cheating on you is painful, on the one hand, and the claim that those actions are wrong. Hume argued that you cannot experience the value. You can only experience the fact.
The Kantian Synthesis
5. Enter the Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). He would say that Hume woke him from his "dogmatic slumber." [6] Before he engaged Hume's thoughts on causation, he leaned to the rationalist side of the debate. But Hume would spark perhaps the biggest paradigm shift in philosophical history.
Kant proposed a synthesis of empiricism and rationalism. My mind clearly organizes the inputs of my senses. I experience individual moments; my mind stitches them together into a sequence in time or into a cause-effect relationship. I only experience the moments. My mind shapes them into an order.
Similarly, I only experience someone taking my stuff. It is my mind that puts the valuation on the event as "wrong." My mind connects "facts" with "values."
I like to think of what Kant was saying as something like typing into a laptop. Right now, I am entering content into a computer. There is a box on the screen. I cannot enter letters outside the box. There are rules to the box. For example, the box won't make me coffee or breakfast. The software organizes the inputs I am making in certain predictable ways.
Similarly, our senses input experiences into our minds, but there are rules to the ways our minds organize that content. Our minds organize our experience into frameworks like cause and effect, space and time, and right and wrong. Kant believed in God, and he believed in the reliability of that organization. So he was not proposing uncertainty. He trusted that God had created reliable "software."
The bottom line is that Kant suggested that the content of our minds comes through our senses, but the organization of that content came through our minds because of certain "a priori" categories God had put in our minds. A priori means "from before." It means that the categories were already there before we began. The categories are "innate" or "inborn."
One consequence of this approach is that, ultimately, it means we do not experience the world as it is. We only experience it as our minds organize it. This shift to our minds as the organizers of reality was the seismic shift in philosophy I was mentioning before. If Descartes led us to focus on our role as knowers (versus simply assuming that the world was more or less as we see it), Kant would imprison us somewhat in our heads, ultimately opening the door up for postmodernism later. [7]
We cannot know, Kant would say, das Ding an sich, "the thing in itself." We only know it as it appears to us, as our minds organize it. If metaphysics is the study of reality, Kant put a significant footnote on it. He would write a book titled, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics. [8] Because we cannot know "things in themselves," it puts a huge damper on the study of such things.
For example, there is a debate in philosophy over whether the world is made of matter (materialism) or ideas (idealism). George Berkeley (1685-1753) wondered if we were all ideas in the mind of God. It's a fun thought experiment. But how would we tell the difference? We do not experience the world as it is. We experience it as we experience it, and our experience of the world is the same no matter what it is made of, whether that underlying substance is something called matter or something called ideas.
A Framework of Understanding
6. Kant's revolution did not end the epistemological debate, which continues to this day. But I have found him to provide a useful starting framework for a working model of how we know things. That framework is that our "knowledge" is a combination of inputs and their organization in our minds. There is far more shaping of the world by our minds than we might like to admit. What we see is not exactly what we get.
For example, psychology has concluded that our brains come to our senses with certain expectations -- certain predictions of what we are going to experience. Far from a blank slate, our minds start with a sketch already in place of what we think we are going to see, hear, touch, taste, or smell. Our unthinking bias is to see it -- even if it is not there. Our senses can modify those expectations, but our minds save work by coming to the world with certain predictions of what we are going to see. [9] Our bias is to see them.
The raw inputs of our senses are indispensable, but their role in shaping our understanding is often dwarfed by the interpretive work of our minds. They are incredibly significant, but they can be swallowed up by our mind machine. If we cannot be sure to know the world as it actually is, our goal is to organize the data of the world in our mind in as "useful" a way as possible, meaning that our interpretations account for as much of the "data" of the world as possible in as "elegant" a way as possible.
Let's say that the world is a picture, but all we can perceive of that picture is a selection of dots. Depending on the size of our canvas, we can potentially draw an infinite number of pictures out of those dots because we can draw as much and as far as we want outside the dots. This is the "elegant" criteria. The most justifiable picture will stick closely to the dots. Similarly, the more dots we have, the better chance we have of a representation that corresponds to the reality we are trying to perceive.
There are two related philosophies here. Both are realist. That is to say, both affirm (by faith) that the world outside ourselves and our human communities is real. Both reject what might be called "naive realism," which simply assumes that we see the world as it is. Critical realism is more optimistic about our ability to discern a truthful underlying structure to the reality we perceive. Pragmatic realism more or less says that such metaphysical questions are a diversion. We may as well treat our interpretations as heuristic devices meant to help us make our way through the world.
The pragmatic approach is the ultimate fall back. [11] The constructions that are organized by our minds are most useful if they account for as much data as possible in as elegant a way as possible. To summarize something that Einstein once said, "That explanation is best which is the simplest without being too simple." [12]
If we wish to call ourselves critical realists, as the New Testament scholar N. T. Wright has explored, [13] we might say 1) the world beyond ourselves is real, 2) our perception of that world is finite and fallen, inevitably skewing our perceptions, although we can approximate accurate knowledge. Here the classic tests for truth are incredibly useful. The correspondence test asks whether the data of the world corresponds well to the theories we construct to account for it. The coherence test asks whether our interpretations of the world are internally coherent. Inner contradiction is taken as a sign of a defective theory.
External Impressions
7. Our unattainable goal is objectivity -- to see the world as it is more than as what it appears to us -- we face an impossible battle. However, I would argue that it is a useful battle -- far more useful in fact than throwing the goal out the window. Some interpretations fit the data better than others. Some interpretations are more elegant than others. We commit ourselves to be "honest" with the lay of the evidence even though we are allowed to take positions by faith as well. [14]
We might think of the inputs of our senses -- from outside us -- as data points. Undoubtedly, some of those data points are real and others are a mirage. But perception is reality -- or at least it is a reality. If our minds perceive some input to be factual, then it is factual as far as our minds are concerned. We do not make decisions or formulate understandings based on the way the world actually is but on the way that we perceive it.
The quest for objectivity thus requires us to police our data. For example, our internal "paradigms" are naturally selective. We choose some data and exclude others. We find some data more significant than others. The world looks much different if you are only looking at part of the data.
Here the work of Thomas Kuhn (1922-1996) is incredibly helpful. [15] Our normal operating procedure is to process the data of the world from within certain frameworks or paradigms. These paradigms select certain data as significant and other data as less significant or ignored. I like to call the data that a paradigm ignores "naughty data." These are data points that are anomalous in our paradigm. We like to ignore them. We come up with "ingenious" explanations for them that are ultimately truth-avoiding.
This anomalous data, Kuhn argued, are the seeds of paradigm shifts. He argued that we should not see these shifts as some inevitabe progression toward the truth. Sometimes, a shift is just different from the paradigm before it. There is no inevitable progress of science. Sometimes, we are just rearranging the data rather than improving our interpretation of it in some objective way.
There is thus a social dimension to science. There is peer pressure. There is the herd mentality we have mentioned so often even in science. Extroverted, inspirational, charismatic figures can lead science in a particular direction just as in politics or any other domain of knowledge. We would like to think that this is less the case in science, but inasmuch as humans are involved, it is still a factor. [16]
These frameworks are part of our cultures. We absorb them unthinkingly as children and as we grow up. The more foundational they are for our personhood, the more we resist the naughty data, the harder we fight to keep our paradigms in place. Kuhn explored how resistant "normal science" is to fundamental paradigm shifts.
But, eventually, the older scientists die off. Einstein never accepted the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics, but he is no longer here to fight against it. Younger scientists may go for a new paradigm. [17] They may initially be denied jobs. They may have to keep their views somewhat quiet at first. But if they eventually acquire enough power in the guild, they may have the opportunity to bring about a paradigm shift...
[5] Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding.
[6] Kant, Critque of Pure Reason.
[7] Kant himself did not see this as imprisonment. His trust that God would not lie to us meant that he believed our minds accurately organized reality.
[8] Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics.
[9] For an accessible introduction to this "predictive modeling" that our brains do, see especially Andy Clark, Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind (Oxford University, 2016). The initial work was done by Karl Friston. See especially now Friston, Active Inference: The Free Energy Principle in Mind, Brain, and Behavior (MIT, 2022). For a fun example, watch this video.
[11] In all that follows, my ultimate justification is that logic, realism, and the classical tests for truth "work" incredibly well when used scrupulously. That is to say, they meet the pragmatic test for truth. We thus need not fall into the abyss of skepticism or extreme versions of postmodernism. I consider Richard Rorty (1931-2007) to be the king of pragmatic realism. Cf. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton University, 1979).
[12] The actual quote that comes closest was from a 1933 lecture "On the Method of Theoretical Physics": "It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience."
[13] N. T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God (Fortress, 1992).
[14] A key problem with a lot of human argument is that we act like we are trying to be objective when in fact we are taking a position by faith. It is acceptable to take a position by faith, but let's be honest about it.
[15] Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (University of Chicago, 1996).
[16] The main voice here was Paul Feyerabend (1924-94), Against Method (New Left, 1975). We might also note the words of that song from the musical Wicked: "Popular, I know about popular... Celebrated heads of state or really great communicators -- did they have brains or knowledge? Don't make me laugh. They were popular!"
[17] I don't mean to suggest that new paradigms are always a matter for the young or old paradigms always for the old, but you get the picture.
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Previously,1.1 Unexamined Assumptions
1.2 "Unitary" Thinking
2.1 Binary Thinking in Ethics
2.2 Contextualization in Missions
2.3 Beyond Relativism and Absolutes
7.1 How Do We Know (part 1)
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