continued from here
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The Ordering of Impressions
8. So, our experiences of the world give us impressions. More accurately, our experiences of the world either conform to or do not conform to our mind's predictions of what we expect. And of course we have fake impressions as well, pseudo-impressions. How does our mind process these impressions?
Let's go back to Kant. As we mentioned, Kant believed that God had built our minds to have certain built-in or "innate" categories to accurately process our impressions. [18] The first of such categories he discussed were space and time. We perceive the items outside ourselves to have dimension. We perceive our experiences to string together in a sequence.
He would add to space and time other innate categories like cause and effect. Although not innate, he added logic and mathematics to the list of things that were not known by experience but could be known to be true through reason.
In short, there are a number of things that seem true about reality that go beyond our mere experiences. They seem to be intrinsic to reality itself. Can we go even further?
9. How about gravity? If I am on the roof of a tall building, I best not treat the question of jumping off as a matter of opinion. "You have your opinion; I have mine. You think I'll go splat but I don't." We can both debate whether we are going to go splat on the way down, but the ground doesn't care which position you take. There is a right and wrong answer.
[As a quick aside, few people are truly relativists when it comes to matters of truth. [19] It's easy to be a relativist on matters of religion or the meaning of life, but you would be hard to find many people who think that the consequences of jumping out of an airplane without a parachute is a matter of opinion.]
Back to Hume. In his consummate skepticism, he suggested that we had no real reason to prefer going out of a building from the first floor rather than out a second floor window. [20] We have not experienced the future, so we cannot empirically say one is better than the other. Kant disagreed, and I hope you will too.
Roy Bhaskar, who coined the phrase critical realism, considered Hume and philosophers like him to be "unserious" when they ventured into suggestions like these. [21] Hume never actually climbed out a second floor window. Bhaskar suggests that there is an underlying structure to reality that, while our perceptions of it may vary, it is worthy of being called real. Our language about it, our pictures of it, our paradigms about it may vary, but we are getting at something that is actually true and there.
Bhaskar suggested that there were three dimensions to reality. [22] First, there is the actual -- the events that happen in the world. They are independent of us. They happen whether we are present or not. If a tree falls in the forest, it makes a sound.
But, yes, there is the empirical. This is my experience of the world. Yes, these perceptions are filtered by my mind. I do not experience the actual as it is but as it appears to me.
But he added a third category, the "real." There are structures and mechanisms that connect my perceptions with the actual. They are more than useful constructs of my mind. There's more to them than that. Gravity was one of them, as an example.
10. If I might tweak Bhaskar and Kant a bit, here is a similarly three-fold analysis of our knowledge of the world. First, the world outside of me is real. This is certainly a very pragmatic belief. If you find yourself in the middle of the road with a truck coming toward you, please step out of the way. It is best to treat the world outside yourself as real. We can hallucinate things about the world. We can be dreaming about the world rather than awake. But the existence of a world that is different from us is consummately reasonable.
It is reasonable to believe that the world would continue to exist even if I did not. If the earth did not exist, the universe would be just fine. No one has ever woken up to find that the world outside him or herself was not there.
Second, my perception of the world is thoroughly affected by my mind. In 1910, Ralph Barton Perry coined the phrase "the egocentric predicament." [23] I like to say that we are stuck inside our heads. We have no choice but to see the world from "in here." More on the paradigms and constructions with which we come to the world in a moment. As Kant put it, we do not see the world as it is. We see the world as it appears to us.
However, Bhaskar is also surely correct. There are underlying realities that are the basis for both the world and my understanding of it. We can surely go beyond pragmatic realism. Faith in certain structures of reality is more than merely useful. It is reasonable to believe that space and time, cause and effect, logic and math, and certain rules of nature are actually real beyond mere perceptions. The way any one person or group expresses that reality may differ, but the reality we are trying to express is real apart from our perception.
To summarize critical realism as I use the term, the world exists independently of me. It is real apart from my perception. However, my perception and understanding of the world will always be finite and shaped by my interpretive frameworks and fallen reason. Nevertheless, there are real truths about the world that we can grasp even if our knowledge of them is always mediated by human paradigms and frameworks of understanding.
Human Paradigms
11. What critical realism gives us is a hope that the constructs of our minds -- the way we organize our thinking about the world -- are more than merely arbitrary inventions of our minds. It gives us hope that some interpretations of the world are actually more accurate than others. We briefly mentioned Thomas Kuhn and the idea of paradigm shifts earlier in the chapter. In the first edition of his 1962 Structure of Scientific Revolutions, his work was interpreted by some to say that one scientific paradigm was no more valid than another. [24] A critical realist view justifies us in thinking that some paradigms are more correct than others and that we might actually approximate truths about the world.
Nevertheless, we should recognize the significant degree to which we construct our understanding of the world. If our perception of the world involves a host of different impressions, we are rarely aware of all of the data points, and some of them will be mirages of our imagination. Remember that our minds come to the world looking to confirm our pre-existing expectations. Our default mode is to see them.
You may have heard of a concept known as confirmation bias. This is our tendency to see what we expect to see. In chapter 3, I mentioned Jonathan Haidt's metaphor of a rider on an elephant. [25] The rider is like our reason and the elephant our deep intuitions and urges. Our elephant largely goes where it wants to go, and our "riders" find reasons to justify it.
As we have argued thus far on the journey, this is often true of the most idea-oriented among us. It is true especially of those who do not use their reason to find the most probable interpretation of the data but rather use their intellects to find possible ways to make the evidence fit what they already believe and what they want or need it to fit.
12. Paradigms are interpretive frameworks. They are meaning-harvesting mechanisms. They affect what we see of the data and what we don't see. They are like a word cloud -- they make some aspects of reality seem bigger and other aspects seem smaller. They direct what data we select as significant and what data we ignore.
When I was growing up, jewelry of almost any kind was considered wrong for a woman to wear (e.g., 1 Pet. 3:3). In the paradigm of my church background, it was very significant. It was something someone in my group would notice immediately on a woman. It was part of our holiness paradigm. It was large in our "word cloud."
My paradigm came into conflict with the paradigms of others at college. Modest jewelry wasn't a no-no for the women at my college. It was only after a break-up in college that it came home to me how insignificant an earring was for most Christian women. In my paradigm, it meant pride. It meant "look at me, look at me" in a bad way. But it crashed in on me that most women put on earrings like I would wear a tie to church back then.
When I got married, I wore a wedding ring. For the first few years of marriage I think I twisted and twisted that thing endlessly. It was uncomfortable and a foreign object on my finger. Yet its meaning was one of commitment to my wife. It says, "I am committed to someone and am not looking for a relationship with anyone else." I assure you, no self-centered pride is involved with it.
Yet, given the holiness paradigm of my youth, someone asked if they could see it not long after I was married. I foolishly took it off and gave it to them to see. They then commenced to parade around, "Ooo, look at me," flaunting the ring in an over-the-top way. To be frank, the person looked ridiculous.
In the "word cloud" of their paradigm, it seemed impossible that a ring would not be some huge statement, some huge psychological indicator. For this person, it meant PRIDE with capital letters. Most of you reading these words will no doubt think this story was very weird.
And yet this is the way paradigms work. Certain datapoints seem very significant. Yet someone with a different paradigm may not find them very significant at all.
13. The idea of paradigms arose in science as Kuhn used them to explain, for example, the Copernican revolution of the 1500s and 1600s when people went from seeing the sun as rotating around the earth to the earth rotating around the sun. In the twentieth century, relativity and quantum mechanics similarly transformed the way we look at the physics of the very big and the very small.
We often think of changes like these as a matter of progress or people getting smarter, but Kuhn points out that the math of the geocentric (earth at the center) thinkers was at one point better than that of the new heliocentric (sun at the center) ones. But the geocentric view had become very complicated to try to account for data that didn't fit simply into the existing paradigm.
Copernicus' (1473-1543) model was much more straightforward. And when Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) later suggested that the planets moved around the sun in ellipses, then the new model was both simpler and more accurate in its math. Kuhn's point is simply that what the prevailing view of science is at the moment ("normal science") is not simply a matter of objectivity. There are social and paradigmatic elements as well.
Paradigms are the scaffolding that stand alongside whatever it is we are interpreting. They affect what we do with the data. They direct what kinds of pictures we draw with the dots, so to speak.
As we mentioned earlier, you can draw an almost infinite number of pictures with a set of dots. In ancient times, they didn't have a lot of dots. This significantly affects what picture you draw. The fewer the dots you have, the less likely it is that your picture either represents underlying reality or that it is highly useful.
Myths were expressions of mysteries using the dots they had. We shouldn't think of myths as bad science -- that's to misapply our modern paradigm to a different world. Ancient myths were as much expressions of things as explanations.
Take the Norse myth that expresses why the seasons change. Jostein Gaarder uses this story as an illustration in his novelized history of Western philosophy. [26] The god Thor gets his hammer stolen and the season goes to winter. He gets it back, and we have spring. It's the Norse version of the Greek story of Demester and Persephone.
The thing is, in the story, Thor kills the guy who stole his hammer. If you are thinking that myths are about explanations, this is a really bad one. The story only works for one year because then the guy is dead. In fact, Thor dresses up like a woman and marries the guy before killing him. He's not going to be fooled next year.
I was always amazed that Gaarder didn't see that his paradigm of what a myth is was inadequate. This story is a really bad explanation for why the seasons change. However, it is a fun expression of the mystery that is the changing of the seasons...
[18] "Innate" comes from words meaning "in born." In other words, we are born with these categories.
[19] I might also point out that relativism on questions of truth is different from relativism on matters of ethics. On matters of truth, a relativist would claim that all truth is relative to the individual or group. As often pointed out, this is an absolute claim which deconstructs the very claim of relativism itself.
Relativism in ethics is a distinct question. It holds that there are no universal moral norms. It sees right and wrong as relative to the individual or group. We have already discussed relativism in chapter 2.
[20] In Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779).
[21] Roy Bhaskar, The Order of Natural Necessity: A Kind of Introduction to Critical Realism (Independently Published, 2017), 8.
[22] Bhaskar, A Realist Theory of Knowledge (Leeds, 1975).
[23] In his article of the same name, "The Ego-Centric Predicament," Journal of Philosophy (1910).
[24] He denied that this was the case in the Postscript to his second 1970 edition.
[25] Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion (Vintage, 2013).
[26] Jostein Gaarder, Sophie's World: A Novel about the History of Philosophy (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux1991).
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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)
7.2 A Framework of Understanding (part 2)
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