01-17-2022, 12:56 AM
(This post was last modified: 02-19-2022, 10:44 PM by Nick.
Edit Reason: rogue letter "t"
)
This is a continuation of my previous thread on The Theory of Knowledge. However, reading it is not strictly necessary to understand this thread, but it provides good background knowledge.
Let's look at the word "theory". I get the feeling people understand this word as referring to no more than a thought-experiment, fresh & untested in practice. This is not the case; a theory is merely a label for a framework that attempts to describe reality. Einstein's theory of gravity was a theory when it was first conceived, and it is still a theory now that it is widely used in practice; the word "theory" makes no statement of truthfulness.
Rationalism - the idea that knowledge is obtained primarily through reason, or "thinking it out". Note that this use of the word "rationalism" has very little to do with the conventional, every-day use of the word "rational". That is, there is nothing irrational (in the conventional sense) by not being a rationalist. This word is purely referring to "knowledge through reason".
Empiricism - the idea that knowledge is obtained primarily through experience; experience here means "sense perception", or knowledge that arises from (literal) impressions on our sensory organs (sight, touch, taste, smell, hearing, etc.)
So, the battle of these two thoughts is like the contention of nature vs nurture. Do we mostly learn from external nurturing after we're born (empiricism), or are mostly endowed with innate conceptions are birth that we can learn to work out through logic as we mature (rationalism)?
Let's take a look. First, consider causality; the notion that some event A causes some event B. I am not merely speaking of B following A chronologically, but that B happened because A happened. A problem arises - we have this vague sense of causality, but it is neither observable nor able to be rationalized. It is not observable because causality cannot be impressed onto our sensory organs; we can observe A and B individually, but the causal relationship is undemonstrative. And causality cannot be rationalized because there's no reason to believe why letting go of a pencil would cause it to fall to the ground (I'm excluding scientific discoveries here - such as the laws of gravitation - because this would be an incidence of circular logic, since we can't rely on scientific discovery if we're trying to demonstrate causality exists, i.e. gravity is not "innately known")
This incompleteness arises from, Kant says, an implicit (and incorrect) assumption that both schools of thought are making. This is assumption is as follows: objects exist roughly as we perceive them, but also exist independently of us, i.e., we are directly observing things as they are. But Kant noticed that these observations that we think characterize those external objects rely on our own internal machinations (the brain & nervous system). So, these observations do not characterize objects as they are, but only as we perceive them.
For example, consider a purple crayon. Is this crayon's "purpleness" intrinsic to the object? Kant would say no. The purpleness of the crayon is interpreted output from our central nervous system (CNS). The crayon may have some property that causes it to reflect the band of light we interpret as purple, but the purple-ness is manufactured by us; we cannot and never can access the characteristics of the crayon that make it reflect purple light, whatever that might be.
This realization is critical. It means both empiricism and rationalism are incomplete. Empiricism because we can never perceive the underlying property of the crayon that makes it purple; only the output of the purpleness as interpreted by our brains. And rationalism because the purpleness is unusable in ironclad logic if it is not an underlying property of the crayon, only an interpreted output. This is why I made it a point to clear up the definition of a "theory"; because all we can ever use to describe reality is a hypothetical framework of reality, tested or not.
In short, we do not have access to the external world as it is, but only the representations we are able to perceive. This is not to say that the external world does not exist independently, but only that we can never reach it as it is intrinsically. It just so happens that only having access to these "representations" does not disrupt our general understanding of how the actual, external world works. This completely destroys both modes of thought - the larger implications of this is that we cannot reliably "build" knowledge from the ground up - known as verificationism.
Well, shoot. How can we ever say we "know" something if we can only know representations and not the real world? Kant's problem of externalities cannot be sidestepped.
It may be easy to fall into the trap that if a theory or idea cannot be conceivably proven wrong, it is a good theory. On the contrary, Karl Popper says the opposite; a theory is only useful insofar as can be proven wrong (but hasn't yet). In other words, a theory is strong if it has a long list of experiments that could conceivably prove the theory wrong (which is to say nothing of the actual outcome of said experiments). The strength in this is that if there's a long list of experiments that could prove your theory wrong, then that indicates your theory is a testable theory that makes an actual claim with predictions - that can be falsified. Let me demonstrate with an example (taken from Carl Sagan's The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark):
Suppose I invite you to my garage. You walk in, and I say "Whoa, watch out, don't run into my fire-breathing pet dragon". You are understandably skeptical, as you see no dragon, and reply as such: "There's no dragon there, I don't see any", to which I respond "Oh, it's an invisible dragon. But it's there!" You combat with "Okay, but if I spray-paint the area of the garage, surely I would see the dragon's silhouette." I come back again: "Oh, but the dragon is incorporeal, and the paint won't stick if you try that". "Very well, I'll get an infrared sensor and detect its fire breath". "Oh, but my pet dragon breathes heatless fire; that won't work either".
This kind of back-and-forth continues as such: every time you propose a test to determine if my dragon is real, I give an explanation as to why the test can't be used. Do you see the problem? I'll let Carl Sagan himself expand:
You get a similar feeling when dealing with conspiracy theories; any attempt you may provide to explain why the conspiracy is false is met with "oh, that's exactly what they want you to believe", or "well of course you won't find any evidence, they hid it" or "my pet dragon is invisible", etc. The theory of the invisible, incorporeal, heatless fire-breathing dragon is weak because it cannot be tested.
Let's look at an example. When Newton's laws of gravitation became mainstream, they were so fundamentally ingrained that they were known as "natural laws". We know now that Einstein's Theory of Gravity has superseded what was so universally accepted as a "natural law". Imagine how much knowledge we would have missed out on if scientists had insisted on the truthfulness of Newton's laws? Even simple GPS systems today rely heavily on Einstein's laws. What happens when and if someone comes up with something that supersedes Einstein? Will we embrace change, or stay in the dark? If science is done right, we welcome all ideas, but exempt none of them of appropriate scrutiny.
6.
This is all very interesting, but you may be asking "Why should I switch to science? How is it better?" My answer is this: science is inherently a self-correcting process where all ideas are welcome, but none immune to criticism. I know that science can be used for evil, but the solution to that is to overwhelm evil with good, not to suppress all progress and hide in the dark. Let us admit it when we're wrong, and replace the old with the new - embrace our own fallibility and learn from our mistakes.
Science is fantastic; when you're in love, you want to tell the world. Thank you for reading.
1.
Last time, we reviewed the general theory of knowledge, and went over some examples that test our intuitive grasp on how to obtain knowledge. But is there a formalized, preferred method of gaining knowledge in modern times? How do we best apply it with all that we've learned so far? To answer this question, I will give a bit of history on this struggle (insofar as I find it instrumentally useful; I'll try not to bore with a history lesson) and will argue science as the method of choice of knowledge acquisition in the modern era. My impression is that there are many misconceptions about science in the mainstream, and my hope is to clear these up and become an advocate of the scientific method.Let's look at the word "theory". I get the feeling people understand this word as referring to no more than a thought-experiment, fresh & untested in practice. This is not the case; a theory is merely a label for a framework that attempts to describe reality. Einstein's theory of gravity was a theory when it was first conceived, and it is still a theory now that it is widely used in practice; the word "theory" makes no statement of truthfulness.
2.
Now for the historical context. First, I'll introduce two competing schools of thought that arose in the 17th century that each attempt to answer these epistemic questions:Rationalism - the idea that knowledge is obtained primarily through reason, or "thinking it out". Note that this use of the word "rationalism" has very little to do with the conventional, every-day use of the word "rational". That is, there is nothing irrational (in the conventional sense) by not being a rationalist. This word is purely referring to "knowledge through reason".
Empiricism - the idea that knowledge is obtained primarily through experience; experience here means "sense perception", or knowledge that arises from (literal) impressions on our sensory organs (sight, touch, taste, smell, hearing, etc.)
So, the battle of these two thoughts is like the contention of nature vs nurture. Do we mostly learn from external nurturing after we're born (empiricism), or are mostly endowed with innate conceptions are birth that we can learn to work out through logic as we mature (rationalism)?
3.
Great, we've narrowed it down to two seemingly reasonable approaches. But who's right? Well, there's a wealth of history involving these two, but I'll skip to the point. German philosopher Immanuel Kant (now considered a critical figure on modern philosophy) published Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics in 1783, which bursted everyone's bubble - it rejects both schools as imperfect!Let's take a look. First, consider causality; the notion that some event A causes some event B. I am not merely speaking of B following A chronologically, but that B happened because A happened. A problem arises - we have this vague sense of causality, but it is neither observable nor able to be rationalized. It is not observable because causality cannot be impressed onto our sensory organs; we can observe A and B individually, but the causal relationship is undemonstrative. And causality cannot be rationalized because there's no reason to believe why letting go of a pencil would cause it to fall to the ground (I'm excluding scientific discoveries here - such as the laws of gravitation - because this would be an incidence of circular logic, since we can't rely on scientific discovery if we're trying to demonstrate causality exists, i.e. gravity is not "innately known")
This incompleteness arises from, Kant says, an implicit (and incorrect) assumption that both schools of thought are making. This is assumption is as follows: objects exist roughly as we perceive them, but also exist independently of us, i.e., we are directly observing things as they are. But Kant noticed that these observations that we think characterize those external objects rely on our own internal machinations (the brain & nervous system). So, these observations do not characterize objects as they are, but only as we perceive them.
For example, consider a purple crayon. Is this crayon's "purpleness" intrinsic to the object? Kant would say no. The purpleness of the crayon is interpreted output from our central nervous system (CNS). The crayon may have some property that causes it to reflect the band of light we interpret as purple, but the purple-ness is manufactured by us; we cannot and never can access the characteristics of the crayon that make it reflect purple light, whatever that might be.
This realization is critical. It means both empiricism and rationalism are incomplete. Empiricism because we can never perceive the underlying property of the crayon that makes it purple; only the output of the purpleness as interpreted by our brains. And rationalism because the purpleness is unusable in ironclad logic if it is not an underlying property of the crayon, only an interpreted output. This is why I made it a point to clear up the definition of a "theory"; because all we can ever use to describe reality is a hypothetical framework of reality, tested or not.
In short, we do not have access to the external world as it is, but only the representations we are able to perceive. This is not to say that the external world does not exist independently, but only that we can never reach it as it is intrinsically. It just so happens that only having access to these "representations" does not disrupt our general understanding of how the actual, external world works. This completely destroys both modes of thought - the larger implications of this is that we cannot reliably "build" knowledge from the ground up - known as verificationism.
Well, shoot. How can we ever say we "know" something if we can only know representations and not the real world? Kant's problem of externalities cannot be sidestepped.
4.
In 1934, Austrian philosopher Karl Popper published (in German) "The Logic of Scientific Discovery". In it, he proposes falsification as the preferred method of knowledge acquisition. It's very crucial that I mention that he acknowledged Kant's problem of externalities - he admitted that we can't "know" the external world, but we can get closer and closer to the truth (perhaps asymptotically) through a repeating cycle of criticism and reconstruction of theories. We abandon the pursuit of certainty, since it is impossible; per Kant, no amount of finite observations can "prove" a theory. But it only takes 1 observation to disprove a theory. Let's use that as a proxy for knowledge - falsification.It may be easy to fall into the trap that if a theory or idea cannot be conceivably proven wrong, it is a good theory. On the contrary, Karl Popper says the opposite; a theory is only useful insofar as can be proven wrong (but hasn't yet). In other words, a theory is strong if it has a long list of experiments that could conceivably prove the theory wrong (which is to say nothing of the actual outcome of said experiments). The strength in this is that if there's a long list of experiments that could prove your theory wrong, then that indicates your theory is a testable theory that makes an actual claim with predictions - that can be falsified. Let me demonstrate with an example (taken from Carl Sagan's The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark):
Suppose I invite you to my garage. You walk in, and I say "Whoa, watch out, don't run into my fire-breathing pet dragon". You are understandably skeptical, as you see no dragon, and reply as such: "There's no dragon there, I don't see any", to which I respond "Oh, it's an invisible dragon. But it's there!" You combat with "Okay, but if I spray-paint the area of the garage, surely I would see the dragon's silhouette." I come back again: "Oh, but the dragon is incorporeal, and the paint won't stick if you try that". "Very well, I'll get an infrared sensor and detect its fire breath". "Oh, but my pet dragon breathes heatless fire; that won't work either".
This kind of back-and-forth continues as such: every time you propose a test to determine if my dragon is real, I give an explanation as to why the test can't be used. Do you see the problem? I'll let Carl Sagan himself expand:
Quote:Now, what's the difference between an invisible, incorporeal, floating dragon who spits heatless fire and no dragon at all? If there's no way to disprove my contention, no conceivable experiment that would count against it, what does it mean to say that my dragon exists? Your inability to invalidate my hypothesis is not at all the same thing as proving it true. Claims that cannot be tested, assertions immune to disproof are veridically worthless, whatever value they may have in inspiring us or in exciting our sense of wonder. What I'm asking you to do comes down to believing, in the absence of evidence, on my say-so.
You get a similar feeling when dealing with conspiracy theories; any attempt you may provide to explain why the conspiracy is false is met with "oh, that's exactly what they want you to believe", or "well of course you won't find any evidence, they hid it" or "my pet dragon is invisible", etc. The theory of the invisible, incorporeal, heatless fire-breathing dragon is weak because it cannot be tested.
5.
What does this mean for us? Popper proposes that we find a theory that is testable, test it, and if it passes all tests, we call it knowledge. If someone comes along with a better theory, we test it. If it has more explanatory power and makes better predictions than our previous theory, we happily throw out the old one, and replace it with a new one. The implication is that science is continually testing and revising knowledge, which is a good thing; change your opinion as new information becomes available. If you're concerned that science often changes its mind, you shouldn't be. This is a sign of progress. We are performing a disservice to progress if we insist on hanging on to obsolete theories that we know are flawed.Let's look at an example. When Newton's laws of gravitation became mainstream, they were so fundamentally ingrained that they were known as "natural laws". We know now that Einstein's Theory of Gravity has superseded what was so universally accepted as a "natural law". Imagine how much knowledge we would have missed out on if scientists had insisted on the truthfulness of Newton's laws? Even simple GPS systems today rely heavily on Einstein's laws. What happens when and if someone comes up with something that supersedes Einstein? Will we embrace change, or stay in the dark? If science is done right, we welcome all ideas, but exempt none of them of appropriate scrutiny.
Quote:In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day.
6.
Quote:I think if we ever reach the point where we think we thoroughly understand who we are and where we came from, we will have failed. I think this search does not lead to a complacent satisfaction that we know the answer, not an arrogance sense that the answer is before us and we need do only one more experiment to find it out. It goes with a courageous intent to greet the universe as it really is, not to foist our emotional dispositions on it but to courageously accept what our explorations tell us.
Science is fantastic; when you're in love, you want to tell the world. Thank you for reading.
Quote:What we do with our world right now will propagate down through the centuries and powerfully affect the destiny of our descendants. It is well within our power to destroy our civilization, and perhaps our species as well. If we capitulate to superstition, or greed, or stupidity, we can plunge our world into a darkness deeper than the time between the collapse of classical civilization and the Italian Renaissance. But we are also capable of using our compassion and our intelligence, our technology and our wealth, to make an abundant and meaningful life for every inhabitant of this planet, to enhance enormously our understanding of the universe and to carry us to the stars.
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