The primary job of an epistemic system obviously is to find the truth.
"Obvious" and similar phrases—especially in philosophy—are big red flags that all too often mean, "Here's where I start bullshitting you." By qualifying a point as "obvious", the writer usually avoids substantiating the point. But if the point were truly obvious, why mention it at all? "Obvious" doesn't always mark bullshit, but it does so often enough that you should automatically view any point so qualified with extreme suspicion.
An enormous part of philosophical investigations of evidentiary epistemology, the connection between our perceptions and "truth" about reality, does not at all discuss whether our perceptions are related to truth about the world, but rather on establishing the lack of deductive rigor in the process itself, and how we should think about this lack. All of these principles, Hume's critique of induction, Putnam's Twin Earth paradoxes, Gettier problems, Probabilism, etc. all talk about the rigor of evidentiary epistemology, not about whether it even begins to talk about the real truth.
The classical Greek Skeptics denied all knowledge, and no philosopher has ever successfully challenged their view. Descartes made a valiant effort, but never got past Cogito, which even the most dedicated solipsist accepts.
Even if we have a completely rigorous epistemic method, such as mathematical deduction, how do we tell if our valid conclusions are actually true? If I put two rocks in a bowl, and then two more, I "know" I'll count four rocks in the bowl. Do I know this because 2+2=4 is a valid theorem of arithmetic? Or do I know that integer arithmetic is a good model of my experience about rocks by some other means? If I put two drops of water in a bowl, and then two more, I "know" I won't count four drops of water.
I don't want to put down philosophy that investigates the rigor of epistemic systems. But I want to make crystal clear that this sort of philosophy asks the question: Assuming our epistemology is doing the job of establishing truth, how well does it do that job? But we're simply assuming that our epistemology does the job we're asking of it.
When we ask whether (rather than how rigorously) our epistemology is finding the truth, we run into a vicious circularity. To determine whether our epistemology is finding the truth, we must know the truth independently of that system. But by definition we need some sort of epistemic system to know the truth.
Theism doesn't really help. Simply by defining "truth" in some God-dependent manner doesn't free us from assuming that our epistemic systems deliver the truth, it just dresses up the assumptions in rococo finery hoping to dazzle us with shininess. At worst, theism just places the assumption in the realm of religious dogma, guarded from doubt and philosophical investigation by threat of Hell.
As Plantinga's evolutionary critique of naturalism shows, if we define "naturalism" in the broadest sense as an epistemology dependent on human reason and perception, and if we define "truth" to be something supernatural in this sense, then we need a supernatural entity to relate supernatural truth to natural knowledge.[1] It's a valid argument but obviously begs the question.[2]
It's clear that we cannot ask whether an epistemology delivers the truth. Rather, we are forced to define "truth" in terms of what an epistemology delivers (a subtle and complicated enough task when our epistemology is not absolutely rigorous).
Much of what passes for "postmodernist" philosophy recognizes this fundamental inversion of the "modernist" relationship between epistemology and truth. If "truth" is whatever an epistemology delivers, then anything can serve as an epistemology; there is no basis in truth for privileging one epistemology over another. But no basis in truth does not—as many postmodernist philosophers assert—mean no basis at all. Even if it makes no sense to ask whether an epistemology delivers the truth, there are other jobs we can ask our epistemology to do, other ways of separating epistemology from bullshit.
[1] Plantinga fundamentally argues against metaphysical naturalism. He still assumes that epistemological naturalism does deliver truth.
[2] I'm convinced that 99% (if not 99% or possibly even 100%) of skill in philosophy consists not of constructing sound arguments but of hiding the fundamental fallacy of begging the question by various means, notably equivocation, enthymemes, hand-waving, and bold assertion.
Wednesday, June 13, 2007
Magical happyland
Creating an elaborate straw man, Edmund Standing accuses the anti-war left of betraying the Iraqi people. Standing simply invents a ridiculous ideological position for the anti-war left:
The observation that we have invaded Iraq in part to secure its oil (the other part is to be able to project military power conveniently in the Middle East) is actually true and in no way entails that Iraq will somehow be a magical happyland if we end the occupation.
We have invaded a country, deposed its government, and continue to occupy it with hundreds of thousands of troops andmercenaries "contractors". This is blatantly a case of denying the Iraqi people the right to govern themselves. To label such an observation as "propaganda", "ideologically blinded" and "deviously presenting a false image" is so egregiously stupid that one wonders if Standing is capable of putting his shoes on the correct feet.
I read quite a lot of the anti-war left, and I have never seen any sort of illusion or fantasy about the wonders of the "insurgency". I have seen only the observation that resistance to foreign military occupation is not by itself a bad thing—which, of course, it is not.
The occupation of Iraq has nothing to do with making Iraq a democratic country. We already know that putting the issue to a vote would lead to a Shi'ite theocracy that would ally itself with Iran and perpetrate genocide against the Sunni and Kurdish minorities.
The occupation of Iraq has nothing to do with providing Iraq with a "stable" non-democratic government. Iraq already had a stable non-democratic government with Saddam Hussein; if we were to politically stabilize the country, we would have to rule in his "iron fist" mode, which we are manifestly not doing. (One wonders if Standing would approve of such a Soviet-style "government" in Iraq under American auspices. Probably: Standing is a theologian, and they typically approve of authoritarian repression.)
The occupation of Iraq has nothing to do with providing Iraq with a "liberal, Western-style" government. You cannot in principle establish such a government by force; it must emerge from the desire of the people for such a government.
So what's left? Oil and imperialism. Go figure.
There are no illusions that life in Iraq will get worse if and when the occupation were to end. The thing is, life in Iraq is already bad, already worse than under Hussein, and already getting worse with the occupation. The crux of the biscuit is not that things would get magically better if the occupation were to end, but that things cannot begin to improve until sometime after the occupation ends.
Standing says, "[H]ell is exactly what life will become for the average Iraqi should the coalition leave the country to be ruled by the medieval minded hordes of the insurgency." Will become? Standing, how fucking stupid are you? Will become? Life is already hell for the Iraqi people. No electricity, no water, no law, no effective police, no health care, and ceaseless sectarian violence. The occupation is not holding "hell" at bay, we are merely observing hell while we secure our imperialist ambitions.
No, there will be no magical happyland if the occupation ends. That's not the point. The point is that the occupation is evil in itself, and improvement cannot begin until it is over.
If someone were to kidnap and torture another to the point where they suffered Stockholm Syndrome, the victim's life would not become a magical happyland if she were freed; indeed it would, perhaps become temporarily worse (better the devil you know). I have no doubt, though, that Standing is so stupid, so morally corrupt that he would argue against freeing the victim on just that basis.
Perhaps there is a sort of reverse Stockholm Syndrome, where someone engaged in an egregiously evil act begins to justify their behavior as beneficial to the victim. If there were such a syndrome, Standing would be its poster child.
the insurgency is presented as a David against the evil US Goliath, a heroic Robin Hoodesque band of revolutionaries seeking to return Iraq to 'the people'. ... [I]t is argued that the moment the last coalition soldier flies out of Iraq, people who currently cry out for Jihad and the creation of an Islamic State will suddenly metamorphose into calm, rational democrats.At least he gets one thing right:
[The anti-war left puts] forward the message that the only reason coalition troops are still in Iraq is to secure Iraqi oil reserves for a corrupt capitalist cabal, and that the Iraqi people are being denied the right to 'govern themselves'.Naturally, this position is patently ridiculous. It's notable that Standing does not give a single example of this fatuous straw man. He can't even be bothered to find some dumbass blogger with a single-digit readership to substantiate his position. One hopes that Butterflies and Wheels editor Ophelia Benson published this essay only to give a us an easy target.
The observation that we have invaded Iraq in part to secure its oil (the other part is to be able to project military power conveniently in the Middle East) is actually true and in no way entails that Iraq will somehow be a magical happyland if we end the occupation.
We have invaded a country, deposed its government, and continue to occupy it with hundreds of thousands of troops and
I read quite a lot of the anti-war left, and I have never seen any sort of illusion or fantasy about the wonders of the "insurgency". I have seen only the observation that resistance to foreign military occupation is not by itself a bad thing—which, of course, it is not.
The occupation of Iraq has nothing to do with making Iraq a democratic country. We already know that putting the issue to a vote would lead to a Shi'ite theocracy that would ally itself with Iran and perpetrate genocide against the Sunni and Kurdish minorities.
The occupation of Iraq has nothing to do with providing Iraq with a "stable" non-democratic government. Iraq already had a stable non-democratic government with Saddam Hussein; if we were to politically stabilize the country, we would have to rule in his "iron fist" mode, which we are manifestly not doing. (One wonders if Standing would approve of such a Soviet-style "government" in Iraq under American auspices. Probably: Standing is a theologian, and they typically approve of authoritarian repression.)
The occupation of Iraq has nothing to do with providing Iraq with a "liberal, Western-style" government. You cannot in principle establish such a government by force; it must emerge from the desire of the people for such a government.
So what's left? Oil and imperialism. Go figure.
There are no illusions that life in Iraq will get worse if and when the occupation were to end. The thing is, life in Iraq is already bad, already worse than under Hussein, and already getting worse with the occupation. The crux of the biscuit is not that things would get magically better if the occupation were to end, but that things cannot begin to improve until sometime after the occupation ends.
Standing says, "[H]ell is exactly what life will become for the average Iraqi should the coalition leave the country to be ruled by the medieval minded hordes of the insurgency." Will become? Standing, how fucking stupid are you? Will become? Life is already hell for the Iraqi people. No electricity, no water, no law, no effective police, no health care, and ceaseless sectarian violence. The occupation is not holding "hell" at bay, we are merely observing hell while we secure our imperialist ambitions.
No, there will be no magical happyland if the occupation ends. That's not the point. The point is that the occupation is evil in itself, and improvement cannot begin until it is over.
If someone were to kidnap and torture another to the point where they suffered Stockholm Syndrome, the victim's life would not become a magical happyland if she were freed; indeed it would, perhaps become temporarily worse (better the devil you know). I have no doubt, though, that Standing is so stupid, so morally corrupt that he would argue against freeing the victim on just that basis.
Perhaps there is a sort of reverse Stockholm Syndrome, where someone engaged in an egregiously evil act begins to justify their behavior as beneficial to the victim. If there were such a syndrome, Standing would be its poster child.
Tuesday, June 12, 2007
A hornets’ nest
AC Grayling on Dawkins, Hitchens, et al.:
[A] mere half dozen anti-religious tomes have stirred up all the hornets in their nests, have offended and outraged the devout, and between them have exposed religious claims and beliefs for what they are. To me this suggests a profound insecurity among the religious. It is obvious why. They are not used to being under pressure somewhat after the fashion of a Honecker, a Ceaucesceu, a Wizard of Oz - this latter, remember, unmasked behind his screen, a knock-kneed pigeon-chested frightened little chap in his underpants, furiously pulling the levers and knobs to keep himself hidden. In the chorus of outrage at the books by Dawkins, Hitchens and others, one hears the furious squeaking of just such levers.(h/t to Butterflies and Wheels)
I just can’t do it
I just can't do it. I can't vote for a candidate who supports the occupation and exploitation of Iraq, who supports aggression against Iran, who supports the corporate plutocracy, and who supports the erosion of our civil liberties.
I am convinced that all the Democrats I am likely to be able to choose have all of the above characteristics.
I can't support Bormann because he's not as bad as Hitler. I can't support Stalin because he's not as bad as Beria.
I just can't do it. I'm not going to do it. I couldn't take enough showers to ever feel clean again if I were to do it. There comes a time where you have to say damn the consequences, I'm not going to do it because it's wrong, no matter how much "wronger" the alternative.
I'm tired of giving up 50%, then 80% then 90%, then 99% and having the Republicans fight to split the remaining 1% and damn us in the same breath for our intransigence.
This is where compromise and the lesser of two evils has brought us: A race to the bottom which the Republicans and authoritarians will always win.
I don't care how close to the bottom we are: I'm out of the race. Maybe, like a dedicated alcoholic, we do have to hit bottom to have any hope of change.
If we get a Guiliani presidency because the left can't rally around an not-quite-so-evil Democratic president, then too bad.
I am convinced that all the Democrats I am likely to be able to choose have all of the above characteristics.
I can't support Bormann because he's not as bad as Hitler. I can't support Stalin because he's not as bad as Beria.
I just can't do it. I'm not going to do it. I couldn't take enough showers to ever feel clean again if I were to do it. There comes a time where you have to say damn the consequences, I'm not going to do it because it's wrong, no matter how much "wronger" the alternative.
I'm tired of giving up 50%, then 80% then 90%, then 99% and having the Republicans fight to split the remaining 1% and damn us in the same breath for our intransigence.
This is where compromise and the lesser of two evils has brought us: A race to the bottom which the Republicans and authoritarians will always win.
I don't care how close to the bottom we are: I'm out of the race. Maybe, like a dedicated alcoholic, we do have to hit bottom to have any hope of change.
If we get a Guiliani presidency because the left can't rally around an not-quite-so-evil Democratic president, then too bad.
Why I'm not voting Democratic
In the 2008 election, I will donate directly to and vote in the primaries for the few actually progressive candidates for the various Democratic nominations. I do not expect any of them to win. In the general election, I'll be faced with Lantos (Representative), Feinstein (Senator) and Clinton, Obama or Edwards (President).
All of these candidates support the continuing occupation of Iraq, the outright theft of its oil, and a war of aggression against Iran. These are all profoundly evil and immoral positions, held by profoundly evil and immoral people and I cannot endorse them, nor can I endorse the party itself for presenting these evil people as candidates.
The counter-argument is: If many Democrats felt this way, one or more Republicans might win; as bad as the Democrats are, the Republicans are definitely worse. This argument is sound, and the fact that I'm writing about this issue with the intention of persuading other progressive Democrats to withhold their votes and money from the party and leading candidates makes the antecedent relevant.
The argument is sound by itself, but it ignores a more fundamental premise. It is not my job to do what is better for the country; it is my job to do what is best for myself.
The notion that I have a duty to vote for what is best for the country is incoherent: If everyone adopted this objectivist view, there would be no individual subjective decisions in the first place to determine what was actually "better" for the country: A country is not a person, it does not have any preferences of its own; thus there are only statistical measures of the preferences of the individual citizens. On this basis, the duty to do what is best for the country is being advocated by those who are by definition not doing what's best for the country: They are doing what is best for themselves. The duty itself is therefore hypocritical and incoherent.
Neither outcome, an evil Democrat or a very evil Republican, is at all good for myself. For almost thirty years, I've been asked to vote for the lesser of two evils. And look where it's gotten me: A situation where the Democratic candidates all support the occupation and exploitation of a sovereign nation. A situation where two of the three as sitting Senators failed to even try to stop the destruction of habeas corpus. The party cannot impeach a President with a lower approval rating than Nixon, manifestly guilty not only of violating federal law, the Constitution, but who has also committed crimes against humanity.
I'm not being asked anymore to choose between bad and less-than-perfect. I'm now being asked to choose between utterly evil and almost utterly evil.
The madness stops now.
Do you personally want to occupy Iraq, steal their oil, kill hundreds of thousands of Iranians, live in a police state, and maintain absolute corporate control of the lying propaganda which passes for the commercial media in this country? If that's what you really want, vote for the mainstream Democratic candidates.
If that's not what you want, if the utter moral monstrousness of our turgid, phallic military occupation offends your conscience, if you're tired of being lied to, exploited and harassed by the corporate plutocracy, then stop voting for the lesser of two evils and start voting for the good. You may fail, but better to try and fail than not try at all.
Even if such action means that the Republicans win, more unified in their naked evil, then so be it: That's who we are. Better naked evil than evil cloaked in lies and bullshit.
All of these candidates support the continuing occupation of Iraq, the outright theft of its oil, and a war of aggression against Iran. These are all profoundly evil and immoral positions, held by profoundly evil and immoral people and I cannot endorse them, nor can I endorse the party itself for presenting these evil people as candidates.
The counter-argument is: If many Democrats felt this way, one or more Republicans might win; as bad as the Democrats are, the Republicans are definitely worse. This argument is sound, and the fact that I'm writing about this issue with the intention of persuading other progressive Democrats to withhold their votes and money from the party and leading candidates makes the antecedent relevant.
The argument is sound by itself, but it ignores a more fundamental premise. It is not my job to do what is better for the country; it is my job to do what is best for myself.
The notion that I have a duty to vote for what is best for the country is incoherent: If everyone adopted this objectivist view, there would be no individual subjective decisions in the first place to determine what was actually "better" for the country: A country is not a person, it does not have any preferences of its own; thus there are only statistical measures of the preferences of the individual citizens. On this basis, the duty to do what is best for the country is being advocated by those who are by definition not doing what's best for the country: They are doing what is best for themselves. The duty itself is therefore hypocritical and incoherent.
Neither outcome, an evil Democrat or a very evil Republican, is at all good for myself. For almost thirty years, I've been asked to vote for the lesser of two evils. And look where it's gotten me: A situation where the Democratic candidates all support the occupation and exploitation of a sovereign nation. A situation where two of the three as sitting Senators failed to even try to stop the destruction of habeas corpus. The party cannot impeach a President with a lower approval rating than Nixon, manifestly guilty not only of violating federal law, the Constitution, but who has also committed crimes against humanity.
I'm not being asked anymore to choose between bad and less-than-perfect. I'm now being asked to choose between utterly evil and almost utterly evil.
The madness stops now.
Do you personally want to occupy Iraq, steal their oil, kill hundreds of thousands of Iranians, live in a police state, and maintain absolute corporate control of the lying propaganda which passes for the commercial media in this country? If that's what you really want, vote for the mainstream Democratic candidates.
If that's not what you want, if the utter moral monstrousness of our turgid, phallic military occupation offends your conscience, if you're tired of being lied to, exploited and harassed by the corporate plutocracy, then stop voting for the lesser of two evils and start voting for the good. You may fail, but better to try and fail than not try at all.
Even if such action means that the Republicans win, more unified in their naked evil, then so be it: That's who we are. Better naked evil than evil cloaked in lies and bullshit.
Monday, June 11, 2007
A Blog from Hell
While I'm recovering from my quarterly Guantanamo-like torture and interrogation, preposterously known to most as "dental work", check out Norm Doering's A Blog from Hell.
He lays the scientific smack-down on Deepak "Smart enough to fool Bill Maher" Chopra and kicks him while he's down; exposes Chris Hedges' anti-atheist idiocy; coins a new term to discuss Sam Brownback's "logical preposterism" and shows Andrew Sullivan the business end of logic and reason. And that's just in the last four or five weeks.
Read this guy. He's good. Very good. (Thanks honey!)
He lays the scientific smack-down on Deepak "Smart enough to fool Bill Maher" Chopra and kicks him while he's down; exposes Chris Hedges' anti-atheist idiocy; coins a new term to discuss Sam Brownback's "logical preposterism" and shows Andrew Sullivan the business end of logic and reason. And that's just in the last four or five weeks.
Read this guy. He's good. Very good. (Thanks honey!)
It’s only fair
I'm tough on religious idiots. I also commented somewhere that you almost always see jailhouse conversions after the criminal has been incarcerated; you rarely see the conversion precede the confession.
The situation is rare enough that it appears in News of the Weird Daily, but still it seems only fair to mention Michael Mohr. After a recent religious conversion Mohr turned himself in for the 2004 murder of Myrna Gonzales. A law enforcement officer commented, "We wish Jesus would solve more of these."
The situation is rare enough that it appears in News of the Weird Daily, but still it seems only fair to mention Michael Mohr. After a recent religious conversion Mohr turned himself in for the 2004 murder of Myrna Gonzales. A law enforcement officer commented, "We wish Jesus would solve more of these."
What is “ethical” behavior?
Update: I notice a number of links from the course management system at Olivet Nazarene University. As a student myself, I'm curious about what y'all have to say about my work.
What, precisely, constitutes "ethical" behavior?
Update: Based on comments, I see I've omitted a important qualifier. I'm talking here only about what constitutes the general domain of behavior that pertains specifically to ethics, not about what constitutes good ethical behavior or behavior I would always approve of.
Kant is notorious for defining (or appearing to define) a behavior as "ethical" if and only if the behavior is not motivated in any way, directly or indirectly, by one's own self-interest. Divine Command Theory holds that ethical behavior is compliance with the commands of God. Obviously, by the latter definition, an atheist cannot act ethically; she can at best only simulate ethical behavior; the requisite motivation is necessarily absent. The definition attributed to Kant seems, on basic reflection, physically impossible given the goal-seeking nature of human minds. Although there are religious atheists (e.g. Buddhists), an atheist committed to naturalistic physical monism (a.k.a. scientific materialism) would thus usually reject Kant's definition.
Divine Command Theory is not really subject to rational discussion. No one has improved on Socrates' Euthyphro paradox, and Leibniz' comment,
In any event, adherence to Divine Command Theory simply excludes a priori atheists and members of other religions (for following the wrong commands, not God's) as ethical agents and establishes a fundamental irreconcilable enmity.
Any naturalistic account of ethical behavior must be predicated on observation: What sorts of behavior do we typically call "ethical"? Alternatively, we can construct arbitrary definitions of "ethical" that allow us to create falsifiable theories that account for human behavior.
One definition of "ethical" that seems scientifically fruitful as well as—at least to me—blindingly obvious:
This definition draws a distinction. It distinguishes behavior which does not promote the self-interest of others, and it distinguishes behavior which, although promoting the self-interest of others, is not contrary to any of one's own self interest. For instance, seeing a movie with a friend would not qualify as a specifically ethical act, since even the value of the companionship itself to one's friend is not (assuming one also values companionship) achieved at any cost at all to one's own self-interest.
What, precisely, constitutes "ethical" behavior?
Update: Based on comments, I see I've omitted a important qualifier. I'm talking here only about what constitutes the general domain of behavior that pertains specifically to ethics, not about what constitutes good ethical behavior or behavior I would always approve of.
Kant is notorious for defining (or appearing to define) a behavior as "ethical" if and only if the behavior is not motivated in any way, directly or indirectly, by one's own self-interest. Divine Command Theory holds that ethical behavior is compliance with the commands of God. Obviously, by the latter definition, an atheist cannot act ethically; she can at best only simulate ethical behavior; the requisite motivation is necessarily absent. The definition attributed to Kant seems, on basic reflection, physically impossible given the goal-seeking nature of human minds. Although there are religious atheists (e.g. Buddhists), an atheist committed to naturalistic physical monism (a.k.a. scientific materialism) would thus usually reject Kant's definition.
Divine Command Theory is not really subject to rational discussion. No one has improved on Socrates' Euthyphro paradox, and Leibniz' comment,
In saying, therefore, that things are not good according to any standard of goodness, but simply by the will of God, it seems to me that one destroys, without realizing it, all the love of God and all his glory; for why praise him for what he has done, if he would be equally praiseworthy in doing the contrary?still has considerable rhetorical force.
In any event, adherence to Divine Command Theory simply excludes a priori atheists and members of other religions (for following the wrong commands, not God's) as ethical agents and establishes a fundamental irreconcilable enmity.
Any naturalistic account of ethical behavior must be predicated on observation: What sorts of behavior do we typically call "ethical"? Alternatively, we can construct arbitrary definitions of "ethical" that allow us to create falsifiable theories that account for human behavior.
One definition of "ethical" that seems scientifically fruitful as well as—at least to me—blindingly obvious:
A behavior is "ethical" if and only if it has the foreseeable effect of promoting others' self-interest at the expense of some specific self-interest of the agent.This definition is a much weakened version of Kant's too-strong definition. Instead of being performed entirely without regard to self-interest, a behavior must merely be contrary to only some self-interest (as well as promoting others' self-interest) to be definitionally ethical.
This definition draws a distinction. It distinguishes behavior which does not promote the self-interest of others, and it distinguishes behavior which, although promoting the self-interest of others, is not contrary to any of one's own self interest. For instance, seeing a movie with a friend would not qualify as a specifically ethical act, since even the value of the companionship itself to one's friend is not (assuming one also values companionship) achieved at any cost at all to one's own self-interest.
Sunday, June 10, 2007
No $$ for Democrats
skippy demands our inaction: No money for the spineless Democratic party. I'll post my own thoughts in support of this idea in an update later today.
I know my wife loves me
For the second time, the religious trope that, "One cannot know—in a scientific sense—that your wife loves you" has appeared. Since people do in fact believe they know their spouses love them, they must be employing a non-scientific method of acquiring this knowledge. Furthermore, since the belief is presumably more often accurate than chance would predict, this non-scientific method is demonstrably effective.
I'm having a "spirited" discussion with Kenneth, a Catholic intellectual at Time Immortal: Faith, Reason and Epistemology which grew out of my comments to George Jonas on Christopher Hitchens.
His comments on love:
The fourth argument would be an attempt substantiate his original assertion that love is generally accepted "without substantiative empirical proof" of its existence, and such acceptance is justified. My responses to his other arguments will show that this assertion is, if not unacceptably vague, actually false.
The objections that Kenneth raises are sound, but they relate to the metaphysical interpretation of empiricism, not specifically to whether people do or do not in fact draw conclusions about love based on an empirical basis, or, to the extent that they do draw non-empirical conclusions, they are any more accurate than any other non-empirical conclusions.
Empirical conclusions are indeed not "proof" in the sense of rigorously deductive certainties. Empiricism is evidentiary, not deductive. As I elaborate in my series on The Scientific Method, a scientific theory is (ideally) a logical formal system from which one derives the evidence obtained; it is not a set of conclusions logically derived from the evidence. Empiricism instead is a rational decision-making procedure: Not which theory is proven, but which theory is better than another.
Likewise one cannot draw empirical conclusions only on the basis of agreement with evidence, especially regarding a single hypothesis in "isolation". As the Dead Parrot sketch so amusingly illustrates, one can always adjust the subsidiary hypotheses of a theoretical framework to maintain agreement with the evidence for a specific hypothesis: "He's pining for the fjords!" For this reason, we must employ additional criteria to make empiricism a rational, deterministic decision procedure.
Two additional criteria do the job: scope and parsimony. A theory that accounts for a large body of evidence compares favorably to a theory that accounts for only for a small subset of that evidence. Likewise a more compact theory, a theory with (depending on the mode of analysis) fewer irreducible premises or ontological objects compares favorably to a theory with more premises or objects. Everything else being equal, a theory with greater scope or that is more parsimonious is preferable to a theory with lesser scope or more extravagance.
Kenneth's third point, that people do in fact employ reasoning that is not scientifically rigorous regarding love, is not controversial. But this trivial fact is beside the point. Two questions drive more directly to the heart of Kenneth's point. Do people employ reasoning that bears little or no relationship with empirical reasoning? And, more importantly, to the greater or lesser extent that people employ reasoning that would draw conclusions different from rigorous scientific reason, are they justified in doing so?
We can see that we must answer "no" to both questions.
First, it is not an objection that people make real-world decisions on the basis of their perceptual reasoning. The normative value of empiricism does not depend on the establishment of absolute proof; it requires only that the chosen theory be better than the alternative. That people do in fact actually decide that others love them is not itself evidence that they are employing non-empirical reasoning.
I don't know about Kenneth, but most people I know draw conclusions about love at least in a context of perceptual evidence: The things that the other person says and does, evidence that could, in principle, be verified with a video camera and a tape recorder. People do not typically believe that someone with whom they have had no interaction at all actually loves them, and the phrase for people with a belief disconnected from perception is at best "deluded" and at worst "psycho stalker" (cough John Hinckley, Jr.).
Secondly, they are employing the evidence in a falsifiable manner. It is beside the point that a specific hypothesis cannot be falsified in isolation; the point is that the hypothesis that "my wife loves me" exists in a theoretical context: my notions about my wife's stateof mind, and love and human psychology in general. Evidence that contradicts my whole theory requires some adjustment to the theory rather than simply ignoring the evidence to the extent of actually denying the evidence. Again, we label people who simply deny the verifiable evidence of their senses as seriously mentally ill, not as exemplars of some alternative epistemology.
We can see such an adjustment in Kenneth's example above: "[D]epending on the person, [indifference and hostility] can be brought out by stress, hormonal shifts, or worry." Here we see that one must updating his theory, his model of the world, because his original simplistic theory was false-to-fact. It is that a falsifiable theory must be updated when falsified that makes the other criteria—scope and parsimony—meaningful.
How far do people adjust their subsidiary hypotheses or arbitrarily restrict the scope of their theories to save the fundamental hypothesis? Any ordinary person will observe that people do in fact go pretty far, especially ignoring parsimony. The battered wife who insists that, deep down, her husband really does love her—indeed anyone with a consistently and thoroughly indifferent or hostile spouse—is ignoring parsimony. And yet again, such people are not held up as exemplars of an alternative epistemology: We see them as deluded or just plain stupid.
Human psychology is complicated and its universals not well known; there are many alternative theories which can account for a range of behavior. But there is a point where such alternatives collapse of their own weight—the principles of parsimony and scope are operative. Contradiction of the canons of empirical reasoning—logic, falsifiability, scope and parsimony—does not intuitively appear to generate better success. Quite the contrary: we view such contradiction as delusion, mental illness or stupidity.
The fact that empirical reasoning does not supply absolute, certain proof, as well as the fact that human psychology is complicated and our understanding is limited, does raise the important question of sufficiency of knowledge: Absent absolute proof, how do we know when we have enough information to justify a decision?
To answer this question, we have to turn to probabilistic game theory. We have to judge the "plausibility" that our theory, which includes the hypothesis that "my wife loves me", is accurate or mistaken—i.e. whether all further evidence will support the theory or will later compel an alternative theory containing the hypothesis that "my wife does not love me" by virtue of scope or parsimony. In principle we have estimates of the prior plausibility (based on the reports of other people who have accurate or mistaken beliefs about love) so we can employ Bayes Theorem to good effect.
We also have to consider subjective value. Whether my wife does or does not love me is not an abstract proposition about which I am emotionally neutral, in the sense that I'm emotionally neutral about the hypothesis that "electrons, i.e. point particles with negative electrical charge and unit mass, exist". Having the accurate belief that my wife loves me entails considerable positive subjective value. Having the inaccurate belief that she loves me will entail considerable negative subjective value. (For the sake of simplicity, we will ignore the case that she does indeed love me now but might change her mind in the future.)
I don't want to get into all the ins and outs of game theory; in essence we multiply each value by the corresponding plausibility; if the results are equivocal, we search for more evidence; if one result dominates, we choose it.
All this sounds reductionist and a little cold-hearted, but it isn't really. Most of this reasoning actually happens, just not quite so explicitly. And people do in fact make decisions about love that can only be called "bad". Furthermore, the decisions we call bad are precisely those which are the least supported by empirical reasoning. Sometimes people get lucky and make good decisions for the wrong reasons, but people never make bad (in a probabilistic sense) decisions for the right reasons.
The prior probability (unconditioned by direct evidence) that someone might actually love one is high enough, and our intuitive beliefs about empiricism and psychology are usually accurate enough, that we don't have to be paranoid or formally rigorous about the decision to believe that others love us. On the other hand, there are people out there who will try to fool us, who will pretend love for the opportunity to exploit or from pure self-delusion; we're justified in exercising reasonable, moderate and sensible caution. And people are in fact often fooled, so it makes sense to examine the issue in a neutral, philosophical and scientific manner to learn how to make better decisions.
[1] I mean small-e empiricism, in the sense of connected in an unspecified way to perceptual experience, not big-E Empiricism, the (deprecated) philosophical position that experience can form a specifically axiomatic foundation for the logical deduction of universal truth.
I'm having a "spirited" discussion with Kenneth, a Catholic intellectual at Time Immortal: Faith, Reason and Epistemology which grew out of my comments to George Jonas on Christopher Hitchens.
His comments on love:
[T]here are many things that most people, by and large, accept without substantiative empirical proof of their existence. Love is an easy example, because there’s no way I can actually ask a person to prove, with evidence, that they love me. I either accept it on faith that they do, or I don’t believe it. Or I say that there is no such thing as love…but why be silly?The operative word here is "proof", and the conflation of proof with empirical[1] knowledge. We can see his focus on proof in his further comments:
[I]ndifference and hostility are not always hallmarks of a lack of love. Indeed, depending on the person, they can be brought out by stress, hormonal shifts, or worry. More to the point, many medications (prednisone comes readily to mind) can stimulate those exact attitudes in a person — I know from first-hand experience, precisely because someone I love dearly was once on the aforementioned drug, and would often fly into psychosis-induced rages at the drop of a hat.Kenneth (with considerable skill) makes four arguments here. The first is the pedestrian observation that finite evidence cannot constitute absolute proof. The second is the principled objection to scientific epistemology, that it is not possible to decide between specific hypotheses in isolation on the basis of evidence. The third is the assertion that people employ a degree of faith (in the strict sense of truth-apt belief contrary to the evidence or without sufficient evidence) . All three of these points are sound but irrelevant.
The real confusing factor in many of the above criteria is that the shift is not sudden, and therefore easily identifiable as being the result of some untoward cause. Instead, the transformation is gradual — it very much looks and feels like the person is becoming steadily and consistently angrier and more resentful, and very much looks and feels like they are “falling out of love” with you. This was certainly my own experience with this young woman of whom I speak.
But she had not ceased to love me — indeed, we’re getting married in October! — but the point is that based on most normal categories, I could have reasoned that she had, in fact, ceased to love me. I would have been wrong in drawing that conclusion, though. The human being is a very complex creature on a number of levels, and sometimes seemingly unrelated changes or issues can produce effects that will be falsely identified as evidence of a wholly different thing.
So while such things as love can sometimes be falsified, the criteria we might use to determine its falseness are not ideal, nor particularly suited to all situations — they are not universal. And so we cannot conclude, in any sweeping sense, that love, as a concept, is completely falsifiable.
The fourth argument would be an attempt substantiate his original assertion that love is generally accepted "without substantiative empirical proof" of its existence, and such acceptance is justified. My responses to his other arguments will show that this assertion is, if not unacceptably vague, actually false.
The objections that Kenneth raises are sound, but they relate to the metaphysical interpretation of empiricism, not specifically to whether people do or do not in fact draw conclusions about love based on an empirical basis, or, to the extent that they do draw non-empirical conclusions, they are any more accurate than any other non-empirical conclusions.
Empirical conclusions are indeed not "proof" in the sense of rigorously deductive certainties. Empiricism is evidentiary, not deductive. As I elaborate in my series on The Scientific Method, a scientific theory is (ideally) a logical formal system from which one derives the evidence obtained; it is not a set of conclusions logically derived from the evidence. Empiricism instead is a rational decision-making procedure: Not which theory is proven, but which theory is better than another.
Likewise one cannot draw empirical conclusions only on the basis of agreement with evidence, especially regarding a single hypothesis in "isolation". As the Dead Parrot sketch so amusingly illustrates, one can always adjust the subsidiary hypotheses of a theoretical framework to maintain agreement with the evidence for a specific hypothesis: "He's pining for the fjords!" For this reason, we must employ additional criteria to make empiricism a rational, deterministic decision procedure.
Two additional criteria do the job: scope and parsimony. A theory that accounts for a large body of evidence compares favorably to a theory that accounts for only for a small subset of that evidence. Likewise a more compact theory, a theory with (depending on the mode of analysis) fewer irreducible premises or ontological objects compares favorably to a theory with more premises or objects. Everything else being equal, a theory with greater scope or that is more parsimonious is preferable to a theory with lesser scope or more extravagance.
Kenneth's third point, that people do in fact employ reasoning that is not scientifically rigorous regarding love, is not controversial. But this trivial fact is beside the point. Two questions drive more directly to the heart of Kenneth's point. Do people employ reasoning that bears little or no relationship with empirical reasoning? And, more importantly, to the greater or lesser extent that people employ reasoning that would draw conclusions different from rigorous scientific reason, are they justified in doing so?
We can see that we must answer "no" to both questions.
First, it is not an objection that people make real-world decisions on the basis of their perceptual reasoning. The normative value of empiricism does not depend on the establishment of absolute proof; it requires only that the chosen theory be better than the alternative. That people do in fact actually decide that others love them is not itself evidence that they are employing non-empirical reasoning.
I don't know about Kenneth, but most people I know draw conclusions about love at least in a context of perceptual evidence: The things that the other person says and does, evidence that could, in principle, be verified with a video camera and a tape recorder. People do not typically believe that someone with whom they have had no interaction at all actually loves them, and the phrase for people with a belief disconnected from perception is at best "deluded" and at worst "psycho stalker" (cough John Hinckley, Jr.).
Secondly, they are employing the evidence in a falsifiable manner. It is beside the point that a specific hypothesis cannot be falsified in isolation; the point is that the hypothesis that "my wife loves me" exists in a theoretical context: my notions about my wife's stateof mind, and love and human psychology in general. Evidence that contradicts my whole theory requires some adjustment to the theory rather than simply ignoring the evidence to the extent of actually denying the evidence. Again, we label people who simply deny the verifiable evidence of their senses as seriously mentally ill, not as exemplars of some alternative epistemology.
We can see such an adjustment in Kenneth's example above: "[D]epending on the person, [indifference and hostility] can be brought out by stress, hormonal shifts, or worry." Here we see that one must updating his theory, his model of the world, because his original simplistic theory was false-to-fact. It is that a falsifiable theory must be updated when falsified that makes the other criteria—scope and parsimony—meaningful.
How far do people adjust their subsidiary hypotheses or arbitrarily restrict the scope of their theories to save the fundamental hypothesis? Any ordinary person will observe that people do in fact go pretty far, especially ignoring parsimony. The battered wife who insists that, deep down, her husband really does love her—indeed anyone with a consistently and thoroughly indifferent or hostile spouse—is ignoring parsimony. And yet again, such people are not held up as exemplars of an alternative epistemology: We see them as deluded or just plain stupid.
Human psychology is complicated and its universals not well known; there are many alternative theories which can account for a range of behavior. But there is a point where such alternatives collapse of their own weight—the principles of parsimony and scope are operative. Contradiction of the canons of empirical reasoning—logic, falsifiability, scope and parsimony—does not intuitively appear to generate better success. Quite the contrary: we view such contradiction as delusion, mental illness or stupidity.
The fact that empirical reasoning does not supply absolute, certain proof, as well as the fact that human psychology is complicated and our understanding is limited, does raise the important question of sufficiency of knowledge: Absent absolute proof, how do we know when we have enough information to justify a decision?
To answer this question, we have to turn to probabilistic game theory. We have to judge the "plausibility" that our theory, which includes the hypothesis that "my wife loves me", is accurate or mistaken—i.e. whether all further evidence will support the theory or will later compel an alternative theory containing the hypothesis that "my wife does not love me" by virtue of scope or parsimony. In principle we have estimates of the prior plausibility (based on the reports of other people who have accurate or mistaken beliefs about love) so we can employ Bayes Theorem to good effect.
We also have to consider subjective value. Whether my wife does or does not love me is not an abstract proposition about which I am emotionally neutral, in the sense that I'm emotionally neutral about the hypothesis that "electrons, i.e. point particles with negative electrical charge and unit mass, exist". Having the accurate belief that my wife loves me entails considerable positive subjective value. Having the inaccurate belief that she loves me will entail considerable negative subjective value. (For the sake of simplicity, we will ignore the case that she does indeed love me now but might change her mind in the future.)
I don't want to get into all the ins and outs of game theory; in essence we multiply each value by the corresponding plausibility; if the results are equivocal, we search for more evidence; if one result dominates, we choose it.
All this sounds reductionist and a little cold-hearted, but it isn't really. Most of this reasoning actually happens, just not quite so explicitly. And people do in fact make decisions about love that can only be called "bad". Furthermore, the decisions we call bad are precisely those which are the least supported by empirical reasoning. Sometimes people get lucky and make good decisions for the wrong reasons, but people never make bad (in a probabilistic sense) decisions for the right reasons.
The prior probability (unconditioned by direct evidence) that someone might actually love one is high enough, and our intuitive beliefs about empiricism and psychology are usually accurate enough, that we don't have to be paranoid or formally rigorous about the decision to believe that others love us. On the other hand, there are people out there who will try to fool us, who will pretend love for the opportunity to exploit or from pure self-delusion; we're justified in exercising reasonable, moderate and sensible caution. And people are in fact often fooled, so it makes sense to examine the issue in a neutral, philosophical and scientific manner to learn how to make better decisions.
[1] I mean small-e empiricism, in the sense of connected in an unspecified way to perceptual experience, not big-E Empiricism, the (deprecated) philosophical position that experience can form a specifically axiomatic foundation for the logical deduction of universal truth.
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