Intro:
Hello to the JREF Forum, and to any fellow Brights who may be over here checking out the musings of our cousins. I enjoyed meeting many of you JREFers at TAM4, and particularly enjoyed Richard Wiseman’s and Ellen Johnson’s presentations. I’ve come over now to post something on your board that kicked off a large and interesting debate in Brightsville. The debate finally wound down (with some converts to my position, but not many), so I’ve been back through the document and made a lot of revisions and additional clarifications. I must apologize for its length, but I believe that those who try it will find something worthwhile. They will find it to be like many essays that they have already have read, in dealing with the ancient struggle between science and religion (or between primarily rational and primarily irrational knowledge). They will find it to be strange – and I hope, exciting – in that this essay talks about winning.
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Essay:
‘Those who know why they believe what they believe can believe it upon the basis of what they know. Those who don’t must believe upon the basis of its being ‘the truth’.’ In the essay below I will show that this is not a postmodern statement. I will show that it passes straight through postmodernism, leaving behind a corpse.
-------------- Truth? ---------------------
If we take as our starting point the skirmish between Socrates and Theodorus, that is recorded in Plato’s Theaetetus*, then we have been at war over ‘truth’ for the past 2400 years. I do not propose to review the war here. I will say only that the Socrates/Plato faction has been winning the major battles, and thereby retaining control of the radio and TV stations, to such an extent as to keep the war pretty well hidden from popular consciousness. But the tide is now turning. Matters have become very interesting during the roughly 260 years since publication of David Hume’s pivotal book, the Treatise of Human Nature. I will have more to say about Hume below, and will be introducing some of his philosophical descendents. But in particular I will be arguing for my own very radically anti-Socratic – or more precisely anti-Platonic – position. And I will be demonstrating that this position has some urgent and startling real world implications.
* Theodorus was a follower of Protagoras, and the argument was over Protagoras’s doctrine the ‘Man is the measure of all things’ [Basically, that there is no truth beyond what people believe to be the truth].
The format of my argument will be highly unusual. I will strive initially for nothing but clear communication of my proposal. I will put it on the table in the form of twelve points, without, necessarily, any attempts at justification or cross linkage. I will then return to provide these things. As an explanation for my selection of this odd format, let me offer a quote from one of my heroes, Sir Karl Popper:
“One of the most characteristic tasks of philosophy is to attack, if necessary, the framework itself. And in order to do so it may become necessary to attack beliefs which, whether or not they are consciously held, are taken so much for granted that any criticism of them is felt to be perverse or insincere. Whenever the framework itself is attacked, its defenders will as a rule interpret, and attempt to refute, the attack within their own adopted framework. But in trying to translate critical arguments directed against the framework into a language appropriate to that framework, they are liable to produce fatal distortions and misunderstandings.”
Popper’s position has – famously – been the object of just such distortions and misunderstandings. And my own position is considerably more radical than his. I think that mine is, in a sense, the full logical extension of his. Basically, ‘where Karl Popper should have gone, but didn’t’; either because it didn’t occur to him (unlikely), or because he was too much of a gentlemen (more likely). In addition I have already experienced considerable ‘fatal distortions and misunderstandings’ of my own in response to earlier drafts of this essay. I will therefore be using the bare assertions (or we might say ‘shotgun blast’) method of initially outlining my thesis because I believe it to need all of the help that it can get. I can promise that my points will all converge onto a single proposal. It will be counterintuitive, and hard to grasp; but it will be very clear and simple.
I offer my twelve points as follows:
1. The basic units that comprise all communicable human knowledge (our words, numbers, musical notation, etc.) are created through a common interactive feedback process between human minds and independent/free-standing reality.
2. No knowledge constructed from these units can therefore claim a position of qualitative superiority on the basis of being ‘untainted’ by potentially fallible human choice. At this most fundamental level our knowledge is all, and unavoidably, human.
3. All conflicts between logically exclusive knowledge proposals are resolvable. If a common derivation process underlies all of our proposals then a decision between any two logically exclusive proposals can be obtained by resubmitting both, simultaneously, to the process. In the sense that reason is part of the process one of the proposals will necessarily be eliminated. Note: If this is accepted then the rational basis for our postmodern ‘separate magisteria’ accommodation – between primarily rational knowledge (paradigm case: science) and primarily irrational knowledge (paradigm case: religion) – is gone.
4. Our concept ‘truth’ is intrinsically irrational. If Point 1 holds then ‘truth’ is either logically redundant, or absurd, in this sense: That if we have any humanly perceptible justification for embracing a proposal as knowledge (for example: that it is observable, or demonstrable, or reasonable, or desirable, or was passed to us by someone who we trust) then we do not need the concept (‘truth’). We can more informatively, and in most cases more succinctly, maintain the proposal upon the direct basis of the justification. While if we have no humanly perceptible justification then we have no grounds upon which to maintain the proposal, and so, again, we do not need the concept. Furthermore, if we were to move to holding all of our proposals upon the direct basis of their justifications then their relative strengths would be immediately apparent. ‘I believe X because my mother told me X’ is an explicitly human, and therefore entirely legitimate, reason for believing X. But ‘I believe Y (which logically excludes X) because I can personally see Y’ is a much better reason for believing Y. Whatever else our ‘truth’ concept may or may not be doing for us, it would appear to be at least blunting our perception of the relative strengths of our other knowledge justification concepts.
5. ‘Revelation’ cannot save truth. It does not go deep enough. For any purported revelation some human had to decide initially whether or not he or she would accept it. [Does this ‘Being’ seem to me to be a god, or a devil? Does its revelation seem – against the background of my present knowledge – to be right or wrong; good or bad?]. Basically, the knowledge still has to be presented in human units. It still has to be accepted or rejected through human judgment. We cannot therefore, in reason, propagate it upon some other basis.
6. Reason is averaged and extrapolated observation. It subsumes logic, but it is far more than logic. For any particular mind it is the best present understanding of reality’s most fundamental regularities that that mind has been able to achieve in terms of its units. Or to put it another way: Reason is the collective output of the newer/higher brain physiological structures and organization that we apparently developed in conjunction with our units. It is the software that has been developed by our minds for the specific purpose of adaptively (in the Darwinian sense) manipulating the units.
7. The ancient position of strong-form epistemological skepticism – the position that we can note first from the Greeks, and then see resurfacing throughout our Roman and European Christian developmental phases in the writings of Sextus Empiricus and Lucian of Samosata, and William of Ockham and Nicholas of Autrecourt prior to its recasting in modern form by John Lock and David Hume – is correct. It is not, of course, ‘true’. It is observably and logically correct. We can see where our reality units come from. It is obvious that they are not – and cannot be – directly, independently, characteristic of reality. We can see that it is logically impossible for us to select units, or to create further knowledge from them, except upon the basis of appeal that is perceptible through our observational and cognitive faculties. We can even check the alternative (through attempted exclusion of these faculties from the process, as in: “We embrace X as ‘the truth’, upon the basis of it’s being ‘the truth’”) and see that this is absurd.
8. Immanuel Kant did not answer the challenge of Hume’s rational destruction of the induction principle as a mechanism for the circumvention of strong-form skepticism. Kant’s arguments for an exception case (‘synthetic a priory’ knowledge) can be logically defeated through Humian arguments.
9. Karl Popper did answer Hume, but he answered through an inversion so profound that its full implications were perhaps not immediately apparent, even to him. During the roughly two hundred years between Kant and Popper our grail quest continued, for the observation based and logically coherent objective-truth-recognition-procedure whose existence seemed to be so clearly indicated by the apparently qualitative superiority of science. Members of the Vienna Circle in particular were certain that some formulation could be found that would justify at least science itself as such objective truth. Popper’s ‘inversion’ was to say, in effect: Forget about it. Hume was right. We have never had, and can never have such a qualitatively superior form of knowledge, even in science. But (and here comes the exquisite twist) this is irrelevant to science. Science has never been about ‘truth’ in this sense*, because it has never been about ‘proof’. The proposals of science can be most effectively distinguished from those of non-science by: A. Their rational explanatory power. B. Their clear and definite statement (to the extent of deliberately opening themselves up to the maximum possibility of observational disproof**). C. Their tentative/conditional acceptance (acceptance only as best present knowledge, while we honestly continue our efforts to disprove them or to subsume them within a proposal of greater explanatory power).
* I do not mean to imply here that Popper rejected – as I do – all understandings of ‘truth’. He was a strong proponent of Alfred Tarski’s revamped form of the old ‘correspondence’ theory of truth. I think that he was simply wrong in this. That when his position is restated with even the Tarskian understanding removed its internal consistency, elegance, and usefulness can be seen to be increased. In any case, and to return to the present point, the Tarskian understanding is clearly not of a qualitatively superior form of knowledge.
** The strength of Popper’s position rests on a logical asymmetry between ‘proof’ and ‘disproof’. Disproof can be seen to be achievable within human knowledge. If we have been holding as a theory: “All swans are white”, and we then discover a bird that is inarguably a swan in all respects apart from its being black, then our theory has been disproved. Like it or not. But in order to be able to ‘prove’, in any meaningful sense, “All swans are white”, we would need to be able to reach outside human knowledge. To prove it through observation we would need simultaneous access to all past present and futures swans. To prove it through reason we would need the kind of meta-rational principle that we were considering induction to be before Hume disproved that. And, to be sufficient for our purpose, any such principle would at least need to be able to undercut my observations expressed as Points 1 and 2 above. It would need to be a demonstrably non-anthropomorphic human principle.
10. Popper thus effectively saved science from Hume’s epistemological meltdown. But he did not save the rest of human knowledge. This jaw dropping realization appears to have been largely ignored by the philosophical community. That which is observably our most powerful form of knowledge (in that it can actually be seen to deliver, in the provision of methods and predictions that enable us influence reality in our desired directions; and in that it can actually be seen to grow, in it’s range of applicability, explanatory power, and internal consistency) was restored to a sound logical footing through formal renunciation of its linkage to proof, or therefore, in any objective sense, to ‘truth’. But what about the rest?
11. I can find many powerful reasons why we should – and none why we should not – go ahead and extend Popper’s inversion to cover all of human knowledge. This could not thereby become science; but it could subsume science as its core. It could acknowledge the authority of science in all areas where science is now in a position to speak, and it could follow science in officially renouncing the pretensions as to extra-human certainty with which it is still saturated*. It could adapt itself to become increasingly consistent with science-based/observation-based reason. The test for science would remain, per Popper: “Does this proposal have greater explanatory power than any logically exclusive proposal, and can this explanatory power be expressed in clearer physical predictions to facilitate its observational disproof?” But the test for all other knowledge could become: “Is this proposal at least as rationally consistent with our present scientific knowledge as any logically exclusive proposal; and then, if so, is it more or less subjectively desirable?”
* This observation goes far beyond our specific use of the word ‘truth’. It extends to every adult who has ever used phrases like “well, that’s just the way that things are” or “just how the world is” in order to download proposals of irrational knowledge into the mind of a child. If my Point #1 cannot be contraverted then “just how the world is” is exactly – both analytically and empirically – that which we cannot know. What we can know, rationally in terms of our ‘merely human’ observational and cognitive faculties, is that some of our knowledge proposals are better than others. What seems to be damn near impossible for a post truth mind to communicate to others that are still locked in truth’s grip is that this, alone, is beautifully and elegantly sufficient for our purposes.
12. When Popper brought down the Vienna Circle’s final candidate for an objective truth recognition process* (through his observation that it could not pass its own test**) and so opened the way for postmodernism, we should never have bought it. Postmodernism was/is a simple case of drawing an incorrect inference from the data. With the demise of our last remaining runner were certainly obliged to admit that we cannot justify any of our knowledge as objective truth. Postmodernism is the unjustified interpretation of that admission as a problem for our knowledge. Basically that in being like all of the rest, ultimately unprovable, science is no better than any of the rest. I think that instead of accepting this we should have responded immediately with the full extension of Popper’s inversion. That we should have recognized our final failure to qualify science as objective truth not as a problem for science – or indeed, for any other human knowledge – but as a final fatal problem for objective truth.
* Its Central Dictum: That the meaning of any statement is, in essence, its verification procedure.
** The verification procedure that justifies this statement (the Central Dictum) is…….?
I believe that these points functionally outline my position; and that the most important of them, by far, is the first. Even upon its sole basis the simple idea that I promised can now be made explicit, as follows: That we have never had, as a species, the kind of qualitatively superior knowledge basis and resultant form whose existence we have been invoking through our concept ‘truth’. I mean this from both directions. I mean (A): That we can see that such an independent knowledge basis does not and cannot exist; and I mean (B): That our concept ‘truth’ can only refer, non-redundantly, to such a knowledge basis. ‘Truth’ has – demonstrably – no specific reference to any human observational or cognitive faculty. We cannot therefore say that it means ‘is observable’, or ‘is desirable’, or ‘was told to me by my mother’, or any such thing. I think that the very best that we can say, in a last ditch attempt to reconcile ‘truth’ with reason, is that it may refer to some characteristic of knowledge that is apprehended through a kind of wooly and imprecise amalgamation of all of our perceptive faculties. And to this I would point out – in particular to the members of my own tribe (scientists, engineers, and empiricist philosophers) – that it is not our standard practice to prefer the relatively wooly and imprecise.
To move from this analytical level to that of our day-to-day use of ‘truth’: It is observable that we have been using the concept in exactly the two logically exclusive ways that I have just suggested. My own tribe appears to use ‘truth’ mainly in the way that is redundant but otherwise rational. We say things like: “We believe that X is true, upon the basis of Y (evidence)”. Or: “It is true that an X is a Y” (where X might for example be ‘aardvark’, and Y might be ‘animal’). Or: “It is observable that X is the truth”. While primarily political and religious people appear to use ‘truth’ in the way that is non-redundant but otherwise absurd. They say things like: “We believe that X is true in spite of Y (evidence)”. Or “We believe in X because we know it to be the truth”. Or (most often to their children): “You must believe X because it is the truth”. In the case of the first group of statements the concept’s redundancy can be shown in the classical way; by removing it: “We believe X, upon the basis of Y (evidence)”. “We define an X as a Y”. “X is observable”*. In the case of the second group the concept cannot be removed without rendering the statements incoherent. It is being used non-redundantly. It has meaning. What it appears to mean is exactly: ‘an independent, qualitatively superior, form of knowledge’, or: ‘a form of knowledge that represents – in contradistinction to the rest of our knowledge – the actual state of reality’. From my opening points No. 1 and 2 this is bedrock irrational. The most fundamental thing that can be known about our knowledge – through both observation and observation based reason – is that it cannot be this.
* I would challenge any fellow Engineer to tell me, hand on heart, that he/she does not prefer these revised versions of the statements.
To consolidate: There is (1) the perfect logical absurdity that has already been noted. That of human synthesis of a kind of knowledge that is supposed to be qualitatively superior upon grounds of its not having been obtained through human synthesis. And then there is (2) what might be called ‘the difficulty through common sense observation’: That our most fundamental knowledge units (our words, numbers, etc.) can be seen to be our own productions; and that a necessary logical corollary of this is that we cannot synthesize a qualitatively superior form of knowledge from them, any more than we could synthesize an apple from some number of oranges. [This can of course be objected to. But the objector should then be ready to answer questions like: Which of our present languages is the real one? And: How were human beings able to manage prior to it? And: How can we account for our observation that new words and concepts are constantly being added to it while old ones are being abandoned? And: How can we account for our observations of redundancy and internal inconsistency within it?]. Finally, and most recently, there is (3) what might be called ‘the difficulty through scientific observation’: That it is now apparent that we obtain all of our visual information through a narrow ‘window’ in the electromagnetic spectrum (approximately .4 to .7 nanometers wavelength), and all of our auditory information through a narrow window in the physical vibration spectrum (approximately 20 to 20,000 cycles per second), and that we then process the data that has in this sense already been ‘anthropized’ through neural computers that were optimized for the particular task of ensuring organism survival, and in the particular environment of the African Rift Valley approximately two million years ago. I cannot imagine it as a possible stretch for any rational person to square such understandings with the belief that any of our knowledge can be directly, independently, characteristic of reality.
The typical reaction of people to the main implication of what has been said so far (that our ‘truth’ concept is intrinsically irrational / that we cannot know anything that can coherently be called ‘truth’) seems to be to bounce back and forth between truth’s two untenable positions. Even primarily rational people will provide examples of the logically absurd usage (‘truth’ as an independent and qualitatively superior form of knowledge) in order to justify their maintenance of the concept when it is pointed out that their standard usage is redundant. While primarily subjectively oriented people will indignantly produce solid examples of the redundant usage (“Well, whatever you may say, it is true that I have two arms and a head”) in response to a demonstration that their standard usage is logically absurd. I can’t throw both knives at exactly the same time, so after a certain number of such dodges these conversations typically end in my plea for just one solid rational justification for their maintenance of the specific concept (‘truth’). For just one thing more that they mean by their “X is the truth”, beyond what I mean by my “X is observable”, or “X is demonstrable”, or “X is esthetically, or mathematically, beautiful”. If this question cannot be answered then it seems to me that the concept (truth) can no longer be rationally maintained. I think that three hundred years ago it could have been answered quite easily: “OK you son of a bitch. I mean by it ‘real knowledge’; ‘the actual state of reality’; ‘that which, objectively, is’”. As I’ve already implied, I think that this is precisely our old strong meaning for the word ‘truth’. I think that this is the meaning that would – and did – justify ‘truth’ as a concept; and that it is the meaning that we are still clearly conveying to our children when we tell them things like “you must believe X because it is ‘the truth’”. But it is apparent through common sense (ref. Points 1 and 2), and it has been perhaps the most fundamental tenet of academic epistemology for the past two hundred years (post Hume and Kant*), that ‘truth’ cannot mean this. That it is logically absurd to believe ourselves to have such knowledge. So I cannot be answered. We are unable to justify the concept, but neither can we reject it. We have been educated from earliest childhood to believe that we need it; that it is in fact our most important concept. Even most members of my own tribe still believe themselves to need their sober objective rational ‘truths’, from the position of which to oppose the silly desire based irrational ‘truths’ of the religious and ideological fundamentalists.
* Or, to bring this right up to date: post Frank Ramsey and Richard Rorty.
In the light of all that has been said above, I now wish to return this ancient battle. Our discussion is about to get practical; even strategic. I would suggest that the most urgent practical question to be raised by my main thesis (the intrinsic irrationality of ‘truth’ / the observation that we simply cannot have the kind of external reference knowledge position that is understood by most people most of the time to be meant by ‘truth’) is this: Why don’t we go ahead and pull the plug on postmodernism? In justification: We have now been observant of its sterile truce for three generations. Our opponents have been observant too, in that they have been avoiding direct attacks against us. But this appears to be changing*, and they have not been idle, and time no longer appears to be on our side. Environmental degradation through pollution and global warming is accelerating. Extinction of species is proceeding at a rate not seen since our last major meteorite impact. Religious and ideological fundamentalisms are everywhere resurgent; and our two most popular forms (Christianity and Islam) are now goading each other towards another terrible confrontation into which we may all be dragged. To take this discussion to the practical level I must pose very directly to the members of my own tribe – and to anyone else who would likewise claim reason as their primary determinant for knowledge – the question that I introduced above:
Exactly what additional claim are you making for the knowledge proposals to which you are applying your concept ‘truth’? What are you saying about them – in calling them this – that is beyond what can be said through application of our explicitly human knowledge justification concepts?
*See the Discovery Institute’s notorious ‘wedge’ document.
As I’ve now exhaustively noted, I believe that in terms of our scientific way of knowing (through observation, and observation based reason) the only viable answer is “nothing”. If you can fully concede this then let me now propose that we formally, collectively, and publicly abandon the concept. Let me make it explicit that I am proposing this on both the most fundamental logical grounds [What, exactly, is a ‘concept’ for which no referent characteristic can be defined?], and on grounds that our merely human knowledge justification concepts can be seen to be better. In final recap: If I tell you that X is observable, or any of the other justifications that I might actually offer for your acceptance of X, then you can argue with me, and we can ultimately settle the issue (ref. Point 3 above). This is obvious for statements like “X is observable”. If you wish to contest it then we can go to where I claim that X can be seen, and we will either see it or we won’t. It is less obvious for statements like “X is indicated by the preponderance of the evidence”. But I would argue that if we are both genuinely desirous of reaching agreement, and we are both rational, and both accept the totality of present scientific knowledge as a common data base, then we will certainly be able to achieve agreement. As noted, this is not so for “X is the truth”. You must either buy this outright – in effect, as a ‘revelation’ from me – or you must assume that I am lying. If we are both rational then you cannot ask me for reasons. If I had had these then I would have proposed X to you on their basis. If human perception/cognition must be recognized as the initial foundation for all of our knowledge then our ‘truth’ concept must either be traceable to some component of human perception/cognition (which would subsume our ability to identify that component), or it must be at best traceable to some wooly/amorphous amalgamation of these components, which would render it clearly inferior to our specific and informative knowledge justification concepts. Both paths lead to the trash can.
From the perspective of this realization postmodernism was/is nothing but the final arrival of our pursuit of ‘truth’ at its inevitable logical conclusion. Postmodernism says: “We cannot exclusively justify any of our knowledge proposals as ‘truth’*. Therefore we can have no sufficient basis for preferring some of them (for example, those of science) over others (for example, those of fundamentalist Christianity or Islam)”. Extension of Popper’s inversion to cover all human knowledge says: “We cannot exclusively justify any of our knowledge proposals as ‘truth’. Therefore we can abandon this concept as having no utility. Therefore we can finally complete the move – that was started in science – to holding all of our knowledge openly and honestly upon what can be seen to have always been its only logically coherent basis”. And further: “That we can damn sure have, from this basis, sufficient justification for preferring some of our proposals over others. Our position is final formal consignment of all human knowledge to the same level playing field. It is final rejection of our illusion of possession of an independent and qualitatively superior form of knowledge”.
* Or, as it is sometimes stated: “We can justify all of them as ‘truth’”. Logically, these positions are equivalent.
For the plug to be pulled on postmodernism would require only this: That those of you who find yourselves to be no more able then I am to answer the question of what more we might legitimately mean by ‘truth’ will accept the full rational implication of this, in honestly abandoning the concept. In ceasing to speak about it or write about it except in opposition. If many do this then The Enlightenment will be rekindled; but this time with a stunning difference, as I will clarify in just a moment. Our point of entry – our flint and steel to re start the blaze – will be to ask all who proselytize for systems of irrational knowledge (in particular, for all systems involving Supernatural Beings, and their associated proposals of cultural or ethnic superiority based on the supposed preferential favor of such Beings) the question that I just put to all of you. If any one of them can answer it then fine. All will remain as it is. But if none can then we will be able to inform them not only that battle is rejoined, but that it will now be – for the first time in human history – a straight fight. Final consignment of all human knowledge to the same playing field (full ‘in our bones’ acceptance of Point #1) does not destroy ‘faith’, but it removes its capacity to be used against reason. What we are talking about abandoning is the independent position from which we have been doing that.
In the absence of this position; if I offer for your belief the proposal that there is a supernatural being who is simultaneously three beings, and who created our 14 billion year old universe consistent of billions of galaxies each consistent of billions of stars, all for the purpose of staging a 7,000 year drama on our comparative speck of dust planet, then you are entitled (in fact, you are even obliged) to ask me straight out to state the basis upon which I embrace this apparently incredible proposal. And if I answer ‘faith’ then you are entitled to ask me: “Faith in what? If it is faith that your proposal has appeal that can be perceived through human reason and desire – i.e. that it can actually be seen to work in terms of our logically coherent basis for knowledge – then your ‘faith’ is redundant. We’re listening, and you can make your pitch. While if it is faith that your proposal consists of an independent form of knowledge – of a form that is qualitatively superior to that which we hold – then please revert to our original questions: Qualitatively superior in exactly what way? How can you account for your possession of it? Where, exactly, do you think that it came from? If you cannot do either of these things, and so cannot justify your proposal upon any logically coherent basis, then please understand that we must place your proposal in the same category as those that involve old women flying on broomsticks, or a corpulent gentleman dressed in red flannel being pulled by flying reindeer”.
High noon; cards on the table; I am talking now about clear intellectual checkmate. I am talking about backing our Dembskis and Plantingas up into a simple logical corner from which they will be able to see that they cannot emerge with both reason and their truths. If Point #1 cannot be contraverted – and/or, if my main question cannot be answered – then I do not believe that this choice can be avoided. I wouldn’t presume to prejudge it for them, but I would point out that in either case the present confusion will be dramatically reduced. We will either be able to welcome them at last into a meaningful dialogue, and get some important disagreements resolved, or we will be able to go ahead and write them off in the clear and honest sense that we would write off a person who believed himself to be a poached egg. We would not entirely cease to listen to such a person, but I think that we would insist upon settlement of the poached egg issue before being willing to discuss anything else that they might have to say. This, I think, should be our position in relation to all who wish to proselytize for irrational knowledge proposals.
In conclusion: Our ancient systems of institutionalized irrational knowledge are not merely ‘implausible’. They are all, prima facie, absurd. And – in contravention of our present postmodernist/knowledge-relativist zeitgeist – they are very far from harmless. Programming large quantities of irrational knowledge into young pre-rational minds as, in effect, ROM data, can be seen to be a mind level analogue of irreparably breaking our children’s legs. It requires all further development of reason to take place from the understanding that reality itself is irrational – which is, in essence a ‘mission impossible’. We have never said such things. We have never gone after our ancient systems of irrational knowledge with the kind of blitzkrieg no-holds-barred ferocity that they deserve, because, I believe, we have not been clear in our own minds. We have been allowing these systems the consideration of possibly being valid on a basis that is entirely different from that of our knowledge. I have been trying to show, through 18 pages of mind bending redundancy – convergence onto the same simple point from different directions – that nothing can be more clearly established then that there is no such alternative basis. I have tried to show that this realization is unavoidable through honest application of our common sense [ref. Points 1, 2 and 3], and that – at the other end of the scale – it has been accepted as perhaps the most fundamental tenet of academic epistemology for at least the past two hundred years*. My proposal is that we finally go ahead and recognize this, formally, publicly, and then begin using it as the devastating weapon against all forms of irrationality that it can be seen to be.
* I have not adequately demonstrated this. But I will claim that no honest look at the literature can fail to do so. Even Kant’s Transcendental Idealism, which I would claim offers the weakest support for my assertion, states as its central tenet that we can never have knowledge of how things are in themselves, but only of the way that they appear to us to be. I could discuss Frank Ramsey’s ‘Assertive Redundancy’ theory of truth, or Willard Quine’s position that all linguistic meaning is unstable, or quote Richard Rorty saying “Nothing counts as justification unless by reference to what we already accept and there is no way to get outside our beliefs and our language so as to find some test other than coherence”. But it is all there for anyone interested enough to delve into it. I will assert, and with it my willingness to defend it in any kind of debate, that the last credible philosopher to hold an understanding of ‘truth’ that would have been even remotely familiar and satisfactory to people who are not involved in academic philosophy was John Locke, in the seventeenth century.
The bottom line is that ‘our’ knowledge (rational/scientific/observation-based knowledge) does not need the illusion of being characteristic of the actual state of reality. To return at last to my header statement: We know why we believe what we believe. We can defend it elegantly upon that basis. And wherever we cannot; wherever we find it to be opposed by some more reasonable logically exclusive proposal, we can honestly set it aside in favor of that proposal. While the kind of knowledge against which we have been struggling – explicitly, ever since Athens – can be seen to depend entirely upon the illusion. Our most effective attack strategy would therefore seem to be to dispel this illusion. Let me say clearly that I am not proposing abandonment of our concept ‘truth’ because I have something against the word. I am proposing abandonment of our idea that we possess a special and qualitatively superior form of knowledge – which I believe myself to have shown to be an illusion – and I am suggesting abandonment of the main word through which we have been invoking this idea as our most elegant and direct way of starting on this enormous project. To preempt a strange but frequent objection that has been raised to earlier drafts of this essay: It is irrelevant that those who wish to maintain the illusion will oppose us by attempting to shift it to other words. As and when this happens we will simply point out that its invocation through such alternative words is every bit as absurd as it was through the primary word. Basically, this objection seems as strange as would be that of the Generals in charge of Army A to allowing their champion to kill the champion put up by Army B, on grounds that Army B would then put up another champion.
I am aware of other objections, and of some important broader questions that can be seen to be raised by what has been said here. But these can be dealt with in the ensuing debate, if I have finally managed to state my main thesis with sufficient clarity and compulsion to spark a meaningful debate. On the one hand it is almost inconceivable to me that my intellectual heroes (Professors E. Wilson, Dawkins, and Dennett; to name but a few) have not already thought of what I have been trying to say here. It seems to me to be so simple, and to have been starring us in the face at least ever since Popper’s publication of Logic der Forschung. But if they have thought of it then – in the sense that they are still observably speaking and writing about ‘truth’ – they must be aware of some fatal logical flaw that I have missed. In this case I would ask them, in the spirit of Phaeton asking Apollo, to simply communicate it to me, so that I can move on. If they have not then I would request their help in disseminating the meme and putting the plan into action.
Keith Sewell February 21, 2006
keith.sewell@sbcglobal.net
Hello to the JREF Forum, and to any fellow Brights who may be over here checking out the musings of our cousins. I enjoyed meeting many of you JREFers at TAM4, and particularly enjoyed Richard Wiseman’s and Ellen Johnson’s presentations. I’ve come over now to post something on your board that kicked off a large and interesting debate in Brightsville. The debate finally wound down (with some converts to my position, but not many), so I’ve been back through the document and made a lot of revisions and additional clarifications. I must apologize for its length, but I believe that those who try it will find something worthwhile. They will find it to be like many essays that they have already have read, in dealing with the ancient struggle between science and religion (or between primarily rational and primarily irrational knowledge). They will find it to be strange – and I hope, exciting – in that this essay talks about winning.
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Essay:
‘Those who know why they believe what they believe can believe it upon the basis of what they know. Those who don’t must believe upon the basis of its being ‘the truth’.’ In the essay below I will show that this is not a postmodern statement. I will show that it passes straight through postmodernism, leaving behind a corpse.
-------------- Truth? ---------------------
If we take as our starting point the skirmish between Socrates and Theodorus, that is recorded in Plato’s Theaetetus*, then we have been at war over ‘truth’ for the past 2400 years. I do not propose to review the war here. I will say only that the Socrates/Plato faction has been winning the major battles, and thereby retaining control of the radio and TV stations, to such an extent as to keep the war pretty well hidden from popular consciousness. But the tide is now turning. Matters have become very interesting during the roughly 260 years since publication of David Hume’s pivotal book, the Treatise of Human Nature. I will have more to say about Hume below, and will be introducing some of his philosophical descendents. But in particular I will be arguing for my own very radically anti-Socratic – or more precisely anti-Platonic – position. And I will be demonstrating that this position has some urgent and startling real world implications.
* Theodorus was a follower of Protagoras, and the argument was over Protagoras’s doctrine the ‘Man is the measure of all things’ [Basically, that there is no truth beyond what people believe to be the truth].
The format of my argument will be highly unusual. I will strive initially for nothing but clear communication of my proposal. I will put it on the table in the form of twelve points, without, necessarily, any attempts at justification or cross linkage. I will then return to provide these things. As an explanation for my selection of this odd format, let me offer a quote from one of my heroes, Sir Karl Popper:
“One of the most characteristic tasks of philosophy is to attack, if necessary, the framework itself. And in order to do so it may become necessary to attack beliefs which, whether or not they are consciously held, are taken so much for granted that any criticism of them is felt to be perverse or insincere. Whenever the framework itself is attacked, its defenders will as a rule interpret, and attempt to refute, the attack within their own adopted framework. But in trying to translate critical arguments directed against the framework into a language appropriate to that framework, they are liable to produce fatal distortions and misunderstandings.”
Popper’s position has – famously – been the object of just such distortions and misunderstandings. And my own position is considerably more radical than his. I think that mine is, in a sense, the full logical extension of his. Basically, ‘where Karl Popper should have gone, but didn’t’; either because it didn’t occur to him (unlikely), or because he was too much of a gentlemen (more likely). In addition I have already experienced considerable ‘fatal distortions and misunderstandings’ of my own in response to earlier drafts of this essay. I will therefore be using the bare assertions (or we might say ‘shotgun blast’) method of initially outlining my thesis because I believe it to need all of the help that it can get. I can promise that my points will all converge onto a single proposal. It will be counterintuitive, and hard to grasp; but it will be very clear and simple.
I offer my twelve points as follows:
1. The basic units that comprise all communicable human knowledge (our words, numbers, musical notation, etc.) are created through a common interactive feedback process between human minds and independent/free-standing reality.
2. No knowledge constructed from these units can therefore claim a position of qualitative superiority on the basis of being ‘untainted’ by potentially fallible human choice. At this most fundamental level our knowledge is all, and unavoidably, human.
3. All conflicts between logically exclusive knowledge proposals are resolvable. If a common derivation process underlies all of our proposals then a decision between any two logically exclusive proposals can be obtained by resubmitting both, simultaneously, to the process. In the sense that reason is part of the process one of the proposals will necessarily be eliminated. Note: If this is accepted then the rational basis for our postmodern ‘separate magisteria’ accommodation – between primarily rational knowledge (paradigm case: science) and primarily irrational knowledge (paradigm case: religion) – is gone.
4. Our concept ‘truth’ is intrinsically irrational. If Point 1 holds then ‘truth’ is either logically redundant, or absurd, in this sense: That if we have any humanly perceptible justification for embracing a proposal as knowledge (for example: that it is observable, or demonstrable, or reasonable, or desirable, or was passed to us by someone who we trust) then we do not need the concept (‘truth’). We can more informatively, and in most cases more succinctly, maintain the proposal upon the direct basis of the justification. While if we have no humanly perceptible justification then we have no grounds upon which to maintain the proposal, and so, again, we do not need the concept. Furthermore, if we were to move to holding all of our proposals upon the direct basis of their justifications then their relative strengths would be immediately apparent. ‘I believe X because my mother told me X’ is an explicitly human, and therefore entirely legitimate, reason for believing X. But ‘I believe Y (which logically excludes X) because I can personally see Y’ is a much better reason for believing Y. Whatever else our ‘truth’ concept may or may not be doing for us, it would appear to be at least blunting our perception of the relative strengths of our other knowledge justification concepts.
5. ‘Revelation’ cannot save truth. It does not go deep enough. For any purported revelation some human had to decide initially whether or not he or she would accept it. [Does this ‘Being’ seem to me to be a god, or a devil? Does its revelation seem – against the background of my present knowledge – to be right or wrong; good or bad?]. Basically, the knowledge still has to be presented in human units. It still has to be accepted or rejected through human judgment. We cannot therefore, in reason, propagate it upon some other basis.
6. Reason is averaged and extrapolated observation. It subsumes logic, but it is far more than logic. For any particular mind it is the best present understanding of reality’s most fundamental regularities that that mind has been able to achieve in terms of its units. Or to put it another way: Reason is the collective output of the newer/higher brain physiological structures and organization that we apparently developed in conjunction with our units. It is the software that has been developed by our minds for the specific purpose of adaptively (in the Darwinian sense) manipulating the units.
7. The ancient position of strong-form epistemological skepticism – the position that we can note first from the Greeks, and then see resurfacing throughout our Roman and European Christian developmental phases in the writings of Sextus Empiricus and Lucian of Samosata, and William of Ockham and Nicholas of Autrecourt prior to its recasting in modern form by John Lock and David Hume – is correct. It is not, of course, ‘true’. It is observably and logically correct. We can see where our reality units come from. It is obvious that they are not – and cannot be – directly, independently, characteristic of reality. We can see that it is logically impossible for us to select units, or to create further knowledge from them, except upon the basis of appeal that is perceptible through our observational and cognitive faculties. We can even check the alternative (through attempted exclusion of these faculties from the process, as in: “We embrace X as ‘the truth’, upon the basis of it’s being ‘the truth’”) and see that this is absurd.
8. Immanuel Kant did not answer the challenge of Hume’s rational destruction of the induction principle as a mechanism for the circumvention of strong-form skepticism. Kant’s arguments for an exception case (‘synthetic a priory’ knowledge) can be logically defeated through Humian arguments.
9. Karl Popper did answer Hume, but he answered through an inversion so profound that its full implications were perhaps not immediately apparent, even to him. During the roughly two hundred years between Kant and Popper our grail quest continued, for the observation based and logically coherent objective-truth-recognition-procedure whose existence seemed to be so clearly indicated by the apparently qualitative superiority of science. Members of the Vienna Circle in particular were certain that some formulation could be found that would justify at least science itself as such objective truth. Popper’s ‘inversion’ was to say, in effect: Forget about it. Hume was right. We have never had, and can never have such a qualitatively superior form of knowledge, even in science. But (and here comes the exquisite twist) this is irrelevant to science. Science has never been about ‘truth’ in this sense*, because it has never been about ‘proof’. The proposals of science can be most effectively distinguished from those of non-science by: A. Their rational explanatory power. B. Their clear and definite statement (to the extent of deliberately opening themselves up to the maximum possibility of observational disproof**). C. Their tentative/conditional acceptance (acceptance only as best present knowledge, while we honestly continue our efforts to disprove them or to subsume them within a proposal of greater explanatory power).
* I do not mean to imply here that Popper rejected – as I do – all understandings of ‘truth’. He was a strong proponent of Alfred Tarski’s revamped form of the old ‘correspondence’ theory of truth. I think that he was simply wrong in this. That when his position is restated with even the Tarskian understanding removed its internal consistency, elegance, and usefulness can be seen to be increased. In any case, and to return to the present point, the Tarskian understanding is clearly not of a qualitatively superior form of knowledge.
** The strength of Popper’s position rests on a logical asymmetry between ‘proof’ and ‘disproof’. Disproof can be seen to be achievable within human knowledge. If we have been holding as a theory: “All swans are white”, and we then discover a bird that is inarguably a swan in all respects apart from its being black, then our theory has been disproved. Like it or not. But in order to be able to ‘prove’, in any meaningful sense, “All swans are white”, we would need to be able to reach outside human knowledge. To prove it through observation we would need simultaneous access to all past present and futures swans. To prove it through reason we would need the kind of meta-rational principle that we were considering induction to be before Hume disproved that. And, to be sufficient for our purpose, any such principle would at least need to be able to undercut my observations expressed as Points 1 and 2 above. It would need to be a demonstrably non-anthropomorphic human principle.
10. Popper thus effectively saved science from Hume’s epistemological meltdown. But he did not save the rest of human knowledge. This jaw dropping realization appears to have been largely ignored by the philosophical community. That which is observably our most powerful form of knowledge (in that it can actually be seen to deliver, in the provision of methods and predictions that enable us influence reality in our desired directions; and in that it can actually be seen to grow, in it’s range of applicability, explanatory power, and internal consistency) was restored to a sound logical footing through formal renunciation of its linkage to proof, or therefore, in any objective sense, to ‘truth’. But what about the rest?
11. I can find many powerful reasons why we should – and none why we should not – go ahead and extend Popper’s inversion to cover all of human knowledge. This could not thereby become science; but it could subsume science as its core. It could acknowledge the authority of science in all areas where science is now in a position to speak, and it could follow science in officially renouncing the pretensions as to extra-human certainty with which it is still saturated*. It could adapt itself to become increasingly consistent with science-based/observation-based reason. The test for science would remain, per Popper: “Does this proposal have greater explanatory power than any logically exclusive proposal, and can this explanatory power be expressed in clearer physical predictions to facilitate its observational disproof?” But the test for all other knowledge could become: “Is this proposal at least as rationally consistent with our present scientific knowledge as any logically exclusive proposal; and then, if so, is it more or less subjectively desirable?”
* This observation goes far beyond our specific use of the word ‘truth’. It extends to every adult who has ever used phrases like “well, that’s just the way that things are” or “just how the world is” in order to download proposals of irrational knowledge into the mind of a child. If my Point #1 cannot be contraverted then “just how the world is” is exactly – both analytically and empirically – that which we cannot know. What we can know, rationally in terms of our ‘merely human’ observational and cognitive faculties, is that some of our knowledge proposals are better than others. What seems to be damn near impossible for a post truth mind to communicate to others that are still locked in truth’s grip is that this, alone, is beautifully and elegantly sufficient for our purposes.
12. When Popper brought down the Vienna Circle’s final candidate for an objective truth recognition process* (through his observation that it could not pass its own test**) and so opened the way for postmodernism, we should never have bought it. Postmodernism was/is a simple case of drawing an incorrect inference from the data. With the demise of our last remaining runner were certainly obliged to admit that we cannot justify any of our knowledge as objective truth. Postmodernism is the unjustified interpretation of that admission as a problem for our knowledge. Basically that in being like all of the rest, ultimately unprovable, science is no better than any of the rest. I think that instead of accepting this we should have responded immediately with the full extension of Popper’s inversion. That we should have recognized our final failure to qualify science as objective truth not as a problem for science – or indeed, for any other human knowledge – but as a final fatal problem for objective truth.
* Its Central Dictum: That the meaning of any statement is, in essence, its verification procedure.
** The verification procedure that justifies this statement (the Central Dictum) is…….?
I believe that these points functionally outline my position; and that the most important of them, by far, is the first. Even upon its sole basis the simple idea that I promised can now be made explicit, as follows: That we have never had, as a species, the kind of qualitatively superior knowledge basis and resultant form whose existence we have been invoking through our concept ‘truth’. I mean this from both directions. I mean (A): That we can see that such an independent knowledge basis does not and cannot exist; and I mean (B): That our concept ‘truth’ can only refer, non-redundantly, to such a knowledge basis. ‘Truth’ has – demonstrably – no specific reference to any human observational or cognitive faculty. We cannot therefore say that it means ‘is observable’, or ‘is desirable’, or ‘was told to me by my mother’, or any such thing. I think that the very best that we can say, in a last ditch attempt to reconcile ‘truth’ with reason, is that it may refer to some characteristic of knowledge that is apprehended through a kind of wooly and imprecise amalgamation of all of our perceptive faculties. And to this I would point out – in particular to the members of my own tribe (scientists, engineers, and empiricist philosophers) – that it is not our standard practice to prefer the relatively wooly and imprecise.
To move from this analytical level to that of our day-to-day use of ‘truth’: It is observable that we have been using the concept in exactly the two logically exclusive ways that I have just suggested. My own tribe appears to use ‘truth’ mainly in the way that is redundant but otherwise rational. We say things like: “We believe that X is true, upon the basis of Y (evidence)”. Or: “It is true that an X is a Y” (where X might for example be ‘aardvark’, and Y might be ‘animal’). Or: “It is observable that X is the truth”. While primarily political and religious people appear to use ‘truth’ in the way that is non-redundant but otherwise absurd. They say things like: “We believe that X is true in spite of Y (evidence)”. Or “We believe in X because we know it to be the truth”. Or (most often to their children): “You must believe X because it is the truth”. In the case of the first group of statements the concept’s redundancy can be shown in the classical way; by removing it: “We believe X, upon the basis of Y (evidence)”. “We define an X as a Y”. “X is observable”*. In the case of the second group the concept cannot be removed without rendering the statements incoherent. It is being used non-redundantly. It has meaning. What it appears to mean is exactly: ‘an independent, qualitatively superior, form of knowledge’, or: ‘a form of knowledge that represents – in contradistinction to the rest of our knowledge – the actual state of reality’. From my opening points No. 1 and 2 this is bedrock irrational. The most fundamental thing that can be known about our knowledge – through both observation and observation based reason – is that it cannot be this.
* I would challenge any fellow Engineer to tell me, hand on heart, that he/she does not prefer these revised versions of the statements.
To consolidate: There is (1) the perfect logical absurdity that has already been noted. That of human synthesis of a kind of knowledge that is supposed to be qualitatively superior upon grounds of its not having been obtained through human synthesis. And then there is (2) what might be called ‘the difficulty through common sense observation’: That our most fundamental knowledge units (our words, numbers, etc.) can be seen to be our own productions; and that a necessary logical corollary of this is that we cannot synthesize a qualitatively superior form of knowledge from them, any more than we could synthesize an apple from some number of oranges. [This can of course be objected to. But the objector should then be ready to answer questions like: Which of our present languages is the real one? And: How were human beings able to manage prior to it? And: How can we account for our observation that new words and concepts are constantly being added to it while old ones are being abandoned? And: How can we account for our observations of redundancy and internal inconsistency within it?]. Finally, and most recently, there is (3) what might be called ‘the difficulty through scientific observation’: That it is now apparent that we obtain all of our visual information through a narrow ‘window’ in the electromagnetic spectrum (approximately .4 to .7 nanometers wavelength), and all of our auditory information through a narrow window in the physical vibration spectrum (approximately 20 to 20,000 cycles per second), and that we then process the data that has in this sense already been ‘anthropized’ through neural computers that were optimized for the particular task of ensuring organism survival, and in the particular environment of the African Rift Valley approximately two million years ago. I cannot imagine it as a possible stretch for any rational person to square such understandings with the belief that any of our knowledge can be directly, independently, characteristic of reality.
The typical reaction of people to the main implication of what has been said so far (that our ‘truth’ concept is intrinsically irrational / that we cannot know anything that can coherently be called ‘truth’) seems to be to bounce back and forth between truth’s two untenable positions. Even primarily rational people will provide examples of the logically absurd usage (‘truth’ as an independent and qualitatively superior form of knowledge) in order to justify their maintenance of the concept when it is pointed out that their standard usage is redundant. While primarily subjectively oriented people will indignantly produce solid examples of the redundant usage (“Well, whatever you may say, it is true that I have two arms and a head”) in response to a demonstration that their standard usage is logically absurd. I can’t throw both knives at exactly the same time, so after a certain number of such dodges these conversations typically end in my plea for just one solid rational justification for their maintenance of the specific concept (‘truth’). For just one thing more that they mean by their “X is the truth”, beyond what I mean by my “X is observable”, or “X is demonstrable”, or “X is esthetically, or mathematically, beautiful”. If this question cannot be answered then it seems to me that the concept (truth) can no longer be rationally maintained. I think that three hundred years ago it could have been answered quite easily: “OK you son of a bitch. I mean by it ‘real knowledge’; ‘the actual state of reality’; ‘that which, objectively, is’”. As I’ve already implied, I think that this is precisely our old strong meaning for the word ‘truth’. I think that this is the meaning that would – and did – justify ‘truth’ as a concept; and that it is the meaning that we are still clearly conveying to our children when we tell them things like “you must believe X because it is ‘the truth’”. But it is apparent through common sense (ref. Points 1 and 2), and it has been perhaps the most fundamental tenet of academic epistemology for the past two hundred years (post Hume and Kant*), that ‘truth’ cannot mean this. That it is logically absurd to believe ourselves to have such knowledge. So I cannot be answered. We are unable to justify the concept, but neither can we reject it. We have been educated from earliest childhood to believe that we need it; that it is in fact our most important concept. Even most members of my own tribe still believe themselves to need their sober objective rational ‘truths’, from the position of which to oppose the silly desire based irrational ‘truths’ of the religious and ideological fundamentalists.
* Or, to bring this right up to date: post Frank Ramsey and Richard Rorty.
In the light of all that has been said above, I now wish to return this ancient battle. Our discussion is about to get practical; even strategic. I would suggest that the most urgent practical question to be raised by my main thesis (the intrinsic irrationality of ‘truth’ / the observation that we simply cannot have the kind of external reference knowledge position that is understood by most people most of the time to be meant by ‘truth’) is this: Why don’t we go ahead and pull the plug on postmodernism? In justification: We have now been observant of its sterile truce for three generations. Our opponents have been observant too, in that they have been avoiding direct attacks against us. But this appears to be changing*, and they have not been idle, and time no longer appears to be on our side. Environmental degradation through pollution and global warming is accelerating. Extinction of species is proceeding at a rate not seen since our last major meteorite impact. Religious and ideological fundamentalisms are everywhere resurgent; and our two most popular forms (Christianity and Islam) are now goading each other towards another terrible confrontation into which we may all be dragged. To take this discussion to the practical level I must pose very directly to the members of my own tribe – and to anyone else who would likewise claim reason as their primary determinant for knowledge – the question that I introduced above:
Exactly what additional claim are you making for the knowledge proposals to which you are applying your concept ‘truth’? What are you saying about them – in calling them this – that is beyond what can be said through application of our explicitly human knowledge justification concepts?
*See the Discovery Institute’s notorious ‘wedge’ document.
As I’ve now exhaustively noted, I believe that in terms of our scientific way of knowing (through observation, and observation based reason) the only viable answer is “nothing”. If you can fully concede this then let me now propose that we formally, collectively, and publicly abandon the concept. Let me make it explicit that I am proposing this on both the most fundamental logical grounds [What, exactly, is a ‘concept’ for which no referent characteristic can be defined?], and on grounds that our merely human knowledge justification concepts can be seen to be better. In final recap: If I tell you that X is observable, or any of the other justifications that I might actually offer for your acceptance of X, then you can argue with me, and we can ultimately settle the issue (ref. Point 3 above). This is obvious for statements like “X is observable”. If you wish to contest it then we can go to where I claim that X can be seen, and we will either see it or we won’t. It is less obvious for statements like “X is indicated by the preponderance of the evidence”. But I would argue that if we are both genuinely desirous of reaching agreement, and we are both rational, and both accept the totality of present scientific knowledge as a common data base, then we will certainly be able to achieve agreement. As noted, this is not so for “X is the truth”. You must either buy this outright – in effect, as a ‘revelation’ from me – or you must assume that I am lying. If we are both rational then you cannot ask me for reasons. If I had had these then I would have proposed X to you on their basis. If human perception/cognition must be recognized as the initial foundation for all of our knowledge then our ‘truth’ concept must either be traceable to some component of human perception/cognition (which would subsume our ability to identify that component), or it must be at best traceable to some wooly/amorphous amalgamation of these components, which would render it clearly inferior to our specific and informative knowledge justification concepts. Both paths lead to the trash can.
From the perspective of this realization postmodernism was/is nothing but the final arrival of our pursuit of ‘truth’ at its inevitable logical conclusion. Postmodernism says: “We cannot exclusively justify any of our knowledge proposals as ‘truth’*. Therefore we can have no sufficient basis for preferring some of them (for example, those of science) over others (for example, those of fundamentalist Christianity or Islam)”. Extension of Popper’s inversion to cover all human knowledge says: “We cannot exclusively justify any of our knowledge proposals as ‘truth’. Therefore we can abandon this concept as having no utility. Therefore we can finally complete the move – that was started in science – to holding all of our knowledge openly and honestly upon what can be seen to have always been its only logically coherent basis”. And further: “That we can damn sure have, from this basis, sufficient justification for preferring some of our proposals over others. Our position is final formal consignment of all human knowledge to the same level playing field. It is final rejection of our illusion of possession of an independent and qualitatively superior form of knowledge”.
* Or, as it is sometimes stated: “We can justify all of them as ‘truth’”. Logically, these positions are equivalent.
For the plug to be pulled on postmodernism would require only this: That those of you who find yourselves to be no more able then I am to answer the question of what more we might legitimately mean by ‘truth’ will accept the full rational implication of this, in honestly abandoning the concept. In ceasing to speak about it or write about it except in opposition. If many do this then The Enlightenment will be rekindled; but this time with a stunning difference, as I will clarify in just a moment. Our point of entry – our flint and steel to re start the blaze – will be to ask all who proselytize for systems of irrational knowledge (in particular, for all systems involving Supernatural Beings, and their associated proposals of cultural or ethnic superiority based on the supposed preferential favor of such Beings) the question that I just put to all of you. If any one of them can answer it then fine. All will remain as it is. But if none can then we will be able to inform them not only that battle is rejoined, but that it will now be – for the first time in human history – a straight fight. Final consignment of all human knowledge to the same playing field (full ‘in our bones’ acceptance of Point #1) does not destroy ‘faith’, but it removes its capacity to be used against reason. What we are talking about abandoning is the independent position from which we have been doing that.
In the absence of this position; if I offer for your belief the proposal that there is a supernatural being who is simultaneously three beings, and who created our 14 billion year old universe consistent of billions of galaxies each consistent of billions of stars, all for the purpose of staging a 7,000 year drama on our comparative speck of dust planet, then you are entitled (in fact, you are even obliged) to ask me straight out to state the basis upon which I embrace this apparently incredible proposal. And if I answer ‘faith’ then you are entitled to ask me: “Faith in what? If it is faith that your proposal has appeal that can be perceived through human reason and desire – i.e. that it can actually be seen to work in terms of our logically coherent basis for knowledge – then your ‘faith’ is redundant. We’re listening, and you can make your pitch. While if it is faith that your proposal consists of an independent form of knowledge – of a form that is qualitatively superior to that which we hold – then please revert to our original questions: Qualitatively superior in exactly what way? How can you account for your possession of it? Where, exactly, do you think that it came from? If you cannot do either of these things, and so cannot justify your proposal upon any logically coherent basis, then please understand that we must place your proposal in the same category as those that involve old women flying on broomsticks, or a corpulent gentleman dressed in red flannel being pulled by flying reindeer”.
High noon; cards on the table; I am talking now about clear intellectual checkmate. I am talking about backing our Dembskis and Plantingas up into a simple logical corner from which they will be able to see that they cannot emerge with both reason and their truths. If Point #1 cannot be contraverted – and/or, if my main question cannot be answered – then I do not believe that this choice can be avoided. I wouldn’t presume to prejudge it for them, but I would point out that in either case the present confusion will be dramatically reduced. We will either be able to welcome them at last into a meaningful dialogue, and get some important disagreements resolved, or we will be able to go ahead and write them off in the clear and honest sense that we would write off a person who believed himself to be a poached egg. We would not entirely cease to listen to such a person, but I think that we would insist upon settlement of the poached egg issue before being willing to discuss anything else that they might have to say. This, I think, should be our position in relation to all who wish to proselytize for irrational knowledge proposals.
In conclusion: Our ancient systems of institutionalized irrational knowledge are not merely ‘implausible’. They are all, prima facie, absurd. And – in contravention of our present postmodernist/knowledge-relativist zeitgeist – they are very far from harmless. Programming large quantities of irrational knowledge into young pre-rational minds as, in effect, ROM data, can be seen to be a mind level analogue of irreparably breaking our children’s legs. It requires all further development of reason to take place from the understanding that reality itself is irrational – which is, in essence a ‘mission impossible’. We have never said such things. We have never gone after our ancient systems of irrational knowledge with the kind of blitzkrieg no-holds-barred ferocity that they deserve, because, I believe, we have not been clear in our own minds. We have been allowing these systems the consideration of possibly being valid on a basis that is entirely different from that of our knowledge. I have been trying to show, through 18 pages of mind bending redundancy – convergence onto the same simple point from different directions – that nothing can be more clearly established then that there is no such alternative basis. I have tried to show that this realization is unavoidable through honest application of our common sense [ref. Points 1, 2 and 3], and that – at the other end of the scale – it has been accepted as perhaps the most fundamental tenet of academic epistemology for at least the past two hundred years*. My proposal is that we finally go ahead and recognize this, formally, publicly, and then begin using it as the devastating weapon against all forms of irrationality that it can be seen to be.
* I have not adequately demonstrated this. But I will claim that no honest look at the literature can fail to do so. Even Kant’s Transcendental Idealism, which I would claim offers the weakest support for my assertion, states as its central tenet that we can never have knowledge of how things are in themselves, but only of the way that they appear to us to be. I could discuss Frank Ramsey’s ‘Assertive Redundancy’ theory of truth, or Willard Quine’s position that all linguistic meaning is unstable, or quote Richard Rorty saying “Nothing counts as justification unless by reference to what we already accept and there is no way to get outside our beliefs and our language so as to find some test other than coherence”. But it is all there for anyone interested enough to delve into it. I will assert, and with it my willingness to defend it in any kind of debate, that the last credible philosopher to hold an understanding of ‘truth’ that would have been even remotely familiar and satisfactory to people who are not involved in academic philosophy was John Locke, in the seventeenth century.
The bottom line is that ‘our’ knowledge (rational/scientific/observation-based knowledge) does not need the illusion of being characteristic of the actual state of reality. To return at last to my header statement: We know why we believe what we believe. We can defend it elegantly upon that basis. And wherever we cannot; wherever we find it to be opposed by some more reasonable logically exclusive proposal, we can honestly set it aside in favor of that proposal. While the kind of knowledge against which we have been struggling – explicitly, ever since Athens – can be seen to depend entirely upon the illusion. Our most effective attack strategy would therefore seem to be to dispel this illusion. Let me say clearly that I am not proposing abandonment of our concept ‘truth’ because I have something against the word. I am proposing abandonment of our idea that we possess a special and qualitatively superior form of knowledge – which I believe myself to have shown to be an illusion – and I am suggesting abandonment of the main word through which we have been invoking this idea as our most elegant and direct way of starting on this enormous project. To preempt a strange but frequent objection that has been raised to earlier drafts of this essay: It is irrelevant that those who wish to maintain the illusion will oppose us by attempting to shift it to other words. As and when this happens we will simply point out that its invocation through such alternative words is every bit as absurd as it was through the primary word. Basically, this objection seems as strange as would be that of the Generals in charge of Army A to allowing their champion to kill the champion put up by Army B, on grounds that Army B would then put up another champion.
I am aware of other objections, and of some important broader questions that can be seen to be raised by what has been said here. But these can be dealt with in the ensuing debate, if I have finally managed to state my main thesis with sufficient clarity and compulsion to spark a meaningful debate. On the one hand it is almost inconceivable to me that my intellectual heroes (Professors E. Wilson, Dawkins, and Dennett; to name but a few) have not already thought of what I have been trying to say here. It seems to me to be so simple, and to have been starring us in the face at least ever since Popper’s publication of Logic der Forschung. But if they have thought of it then – in the sense that they are still observably speaking and writing about ‘truth’ – they must be aware of some fatal logical flaw that I have missed. In this case I would ask them, in the spirit of Phaeton asking Apollo, to simply communicate it to me, so that I can move on. If they have not then I would request their help in disseminating the meme and putting the plan into action.
Keith Sewell February 21, 2006
keith.sewell@sbcglobal.net
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