Professor
Jeffery Kasser produced a series of 36 lectures through The Great Courses entitled Philosophy
of Science.
These
are my notes, commentary, and synopsis from Kasser’s lectures. The author of this blog highly recommends
this course as a high quality lecture on the philosophy of science.
One may
purchase the entire course here.
Friday, June 29, 2012
The argument that concepts should be connected to experience
has a long history, even apart from science.
Before the logical positivists and the logical empiricists began their
arguments at the beginning of the 20th century, philosophy had been
considering these issues a few centuries before. Empiricism asserts - roughly - that the
source of knowledge is through experience, or, more precisely, through
experience from the senses.
Locke is regarded as the first empiricist. His project was to find and determine the
limits of knowledge. He also wished to
investigate the sources of knowledge, and to place a scope on knowledge.
Locke claimed that experience was the source of thought. Everything inside the mind came from the
senses. Ideas are inside the mind but are
composed of attributes taken only through the senses. The mind perceives sights, sounds and other
sensations, but cannot directly sense the physical object. The mind has two basic powers: combination
and abstraction. Abstraction focuses on
parts of an idea. Combination allows the
mind to take these parts of ideas and then rearrange them into new ideas; in
some cases these ideas are not found in the world of experience– unicorns, for
example.
This
philosophical point of view places limits on what we can know. The inner nature of things is unavailable to
us since our ideas are limited only to the perceptions provided by our senses. There is no practical way to understand how
these external objects interact with our senses to create the ideas within our
minds.
Empiricism helps
to clarify ideas. However, it does not
give confidence that we can assume things about reality before we understand
the limitations that the perceptual process places upon our access to knowledge
of external objects.
George
Berkeley, another empiricist, claimed that reliance upon experience implies
more radical conclusions than Locke proposed.
He claimed that we have no direct experience of matter, and we cannot
get a complete idea of matter through abstraction. He asserts that we cannot imagine anything
without its properties. The process by
which material objects produce sensations within our minds is mysterious. He claimed that God puts these ideas into our
minds directly, and does not use matter as a medium to transmit these ideas
into our minds. He wanted us to abandon the
effort to go beyond our experience and sense organs to access the matter (or
things) behind these sense impressions.
What we
experience through our senses is the world itself; there are no objects
imprinting themselves upon our sense organs.
We can discover the patterns created within our experiences, and learn
to predict subsequent patterns; Newton’s Laws are an example of the discovery
of these patterns. Science develops
rules on the experiences we will have.
Berkeley
wanted to purge skepticism and atheism from philosophy. He saw his work contributing to these ends.
Dave Hume’s
conclusions are more radical than Berkeley’s.
Hume takes empiricism to some of its logical conclusions. Hume wanted to bring experimental methods to
philosophy. Applying this rigorously,
Hume discovered that some of our crucial notions have a questionable link to experience. Experience merely reveals one set of
sensations followed by others. These
sequences of sensations do not reveal any causal link among themselves, and
thus, our notion of causality (cause and effect) has no grounding in experience. Our sense impressions are always changing,
and thus, we do not experience anything enduring. Even our sense of self does not endure. Hume also speculated that we may not be
thinking beings, but beings that experience one series of impressions followed
by others.
Can we call anything evidence that we do not
experience now? Can we be sure that our memory of experience
and impressions is real, accurate or true?
This reasoning process ends in a deep form of skepticism.
Among Hume’s
conclusions was that some of our core notions are meaningless or have no basis
in experience, or mean something different from what we would think on first
impression. With this, Hume questioned
philosophy’s position with regard to science. Where does philosophy fit in with regard to scientific empiricism? Hume also concluded with a notion of what is
called “Hume’s Fork.” Hume’s Fork claims that meaningful statements must be in
one of two forms: (1) relations of
ideas, or (2) matters of fact. (1) can
be things such as logic or mathematics, while (2) can be the empirical
sciences. Hume, as one would expect, was
interested in matters of fact. He saw
his project as discovering the laws of the mind as Newton discovered laws of
nature.
Many wonder if
Hume’s project is psychology. Many also
wonder if the Philosophy of Science and Philosophy in general is psychology
without the experiments.
Toward the
end of the lecture, we observe several issues that the empiricists of the 17th
and 18th centuries had to deal with:
- How
to reconcile experience with reasoning in order to do serious science and
philosophy?
- Can
philosophy connect experience to reasoning processes to demonstrate its
legitimacy?
- Is
philosophy merely science without evidence?
Commentary
In contrast
to Hume’s conclusions questioning the legitimacy of philosophy, he demonstrates
the exact opposite. If one claims that
empiricism justifies science, Hume’s reasoning demonstrates the potential
illegitimacy of empiricism, not philosophy.
Philosophy investigates and then subsequently poses questions. If these investigations reveal the lack of
grounding in philosophy for empiricism, the philosophical critique holds. To conclude that this line of reasoning
undermines philosophy is backwards. When
a messenger (philosophy) delivers a message (empiricism has no rational
ground), one is not credible in questioning the messenger (dogmatically holding
to empiricism and assuming – not proving – that philosophy is the culprit).
This
discussion contributes to a widely held notion among defenders of science that
lack of evidence to any idea places the idea outside the bounds of knowledge. Even empirical science has to abstract
several stages from experience to reason toward physical laws and principles. Furthermore,
scientists will question the evidence itself when such evidence contradicts
an established theory; this common practice is a spectacular contribution to
the demonstration of the legitimacy of philosophy. When
one rejects evidence on theoretical grounds, one is doing philosophy. Finally, the empiricist assertion cannot be
taken seriously when one considers the entire realm of mathematics, where one
can reason completely within a system of thought without any evidence whatsoever. It would be foolish to claim that mathematics
is not knowledge.
In
conclusion, we know from observing scientific work that evidence of the senses
– experience - contributes to science, but it is not clear how to connect
evidence to theory. This effort was a
spectacular failure of the classical empiricists. Their promise of a method to connect
experience to theory, and thereby setting all other knowledge outside the
bounds of knowledge, does not work.
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