The Radical Notion of David Hume

The Radical Notion of David Hume

If Hume awakened Kant from his philosophical slumber, perhaps we should take a closer look at Hume’s thoughts.  Hume’s thoughts may be more radical than is commonly thought, and perhaps Kant’s response to Hume was a spectacular failure.

Furthermore, if we take Hume seriously, and if we take science seriously, we must figure out what we are to do.  Hume’s critique attacks and destroys a major assumption of science itself.  If there is no serious answer to Hume, then science has no philosophical foundations, if we assume that Empiricism is true.  Perhaps Empiricism is not true, after all.

Taking notes on Kasser’s lectures a little over a year ago, I wrote the following:

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.  

This is a very shocking conclusion drawn from a major philosopher.  Perhaps Kant was justified in thinking for many years upon what Hume was getting at.  Kant, perhaps the greatest thinker of modern times, was fully aware of this devastating conclusion that Hume drew from strictly applying the philosophy of Empiricism.

After the aforementioned notes, I made the following comments:

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.

So, does experience reveal one set of sensations followed by others?  It seems that Kant attempted to make the mind active in taking the input from the things in themselves, with the mind actively processing these things, thus accounting for cause and effect within things as they appear.  We can marvel at Kant’s spectacular efforts in his Critique of Pure Reason, but this gets us nowhere further from Hume.  Kant did not escape Hume’s trap that if we are Empiricists, one set of sensations follow another.  Who cares if the mind organizes and processes this information?  It still leaves us at square one. 

Hume’s devastating attack on Empiricism, I think, was a final blow.  The problem is that Kant followed him with a dazzling brilliance and ability for analysis, that, perhaps we forget Hume in the bright light of Kant.  It appears to me that Kant sidestepped this issue with a philosophical sleight-of-hand, as it were.  He does not address the core issue, but attempts to move cause and effect around to sooth us, but not give us an ultimate answer.

Let us make this very clear with an illustration.  You are performing measurements on the Second Law of Thermodynamics.  You have a thermometer.  You are taking a serious of measurements.  Every half hour, you look at the thermometer and record the temperature in your laboratory book.  If you believe in Empiricism, that we must base all our theories on experience, what connects one measurement to another measurement?  Between the first and second measurement, what happened?  You do not know, because you did not observe it.  You can only infer what happened.  Wait – but if you infer what happened, you are not relying on observation to tell you what happened between measurements.  If we cannot infer what happens between measurements, we cannot do science as Empiricists.

We cannot say, under any circumstances, that we rely only on evidence for our knowledge and theories. 

So, what are we to say?

Freddy Martini

Philosophy of Science: Logical Positivism

Philosophy of Science: Logical Positivism

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.

Introductory Note

The efforts, struggles, and spectacular failures of Logical Positivism illustrate that the problems philosophy reveals about certain ideas eventually return to haunt us.  Connecting ideas to experience to find Truth is extremely difficult.  This discussion reveals the stubbornness of the problem, and perhaps the equal - or greater - stubbornness of Positivists.

Synopsis

Logical Positivists influenced the Philosophy of Science for several decades.  They also made the Philosophy of Science a major study.  As was the case with the Classical Empiricists, Einstein and others’ work in Physics impressed them.  19^th and late 20^th century German philosophy was the main impetus driving them; they did not like the direction German philosophers were taking philosophy.  Positivists believed that the philosophy of the day was speculative and an obstacle to scientific progress.  They were not worried about Pseudoscience as was Popper.  They worried that metaphysics and philosophy were getting in the way of science. 

The ‘Positivist’ part of Logical Positivism was derived from the work of August Compte, who had animus against traditional metaphysics.  The ‘Logical” part of Logical Positivism came from the belief in mathematical logic’s ability to provide methods to build a new empiricism favorable to science and unfavorable to metaphysics.  Hume’s Fork heavily influenced this version of empiricism: (1) the philosopher establishes the relations of ideas, not matters of fact, and (2) philosophy clarifies linguistic problems and establishes the relationship between statements and experience.

The principle of Logical Positivism is as follows: every meaningful statement is either (1) analytic or (2) makes a claim about experience.  Thus, there is a class of statements whereby we cannot say that they contain any Truth.  Imperatives and questions have meaning but not in the empirical sense; they are not candidates for Truth.  Poetry and poetic statements also do not aim for literal truth.

Analytic statements are true or false based upon their meaning, but they have no factual content.  Analytic statements are knowable a priori: this means that empirical evidence is not needed to establish their truth.   For example, no empirical evidence is needed to establish the truth of logical or mathematical propositions.  The power and importance of analytic statements is that analytic truths are necessary.  For example, ‘No bachelor is married’ is true by definition.  On the other hand, there can be a problem with analytic statements; we may be certain that every effect has a cause, but this certainty loses some of its importance if this assertion is merely based upon how we use the words ‘cause’ and ‘effect.’ 

Kasser explains that classical metaphysics is based upon facts, which makes them synthetic, but that the metaphysics is supposed to be knowable independent of experience.  Classical metaphysical claims hold no matter what experience shows.  Positivists claim that a factual claim’s meaning is limited to its claims about possible experience.  Positivists claim that metaphysical statements are not just merely true or false, but that they are incapable of bearing truth or falsehood.  Perhaps they are examples of unintentional poetry, they speculate - cynically, perhaps.

Logical Positivists claim that a statement must be true or false to be meaningful.  This statement must also have a correct method by which to determine whether or not it is true.  Analytic statements use mathematical or logical proof, which makes them verifiable.  If analytic statements can be linked correctly to a source, according to linguistic rules, they are meaningful.  The concern within the Philosophy of Science is empirical statements, which are not analytical, but synthetic.  Classical empiricism and operationalism focused upon connecting a term to experience for verification, while the logical positivists focused upon the meaning of a statement to connect it to experience.  This was a liberalization of empiricism, which some advances in logic made possible.  Using this method, a term gets its meaning from making meaningful statements; a term does not need its meaning independently established.  Verifiability of a synthetic statement involves finding possible observations that support its truth.  Actual observations assess the truth of the statement, not its meaningfulness.  The difficulty is the requirement whereby these observations are possible. 

A set of possible observations showing the conclusive truth of a statement is one way to ensure a statement’s verifiability.  This, however, may be impractical.  For example, establishing the truth of “All copper conducts electricity” with a finite number of observations is not possible.  Some Popper-influenced proposals substitute conclusive falsifiability with conclusive verifiability.  Combinations of these two approaches face many counter-examples: unobservable objects are a problem.  “That streak in the cloud chamber was produced by an electron” gets ruled out using these aforementioned rules.  If unobservable things get left out using these rules, we need a more practical, and possibly a weaker rule.  Ayer suggested that using a statement to derive observable statements that cannot be derived within it may work.  However, even this suggestion has problems; it is too weak because it lacks restrictions on auxiliary hypotheses.  For example, “If everything proceeds according to God’s plan, then this litmus paper will turn pink when placed in this solution” is an acceptable statement using Ayer’s suggestion.  A modified suggestion on this approach is to require the auxiliary hypothesis to be independently meaningful.  Kasser claims that this suggestion succumbs to technical objections.

These philosophical difficulties to the Logical Positivist approach strangely did not affect Positivism’s credibility.  The idea to connect meaningful statements to observation remained a powerful idea, but was tediously difficult, if not impossible to adequately defend.

Commentary

The claims of the Logical Positivists may sound good, but upon closer inspection, they do not survive careful philosophical objections.  It seems that their assertions, and the accompanying claims to truth, are presumptuous.  The Problem of Induction has been around for a long time, and the Positivist approach assumes that there is no problem with induction.  Perhaps, they have ignored the problem of induction. 

There is a serious problem with all empirical claims, and this problem goes to the root of science.  Defenders of science cannot ignore these problems as irrelevant and go on in a stubborn fashion taking Positivism for granted.  To state it boldly, there seems to be no way for the philosophical establishment of truth to a claim such as “All copper conducts electricity.”  This objection is not necessarily fatal for science from a practical view.  However, we must accept that this attack is possibly fatal to the scientific claim to philosophical truth.  It appears that many wish to establish scientific truth on the same level as that of mathematics.  This philosophical exercise shows that this is not true – at least not yet.

This attack has implications beyond science.  In our court systems, in legislation, and in the execution of law, we seem increasingly dependent upon scientific experts.  Science has a privileged status in government and within law.  Also, there is the competition for funds from government, companies, and many other organizations for the funding of scientific research.  However, how can we justify this privileged status when this claim to truth is in serious question?  Why should science get more funding than the humanities, literature, art, or even religion?  Why does it seem that science has a powerful privilege over these other important areas of human nature?  Who in their right mind can claim that poetry has no serious meaning?  Who will claim that great literature has no meaning because it does not fit the positivist approach?

Perhaps the spectacular successes of Newton, Einstein, and Maxwell provide a model of prestige that contemporary supporters of science research wish to emulate.  This prestige gives an air of authority and supposed truth to all claims of being “scientific.”  Perhaps this helps in raising funds for projects that otherwise would go unfunded.  However, we astute observers of science (and technology) must seriously question when this power over our institutions is detrimental to other important areas of human inquiry.  

Philosophy of Science: Classical Empiricism

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 20^th 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 17^th and 18^th 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.