In my previous post I was chewing over whether trying to convince someone to subscribe to your world view is a worthwhile exercise. Often, when trying to, one might make an appeal to authority. The problem is that, it seems every view has had reams of scholarship written defending it. So for any given view, no matter how salient, eloquent, or passionate it might be, there is no doubt somewhere in the world another work of comparable excellence supporting the diametric view.

So the question is: if one considers all works on a topic and assigns each one a value corresponding to its position (for example, materialism:1, idealism:-1), would the sum total be null? That is, does considering the entire scholarship of the philosophical tradition result no view being more acceptable than another?

That makes “appealing to authority” utterly useless. “Ok, you’ve cited a very well respected work. Here’s an equally respected work to the contrary.”

There is a counter-argument to every argument. This is not to say I think debate or discussion is useless, but I think the appeal to “scholarship” can be. Digging through the archives it seems gives us a valueless result when all sides are considered.

Blogging has introduced me in a new way to disagreement. You write something, you publish it, people argue, you fire back, ad infinitum (or so it seems, sometimes). It’s a great exercise. It’s refining. And, if conducted with some level of maturity, it is mutually beneficial.

But how often do people come to agree? How often is convincing someone even possible? It’s one thing if people share the same view beforehand, and need to iron out some semantical issues. But how often is person A able to convince person B, thus changing person B’s world view (I am of course talking about matters of philosophy, theology, ideology, etc)?

It seems that no matter how compelling an argument is or how salient the reasoning, there is seldom a winning over.

Consider the entire history of philosophy. Alfred North Whitehead said that philosophy is a “a series of footnotes to Plato” — I’d substitute Aristotle. It is between Plato and Aristotle that we see a symbol of the ongoing philosophical disagreement. Since then (and likely centuries prior) the dialectic has had full momentum, in some form or another. Between realism and idealism. Mysticism and naturalism. Republicans and democrats.

Think about it: every major work of philosophy has had an equally compelling counterpart claiming contrary points. In the 2000+ years of western philosophical tradition, we have not established a single solitary point that everyone can agree on. There is no commonly accepted epistemology. There is no real philosophy of mind or definition of human nature. There has never been more disagreement of the reality of God than in present day.

As other fields focus and approach some degree reliability and conclusion, it seems that in this one field, everything is spiraling outward in a tangle of threads that will never be woven together.

If convincing is so seldom possible, does that make the discussions ultimately moot?

So what are we left with? Just to be clear, I’ll restate the major points I’ve tried to establish thus far (sorry if my syntax is not technically right):

[A-1] Humans create knowledge - knowledge is all the mind can work with
[A-2] Use of the senses results in a certain kind of knowledge - particulate knowledge (that is, knowledge from our experience and interaction with particles)
[A-3] Particulate knowledge cannot contain information that the senses cannot capture
[A-4] Our senses do not inform us about everything that exists
[A-5] Humans are able to think apart from particulate knowledge
[A] Particulate knowledge is incomplete

[B1] Humans can only ask questions about what they can think about - that is, they can only ask certain questions
[B2] If we can only ask certain questions, we can only gather certain answers
[B3] As we can only assemble certain questions and answers, we then form certain expectations, inferences, and directives with regards to what can be discovered
[B] Our expectations, inferences, and directives are incomplete

[C1]Any system that advocates the the exclusivity of [A] and [B] is necessarily incomplete as to what knowledge it can form
[C2] Modern-day science claims to to be the path to objective truth
[C3] Modern-day science posits [A] and [B]
[C4] Modern-day science cannot satisfy its claim, that being [C3]
[C] Modern-day science is logically fallacious

* * *

Science, though invaluable to human progress and as a method to answer some “whys,” cannot answer every “why.”

Here is a very delicate point, but in closing, one that I would like to leave you with:

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The great irony of the scientific method

What I’m about to suggest might seem, to some, absolutely outlandish, but I think if you follow the reasoning, you’ll see that there is some merit – that science is inherently self-defeating – inherently unscientific.

For something to be considered a scientifically valid hypothesis, if must meet a few requirements. The hypothesis must be testable and those tests must be repeatable. The results must be observable. The hypothesis must be falsifiable.

Now here is the irony:

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Let’s throw around some ideas about truth, and what actually makes one “valid.” A skeptical person asks, “Well, what good is it? So what if there is truth outside the reach of the scientific method? No one will agree on it! It’s a waste of time.”

This kind of response reveals an ever present presumption which underpins the hard scientific impetus, and it is one I’ve not yet heard discussed. It is this:

“Truth is only valuable if every one has the potential to agree with it. No one’s demanding that you do agree, but if there is no evidence, if there are no meaningful experiments, you don’t even give dissenters the possibility of being convinced, and you’ll just wind up in a relativistic hubbub.”

This can be nothing else but a presumption, and it lies at the heart of the scientific process. That is, the value or quality of a truth is tied to the potential for every human to embrace it, or, whether it is a candidate for universal agreement. This then means that a truth, even if only subscribed to by one person is inconsequential, regardless of whether it is truth or not. The ultimate distillation of that is that truth is in and of itself, irrelevant.

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A brief aside to talk with our friend David

I’ve just been reading a passage from David Hume’s A treatise of Human Nature*, about how we can come to some level of certainty in our investigations. It makes some good points (which I agree with and have thus far in my investigation, not disagreed with), and at other points falls catastrophically on its face. Let’s go!

[Edit: I have removed the first argument I made about this passage from Hume as I possibly have misunderstood a term he uses – demonstrable sciences – and applied to it meaning which he did not. I have thus replaced the older argument with what I feel to be a much stronger one. Thank you Dan for pointing out my error – I would hate to have continued on in it!]

We are permitted to substitute words for other words which would still manage to convey the initial concept accurately. “Concepts” afford us that luxury. We will apply such a substitution here, in order to make the argument more obvious to the reader:

Hume says these two things in the passage:

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Every “why”

Now the scientist (or at least, the cynical one) would say, “Well if something exists that doesn’t interact with the 4 fundamental forces, can’t be observed, tested, or even proven to exists, then its irrelevant to us and has no impact on us – how can it? Science deals with those things and so is is equipped to answer every why that is relevant to human existence. Anything else is just guess work, and who’s to say your conclusion is more valid than mine?”

This is the expression of an entrenched philosophy (positivism), and I believe is actually the absence of any sort of mature philosophy or serious thinking the matter through.

Since we can’t verify this scientifically, we will have to do so rationally. There are only three possibilities for what the scientific process is capable of answering:

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Is science the only “way of knowing”?

Forthwith, my arguments have primarily to do with a particular persuasion, and a particular mode of thinking. This position has become the prevalent one within the scientific discipline, and in my estimation is the joining together of two separate philosophies:

Empiricism: experience and the senses are to be emphasized in truth discovery.

Positivism: the only truth that can be discovered is through strict scientific method.

For many people, positivism would simply be seen as the natural result of “empiricism,” in that empiricism (as a method) involves the process of testing a hypothesis, and establishing (or trying to establish) objectivity through evidence.

I, however, see the need list them separately so we can consider the whole equation:

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Implications of particulate knowledge

So, what’s the big deal? What impact does this have on the scientific process? It has a dramatic impact: we can only ask scientific questions about that which we have the capacity to observe. What we have the capacity to observe – what particulate knowledge we then go on to form – is a direct and explicit result of the mechanisms of the mind: programming, intent, and knowledge we’ve already formed. These all contribute to where we’ll look, how we will investigate, and what conclusions we will draw.

Our working paradigm for what is – our expectation of what can be known – is shaped entirely by our input. We have 5 sensory input pathways. That’s all. And yet, people will become violent in defense of the purity and totality of what can be known through scientific process, which only works with particulate knowledge. We do not know what lies beyond the veil of our 5 input pathways. We cannot even conceive of another sense that we could then search for it or test it.

I’ll restate it because it’s so important: we can only ask scientific questions about that which we have the capacity to observe, and what particulate knowledge we then go on to form, is a direct and explicit result of the mechanisms of the mind.

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A basic framework for the mind

So we have total data – the entirety of existence. I would now like to move on from there to talk about humans, and our capacity to apprehend.

It is my belief that the only thing humans are capable of working with is knowledge. Where we’re talking about logic, history, shopping lists, faith, or hatred, all of this I’ defining as knowledge – the contents of the mind. The analogy of binary – the 1’s and 0’s a computer uses – helps to illustrate what I mean. The exclusive and internal language or processing. Yes, the category of knowledge is far more abstract, open to debate, and uncertain as far as any fundamental property is concerned, but I think it’s fairly safe to say that a mind can only use knowledge. This would seem to be somewhat self-evident – the mind creates and interprets knowledge, and in turn, knowledge only exists in the mind.

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