This Paper is Equally Likely to be for Another Class
(Question 3)
I. Introduction
To shake he very grounds one basis their beliefs on can be quite an altering experience. Or it can also offer a viewpoint that would appear the exact same with only a semantic difference that truly does not affect the viewpoint. A fundamental change of principal, while it must be examined what exactly changed is always an unsure proposal as often the motivations of those who discover it will find a way to shape it into what it once was close to. The language presented by Coone, based on Quine’s ideas represents this in the idea of a paradigm shift. It is thought that the believers in one paradigm will defend it to the death, altering any system of results to defend paradigm A, until it is impossible but to switch to paradigm B. In the same sense, it seems almost inevitable that while Quine finds difficulty with what he acknowledges as the two dogmas of empiricism, he finds that he will try to preserve what he can.
What he finds, however, is a force to be reckoned with as it will challenge the basic building blocks of not only the theory but of the modern empiricist’s theory of knowledge. This finding will push Quine to reject more than just what appears to be a small problem in this philosophy, but to make a thrust that would upset the very rationale behind science.
II. The Dogmas
While it may seem somewhat self evident that to accept that an analytic/synthetic division is mutually exclusive, the slippery slope that appears in front of one is not expected after taking this mere, seemingly innocent step. The problem with this step lies with the verification methods used to verify that something is necessary or that it is actually the way that the world is.[1]
The problem with this lies in the idea of reductionism[2]. Reductionism is basically the idea that we do not need to look at the context in which a situation occurs but that we may confirm it individually, and that that confirmation will be universal. The problem with this becomes apparent when you try to boil water. Water generally boils at 100 degrees Celsius. But this varies depending on height, purity of water, and I’m sure other such properties. The other problem is that the dependencies of one event, one test, one verification on other events and conditions. Reductionism is then the idea that verifying anything only verifies what you have set out to, but at the same time it seems it could verify the conditions that were the cause of whatever experiment you set out to verify. The problem then is that you can verify a plethora of events in a single act of attempted verification.
This becomes rather troubling when one realizes that it if we set out to verify the moon is made of cheese, and that if it were made of cheese then space was square, and decided it was, we might have also witnessed along the way the curvature of time and space and concluded that our orbit is only a square around the sun and that we have been living in a false perception. This false perception hid the fact that the moon was made of cheese from us, in which case these two things would both be synonymous if we gave them both the same conditions for verification. It would be equivalent to suddenly discovering that a bachelor was an unmarried man.
The difficulty in this is it seems that through the process of verification we are almost creating new definitions out of the very air before us, and assigning them meaning as if they had been a relic set in stone. If we apply a synthetic definition to something, we find that it is composed of analytic definitions that were noted previously, giving it then a redundant meaning of new conditions. It would be as if you were handed a set of integers and told to add them together and find all the combinations you could. Eventually you could not come up with anymore integers, and would hence be unable to discover any new integers without adding one to the highest or subtracting one to the lowest. In this way, it is against the logic of this system that new ideas could come into it without the advent of new data emerging from some hence unknown circumstance.
In the same way, reductionism is not just wrong, but neglects everything except what is the object of its interest. If you are seeking to prove that lightning is not god’s way of smiting an unbeliever, yet it always strikes something, you may be hard pressed to find it. Concluding that the earth and every living thing, be it plant, animal, or mineral seems like a childish conclusion. But if what you decided you saw was a vengeful creator taking out his aggression with the tool that symbolizes his rage, you may very well feel this is a coherent view. After all, that is why they used to keep a town’s gunpowder in the church cellars. It would be as if every time you saw the sun rise, you heard the bells of a clock going off. A child might conclude that every time he hears these bells, the sun will rise, and that the sun rises when bells ring. Unfortunately as Pavlov’s dogs found out, sound does not create action. The sun rises for many more reasons than the hour of the day, the ringing of bells, or even the crowing of a rooster.
What this boils down to is the fact that an event can not simply be boiled down into an A causes B effect, and this idea universalized to every situation. We do not only gather our data through our senses, but every event is a unique situation with causes and circumstances that are not immediately available at first glance. It would be as if you saw a solar eclipse and decided that the sun would never appear again, only to find later that the sun never disappeared, but that an object passed directly between it and earth. Reductionism rests on the basis that each event can be distilled into an A causes B relationship, and neglects even the most fundamental assumption that there is more at work than in a controlled experiment in a lab.
III. Consequences
There are many consequences of course that would follow from the rejection of these ideas. Any time a fundamental idea is banished to the realm of academic history, it proceeds to leave those who followed it at a loss of where they will be left to go from there. One of the most extreme consequences, stemming from the loss of a reliable method to prove something, is that you can not prove anything. If something ( eX) can be caused by anything(X), it seems that anything(X) can cause everything(X)! Or it could be that nothing can be caused at all and that Hume was right that there is no such thing as discernable cause and effect. Or it could just be that under the right circumstances, nothing causes everything or vice versa. This would of course lead to the rejection of the law of non contradiction, so it seems that instead of throwing out one of the key concepts we hold true of reality, a paradigm shift is in order.
Though these are somewhat severe consequences, the theory that embodies them all is the theory of underdetermination[3]. This theory is the idea that for every any situation, or for any observation, there are a multitude of theories that may provide an explanation, but that each theory is logically inconsistent with the others. We may orbit around the sun, or Ra might bring the sun across the sky in his chariot, followed by the moon later on that night. Now, since we have gone to space, we have found that the sun does actually orbit us and this is not some optical illusion or that it is indeed the will of the Egyptian god that he carries the sun across the sky. But in the same way, other situations that may appear to have multiple and true solutions would appear to be logically incoherent as we could not judge either as correct.
Imagine working out a math problem and having absolutely no idea what the right answer is do to the fact that the signs you were using may in fact mean their exact opposite, and honestly, who are you to decide which is the correct term to use in its place? Or for that matter the use of language. We could not know the true meaning of the words we’ve created, as it would seem there are many differing opinions in many dictionaries. We often hear others misuse words around us, and find them to be quite odd and rather obtuse, but who are we to judge their use of a word when the definition and the language itself is all relative to the book written that explains this created tool? All things would then become relative, and as Quine says: “Each man is given a scientific heritage plus a barrage of sensory stimulation; and the considerations which guide him in warping his scientific heritage to fit his continuing sensory promptings are, where rational, pragmatic.”[4]
At best then, the whole of science is reduced to a relative and foggy swamp of pseudo-knowledge. Through this it would seem that Quine would even leave logic up to not only revision but complete destruction, as our sensory input changes.
IV. Evaluation
In all honesty, the very idea of empiricism seems perched precariously over a well of chaos, that if it were to slip off any of its dogmas it would land in a realm that would put even an ethical relativist to shame. I agree that these dogmas must be disposed of, but in their place a new epistemology would have to be founded, and a clear concept of universal ideas and the necessity of a coherent proof of not only truth but a proof that would stand up under scrutiny as one independent of others. The only problem with this is that, as Davidson points out, one can not escape the idea of a conceptual scheme. Thus, it seems only logical that we must remain silent of what we can not speak as Wittgenstein posited.
It seems that there must exist a metaphysical truth, a truth that is not only outside of the realm in which it must be verified but is absolute in itself. The closes we have is the idea of identity, a=a, which must inherently be true unless we remove the law of non contradiction. What would be needed then would be an undeniable absolute. This concept however seems not to stand up to reason due to the fact that it would be self verifying, and what else could we verify it with? In a way it would seem that the best we can do would be to latch onto the notion of pragmatism, at least as far as science suggests, because electricity is a pleasant commodity to have.
While pragmatism suffices for living and seems to broaden our base of practical and useful knowledge and application, it falls short of what we strive for in the form an actual understanding of what we know and how we know it, in addition to finding a truth with which to compare ideas and discoveries. For years, quicksilver was thought to be the gift of god and a true cure for any ailment. It didn’t matter if whoever imbibed the sacred metal died – they were simply too far gone and too sick to gain its benefit. But we later developed out medical knowledge and found out that there was no need to imbibe any medicine, we could simply bleed the evil sickness out of our bodies. Again, large strides have improved out science in yet another way; we now possess the complex knowledge to take pills made from compounds we barely understand, but after all, it is progress.
V. Conclusion
Empiricism then seems to have disappeared and gone missing. After all, what is the point of empiricism if there is nothing to verify? Doesn’t that go against the supposed lexical usage of the term, contradicting it and readily placing it in the bin of untruths? It would be hard to have empiricism without anything to verify, and without any principle of verification.
With empiricism gone, it appears to have sunk the ship of knowledge, and Quine seems to be claiming that we simply float along on whatever works in an instant, but we are never able to truly navigate as we do not understand the motion of the stars, let alone those of the waves, or of even where the waves are generated from.
Though I would like to conclude that pragmatism is just fine and has no problems of its own, it seems that the consequences of this belief put us not only back at square one for analytics, but suggest a need for a complete overhaul of epistemology and a hunt for a universal. We need a concrete fact, any one will do, one that can not be shaken by alternate sense data we can not escape. But as the blind well never know a rainbow, we too can not escape our subjective hindrance to the world around us.
Citations to:
Baillie, James. 2003. Contemporary Analytic Philosophy. New Jersey: Pearson Education
