A couple of times in this blog I have referred to figures connected with that strange, loose agglomeration of public intellectuals, pundits and ex-professors, known as the Intellectual Dark Web, whose opinions Youtube regularly recommends for my degustation. In tonight's post, I want to talk about them some more, focussing particularly on the theories of four of them. Specifically, I want to talk about Bret Weinstein, his brother Eric Weinstein, Jordan Peterson, and Sam Harris, in that order. What these thinkers have in common is a certain kind of philosophic bravado, an intellectual boldness – they all either subscribe to or claim to have invented Theories of Everything. We could call it genius or we could call it hubris. There is of course nothing wrong with having opinions on Life, the Universe and Everything, and if someone has an opinion on these topics, we should expect that someone to believe it true. Likewise, we would expect that particular someone to want to communicate his or her theory to as many people as possible, especially if he or she believes the theory novel, groundbreaking, and merits exposure. Social media today (and yes, Youtube can be considered social media) enables a person to reach an audience of potentially millions, so long as the algorithm falls out in his or her favour. Fame, additionally, itself has a certain allure. Oscar Wilde said that "There is only one thing in life worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about", and intelligent people are not immune to the siren song of celebrity. I have noticed particularly that Peterson takes pride in the number of clicks his clips receives, that it feeds his ego. Peterson is not inured against vanity and it is possible that he may have been destroyed by it, by his fame or notoriety. Not only is Youtube full of clips by people like Peterson and Harris interviewing other people (or interviewing each other), it is full of clips of people talking about Peterson and Harris, typically eighteen years olds who think Harris wonderful or who once thought Harris wonderful, changed their minds, and want the world to know why. This meta-punditry can make people stars by association as I think might have happened recently with Lex Fridman. I myself might not be immune to the siren song of celebrity but there is little chance of me becoming famous so long as this blog only receives two hits a day. Suffice it to say – the type of person who believes he or she can change the world with a theory is also the type of person who loves the spotlight.
Since I have been in lockdown, I have become a fan of the Dark Horse live stream hosted by Bret Weinstein and his wife Heather Heying. Bret was an academic, specialising in biology, who became famous as a result of the catastrophe that occurred at Evergreen State College when ultra-Woke students rose up in revolt against professors, including Weinstein, they deemed part some kind of oppressive white heteronormative patriarchy. Since being forced out of Evergreen, Weinstein, I believe, has made his living entirely through his online presence, his podcasts. (I might be wrong about this.) The live streams are fascinating – Weinstein and Heying are intelligent, sure-footed, knowledgeable and informed while also being personable and charming. They take every question posed to them, including the ones that seem on face value silly, quite seriously. But just because Bret Weinstein is smart and likeable doesn't mean he is right about everything.
Weinstein is a proponent of evolutionary biology. This theory, taken to its extreme, says that all features of living organisms can be explained as being the results of evolution, of natural selection (and other mechanisms such as genetic drift) operating on random genetic variation. The features that can be explained include not only physiology, but also culture and psychology. For instance, Weinstein argues that religion must possess some kind of adaptive value because all human societies have had some form of religion for millennia. A couple of years ago I watched a debate between Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson about religion with Weinstein as the mediator. Harris thinks all religions are bad and that we should get rid of all of them. Peterson is harder to pin down but he seems to believe in some kind of Judeo-Christian deity. Weinstein, both figuratively and literally, sat between the two – an atheist who thinks religion serves some kind of evolutionary purpose and so shouldn't need to be extirpated. Weinstein didn't invent evolutionary biology but he is currently one of it its foremost advocates. I have inveighed against evolutionary biology in the past, partly because I did not think it could explain homosexuality, partly for other reasons. I have been thinking about this in the last couple of days and I think evolutionary biology and homosexuality actually can be reconciled – if we suppose that the Western world has misdefined the word 'homosexual'. If we suppose that sexuality is really a continuum from totally homosexual to totally heterosexual, if we suppose that there are lots of bisexual men and women in the world who do not identify as such, it may be possible to say that some inclination to homosexuality among a subset of the world's human population may be an evolutionary adaption of some sort. It has taken me a long time to arrive at this tentative conclusion because I myself am so strongly heterosexual and have had in the past a profound aversion to homosexuality in all its manifestations.
Despite recent developments, homosexuality remains a stubborn issue for evolutionary biologists. Another obdurate issue is ageing, referred to by biologists as 'senescence'. Why do we get older and, if we are lucky enough not to be killed by car accidents or volcanoes, at last die of old age? If we accept the tenets of evolutionary biology, an organism that has a longer period of reproductive fitness should be more likely to have more offspring than its cohorts. So there should be selective pressure towards a longer reproductive phase and a longer life. And yet, we age – we get grey hair, a middle age spread, wrinkles, and hardened arteries. Women lose the capability to become pregnant with menopause and men's fertility also decreases as they age, albeit more gradually. If we suppose that in our ancient past, say an hundred thousand years ago, no one lived past the age of forty because of disease, starvation, or predation, we might suppose that Evolution didn't care about octogenarians. But, to the extent that some people have always died of diseases associated with old age, there should have been some selective pressure towards a longer life span, even if that pressure was small. Perhaps there has indeed been some pressure. Some do say that fifty is the new forty.
An important manifestation of ageing is ever shortening telomeres. "What's a telomere?" you may well ask. A telomere is a structure at the end of a chromosome, a little like like a cap or aglet; when a chromosome replicates itself (during mitosis) it is unable to copy its whole length and so some non-coding DNA at the end of the chromosome acts as a fail-safe. The more often a cell divides, the shorter its telomeres become; there is some evidence that shorter telomeres contribute to the diseases of old age, bring about cell death (known as 'apoptosis'). I often used to wonder, having learned a little about telomeres, why a sperm cell isn't as old as old as the man who produced it, why we aren't born as old as our parents. I now know that there is an enzyme, telomerase, that lengthens telomeres. This enzyme is present in germs cells, such as those found in the testicles, but absent in somatic cells. This raises the question: if ever shortening telomeres and consequently cellular senescence can be reversed by an enzyme that occurs in some bodily tissues, why isn't it present in all bodily tissues?
And now we bring Bret Weinstein back in. In 2002, Weinstein and some collaborators published a paper called, in part, "The reserve-capacity hypothesis". Weinstein argued that the same mechanism that causes cellular senescence reduces the possibility of cancerous tumours forming when an organism is young. The logic is that a cancerous tumour occurs when a cell goes renegade, becomes immortal, and starts producing a legion of immortal descendants; telomeric diminishment prevents tumours from becoming uncontrollable by killing them off. There is a trade-off between avoiding cancer when young and the diseases associated with senescence when old. The notion behind Weinstein's hypothesis is 'antagonistic pleiotropy', the idea that an adaption can be beneficial to an organism when it is juvenile but detrimental when it gets older. An even more fundamental notion behind Weinstein's hypothesis is that, because he believes all the details of life can be explained evolutionarily, he thinks that ageing itself must have some kind of evolutionary purpose.
I do not think Weinstein's hypothesis can be correct. To either defend or refute it, we would need to work out a mathematical model of the growth or decline of a population that takes into account reproduction, death as a result of external environmental factors, death as the result of cancer, and death as the result of senescence. I was thinking about this last night and though I haven't worked out the mathematics of such a model, I don't think it would be that complicated. My hunch is that extended life span would always win out. My chief objection to Weinstein's hypothesis, however, is simple. If it were true that ever-shortening telomeres prevents cancer, we would expect cancer to be a disease that affects young people more than old people, because young people have longer telomeres. The obvious fact, however, is that the likelihood of getting cancer increases with age. And the somatic cells of old people already have short telomeres. It is possible that I have misunderstood Bret's hypothesis but, simply put, the fundamental question is, "Why is death inevitable? Why does everyone die?" and I don't think Bret's hypothesis has answered this most intractable of problems.
Bret Weinstein subscribes to a Theory of Everything, evolutionary biology, the idea that all features of biological systems can be explained as being the results of Darwinian evolution. But he didn't invent this theory. In contrast, his brother Eric Weinstein has come up with an original honest-to-God Theory of Everything all on his own. The field is physics rather than biology but the confidence (or hubris) is the same. A couple of days ago, I googled Eric Weinstein and found, on Youtube, a strange clip, published on April Fools' Day this year, in which Eric, quarantined at home, presents his theory of Geometric Unity. Eric had presented this theory before, at Oxford in 2013, but although he has been hosting his own podcast, the Portal, since June 2019, this is the first time he has talked his theory publicly since then. Eric Weinstein is not currently an academic but it seems he came up with this theory while completing a PhD in mathematical physics in 1992 or sometime just before then. The theory has been something he has privately obsessed over for thirty years (while working as managing director of Peter Thiel's investment firm). I lack the mathematical expertise to judge whether his hypothesis is plausible or not – it involves something known as the 'observerce' which has fourteen dimensions, and, in order to understand Eric Weinstein's theory, one needs to understand General Relativity first. Although I got to grips with Special Relativity a long time ago, General Relativity remains beyond my comprehension, although I understand it much better now than I did a fortnight ago because I have been attempting to educate myself about it by means of Wikipedia entries and Youtube clips. It is possible that Weinstein's theory is correct but it doesn't seem that there has been any discussion of it within the Physics community. Perhaps because he has now disseminated it publicly, such discussion will soon occur. An objection to it, apparently, is that he predicts the existence of particles that would already have been found by the Large Hadron Collider if they existed. Still, I would like Eric Weinstein's theory to be true, if for no other reason than to applaud his bravado, his being an outsider speaking truth to the establishment intolerant of novel ideas.
One of the newer voices within the punditry who comprise the Intellectual Dark Web or who are loosely connected with it (or who want to be connected with it) is Lex Fridman. Not long after I watched Eric Weinstein's clip, I watched Fridman interview Weinstein about Geometic Unity. Weinstein became visibly annoyed with Fridman because Fridman couldn't follow Weinstein's account of it. Weinstein seems to think that anyone who has an interest in the deepest questions in physics and maths, such as the questions "Is a Grand Unified Theory possible? And, if so, what is it?", can understand the problem simply by doing a little research, and blamed Fridman for not understanding. Anyone, he seems to be saying, who puts in the requisite effort should be able to see that General Relativity, Dirac's theory of matter, and the Yang-Wells-Maxwell-Higgs theory don't fit well together, and that a better, more encompassing theory is needed. This is like saying that anyone who picks up a guitar, with a little effort, should be able to play as well as Jimi Hendrix. In fact, to be good at anything requires the right kind of talent and lots and lots of application. I agree that it would be good for people to make the effort to understand and decently critique Weinstein's hypothesis but those people should be professional physicists. To take it out on poor Lex Fridman seems a little mean.
Another public intellectual who has proposed a Theory of Everything is Jordan Peterson. Peterson's theory isn't biological or physics-based; rather it encompasses psychology, sociology, and anthropology. Peterson's core idea, his idee fixe, is that life consists of a battle between chaos and order with the ego in between – generally speaking we live our lives within a world of fixed meanings but occasionally chaos intrudes forcing us to reassess our priorities and usual procedures. Peterson's theory is inevitably tripartite, a misreading of Jung. Order is the father, chaos is the mother, and in between is the son, the hero, the logos. If this seems sexist to you, you'd be right – Peterson is a misogynist and I have no idea how he can have, as he seems to have, a reasonably cordial relationship with his wife and daughter. About six months ago I read his magnum opus Maps of Meaning – or, rather, I read half of it. I had decided that if I was going to be critical of Peterson, I should do him the justice of reading his most important book. But I was overwhelmed with boredom halfway through, during his seemingly unending discussion of Mesopotamian myth, and set it aside permanently. When the libraries reopen, I will borrow it again and finish it. Someone who did manage to read the whole thing is Nathan Robinson; I highly recommend his piece about it in The Magazine of Current Affairs "The Intellectual We Deserve" (https://www.currentaffairs.org/2018/03/the-intellectual-we-deserve). Robinson's criticism of Peterson centres on Peterson's obscurantism, his mixing of banal platitudes with ridiculous assertions all dressed up in language so tortuous and byzantine that it becomes impossible to work out what position Peterson is actually taking on anything. Personally, I found it tedious and endlessly repetitive. Peterson's central idea is that humans are goal-seeking agents and that, so long as we are inhabiting 'explored territory' and are attaining our goals in the ways we expect, we are happy. If a little chaos intrudes, we reassess our procedures for attaining our short-term goals but, if a lot of chaos intrudes, we are forced to reassess the goals themselves, in short reassess everything. The distress we experience when this happens can lead to violence and war. Peterson repeats this core idea over and over again, and sees it reflected in ancient myth, across cultures, and across religions. The problem with Peterson's core 'insight' is that it is so vague and general as to be unfalsifiable. Those people who see life as the pursuit of one goal after another may find that his world-view resonates with theirs, but it didn't resonate with me in the slightest. It is completely foreign to me. I myself am not goal seeking at all; rather I just allow myself to float with the tide as it ebbs in and out. Perhaps I should read Peterson's book 12 Rules for Life and admit that existence is a constant war against everyone else and that I should take responsibility for my life.
Karl Popper said that one of hallmarks of much pseudoscience is that it is unfalsifiable. A question we could ask evolutionary biologists is, "What evidence could refute your claim that all features of living organisms are the result of chance mutation and natural selection?" If the evolutionary biologist cannot give an answer, evolutionary biology isn't a real science. Freud asserted that dreams are an expression of repressed desire and that the proof of this is the content of dreams; likewise evolutionary biologists argue that a biological feature must be an adaption to past circumstances because an organism possesses it. Although I lack the mathematical nous to understand Eric Weinstein's theory of Geometrical Unity, the problem with it may be that it, too, is unfalsifiable. And quite obviously Peterson's theory is unfalsifiable. The problem of unfalsifiability may bedevil all potential Theories of Everything.
And now, finally, I turn to Sam Harris.
In The Moral Landscape, Harris presents a Theory of Everything applicable to morality. Now, I haven't actually read The Moral Landscape but I have read and heard enough about it that I feel I can venture an opinion on it. Harris argues that morally good actions are those that increase human well-being. His is thus a kind of utilitarianism. He makes two important claims: that this theory follows inevitably from science, from our understanding of the objective world, and that our definition of human well-being is open to revision as our understanding of science improves. He thinks that it is self-evident that human flourishing is an objective good. He derives an 'ought' from an 'is'. I used to believe in utilitarianism but no longer do so, and want to give some reasons why.
The problem with utilitarianism is that we can imagine scenarios in which a utilitarian calculation produces a result that runs counter to the ordinary morality that informs our everyday life. Suppose I am extremely hungry and can satisfy my hunger by shoplifting a packet of biscuits from the supermarket. Suppose furthermore that the supermarket won't even notice that the packet of biscuits is missing. If we accept Harris's theory, my shoplifting a packet of biscuits increases the net amount of well-being in the world and so is not only morally permitted but morally required. In practice however, we all believe theft is wrong, regardless of the circumstances. We have accepted a rule from on high which we do not even question. A second scenario is the one we are all currently living through. Some people on the Right have argued that the net loss of sum-total well-being occasioned by shutting down the global economy, almost certainly bringing about a global economic depression, is greater than the sum-total loss of well-being occasioned by allowing a few old people to die. But most people, including Harris himself (I know this from a tweet he wrote), do not believe this. Most people believe the most important thing is to save lives. We believe this because we trust our governments to make the right decisions (at least here in New Zealand, if not in the United States.)
The word for the type of morality I subscribe to is 'deontological', a category of moral theory different to utilitarianism. The most famous deontologist is Immanuel Kant but I am not going to spend any time talking about him here. Deontology holds that an action is right or wrong to the extent that it conforms or fails to conform to a set of rules, and has nothing to do with any consequences it brings about. It is just such a deontological schema that is our default moral setting. Consider the following example. About three weeks ago, David Clark, the Minister of Health here in New Zealand, was found to have taken his mountain bike to a mountain bike trail at Signal Hill near Dunedin for a ride, in contravention of lockdown rules. Even though the probability of him transmitting coronavirus to anyone or catching it himself while mountain biking alone in the wilderness is by almost any measure nonexistent, Clark was stripped of one of his portfolios and demoted. The media were unified in denouncing him; not one voice spoke up in his support. By a utilitarian standard, he had done nothing wrong, but he had violated the isolation rules established by the government. This shows that our default moral setting is deontological. I'll give another example. My mother and I inhabit the same bubble and have only interacted with each other for over a month. The day before yesterday some friends of hers walked over to the apartment block she lived in and we all sat out the front, several meters apart, drinking beer or wine and conversing. From a utilitarian perspective, we had done little wrong. But my mother didn't sleep at all that night, plagued by pangs of remorse. We were guilty of having broken, in a small way, the quarantine rules.
Morality begins at home. Children are told by their parents to do what they are told and to always tell the truth, or be punished. As adults, social authorities take the place of our parents in telling us what we should or shouldn't do. The rule, "Always tell the truth!" is a maxim very strongly supported by Sam Harris. But Harris fails to recognise that there may be occasions when lying might increase human well-being. One argument for religion is that, if people believe that if they do the right thing they will go to heaven or otherwise go to hell, even if this belief is false (even if they have been lied to), it increases the amount of well-being in the world because it encourages people to act virtuously. This argument is one Harris and the other New Atheists, such as Hitchens and Dawkins, vehemently oppose, but they haven't disproved it. It seems to me that morality is simply those set of rules established democratically by a government for the good governance of a nation. This raises the question: can a government ever be wrong? The abolishing of the Jim Crow laws in the 'sixties and the recent legalisation of cannabis in many American states shows that elected officials are themselves subject to higher moral laws. Every religion in the world preaches the central doctrine, "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you", a doctrine related although not identical with Kant's Categorical Imperative. The universality of this precept suggests that it, rather than any utilitarian calculation, is the foundation of morality. Children do not calculate the future utility of their actions when the decide what to do or not do – and neither do adults. We simply follow the rules we have been taught.
In this post, I have discussed four members of the Intellectual Dark Web. All four either subscribe to or claim to have invented Theories of Everything. Bret Weinstein subscribes to Evolutionary Biology. Eric Weinstein claims to have discovered a Grand Unified Theory that reconciles particle physics with General Relativity. Jordan Peterson claims to have discovered that human nature is a battle between order and chaos. And Sam Harris claims that morality can emerge from science, that morality is objective. At least three of the four are wrong. The question I ask myself sometimes is whether I could come up with a Theory of Everything myself or at least answer some of the philosophical problems that bother us. Probably not. But it is worth trying.
Monday, 27 April 2020
Friday, 17 April 2020
Analytic a posteriori truths
According to Wikipedia, many philosophers starting with Kant (who invented the terminology) have rejected the category of analytic a posteriori truths. In tonight's post, I wish to discuss the likelihood that all propositions that we consider analytic do indeed fall into this category and do so because language is learnt. This post follows on from a previous post I wrote titled 'The analytic-synthetic distinction". I shall also discuss the possibility that regret is an evolutionary adaption and say something more about my own life. I fear that this blog is no longer as interesting as it once was, that I no longer write as well as I once did, but I have insightful thoughts in my head and I want to get them down in written form. I hope that the reader will take the time to read a somewhat stylistically unflashy essay and engage with the argument it makes even if you find the subject matter a little abstruse.
We need to start with some definitions. We need to define a priori, a posteriori, analytic, and synthetic. One standard definition of an a priori truth is that such a truth is known independent of experience. A posteriori truths are known by virtue of experience. The distinction between a priori truths and a posteriori truths is epistemological. Analytic truths are propositions that are true by virtue of the meanings of the words they contain while synthetic truths are propositions that are true by virtue of the way they relate or correspond to facts in the outside world. The distinction between analytic and synthetic propositions is linguistic. All interesting propositions are synthetic; analytically true propositions don't tell us anything we don't already know. Combining these two distinctions, we arrive at four possible categories of proposition:
1. Analytic a priori truths. These are in essence tautologies.
2. Analytic a posteriori truths. Kant rejected this category as being self contradictory.
3. Synthetic a priori truths. These are interesting truths that we know without recourse to evidence from the real world.
4. Synthetic a posteriori truths. These are truths which tell us something we didn't know about the world in which we live in, based on empirical evidence.
Because Kant rejected the second category, in his view all truths are analytic a priori, synthetic a posteriori, or synthetic a priori. The empiricists, such as Hume, had believed that all knowledge is acquired from experience and would thus have rejected the idea of synthetic a priori knowledge if they had known this term for it; Kant however devotes much of his great work The Critique of Pure Reason to defending the idea that we are born with innate knowledge, that we possess faculties that yield true interesting true beliefs independently of experience. In particular, Kant argued that we are born with an understanding of space, time, and causality that is nontrivial, interesting. Kant also argues that the truths of mathematics are synthetic a priori truths. I shall come back to mathematics later in this essay.
A simple way to clarify the distinction between analytic a priori truths and synthetic a posteriori truths is through a famous, classic example. Consider the proposition, "All bachelors are unmarried". This statement cannot be refuted, is true in all possible worlds, because the word "bachelor" means "an unmarried man". It is also uninteresting because it can be re-expressed as the tautology, "All unmarried men are unmarried." This proposition, according to Kant and those who followed him, is an analytic a priori truth. Now, suppose I carry out interviews with one hundred bachelors and, based on these interviews, state, "All bachelors are lonely." This proposition is interesting, tells us something we didn't already know, and is based on empirical evidence. Accordingly, we describe it as synthetic a posteriori. Unlike the first proposition, the second can be refuted. If we find a single bachelor who isn't lonely, it will have proved the second proposition to be false.
At the opening of this essay, I signalled that I was going to argue in favour of a completely different position, that the propositions (or beliefs or units of knowledge) we describe as analytic are all known a posteriori. To justify this highly unorthodox opinion, I wish to talk about speech acts and definitions.
The theory of speech acts was most famously first presented by J.L. Austin, who also called them performative utterances. Speech acts come in an enormous number of flavours, from requests, questions, and answers, to promises, declarations, and much more. Speech acts do not describe the world but are intended to change the world or themselves bring about change. It is the second sort, the speech acts that themselves change the world, that I am interested in. Suppose a marriage celebrant says, "I now pronounce you man and wife". This speech acts changes the world – two people who were formally single are now wedded. Suppose a judge says, "I find you guilty and sentence you to ten years hard labour." Again this speech act changes the world – the accused is now a criminal and a prisoner. Suppose a boss says, "I now promote you to head of the human resources division" – the nature of his employee's job has now changed. Somewhat controversially I believe that when a psychiatrist says, "I now diagnose you schizophrenic" this similarly changes the world. The patient is now subject to a completely different legal and social discourse than he did previously, including the expectation that he or she will need to take medication for the rest of his or her life.
It has been a long time since I read Austin or his most important follower John Searle but, from what I can remember, they do not discuss what I believe to be the most important kind of speech act – definitions. Suppose I say, "I define the adjective 'clugy' as designating people who experienced psychosis but recovered." My utterance does not describe the world and is neither true nor false – but if you accept my definition we can then talk meaningfully about people who are clugy and people who are not in ways that will be true or false. Although my act of definition is neither true nor false, if you accept my definition, a statement like "That clugy woman recovered" will then be analytically true. If a doctor says, "I define schizophrenia as a lifelong condition that requires daily medication (like diabetes)" and another person says, "Sue recovered from schizophrenia", that second statement is analytically false, because it contradicts the definition of schizophrenia established by the doctor. All analytic propositions are derived from definitions that are learned at some time. Suppose my friend Sally has picked up the belief that the word 'bachelor' means 'a lonely man'. If she says, "All bachelors are lonely" it will be analytically true for her but synthetic, and potentially false, for me; if I say "All bachelors are unmarried" it will be analytically true for me but synthetic, and potentially false, for her. The fact that words can mean different things to different people undermines Kant's whole notion that analytic truths are known a priori without any relation to lived experience.
In my previous post about the analytic-synthetic distinction, I argued that Kant's project fails for three reasons. First, different people define words in different ways. Second, the meanings of words can change over time. And third, language is learnt. Even if we suppose for the moment that everyone in a language group defines all the words in their vocabularies in the same way and always has, language must still be learnt and this requires definitions. We can demarcate out two different types of definition, what I call specific definition and diffuse definition. Specific definition is when a person is told explicitly the definition of a word or looks it up in a dictionary. Diffuse definition is when a person, typically a child, infers the meaning of a word from the way adults are using it. The first type of definition is necessary for big, complex words (like disponible) while the second type of definition is how we typically learn normal, everyday words like 'cat' and 'table'. Because most of the words we know we learn in the second way, the line between synthetic truths and analytic truths becomes vague. According to the dictionary, cats are defined as carnivorous and so the proposition "All cats are carnivorous" is analytically true – but if we tell a ten year old child, a child who has no difficulty distinguishing cats from other animals, that her pet tabby will become unwell if it eats fruit or vegetables, it may well surprise her. The statement, "Cats are carnivorous," will be synthetic for her even though it is analytic for me.
All analytic truths are known a posteriori because we must learn the meanings of words from others in our environment at some time. Kant argued that mathematical truths are a priori synthetic. But I am going to argue that mathematical truths are a posteriori analytic because they also depend on definitions. This is a bold and controversial stance to take but I have been thinking about this for a while and finally want to lay out my theory.
Suppose I define the word 'two' by saying, "I define the word 'two' as being 'one plus one'". This definition is neither true nor false – it is another speech act. I then define the word 'three' by saying, "I define the word 'three' as being 'two plus one'". I go on to define the word 'four' by saying, "I define the word 'four' as being 'three plus one.'" Finally, I define the word' five' by saying, "I define the word 'five' as being 'four plus one." We now consider the question "What is three plus two?" By substitution, "Three plus two" is "Three plus one plus one". By substitution again, "Three plus one plus one" is "Four plus one". And this is "five". Thus "3 + 2 = 5" is a tautology. And thus an analytic truth.
I wish to make three points concerning this theory. First, of course, we don't have a different word for every possible whole number. For numbers bigger than twenty, we use a kind of algorithm to work out their names. We say, for instance, 'one million, twelve thousand and sixty three," sorting the number verbally into groups of different sizes. If we did have an entirely different word for every possible whole number, let alone every rational number, we would be required to have an infinitely large vocabulary, an impossibility. Second, arithmetic doesn't just depend on definitions and substitutions – there are also rules such as the commutative law (a + b = b + a) and the associative law ( a + (b +c) = (a +b) + c ). It may well be that mathematics is like language, that the fundamental axioms of arithmetic are analogous to Noam Chomsky's universal grammar. Finally, people may object that definitions plus rules can't explain geometry, such as the law that the internal angles of a triangle sum to 180 degrees. I admit that I haven't worked out all the details of the theory yet.
I'll finish this post by summarising its main contention. I am arguing that all analytic truths, truths that depend on meaning, are a posteriori rather than a priori because the meanings of words must be learnt. I have argued that even mathematics can be described as analytic a posteriori. When I began writing this essay, I also intended to discuss regret from an evolutionary perspective but this post is long enough already. I'll talk about it in a later post. We'll see down the track.
We need to start with some definitions. We need to define a priori, a posteriori, analytic, and synthetic. One standard definition of an a priori truth is that such a truth is known independent of experience. A posteriori truths are known by virtue of experience. The distinction between a priori truths and a posteriori truths is epistemological. Analytic truths are propositions that are true by virtue of the meanings of the words they contain while synthetic truths are propositions that are true by virtue of the way they relate or correspond to facts in the outside world. The distinction between analytic and synthetic propositions is linguistic. All interesting propositions are synthetic; analytically true propositions don't tell us anything we don't already know. Combining these two distinctions, we arrive at four possible categories of proposition:
1. Analytic a priori truths. These are in essence tautologies.
2. Analytic a posteriori truths. Kant rejected this category as being self contradictory.
3. Synthetic a priori truths. These are interesting truths that we know without recourse to evidence from the real world.
4. Synthetic a posteriori truths. These are truths which tell us something we didn't know about the world in which we live in, based on empirical evidence.
Because Kant rejected the second category, in his view all truths are analytic a priori, synthetic a posteriori, or synthetic a priori. The empiricists, such as Hume, had believed that all knowledge is acquired from experience and would thus have rejected the idea of synthetic a priori knowledge if they had known this term for it; Kant however devotes much of his great work The Critique of Pure Reason to defending the idea that we are born with innate knowledge, that we possess faculties that yield true interesting true beliefs independently of experience. In particular, Kant argued that we are born with an understanding of space, time, and causality that is nontrivial, interesting. Kant also argues that the truths of mathematics are synthetic a priori truths. I shall come back to mathematics later in this essay.
A simple way to clarify the distinction between analytic a priori truths and synthetic a posteriori truths is through a famous, classic example. Consider the proposition, "All bachelors are unmarried". This statement cannot be refuted, is true in all possible worlds, because the word "bachelor" means "an unmarried man". It is also uninteresting because it can be re-expressed as the tautology, "All unmarried men are unmarried." This proposition, according to Kant and those who followed him, is an analytic a priori truth. Now, suppose I carry out interviews with one hundred bachelors and, based on these interviews, state, "All bachelors are lonely." This proposition is interesting, tells us something we didn't already know, and is based on empirical evidence. Accordingly, we describe it as synthetic a posteriori. Unlike the first proposition, the second can be refuted. If we find a single bachelor who isn't lonely, it will have proved the second proposition to be false.
At the opening of this essay, I signalled that I was going to argue in favour of a completely different position, that the propositions (or beliefs or units of knowledge) we describe as analytic are all known a posteriori. To justify this highly unorthodox opinion, I wish to talk about speech acts and definitions.
The theory of speech acts was most famously first presented by J.L. Austin, who also called them performative utterances. Speech acts come in an enormous number of flavours, from requests, questions, and answers, to promises, declarations, and much more. Speech acts do not describe the world but are intended to change the world or themselves bring about change. It is the second sort, the speech acts that themselves change the world, that I am interested in. Suppose a marriage celebrant says, "I now pronounce you man and wife". This speech acts changes the world – two people who were formally single are now wedded. Suppose a judge says, "I find you guilty and sentence you to ten years hard labour." Again this speech act changes the world – the accused is now a criminal and a prisoner. Suppose a boss says, "I now promote you to head of the human resources division" – the nature of his employee's job has now changed. Somewhat controversially I believe that when a psychiatrist says, "I now diagnose you schizophrenic" this similarly changes the world. The patient is now subject to a completely different legal and social discourse than he did previously, including the expectation that he or she will need to take medication for the rest of his or her life.
It has been a long time since I read Austin or his most important follower John Searle but, from what I can remember, they do not discuss what I believe to be the most important kind of speech act – definitions. Suppose I say, "I define the adjective 'clugy' as designating people who experienced psychosis but recovered." My utterance does not describe the world and is neither true nor false – but if you accept my definition we can then talk meaningfully about people who are clugy and people who are not in ways that will be true or false. Although my act of definition is neither true nor false, if you accept my definition, a statement like "That clugy woman recovered" will then be analytically true. If a doctor says, "I define schizophrenia as a lifelong condition that requires daily medication (like diabetes)" and another person says, "Sue recovered from schizophrenia", that second statement is analytically false, because it contradicts the definition of schizophrenia established by the doctor. All analytic propositions are derived from definitions that are learned at some time. Suppose my friend Sally has picked up the belief that the word 'bachelor' means 'a lonely man'. If she says, "All bachelors are lonely" it will be analytically true for her but synthetic, and potentially false, for me; if I say "All bachelors are unmarried" it will be analytically true for me but synthetic, and potentially false, for her. The fact that words can mean different things to different people undermines Kant's whole notion that analytic truths are known a priori without any relation to lived experience.
In my previous post about the analytic-synthetic distinction, I argued that Kant's project fails for three reasons. First, different people define words in different ways. Second, the meanings of words can change over time. And third, language is learnt. Even if we suppose for the moment that everyone in a language group defines all the words in their vocabularies in the same way and always has, language must still be learnt and this requires definitions. We can demarcate out two different types of definition, what I call specific definition and diffuse definition. Specific definition is when a person is told explicitly the definition of a word or looks it up in a dictionary. Diffuse definition is when a person, typically a child, infers the meaning of a word from the way adults are using it. The first type of definition is necessary for big, complex words (like disponible) while the second type of definition is how we typically learn normal, everyday words like 'cat' and 'table'. Because most of the words we know we learn in the second way, the line between synthetic truths and analytic truths becomes vague. According to the dictionary, cats are defined as carnivorous and so the proposition "All cats are carnivorous" is analytically true – but if we tell a ten year old child, a child who has no difficulty distinguishing cats from other animals, that her pet tabby will become unwell if it eats fruit or vegetables, it may well surprise her. The statement, "Cats are carnivorous," will be synthetic for her even though it is analytic for me.
All analytic truths are known a posteriori because we must learn the meanings of words from others in our environment at some time. Kant argued that mathematical truths are a priori synthetic. But I am going to argue that mathematical truths are a posteriori analytic because they also depend on definitions. This is a bold and controversial stance to take but I have been thinking about this for a while and finally want to lay out my theory.
Suppose I define the word 'two' by saying, "I define the word 'two' as being 'one plus one'". This definition is neither true nor false – it is another speech act. I then define the word 'three' by saying, "I define the word 'three' as being 'two plus one'". I go on to define the word 'four' by saying, "I define the word 'four' as being 'three plus one.'" Finally, I define the word' five' by saying, "I define the word 'five' as being 'four plus one." We now consider the question "What is three plus two?" By substitution, "Three plus two" is "Three plus one plus one". By substitution again, "Three plus one plus one" is "Four plus one". And this is "five". Thus "3 + 2 = 5" is a tautology. And thus an analytic truth.
I wish to make three points concerning this theory. First, of course, we don't have a different word for every possible whole number. For numbers bigger than twenty, we use a kind of algorithm to work out their names. We say, for instance, 'one million, twelve thousand and sixty three," sorting the number verbally into groups of different sizes. If we did have an entirely different word for every possible whole number, let alone every rational number, we would be required to have an infinitely large vocabulary, an impossibility. Second, arithmetic doesn't just depend on definitions and substitutions – there are also rules such as the commutative law (a + b = b + a) and the associative law ( a + (b +c) = (a +b) + c ). It may well be that mathematics is like language, that the fundamental axioms of arithmetic are analogous to Noam Chomsky's universal grammar. Finally, people may object that definitions plus rules can't explain geometry, such as the law that the internal angles of a triangle sum to 180 degrees. I admit that I haven't worked out all the details of the theory yet.
I'll finish this post by summarising its main contention. I am arguing that all analytic truths, truths that depend on meaning, are a posteriori rather than a priori because the meanings of words must be learnt. I have argued that even mathematics can be described as analytic a posteriori. When I began writing this essay, I also intended to discuss regret from an evolutionary perspective but this post is long enough already. I'll talk about it in a later post. We'll see down the track.
Sunday, 5 April 2020
Concerning Knowledge Part 2
The study of knowledge is known as epistemology. In the previous two posts I discussed an argument for the existence of God in which I suggested that the existence of Truth (where the Truth is the set of all true propositions) justifies the idea that an omniscient knower exists. I suggested that a person's beliefs are true when they align with the beliefs of this omniscient knower. In tonight's post I wish to set this argument aside and talk about knowledge more generally. I wish to discuss the Gettier problem again. And I also wish to show that any naive understanding of the nature of knowledge is defective because it fails to take account of the fact that most knowledge is acquired through direct or indirect interactions with other knowers.
A traditional definition of knowledge, first presented but not ultimately endorsed by Plato, is that knowledge is true, justified belief. That is, for a given proposition to count as knowledge, it must be true, it must be justified, and it must be believed. Edmund Gettier raised an objection to this simple definition – I discussed the Gettier problem in the previous post and I direct the reader, if he or she is interested in it, to the article in Wikipedia about it. We can summarise the Gettier problem in the following way.
1. Smith believes P.
2. Smith believes Q.
3. P implies Q.
4. P is false.
5. Q is true.
Therefore Smith has a true justified belief in Q but it can't count as knowledge because the justification for Q is false. Smith believes Q. Q is true. And Q is justified. But it still isn't knowledge. The Gettier problem has stirred up a lot of debate among professional philosophers but the obvious solution, the solution I discussed in the previous post, receives little mention in Wikipedia. I know that I am not the first to consider this obvious solution and wonder if the compilers of Wikipedia. the lexicographers in charge, downplayed this obvious solution in favour of less persuasive solutions to encourage readers to work it out for themselves. Alternatively it could be that many of the people who call themselves philosophers are all stupid. This wouldn't surprise me.
Before I move on to presenting the obvious solution, I need to bring up a semantic issue. There is no word in English for a unit of knowledge. There is a neologism 'knol' associated with knowledge which I shall appropriate for my own purposes in this essay. A 'knol' is a proposition that is known by a subject. Although I would like to avoid using this word 'knol' in this essay, it may be necessary, even though it is clumsy and I would have preferred it if the English language was furnished with a better word.
The solution to the Getier problem is that for a true justified belief to count as knowledge, to be a 'knol', the justification must also be a true, justified belief, must also be a 'knol'. I discussed one of Gettier's examples in the previous post. I shall now quote another:
"Smith, it is claimed by the hidden interlocutor, has a justified belief that "Jones owns a Ford". Smith therefore (justifiably) concludes (by the rule of disjunction introduction) that "Jones owns a Ford, or Brown is in Barcelona", even though Smith has no information whatsoever about the location of Brown. In fact, Jones does not own a Ford, but by sheer coincidence, Brown really is in Barcelona. Again, Smith had a belief that was true and justified, but not knowledge."
Obviously, the reason that Smith's belief that "Jones owns a Ford, or Brown is in Barcelona" doesn't count as knowledge, isn't a knol, is that the justified belief that "Jones owns a ford" is false. For a true justified belief to be a knol, the justification must also be a knol. The picture I wish to present of knowledge is that it is a vast interconnected web or network of true, justified beliefs, of knols. Every knol is justified by other knols which are themselves justified by other knols. Unfortunately, this picture conjures up the possibility of an infinite regress, something I think we should try to avoid. One way to banish the possibility of an infinite regress would be to suppose that knowledge is circular: (P is justified by Q and R. R is justified by S. S is justified by P.) Another way to banish the possibility of an infinite regress, a preferable way I believe, is to drop the requirement that knols require justification, to declare that some knols are true beliefs that don't need to be justified. According to this second strategy, knowledge consists of two different types of knol – those that are justified by other knols and those that do not require justification perhaps because they are self-evident or perhaps because they are generally accepted by everyone without anybody ever challenging them. Consider another example of a Gettier problem:
"After arranging to meet with Mark for help with homework, Luke arrives at the appointed time and place. Walking into Mark's office Luke clearly sees Mark at his desk; Luke immediately forms the belief "Mark is in the room. He can help me with my logic homework". Luke is justified in his belief; he clearly sees Mark at his desk. In fact, it's not Mark that Luke saw; it was a marvelous hologram, perfect in every respect, giving the appearance of Mark diligently grading papers at his desk. Nevertheless, Mark is in the room; he is crouched under his desk reading Frege. Luke's belief that Mark is in the room is true (he is in the room, under his desk) and justified (Mark's hologram is giving the appearance of Mark hard at work)." But it isn't knowledge. Luke's belief that Mark is in the room isn't a knol even though it is both true and justified.
We can parse this example in the following way. Luke has the belief that Mark is in the room. This belief is true. This belief is justified by the Luke's perception of seeing Mark at his desk grading papers. This perception is false. However, this perception (or belief) is also justified: it is justified by the anterior belief shared by all people that sense perceptions are trustworthy. This knol ("My sense perceptions are reliable") is a knol that everyone accepts without justification, as being axiomatic. In this case it is wrong. But generally speaking such a knol, the knol that sense data is trustworthy, is fundamental to the way we make sense of the world.
So, in order to resolve the Gettier problem without assuming an infinite regress, we must suppose that some knols are true justified beliefs while other knols are simply true beliefs. We can distinguish between these two different types of knol by calling the first kind 'justified knols' and the second 'bare knols'. We might suppose that most of the knols that constitute a person's knowledge-network are of the first kind, that bare knols are like the fundamental axioms of arithmetic and the bulk of a person's knowledge consists of justified knols. But this isn't true. Most of the 'facts' that a person knows are justified by nothing whatsoever.
Consider the following example. "Earth is the third planet from the Sun". You know this and I know this. But is this belief justified? If I ask you why you believe Earth is the third planet from the Sun, you will be forced to say something like, "Someone told me it or I read it somewhere when I was a child." But you will be unable to name and cite your source. Likewise, you and I both know that an effective method to kill viruses on surfaces is to wipe the surfaces down with disinfectant. But this knol is justified, if it is justified at all, by inductions from our observations of others doing this. Although you may have been told explicitly that disinfectant kills viruses, I haven't, or if I have, have forgotten it. This raises the possibility that some of our knols are based on justifications that we have since forgotten. Can we be said to have a true, justified belief if we can no longer remember the justification for our belief?
I don't know if I have ever said this explicitly in this blog, although I think I must have, but I strongly feel that much of our knowledge of the world is derived from what we learn from others – from books, newspapers, conversation with friends and family, Wikipedia. This conviction, that much of our understanding of the world derives from hearsay, deeply informs my philosophical thinking. It puts me at odds with both the Empiricist and Rationalist traditions. Empiricists, I think
like Hume and definitely like Ayn Rand, hold that our knowledge of the world is based on our experience of the world. What we know about cats we know from our observations of cats in the real world. A strong Rationalist, however, might subscribe to the Platonic notion that we have an innate understanding of cats, that we are born with some understanding of the 'cat' Idea. I think I think that most of our knowledge is gained a posteriori but is learned indirectly, through language. I know that cats predate viciously on native birds not because I have observed them doing it or because I somehow worked it out rationally but because I have been told they do so by the media. I have never observed a neutrino and certainly could never arrive at the concept of a neutrino through reason alone; rather, I read about neutrinos in my physics textbook and have chosen to place my trust in the book's authors. Did Russia intervene in the 2016 American Election in support of Trump? I could choose to believe Fox, or I could choose to believe Nancy Pelosi and Bill Maher. Not only do we learn about the world from others, when there is differences in what people report, we must decide who to believe. I think we live in a world where there is a crisis in our collective notion of truth because misinformation spreads so easily through social media. There have always been kooks and conspiracy theorists but we live in an age where the lunatic fringe has had its voice amplified.
Something which factors into my understanding of truth is my own experience of mental 'illness'. I have experienced delusions, a long time ago. When I first became 'sick' in 2007, I formed the delusion that the world was ruled by a conspiracy of closet homosexuals. The aspect of this delusion that is interesting here is that it was unfalsifiable – there was no way I could 'reality test' it. No member of the conspiracy could be expected to blow the whistle on it; those who threatened to do so were either killed or were outed as gay and in this way destroyed. The lesson I eventually learned is to be skeptical about all my beliefs. In order to recover, and I have been recovered for a long time now, I had to dismantle all my delusions. And I had to realise that psychiatric discourse is itself insane, delusional. This is something that it is necessary for me to talk about and maybe I will in the next post.
In conclusion... In this post I have presented two somewhat different pictures of knowledge. One picture is that knowledge is a web or network of interconnected true, justified beliefs, in which every belief justifies other beliefs and is justified by other beliefs. The second picture is knols can be discreet separate factoids that we learn from a trusted source. Which picture is right? Perhaps a combination of the two. I like Bill Maher and sometimes I agree with him but sometimes (especially when he talks about Israel) I don't. When assessing truth claims we assess, compare, consider, evaluate. It is an extraordinarily complex process. This post is quite long enough now: the subject of knowledge is so big that to do it justice we might need to write ten books about it. And I haven't finished talking about it yet.
A traditional definition of knowledge, first presented but not ultimately endorsed by Plato, is that knowledge is true, justified belief. That is, for a given proposition to count as knowledge, it must be true, it must be justified, and it must be believed. Edmund Gettier raised an objection to this simple definition – I discussed the Gettier problem in the previous post and I direct the reader, if he or she is interested in it, to the article in Wikipedia about it. We can summarise the Gettier problem in the following way.
1. Smith believes P.
2. Smith believes Q.
3. P implies Q.
4. P is false.
5. Q is true.
Therefore Smith has a true justified belief in Q but it can't count as knowledge because the justification for Q is false. Smith believes Q. Q is true. And Q is justified. But it still isn't knowledge. The Gettier problem has stirred up a lot of debate among professional philosophers but the obvious solution, the solution I discussed in the previous post, receives little mention in Wikipedia. I know that I am not the first to consider this obvious solution and wonder if the compilers of Wikipedia. the lexicographers in charge, downplayed this obvious solution in favour of less persuasive solutions to encourage readers to work it out for themselves. Alternatively it could be that many of the people who call themselves philosophers are all stupid. This wouldn't surprise me.
Before I move on to presenting the obvious solution, I need to bring up a semantic issue. There is no word in English for a unit of knowledge. There is a neologism 'knol' associated with knowledge which I shall appropriate for my own purposes in this essay. A 'knol' is a proposition that is known by a subject. Although I would like to avoid using this word 'knol' in this essay, it may be necessary, even though it is clumsy and I would have preferred it if the English language was furnished with a better word.
The solution to the Getier problem is that for a true justified belief to count as knowledge, to be a 'knol', the justification must also be a true, justified belief, must also be a 'knol'. I discussed one of Gettier's examples in the previous post. I shall now quote another:
"Smith, it is claimed by the hidden interlocutor, has a justified belief that "Jones owns a Ford". Smith therefore (justifiably) concludes (by the rule of disjunction introduction) that "Jones owns a Ford, or Brown is in Barcelona", even though Smith has no information whatsoever about the location of Brown. In fact, Jones does not own a Ford, but by sheer coincidence, Brown really is in Barcelona. Again, Smith had a belief that was true and justified, but not knowledge."
Obviously, the reason that Smith's belief that "Jones owns a Ford, or Brown is in Barcelona" doesn't count as knowledge, isn't a knol, is that the justified belief that "Jones owns a ford" is false. For a true justified belief to be a knol, the justification must also be a knol. The picture I wish to present of knowledge is that it is a vast interconnected web or network of true, justified beliefs, of knols. Every knol is justified by other knols which are themselves justified by other knols. Unfortunately, this picture conjures up the possibility of an infinite regress, something I think we should try to avoid. One way to banish the possibility of an infinite regress would be to suppose that knowledge is circular: (P is justified by Q and R. R is justified by S. S is justified by P.) Another way to banish the possibility of an infinite regress, a preferable way I believe, is to drop the requirement that knols require justification, to declare that some knols are true beliefs that don't need to be justified. According to this second strategy, knowledge consists of two different types of knol – those that are justified by other knols and those that do not require justification perhaps because they are self-evident or perhaps because they are generally accepted by everyone without anybody ever challenging them. Consider another example of a Gettier problem:
"After arranging to meet with Mark for help with homework, Luke arrives at the appointed time and place. Walking into Mark's office Luke clearly sees Mark at his desk; Luke immediately forms the belief "Mark is in the room. He can help me with my logic homework". Luke is justified in his belief; he clearly sees Mark at his desk. In fact, it's not Mark that Luke saw; it was a marvelous hologram, perfect in every respect, giving the appearance of Mark diligently grading papers at his desk. Nevertheless, Mark is in the room; he is crouched under his desk reading Frege. Luke's belief that Mark is in the room is true (he is in the room, under his desk) and justified (Mark's hologram is giving the appearance of Mark hard at work)." But it isn't knowledge. Luke's belief that Mark is in the room isn't a knol even though it is both true and justified.
We can parse this example in the following way. Luke has the belief that Mark is in the room. This belief is true. This belief is justified by the Luke's perception of seeing Mark at his desk grading papers. This perception is false. However, this perception (or belief) is also justified: it is justified by the anterior belief shared by all people that sense perceptions are trustworthy. This knol ("My sense perceptions are reliable") is a knol that everyone accepts without justification, as being axiomatic. In this case it is wrong. But generally speaking such a knol, the knol that sense data is trustworthy, is fundamental to the way we make sense of the world.
So, in order to resolve the Gettier problem without assuming an infinite regress, we must suppose that some knols are true justified beliefs while other knols are simply true beliefs. We can distinguish between these two different types of knol by calling the first kind 'justified knols' and the second 'bare knols'. We might suppose that most of the knols that constitute a person's knowledge-network are of the first kind, that bare knols are like the fundamental axioms of arithmetic and the bulk of a person's knowledge consists of justified knols. But this isn't true. Most of the 'facts' that a person knows are justified by nothing whatsoever.
Consider the following example. "Earth is the third planet from the Sun". You know this and I know this. But is this belief justified? If I ask you why you believe Earth is the third planet from the Sun, you will be forced to say something like, "Someone told me it or I read it somewhere when I was a child." But you will be unable to name and cite your source. Likewise, you and I both know that an effective method to kill viruses on surfaces is to wipe the surfaces down with disinfectant. But this knol is justified, if it is justified at all, by inductions from our observations of others doing this. Although you may have been told explicitly that disinfectant kills viruses, I haven't, or if I have, have forgotten it. This raises the possibility that some of our knols are based on justifications that we have since forgotten. Can we be said to have a true, justified belief if we can no longer remember the justification for our belief?
I don't know if I have ever said this explicitly in this blog, although I think I must have, but I strongly feel that much of our knowledge of the world is derived from what we learn from others – from books, newspapers, conversation with friends and family, Wikipedia. This conviction, that much of our understanding of the world derives from hearsay, deeply informs my philosophical thinking. It puts me at odds with both the Empiricist and Rationalist traditions. Empiricists, I think
like Hume and definitely like Ayn Rand, hold that our knowledge of the world is based on our experience of the world. What we know about cats we know from our observations of cats in the real world. A strong Rationalist, however, might subscribe to the Platonic notion that we have an innate understanding of cats, that we are born with some understanding of the 'cat' Idea. I think I think that most of our knowledge is gained a posteriori but is learned indirectly, through language. I know that cats predate viciously on native birds not because I have observed them doing it or because I somehow worked it out rationally but because I have been told they do so by the media. I have never observed a neutrino and certainly could never arrive at the concept of a neutrino through reason alone; rather, I read about neutrinos in my physics textbook and have chosen to place my trust in the book's authors. Did Russia intervene in the 2016 American Election in support of Trump? I could choose to believe Fox, or I could choose to believe Nancy Pelosi and Bill Maher. Not only do we learn about the world from others, when there is differences in what people report, we must decide who to believe. I think we live in a world where there is a crisis in our collective notion of truth because misinformation spreads so easily through social media. There have always been kooks and conspiracy theorists but we live in an age where the lunatic fringe has had its voice amplified.
Something which factors into my understanding of truth is my own experience of mental 'illness'. I have experienced delusions, a long time ago. When I first became 'sick' in 2007, I formed the delusion that the world was ruled by a conspiracy of closet homosexuals. The aspect of this delusion that is interesting here is that it was unfalsifiable – there was no way I could 'reality test' it. No member of the conspiracy could be expected to blow the whistle on it; those who threatened to do so were either killed or were outed as gay and in this way destroyed. The lesson I eventually learned is to be skeptical about all my beliefs. In order to recover, and I have been recovered for a long time now, I had to dismantle all my delusions. And I had to realise that psychiatric discourse is itself insane, delusional. This is something that it is necessary for me to talk about and maybe I will in the next post.
In conclusion... In this post I have presented two somewhat different pictures of knowledge. One picture is that knowledge is a web or network of interconnected true, justified beliefs, in which every belief justifies other beliefs and is justified by other beliefs. The second picture is knols can be discreet separate factoids that we learn from a trusted source. Which picture is right? Perhaps a combination of the two. I like Bill Maher and sometimes I agree with him but sometimes (especially when he talks about Israel) I don't. When assessing truth claims we assess, compare, consider, evaluate. It is an extraordinarily complex process. This post is quite long enough now: the subject of knowledge is so big that to do it justice we might need to write ten books about it. And I haven't finished talking about it yet.
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