Maverick Philosopher

Is Empiricism Self-Refuting?

Russell says it is; I examine his claim. Substack latest.

Addenda (11/19)

Tony Flood writes,

Brian Kilmeade mentioned Ayaan Hirsi Ali's conversion to Christianity  quickly as he introduced her, one of his guests tonight, but I heard it on TV which was on in the background; I thought I had misheard Kilmeade. I've always admired her courage and considered her professed atheism in the context of her experience of Islamic terror. 

But her Wiki entry says she "converted to Christianity" (by which I hope she means that she received Christ as her savior), citing this and this. 

 

She blogged about Russell last week (as you did today): 

In 2002, I discovered a 1927 lecture by Bertrand Russell entitled “Why I am Not a Christian.” It did not cross my mind, as I read it, that one day, nearly a century after he delivered it to the South London branch of the National Secular Society, I would be compelled to write an essay with precisely the opposite title.

In high school in 1970 along the road to my Communism, I had read Russell's essay and decided I would study philosophy. I remember catching his obit in the papers, marveling at the longevity of this stellar Victorian intellectual who had been my contemporary for over a decade-and-a-half and therefore could have met. 

 

Anyway, Ali's now firmly in my Hall of Hero(in)es. Feel free to share this, which may come as news to others as it did to me.

 

Thanks, Tony. I share your high opinion of Ali. The Unherd article which I excerpted earlier is important.  I too read Russell's Why I am not a Christian in high school.  Russell was a logical and philosophical technician of high rank, but unlike his pal Wittgenstein, he wrote popular works as well. Wittgenstein, as you know, took a dim view of Russell's popular writings. Russell was secular to the core; Wittgenstein, I could easily show, had the heart of the homo religiosus despite his bladed intellect.

 

Edward writes,

Interesting, and overlaps with a central theme of the book, as follows. Assume

1 Knowledge is propositional. That is, whatever counts as knowledge has to be expressible in language as a proposition.

2 Propositions have two terms and can be affirmative or negative, universal or particular. Thus to any two terms there correspond exactly four propositions.

3 There are a finite number of term types, as set out in Locke’s classification of ‘ideas’ in Book II of the Essay.

4 The meaning of any term is derived from experience. Locke assumes that every word either signifies a simple ‘sensible idea’, or signifies a complex idea that can be analysed into simple parts.

These assumptions define what Bennett calls meaning-empiricism, and Hanna calls semantic psychologism. It follows from them that every object of human understanding is defined by a proposition whose meaning depends on experience.

In this way we can set a limit to human understanding.

Note that the empiricist project differs from the scholastic-Aristotelian one. The scholastics generally did not believe in meaning-empiricism, because they thought that the proper signification of a term is an object, not an idea. So I think to settle your question we must look at whether words signify ‘ideas’, i.e. affections of the soul, or not.

Ad (1). Is all knowledge propositional? You are making a very strong claim here: necessarily, nothing counts as knowledge that is not expressible in declarative sentences.  But knowing what something is like counts as knowledge. I know what it is like to be punched in the stomach, but not what it is like to undergo a menstrual period.  I know some people by description only, others by acquaintance only, and still others by description and by acquaintance. Isn't knowledge by acquaintance a counterexample to your thesis?  And then there is 'carnal knowledge.' Does it not count as knowledge? There is also 'know how.' My cats know how to open doors, but they would be hard-pressed to verbalize that knowledge.

Ad (2). "Thus to any two terms there correspond exactly four propositions." Since copulae are typically tensed, there have to be more. There have to be at least twelve. 'Every animal in the house was/is/will be a cat.'  4 categorical forms X 3 simple tenses = 12 different propositions.  And then there are the tenseless uses of copulae, e,g, 'The cat is an animal.'   'The triangle is a three-sided plane figure that encloses a space.' Yogi Berra joke: "You mean now?"  'God is' is either eternally true/false or omnitemporally true/false, and tenseless either way.

Ad (3). OK.

Ad (4). "The meaning of any term is derived from experience." My question is: how could we know that this proposition is true if it is indeed true? To know that it is true, we have to know what it means. But it cannot mean anything if it is true. Do the terms of this proposition signify a sensible idea? No. 'The meaning of any terms' does not signify a sensible idea.  The same goes for 'a meaning derived from experience.'  Meaning-empiricism is meaningless on its own theory of meaning.

Bertrand Russell: Empiricism is Self-Refuting. Is He Right?

An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth (1940), 1969 Pelican ed., pp. 156-157:

I will observe, however, that empiricism, as a theory of knowledge, is self-refuting. For, however it may be formulated, it must involve some general proposition about the dependence of knowledge upon experience; and any such proposition, if true, must have as a consequence that [it] itself cannot be known. While therefore, empiricism may be true, it cannot, if true, be known to be so. This, however, is a large problem.

It is indeed a large problem.  But, strictly speaking, is empiricism self-refuting?  A self-refuting proposition is one that entails its own falsehood.  *All generalizations are false* is self-refuting in this sense.  It is either true or not true (false).  (Assume Bivalence)  If true, then false.  If false, then false.  So, necessarily false.  Other self-refuting propositions are antinomies: if true, then false; if false, then true.

Let empiricism be the proposition, *All knowledge derives from sense experience.*  Clearly, this proposition does not refute itself.  For it does not entail its own falsehood.  It is not the case that if it is true, then it is false.  Rather, if it is true, then it cannot be known to be true.  For it is not known by experience, and therefore not knowable if true.

Empiricism, then, is not self-refuting, but self-vitiating, self-weakening.  It is in this respect like the thesis of relative relativism (RR): it is relatively true that all truths are relative.  (RR) does not refute itself, but it does weaken itself.  Presumably, what the relativist really wants to say is something stentorian and unqualified: all truths are relative!  But the demands of logical consistency force him to relativize his position.

The real problem is that if empiricism is true, then it cannot be believed with justification.  For on empiricism the only justificatory grounds are those supplied by sense experience.  It is also quite clear that empiricism is not a formal-logical truth or an analytic truth.  A logical positivist would have to say it is cognitively meaningless.  But we shouldn't go that far.  It plainly enjoys cognitive meaning.

You might say that empiricism is just a linguistic proposal, a non-binding suggestion as to how we might use words.  Equivalently, one might say it is just a stance one might adopt.  If you tell me that, then I will thank you for 'sharing,' but then politely voice my preference for either a non-empirical stance or a stance that is not a mere stance, but the blunt asseveration that empiricism is false.  After all, I know that kindness is to be preferred over cruelty, ceteris paribus, and I know this by a non-empirical value intuition.

Another wrinkle is this.  If all knowledge derives from sense experience, then presumably this cannot just happen to be the case.  I should think that if empiricism is true, then it is necessarily true.  But what could be the ground of the necessity?  I have already noted, in effect, that the necessity is neither formal-logical nor analytic.  Is the necessity grounded in the nature, essence, eidos, of knowledge?  That would be a rather unempirical thing to say.  Empiricists have no truck with essences or Forms or eide.

Here then we appear to have a further embarrassment for empiricism.  It cannot be the nature of knowledge to derive from and have its sole justificatory ground in sense experience.  So it just happens to be the case.  This cannot be ruled out as logically impossible.  But it smacks of deep incoherence and is, shall we say, profoundly unsatisfactory. 

Please note that similar reasoning can be deployed against scientism.  If all knowledge is natural-scientific knowledge, then this proposition, if true, cannot be known to be true.  Is it then merely believed without justification?  Is it merely a matter of adopting the 'scientistic stance' or doing the 'scientistic shuffle'?  If so, I will thank you for 'sharing' but then politely refuse your invitation to dance.

Related: Five Grades of Self-Referential Inconsistency

Hat Tip: I thank Patrick Cronin for reminding me of the Russell passage.

Are the Laws of Logic Empirical Generalizations?

London Ed raises the question whether logic is empirical.  

That puts me in mind of  the old idea of John Stuart Mill and others that the laws of logic are empirical generalizations from what we do and do not perceive. Thus we never perceive rain and its absence in the same place at the same time. The temptation is to construe such logic laws as the Law of Non-Contradiction -- ~(p & ~p) -- as generalizations from psychological facts like these. If this is right, then logical laws lack the a priori character and epistemic ‘dignity’ that some of us are wont to see in them. They rest on psychological facts that might have been otherwise and that are known a posteriori.


London Ed might want consider this reductio ad absurdum:

1. The laws of logic are empirical generalizations. (Assumption for
reductio)
2. Empirical generalizations, if true, are merely contingently
true. (By definition of ‘empirical generalization’: empirical generalizations
record what happens to be the case, but might not have been the case.)
Therefore,
3. The laws of logic, if true, are merely contingently true.
(From 1 and 2)
4. If proposition p is contingently true, then it is possible
that p be false. (Def. of ‘contingently true.’)Therefore,
5. The laws of logic, if true, are possibly false. (From 3 and 4)Therefore,
6. LNC is possibly false: there are logically possible worlds in which ‘p&~p’ is true.
(From 5 and the fact that LNC is a law of logic.)
7. But (6) is absurd (self-contradictory): it amounts to saying that it is logically possible that the very criterion of logical possibility, namely LNC, be false. Corollary: if
laws of logic were empirical generalizations, we would be incapable of defining ‘empirical generalization’: this definition requires the notion of what is the case but (logically) might not have been the case.

Ducasse on the Nature and Observability of the Causal Relation

0. Herewith, some interpretative notes on Curt Ducasse, "On the Nature and Observability of the Causal Relation," in Causation, eds. Sosa and Tooley, Oxford 1993, pp. 125-136.

 

1. Assuming that causality is a relation (not entirely obvious!), the question arises as to what sorts of entity can serve as its relata. Following Schopenhauer, whom he cites, Curt Ducasse holds that in strict propriety only events can be causes and effects. An event is either a change or an absence of a change. Thus a tree's losing its leaves is an event, but a tree is not. In strict propriety, it makes no sense to say that Bill was killed by a mountain lion. One has to say something like: Bill was killed by the attack of a mountain lion. In the attack the lion is the agent as Bill is the patient, but the latter is no more the effect than the former is the cause. The cause is the lion's attack, the effect is Bill's death. Some theorists distinguish between agent-causation and event-causation, but for Ducasse, there is no such thing as agent-causation: causation just is event-causation.