HOW REASONABLE IS SCIENTIFIC REASON?

 

 

The following is part of an interview from cbc radio. The interviewee is Sajay Samuel .

Isn’t scientific knowledge true since it manifestly works? Samuel begins his answer by drawing a distinction he finds in the work of historian of science Peter Dear.

Samuel Sajay: Peter Dear notes that, when we today speak about science, we speak about science in two ways. We refer to bodies of knowledge that tell us something about the world as it is. We also speak about science as an instrument with which to change the world, to improve the world—the vaccine, the bomb, the car.

It has both this instrumental face, to use his language, and a natural, philosophical face—natural philosophy being the study of the way the world works and the way the world is. When you ask, why is science true? Why is a certain theory true?, the tendency is to say, because it works, because the plane flies, because the vaccine prevents disease, because the atom bomb explodes—those stand as proofs of the truth claims of science. If science were false, if the truth claims made by science were false, this vaccine wouldn’t work. If you ask, why does this vaccine work; it’s because the science is true. There’s circularity in this jusࢢficaࢢon; it’s true because it works, and it works because it’s true. Peter Dear calls it an ideology, and he calls it that in part, I think, because it can be falsified. Take the case of radio waves, which is one of his two examples. The predicࢢon of radio waves in 1880, I think it was, by Hertz, based upon a scienࢢfic theory propounded by Maxwell regarding the ether. The atmosphere is composed of ether through which radio waves propagate. Well the radio waves, which is one of his two examples. Well the radio waves were real—the prediction was sound; it worked—but the theory was not: it was utterly false. The other example he gives is of navigators, who, even today, use the old geocentric astronomy rather than the heliocentric astronomy. Again, you can have a perfectly false theory regarding what the world is, and it’s useful. You can get things done. This unquestioned justification—why is something true? Because it works. Why does it work? Because it’s true— can be easily falsified. And yet is held. We don’t tend to question the connection between knowing something and constructivism, knowledge through construction can be understood to be the signature of modernity.

What concerns Samuel is that science, historically speaking, doesn’t just supplement common sense; it displaces it. Scientific knowing becomes the epitome of reason and the paradigm of all proper knowledge. The term “common sense” continues to denote sound judgment, but it also begins to evoke a certain ignorance of how things really are. Typical, in this respect, is Albert Einstein’s often cited remark that “common sense is nothing more than a deposit of prejudice laid down by the mind in childhood.”

Samuel wants to contest science’s monopoly of reason. He would like to restore the dignity of common sense and restrict the application of science. Two distinctions are crucial to his case: mathematical knowledge must be distinguished from judgment, and experiment must be distinguished from experience.

Benedict XVI on Faith and Reason

 Ratzinger was concerned with the faith-reason relation.

In (Intro to Christianity p.26) he wrote: “Ever since the Prologue to the Gospel of John, the concept of logos has been at the very center of Christian faith . . . The God who is logos guarantees the intelligibility of the world, the intelligibility of our existence, the aptitude of reason to know God and the reasonableness of God, even though his understanding infinitely surpasses ours and to us may so often appear to be darkness. 

“The world comes from reason, and this reason is a Person, is Love.” Ibid.

In ITC Ratzinger is dealing with a text governed by the word credo and can hardly avoid giving some account of the act of faith.

He begins with the assertion that for human living, openness to a reality that exceeds the visible and tangible is an existential prerequisite, even an imperative. p.52

Until the early modern period, rational thought assisted, rather than inhibited, the act of faith in the invisible.

For ancient and medieval ontology, being is true—intelligible, meaningful—because it is creatively thought by God, who is absolute spirit. So long as this presupposition is in place, we can describe human thinking as the “rethinking of being” or the “rethinking of the thought that is being itself.” Man can rethink the logos, the meaning of being, because his own logos, his reason, is logos of the one logos, thought of the original thought, of the creative spirit that permeates and governs his being. Ibid p.59

This (healthful)assumption was abandoned, highly influentially, by the eighteenth-century Neapolitan philosopher Giambattista Vico.

According to Vico, understanding is or should be of the humanly initiated.

Not verum quia ens,”true because being,” but verum quia factum, “true because made”. 

Eventually it produces the technological rationality which Ratzinger takes to be normative today. The true is now the feasible.

Here we have a further definition of truth, verum quia faciendum: something is “true because it can be done.” 

In the context of the ancient thinking and of the Bible, a stand was taken trustfully on the ground of the word of God. op.cit.p69

That word is meant to clear a path to the total of reality.

Such a total meaning cannot be made, it can only be received. 

This enables Benedict to make a link with the New Testament concept of faith. 

Christian faith is a faith that comes “from hearing”. Romans 10:17

To put it in another way, such a faith is the reception of something that I have not thought out, so that in the last analysis thinking in the context of faith is always a thinking over of something previously heard and received.op.cit.p.91

The affirmation of “credo in” ends not with a ground but with a person: the incarnate Word, in whose life “the meaning of the world is present before us”.

So that beside the language of logos is the language of love.

“Meaning knows me and loves me.” Ibid p.80

The self-communicative fullness of being(a philosophical description) is identical with the self-donation of the God of love. Absolute being, unsurpassable love.

Theology must continue to draw from the treasury of knowledge that it did not invent itself, that always surpasses it and that, never being totally exhaustible through reflection, and precisely because of this launches thinking.

Philosophy must truly remain an undertaking of reason in its proper freedom and proper responsibility; it must recognize its limits, and precisely in this way also its grandeur and vastness.

Intro to Metaphysics Part 3

 

                                      

                            

                                Plato and his student Aristotle.

                                                   

                                           Part 3

                                 Actuality and Potentiality

(I think that I may have forgotten to mention that I have been and will continue to rely heavily on the American philosopher Edward C. Feser.)

For Aristotle as for Plato, universals or forms are real, and they are not reducible to anything either material or mental. Still, he thinks it is an error to regard them as objects existing in a “third realm” of their own. Rather, considered as they are in themselves they exist only “in” the things they are the forms of; and considered as abstractions from these things, they exist only in the intellect. Furthermore even the intellect rely on the senses in coming to know them.

A. Actuality and potentiality

Contra Parmenides who said that change is impossible because something can’t come from nothing, but that nothing was the only thing that something new could come from, since the only thing there is other than what already exists (i.e. being) is non-being or nothing.

Aristotle’s reply is that while it is true that something can’t come from nothing, it is false to suppose that nothing or non-being is the only possible candidate for a source of change.

Take a blue rubber ball for instance.

It can be solid, round, blue, and bouncy. (Different aspects of its being)

There are ways it is not: square and red, for example; it is not a dog or other things.

But the ball is potentially is: red (if you paint it), soft and gooey (if you melt it), a miniature globe (if you draw little continents on it), and so forth.

So being and non-being aren’t the only relevant factors here; there are also a thing’s various potentialities.

On Conscience

(Notes taken while reading ON CONSCIENCE by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger. Ignatius

 Conscience, the highest norm that man is to follow even in opposition to authority. If this were the case, it would mean that there is no truth, at least not in moral and religious matters.

One must follow a certain conscience or at least not act against it.

Some would argue that we should be grateful to God that He allows so many unbelievers in good conscience. For if their eyes were opened and they became believers, they would not be capable, in this world of ours, of bearing the burden of faith with all its moral obligations. But as it is, since they can go another way in good conscience, they can still reach salvation.

According to this view, faith would not make salvation easier but harder. Being happy would mean not being burdened with having to believe or having to submit to the moral yoke of the faith of the Catholic Church. The erroneous conscience, which makes life easier and marks a more human course, would then be the real grace, the normal way to salvation. Untruth, keeping truth at bay, would be better for man than truth.  

If this were the state of affairs, how could faith give rise to joy? Who would have the courage to pass faith on others? Would it not be better to spare them the truth or even keep them from it?

Is conscience subjectivity’s protective shell, into which man can escape and hide from reality?

Conscience is a window through which one can see outward to that common truth that finds and sustains all, and so makes possible through the common recognition of truth the community of wants and responsibilities.

Conscience is man’s openness to the ground of his being, the power of perception for what is highest and most essential.

The liberal idea of conscience dispenses with truth. It becomes the justification of our subjectivity, which would not like to have itself called into question. Similarly, it becomes the justification for social conformity. As mediating value between the different subjectivities, social conformity is intended to make living together possible. The obligation to seek the truth terminates as do any doubts about the general inclination of society and what it has become accustomed to. Being convinced  of oneself, as well as conforming to others, is sufficient. Man is reduced to his superficial conviction, and the less depth he has, the better for him.

The Nazi SS would be justified and we should seek them in heaven, since they carried out all their atrocities with fanatic conviction and complete certainty of conscience. Since they followed their (albeit mistaken) consciences, one would have to recognize their conduct as moral and as a result, should not doubt their eternal salvation.

That is the  justifying power of the subjective conscience. Firm, subjective conviction and the lack of doubts and scruples that follow from it do not justify man.

To identify my conscience with the “I,” with its subjective certainty about itself and its moral behavior would make my conscience a mere reflection of the social surroundings and the opinions in circulation. On the other hand, this consciousness might also derive from a lack of self-criticism, a deficiency in listening to the depths of one’s own soul.

The identification of conscience with superficial consciousness, the reduction of man to his subjectivity, does not liberate but enslaves.

Whoever equates conscience with superficial conviction identifies conscience with a pseudo-rational certainty, a certainty that in fact has been woven from self-righteousness, conformity, and lethargy. 

Intro to Metaphysics Part 2

 

Aristotle Metaphysics

Part 2

Realism

 

          You might think that Plato has gone off the rail a bit; Aristotle certainly thought so.

Although something like Plato’s theory is very hard to avoid.

 Universals

          Over and above this or that particular triangle, we have the universal “triangularity”; over and above this or that particular human being, we have the universal “humanness”; over and above this or that particular red thing, we have the universal “redness”; in general, each particular thing seems to instantiate or exemplify various universal features. The particular things are unique and non-repeatable, but the features they exemplify (e.g. “humanness”) are repeatable and common to many things, hence “universal’.

 Numbers and other mathematical entities.

          Numbers are not physical objects: the numeral “2” isn’t the number 2 any more than the name “George” is the same thing as the man George.

 Numbers are not purely mental: we discover them rather than invent them. They are in someway “out there” waiting for us to find them and thus cannot depend for their truth on our thinking about them.

They are necessary truths rather than contingent ones.

To know that 2+2=4 is to know a necessary truth, one that could not have been otherwise. It would remain true even if the entire universe collapsed in on itself.

 Propositions.

          Statements about the world, whether true or false, which are distinct from the sentences that express them. “John is a bachelor” and “John is an unmarried man” are different sentences, but they express the same proposition. When Socrates and Ben Gallant think that snow is white, they are thinking exactly the same thing, despite the fact that one of them expresses this thought in Greek in the Athens of the 5^th century B.C., and the other in English in 21^st century Canada.

Being different from any sentence, or indeed from any other sequence of physical sounds or shapes we might use to express them, propositions are in some sense distinct from the material world. But since a proposition is either true or false whether or not we happen to be entertaining it—again, 2+2=4 would be still be true even if we forgot this tomorrow, 2+2=5 would be false even if we all came to believe it, and snow was white long before anyone first saw it—it seems to follow that propositions are also independent of any mind.

 

          The  view that universals, numbers, and/or propositions exist objectively, apart from the human mind and distinct from any material or physical features of the world, is called realism.

It can seem at first glance to be very dry, esoteric, and irrelevant to practical life. But nothing could be further from the truth, as we shall see.

 

Intro to Metaphysics Part 1

  The study of reality and existence is metaphysics, named from a set of books written by Aristotle asking what is being, what are first causes, and what is change. It studies what we are and what our purpose is, seeking knowledge about everything from the nature of the entire universe to that of he human mind.

Starting with Plato I think will make it much easier to understand the theories of his student Aristotle, later on.

Plato wanted to understand the relationship between the material and immaterial realms, the one and the many, change and permanence and the proper role of both senses and the intellect in coming to know them. He sought to demonstrate that objective knowledge about all these things, and not mere opinion, was possible. This is enshrine in his famous theory of Forms.

(For a fine introduction to Plato’s thought in general and his Theory of Forms in particular, see David Melling, Understanding Plato (Oxford University Press, 1987)

 

What is a “Form”?

Consider several triangles; on paper, on chalkboard, on sand, on the pc screen, small, large, red, black.

The essence or nature of a triangle is a closed plane figure with three straight sides.

The features of a triangle has nothing to do with ‘triangularity” as such.

Every particular physical or material triangle—the sort of triangle we know through the senses, and indeed the only sort we can know through the senses—is always going to have features that are simply not part of the essence of nature of triangularity per se, and is always going to lack features that are part of the essence or nature of triangularity.

Plato would say that when we grasp the nature of being a triangle, what we grasp is not something material or physical, and not something we grasp or could grasp through the senses.

Material triangles come and go but triangularity stays the same.

The essential features of triangles would remain true even if every particular material triangle were erased tomorrow.

What we know when we know the essence of triangularity is something universal rather than particular, something immaterial rather than material, an something we know through the intellect rather than senses.

 

What we know is an objective fact that we have discovered, not invented. It is not up to us to decide what the feature of a triangle should be. If the Canadian parliament should declare that  triangles should sometimes regarded has having four sides, it would cast doubt on the sanity of the parliamentarians. The Pythagorean theorems were true long before we discovered them and will remain true long after we’re all dead.

 

          Now if the essence of triangularity is something neither material nor mental—that is to say, something that exists neither in the material world nor merely in the human mind—then it has a unique kind of existence all its own, that of an abstract object existing in what Platonists sometimes call a “third realm.” And what is true, of the essences of triangles is no less, true in Plato’s view, of the essences of pretty much everything; of squares, circles, and other geometrical figures, but also (and more interestingly) of human beings, tables and chairs, dogs, cats, justice, beauty, goodness, and so on and on.

          When we grasp the essence of any of these things, we grasp something that is universal, immaterial, extra-mental, and known via the intellect rather than senses, and is thus a denizen of this “third realm”. What we grasp, in short, is a Form.

          The Forms not being material cannot exist in a spatial location. Plato’s whole point is that the Theory of Forms, if correct, proves that there is more to reality than the world of time and space. As Plato sees it our senses are not the only sources of knowledge of reality; for the highest level of reality is knowable only through the intellect.

In general, the world of material things is merely a faint copy of re realm of the Forms. Particular things an events are what they are only by “participating in,” or “instantiating” the Forms.

Fido is a dog because it participates in the Form of dog.

Paying your phone bill is a just action because it participates in the Form of Justice.

These individual exemplars are all imperfect in various ways.

The Forms are perfect, being the archetypes or standards by reference to which we judge something to be a dog or just action, etc.

Individual things come and go; the Forms, being outside of time and space, are eternal and unchanging.

The Forms are more real that the material things that exemplify them.

A shadow or reflection won’t exist at all unless a physical object casts it, while the object will exist whether or not its shadow or image does. By the same token, the physical objects themselves exist only insofar as they participates in the Forms, while the Forms would exist whether or not the particular physical instantiations did.

 

My view on politics

 I do not like “one person one vote” which seems to be the sacrosanct democratic principle.

Why? Because this way of choosing a leader will always result to the least common denominator or representative. Someone put it very nicely:  What is more important in any voting system - the means or the end? If the process leads to sub-optimal outcomes, should we still fight tooth and nail to preserve this process?

The only time we ask for everybody’s opinion an insist on it, is when we choose our leaders. Now leaving aside the gerrymandering and the many other possible political manoeuvring trying to beat the one person one vote system, why would we ask everybody, even those who have no idea what the idea of leadership is all about, to chose our leaders? In any other circumstances when a choice has to be made, be it building something, buying something, etc., we consult experts in the matter before we make a decision. So why pretend that everyone is an expert when it comes to leadership? 

My problem however is that there does not seem to be any reasonable alternative.

The only positive I can see with the system we have is that, hopefully, having more than one political party seeking election, they can keep each other in check when one is in the power seat. A very important factor indeed is the reporters, always questioning and investigating, keeping a close look at the politicians’ moves.

You might have guessed by now that my allegiance is to conservative principles. If one googles ‘conservatism’ one is bombarded by many, many descriptions of many kinds of conservatism. My description is short and to the point, I think. A conservative will if necessary, trim, make sure a tree is well fed and continues to provide for new circumstances. A liberal will uproot the tree and plant another one, for the same purpose.

I never judge the parties by their political names. Before I vote, I closely look at their leader, at his character, at his decisions records. Their platform has to be seriously consider. Because so many people will choose a candidate for so many idiosyncratic reasons, I always feel that my efforts are wasted.

Now on a more personal level. I had at least a dozen books on political matters, books I did my best to learn from for many years. Then one day, I gave them all away and promised myself not to discuss politics anymore. The reason was that I became too emotional, too argumentative, when it came to political matters. It was perhaps due to my lack of knowledge in the matter which made me see everything in black and white instead of shades of grey; I really don’t know.