Whereof we can speak
One reason I’m insisting on this idea that rational inquiry and discussion and argument are continuous rather than discontinuous with ‘the scientific method’ and empiricism is that non-rational, evidence-free truth claims are not arguable or discussable, which means that they’re authoritarian and coercive. That’s all obvious enough, but I think it needs spelling out. So people who try to argue that humanist truth-claims are radically discontinuous with scientific ones (apart from giving the game away by arguing themselves) are giving hostages to fortune. They risk handing us all over to people who make ‘faith-based’ arguments and expect the rest of us to accept them. You know, the ‘homosexuality is a sin and that’s all that needs to be said’ crowd. The ‘because god said so’ crowd. The ‘it’s in the Bible/Koran/Vedas/Talmud’ crowd. The crowd that free people don’t want to take orders from.
What would such claims look like, anyway? The commenter at Inside HE who offered the ‘material gain’ proverb as an example of an unscientific claim followed it up with ‘If you read a few serious novels you’ll find many such statements and they’ll be expressed much better this one.’ But is that what one finds in serious novels? Can we sum them up that way? ‘From my protracted reading of novels I have learned that’ – what? What paraphrasable nuggets do we take away from our reading of serious novels that we couldn’t get anywhere else? Compassion is good? Life is complicated? There’s nowt so queer as folk? What? What special walled-off non-researchable evidence-free uninvestigatable unverifiable claim emerges? I would really be curious to know.
It’s not that we don’t learn or get anything – but that to the extent that it can be put as a truth-claim, it’s not ineffable, it’s not special. Literature itself perhaps is (I think, although that’s a highly contested claim, and I actually get very skeptical of it myself at times), but the truth claims one can derive from reading it? I don’t believe it.
What special ineffable opposite-of-empirical but still validly persuasive truth claim can one derive from Emma, for example? Or Wuthering Heights? Or King Lear? Apart from anything else, any paraphrasable truth claim one can think of (at least any I can think of) instantly reduces the novel or play in question to a boring heap of dust. That’s not why we read them. They’re not homilies. And if they were, those homilies could still be derived in other ways. No, they say themselves, and that’s enough, that’s what they’re for.
You can say that serious novels and literature in general do all sorts of things: deepen our understanding of human nature; teach us empathy; provide experience; and so on; but none of those is radically alien to and different from and cut off from empirical rational inquiry. Literature is different in other ways. Maybe that’s where the confusion comes in. Reading literature is a different kind of experience from doing science – different, and as special as you like. But that doesn’t mean it throws up any miraculously weird different arational truth claims.
Great post!
It raises the question, what is it that we get from novels that is of value if it is not truth?
“they say themselves, and that’s enough, that’s what they’re for”
Indeed. But why bother with what they say? It seems to me that it is a sharing of experience and feelings that novels give us that is so wonderful and useful.
By sharing in those experiences and feelings of artists, we may find it easier to understand our own experiences and feelings and make better use of them — get more out of our own lives.
But that very usefulness brings literature a bit closer to the plane of existence occupied by information such as “the fish are biting in the stream on the other side of the hill” or “the tribe on the other side of the hill are arming themselves to the teeth” or “the lovely young thing on the other side of the hill has eyes for you”.
And if that’s not truth what is it?
Apologies for answering myself, but I think the “truth value” that is becoming clear wrt literature is the truth that it holds for me personally and subjectively, and not what it says about fish, other tribes or prospective mates.
These latter things are true statements which have value for me because they have correspondence with real fish and real people. The former ones have value for me because they have correspondence with my own experiences and feelings.
OB, I haven’t read your book (yet) but how do you distinguish between a truth claim and some other sort – it seems you rule out ethical statements and the like because they are not truth claims … but couldn’t that lead to defining tc’s as only being empirically testable in which case of course there are no non e.t. truth claims?
Yes, I think the personal and subjective quality of literary ‘truth’ is what we were all circling around in that IHE discussion. Literary truth (if truth is the right word, and it’s not the one I would use, I think) doesn’t have to be factually true. That’s why it’s a somewhat odd way to use the word.
Robyn, no, I don’t think so. How I distinguish is just the familiar old fact-value distinction, the old is-ought gap.
I suppose I think these other uses of the word ‘truth’ smack a little of Rorty’s ‘rhetorical pat on the back’.
Now, that makes excellent use of that phrase. It is entirely more at home there than with Rorty himself.
snicker. Yeah, I definitely misappropriated it.
OB, I’m a little puzzled by your apparent conflation of “rational inquiry” and “science”. (Perhaps I’ve misread you — please correct me if I have.) For what of mathematicians and philosophers? Logic does not depend on sense data or experimentation. Rigorous a priori analysis is the paradigm of rational thought, and risks no “hostages”. (At least, not the ones you had in mind. I’ve discussed a different kind of “hostage-taking metaphysics” before.)
We should reason critically about ethical matters, but that doesn’t mean employing the scientific method. Scientists employ reason, of course, but not all reasoning employs science. Assumptions to the contrary only encourage the silly relativists who at least get one thing right: science doesn’t exhaust the big questions.
The appropriate response to this observation, I hope you’ll agree, is not to turn to “faith” or otherwise make up arbitrary “answers”, but rather to rationally engage these big questions using rational tools which go beyond the empirical. That is, we should turn to philosophy, not religion. But it’s hard to do that when people keep forgetting that philosophy exists, and insist that all rational inquiry is scientific inquiry.
That claim is the real hostage taker, because the contrapositive asserts that non-scientific inquiry (e.g. ethics) is non-rational inquiry. And that gives the silly relativists free reign. Needless to say, we shouldn’t want to do that.
I addressed OB’s supposed conflation of rational inquiry and science in the thread just below, and OB said she agreed with me though, admittedly she went on to talk about things in a slightly different way.
The thing is that you can only do rational inquiry on things you can examine empirically. And the only way we humans have invented for getting at the truth is by generating hypotheses and testing them. That makes rational inquiry and science coextensive. You can’t get much more conflated than that.
If you want to talk about ethics you have to talk about the effect in the world of following certain rules. You may also wish to talk about how it feels to follow those rules, and you can do that for yourself. You can also talk about how other people _report_ how they feel about following those rules. So either it is empirical or it’s not there for you to work with.
You can call ‘inquiry’ simply experiencing things and then it’s not rational. But any examination or evaluation of experiences or feelings, any drawing of conclusions is rational and empirical, any judgments about the truth of something follows, in the final analysis, the scientific method (defined as generating hypotheses and testing them).
That sounds like an awfully crude form of empiricism. (Whatever happened to the rationalists?) It simply isn’t true that “you can only do rational inquiry on things you can examine empirically.” The faculty of reason complements the brute senses, and can teach us things that the latter cannot. Again, I give you the examples of mathematics and analytic philosophy. There’s nothing empirical about a proof that there are infinitely many prime numbers (we certainly haven’t seen all those numbers), but it’s eminently rational.
As for your talk of “ethics”, what you describe isn’t ethics at all — it’s sociology or psychology. The question isn’t what people actually do or feel. It’s what they rationally ought to do or feel. Empirical results are often important of course, e.g. to learn what acts would have the best consequences. But that doesn’t yield much of an ethical conclusion unless you also establish that we ought to bring about good consequences. (You know, the old ‘is-ought’ gap.) And philosophers have indeed sought to provide arguments to that effect. Whether they succeed is debatable, but it does require that much — i.e. debate, or engaging with their arguments — and not merely dismissing them out of hand based on a prejudice that “either it is empirical or it’s not there for you to work with”. (Again, try telling that to a mathematician!)
“any drawing of conclusions is rational and empirical“
No, some are just rational. Of course, if you want to redefine the word “science” so as to encompass the a priori disciplines of maths and philosophy, you’re free to do so. But that doesn’t change the fact that sometimes we can make intellectual progress by thinking without need of any observing.
Well, I’m more talking about the justification for our ideas than their source. That’s a different kind of “empiricist” debate. (Though if you’re interested, I’ve also written a bit about that, here.)
Note that even if experiences are necessary for us to obtain our concepts in the first place, some knowledge might still be a priori in the sense that the justification for our beliefs requires no further experience. (Do you really need to look at the world in order to know that it contains no square circles?)
Of course, this is a complicated issue, which philosophers have split much ink over. I can’t do justice to it here. If you’d like a good reference, try Bonjour’s In Defense of Pure Reason.
Heh, I wonder how one splits ink? (Sounds like a Rutherfordian feat!) I meant “spilt”…
I’m almost certainly missing the point here, but “things” like ‘justice’ and ‘rights’ are not available as sensory data, alongside pink unicorns, so the argument Richard is putting forward should not be trivialised.
“(Do you really need to look at the world in order to know that it contains no square circles?)”
As an idea, maybe not. But how do you know there are such things as squares and circles if you’ve never looked at the world? Or, in other words, how can one discuss anything with anyone without agreeing on any terms for the discussion whatsoever? I’m far from the first person to point out that the high priests of Po-Mo draw the line at making do with low salaries, meaning that in that and many other aspects of daily life they prove that they themselves don’t believe what they are preaching all the way.
Stewart, from the little I know of them, I doubt the “high priests of Po-Mo” could accept the sort of rationalism I’m discussing here. (They’re at least as skeptical of logic as they are of science, and they tend to despise analytic philosophy. You know, Western “phallogocentrism” and all that. *rolls eyes*)
If anything, rationalists are further away from the PoMos than empiricists are. My first comment explained why scientism opens the door to relativism, and Juan’s comment (dismissing rational inquiry into ethics) simply confirms this.
Anyway, to answer your questions: my previous comment noted that we may need experience in order to acquire concepts (like ‘square’ and ‘circle’). But given that we have the concepts, we can proceed to learn more about them using distinctive rational methods of inquiry that are quite different from those that scientists use. The point is simple enough: even if you don’t trust philosophers, it’s plain as plain can be that mathematical inquiry is both rational and non-empirical. So “science” and “rational inquiry” shouldn’t be conflated.
This might be a good moment to think about Quine’s naturalised epistemology, and I think we too often forget that Piaget and Vygotsky, amongst many others, showed that the human ability to manipulate abstracta is gained only by first interacting with concreta.
Richard, I don’t think you are saying anything that Ophelia would disagree with (although I will let her speak for herself).
It seems to me that you’re engaging in semantic hair-splitting; her first sentence from the current post:
What’s the problem with that? It seems to me that there is no claim here to the effect of reducing all inquiry to scientific inquiry. In fact, Ophelia seems to be making the same point you have been making, with regard to a priori knowledge.
Richard,
Yes, what Ian says. I’m not conflating science and rational inquiry, I’m saying they overlap, and that they are not radically discontinuous.
“We should reason critically about ethical matters, but that doesn’t mean employing the scientific method. Scientists employ reason, of course, but not all reasoning employs science.”
That’s exactly what I’m saying.
“Assumptions to the contrary only encourage the silly relativists who at least get one thing right: science doesn’t exhaust the big questions.”
Sure. But the point I’m trying to make is heard much less often: science doesn’t exhaust the big questions, but it’s not necessarily irrelevant to them, either. There are at least components of most or perhaps all the big questions that are susceptible to some forms of scientific inquiry. That’s what I think gets conflated. I think people make an easy but mistaken move from “science doesn’t exhaust the big questions” to “science has nothing at all to say about the big questions” – but of course those two statements are quite different, and the second by no means follows from the first. But I think a lot of people are quite convinced that it does.
“The appropriate response to this observation, I hope you’ll agree, is not to turn to “faith” or otherwise make up arbitrary “answers”, but rather to rationally engage these big questions using rational tools which go beyond the empirical. That is, we should turn to philosophy, not religion.”
Absolutely. That’s what I’m saying. But I consider philosophy and science allies in that kind of work, not opponents or inhabitants of different universes.
Ophelia’s points here are more subtle and more interesting than my reactions to them, I will be the first to admit.
I have to take at least part of the blame for leading Richard to describe what I said as “scientism”. But not all of it.
To begin with, I don’t “dismiss rational inquiry into ethics”. I am rather saying that ethics without reference to what people do, the effect of what they do and how they feel about what they do is useful only as preparation for talking about said people.
And maths, like any other product of the human imagination, may well be useful in dealing with the world. But any mathematical proof is true only about mathematics though if used well it may point to something that is true outside mathematics. And as a result of one’s experience with mathematics in relation with other things, one may develop the habit of acting as if the mathematical truth were sufficient, because it always has been. But because there is an interface between the math and the other stuff, there is at least theoretical room for error.
Because math is highly abstract it is much more useful on its own than, say, ethics. To my mind, rational inquiry on ethics without reference to actual people is very risky indeed.
I tend to view discussion about maths, ethics,literature and such as part of what Daniel Dennett calls third person phenomenology in which subjective experience is brought out into the public arena where it can be pooled and shared and worked with.
Actually, as the title of the linked essay shows, Dennett calls it “heterophenomenology” not “third-person” phenomenology.
OB, thanks for the clarification.
I agree that there is often some overlap, but it seems at least possible that this might be decomposable into wholly distinct a priori and empirical components. (E.g. in ethics, between ultimate normative principles like “maximize utility”, and empirical knowledge of how to successfully implement this.) What would be so bad about that?
You wrote that the reason you deny any deep distinction or discontinuity here “is that non-rational, evidence-free truth claims are not arguable or discussable“. But who said anything about non-rational claims? You seem to be expressing the assumption that only disputes involving empirical evidence can be rational disputes. But if that’s not what you meant, then I’m not sure what your argument is at all.
Philosophers and scientists might be “allies” in the sense that they both value (and advance) rational inquiry. But that needn’t stop them from working in different methodological “universes” — indeed, if you accept the a priori / a posteriori distinction in rational justification, then such a split is precisely to be expected.
Richard wrote “The faculty of reason complements the brute senses, and can teach us things that the latter cannot. Again, I give you the examples of mathematics..”
There is a lovely story told by the great American physicist Richard Feynman. He used to tease mathematicians. Once they challenged him to say if a certain topological operation was possible to do to an orange. (The operation was very counter-intuitive.) He pondered and decided it was not. They then declared him wrong and showed him the mathematical proof, all beautiful and correct logic. They were crestfallen when he pointed out that it was based on assumptions that do not hold for real objects such as oranges.
The moral of this story is that pure mathematics needs something outside itself before it can be deemed to be useful in a practical setting.
(Sure, but we can still learn things that may not be deemed useful in a practical setting…)
Such as ?
Many things can be ‘learned’, such as the beauty of a Zen koan, or an equation, but it is wise also to know to what purpose knowledge should be put. That too is a point of much ponderation, but the answer will, in the end, come down to concrete results on flesh-and-blood beings [or oranges].
There is ancient, time-tested “wisdom” in folk sayings, such as “many hands make light work” and “too many cooks spoil the broth”. Unfortunately, as these two contradictory examples show, it’s easy to be “wise” after the event and what is needed is what is lacking: a guide to foreseeing problems before they happen
It seems like “a guide to foreseeing problems before they happen” is one of the things one would hope to achieve from a study of mathematics, or ethics, in the abstract. But surely the proof of the pudding is in the eating, or something like that. :)
If these experiences and wisdom really are ineffable, why are people trying to talk about them at all? The content of an ineffable experience is purely emotive, an experience of certainty which is then attached to whatever happens to drift through your mind. It’s a lot like cocaine, which makes your believe that everything you think and do is the RIGHT thing. I tried it once and found myself wondering why anyone would ever do that to themselves deliberately. Rational judgement becomes impossible. I suspect that religion operates in a similar way.
Years ago I had a prolonged period of mystical satori (not drug induced) and I can tell you that if you’re not careful you can amass a lifetime’s worth of bullshit in a very short time while in this state. As the Bhuddists say, if you meet the Bhudda on the road, kill him. This is not to say that I learned nothing; I came to value optimism, imagination, and empathy more strongly, mainly because I struggled to preserve the essence, rather than the outcome, of the experience. But I also experienced what it must be like to be born-again, and understood why so many of them seem to be mad.
Very interesting. Certainty on the one hand and rational judgment on the other. I’m deathly afraid of people who have all the first and none of the second.
Also interesting is a comment a friend of mine made about Sam Harris, that he is not strictly an atheist but an apophatic theologian. In fact, there’s not much of a difference. Apophatic theology says you cannot talk about God, kataphatic theology (like the fundies and evangelists) goes on at great lengths about him. The heart of apophatic theology is uncertainty; kataphatics are very certain. Other expressions of apophatic theology: Socrates claim that “All I know is that I know nothing,” Lau Tzu’s “The Way that can be spoken is not the True Way,” the old Judaic bans against idolatry and speaking the name of God. Socrates was condemned as an atheist, and the Romans considered the Jews atheists upon finding the Holy of Holies empty. The Bhudda raises a lotus flower and smiles. The masters smile, bow, and walk away. The speech that follows is for the acolytes. To those who know, no words are necessary; to those who don’t, no words will suffice. There is no dogma, only a method. Even the word God is pointless because it means nothing.
The essence of the ineffable experience, and of apophatic theology, is that it makes no truth claims, and therefore can never contradict science. It is, after all, just a feeling, albeit a well-adapted one. Unfortunately there are all too many opportunistic fools waiting in the wings to exploit that experience. I suspect that the true heirs of Jesus and other mystics are not the believers, but scientists, driven by their love of truth and their fellow man, and their wonder of the universe.
Aha – Meera Nanda wrote an article for B&W on the non-atheism of Sam Harris.
Mystical feeling seems quite benign, provided one keeps it just a feeling. But so many people don’t. So many people want to do both. Like people who make arguments while disavowing the law of non-contradiction. Eat cake, have cake, eat cake, have cake.
I, for one, have no difficulty acknowledging the existence of mystical feelings, which don’t lose anything by sober recognition of their likely non-supernatural sources. But one becomes less keen to get into those waters at all when in the company of those who without further ado make the leap from the existence of mystical feelings to the absolute truth of a particular dogma.
A lot like: “This, to me, is inexplicable. Therefore, this text is sacred and infallible.” Only a short step further than the IDers who claim to be scientific go.
Same here. If I had any difficulty with the mystical feelings I wouldn’t love Wordsworth, but I do love Wordsworth, so there you go.
The mystical feeling is a wonderful thing, provided we keep our feet on the ground, and maintain our sense of humour and personal fallibility. The danger lies in it’s similarity to a kind of mania. Manics are prone to bouts of paranoia and near psychosis, due to delusions of certainty. This is where the dogmas come from; really, they’re products of pride. We should teach children less about the dogma, and more about the experience, both the merits and the dangers of it. This might make them less prone to having the experience hijacked, and a less credulous to the claims of messiahs and prophets.
Delusions of certainty are the problem, all right. Even (some) mostly rational people can have them – which can be very disconcerting.
I enjoyed reading the post and the comments a lot. It’s such a shame that there is a scepticism about any shared commitment to rational enquiry between the sciences and humanities. And it’s always healthy to hear sloppy uses of ‘truth’, like in ‘but it’s true for me’, denounced.
But it’s a contested philosophical issue whether there isn’t possible a substantial conception of non-factual truth. I’m thinking in particular of the claims, say by Richard – I think! – that ethics is a priori. I’m definitely commited to it being the case that some moral commitments are unjustified, others are, that reflection is a means to learn about this, that divergence can be ironed out with more reflection, knowledge and discussion. And literature can be part of that process.
I think that although we can make sense of moral justification as a product of rational enquiry, it’s far from clear whether this is enough to vindicate moral truth, or stronger: moral facts or moral a priori knowledge.
Literature can be part of that process, yes, but can it be part of it in some special magical way, or just in the same sort of way than any other kind of writing or thinking or discourse or reflection can be?
I think literature sometimes functions as a valor word: as if all literature, simply by being literature, offers profound intuitions about human experience. I don’t believe that. I think it depends on the quality (and nature) of the literature.