Plato’s been causing trouble.
It’s that old Platonic ideal. Imagine an elephant. Not just some elephant you know (if you do know any), but the ideal prototypical elephant. Big, sort of gray, ears, legs, tail, trunk. An idea from which all other elephants deviate. That’s your Platonic elephant. Pure elephanticity.
The Platonic elephant doesn’t exist, except as an idealised abstraction in our minds. But this notion of ideal forms, of Platonism, is so pervasive that we sometimes don’t even see it. Which is why, as I say, it causes trouble.
People who aren’t good at understanding evolution are fond of repeating that there are no transitional forms. But in fact every species represents a transitional form. What we consider the species ‘elephant’ is nothing more than the set of all elephants that exist, which is different today than it was 200 years ago, which was different from 10,000 years ago. Real elephanticity keeps moving. When people think of the Platonic elephant as an immutable concept, they get tripped up.
Christian Platonism’s been dicking with my head for a long time, too. That involves the belief that a perfect version of you existed before this life (if you’re Mormon), or that your essential nature is spirit perfection, if you can keep it unspotted by the flesh. That Paul was horrified by flesh is one of the saddest contributions to Western thought, and goes a long way to explaining how fucked up Christianity is.
Avid comment readers will remember a recent Anonymous commenter (no, not Dieter Pingle) who made it clear that he (or perhaps she) wasn’t going to accept any evidence as good enough, that all evidence was equally valid (or invalid), and that the only way to go was pure reason.
Anon groused:
You put your faith in a system that “works well enough.” Mormons and other religious people do the same. You can’t come up with any real evidence to support your view and you feel that they can’t either.
Let’s ignore the fact that, since Anon didn’t accept that some evidence was better than others, I had already given her (or him) the best evidence anyone could ever provide.
What I realised from this exchange was that I had been accepting empirical evidence because it worked “well enough”, while acknowledging that it was somehow inferior to, and would take second place to, ‘pure reason’. And I had accepted this for as long as I could remember.
I have now come into contact with an article called “Newton’s Flaming Laser Sword” (PDF) by Mike Alder of our own august UWA. It’s the kind of thing everyone else probably knows already, but which I’m only now becoming aware of. (Ain’t larnin’ grand.) His argument is that ‘pure reason’ of the Platonic kind isn’t actually good for anything really, and that empiricism, such as it is, is the real driving force for knowledge.
The scientist’s perception of philosophy is that all too much of it is a variation on the above theme, that a philosophical analysis is a sterile word game played in a state of mental muddle. When you ask of a scientist if we have free will, or only think we have, he would ask in turn: ‘What measurements or observations would, in your view, settle the matter?’ If your reply is ‘Thinking deeply about it’, he will smile pityingly and pass you by. He would be unwilling to join you in playing what he sees as a rather silly game.
…
So far I have presented the orthodox position of scientists: truth about how the universe works cannot generally be arrived at by pure reason. The only thing reason can do is to allow us to deduce some truth from other truths. And since we haven’t got many truths to start out from, only provisional hypotheses and a necessarily finite set of observations, we cannot arrive at secure beliefs by thought alone. Most scientists are essentially Popperian positivists, they take the view that their professional life consists of finite observations, universal general hypotheses from which deductions can be made, and that it is essential to test the deductions by further observations because even though the deductions are performed by strict logic (well, mathematics usually), there is no guarantee of their correctness. The idea that one can arrive at reliable truths by pure reason is simply obsolete. Plato believed it, but Plato was wrong.
His point is that if a question can’t be settled experimentally, it’s not worth arguing about. Unless you like that sort of thing. I suppose I do like that sort of thing, so I’ll be considering that in due time. For now, I’m still getting my head around the idea of unseating Platonic ‘pure reason’ from the high seat it’s occupied for centuries, and putting empiricism in that place. I think I’ll be reading this article a few times… very slowly.
31 July 2010 at 5:40 pm
It is true that rationalism alone is incomplete…but empiricism alone is also incomplete. This isn't to say that all methods of gaining knowledge are equivalent, but that we shouldn't try to make one "on top" of all the rest.
1 August 2010 at 1:39 am
Well, that's Alder's point. We know empiricism is incomplete. Everything we've gathered empirically may need to be scrapped someday. Updated.
But for all that, empiricism allows us to make predictions that come true. Platonic reasoning doesn't do this in any but the most trivial way.
1 August 2010 at 1:58 am
I dunno. I guess Hume had figured that out a while ago (but I guess you already mentioned that you might be late to this bus…), BUT I can't help but feel like this is scrapping entire sets of truths. E.g., scrapping out a priori truths completely because they are independent of experience. I mean, when you talk about the value being in "mak[ing] predictions that come true," this is AUTOMATICALLY esteeming a posteriori truths above a priori ones. If we do that, then obviously Platonic reasoning will seem quite lacking.
1 August 2010 at 3:06 am
Yeah, Hume was a legend.
So what's the case for a priori reasoning?
1 August 2010 at 3:12 am
Math, especially the pure kind.
1 August 2010 at 5:08 am
Alder addresses this. He talks about the axioms of Euclidean geometry, and concludes:
This pretty much does for platonism as far as mathematicians are concerned. Axioms stopped being self-evident truths as soon as the work was read and understood. Instead they were simply postulates, and they might be interpreted as true statements about the world, perhaps in several different ways. Or they might not be interpreted at all. Platonism died for mathematicians some centuries ago, and simply looks silly. Mathematics doesn't give truths, it gives consequences.
Once you have axioms, they can be treated more profitably as observations.
I'm not a maths person, so I wonder if someone who is could tell me something about this.
1 August 2010 at 5:22 am
yeah, I'm not a math person either, but Alder's response doesn't smell right to me.
I'm with you on wanting a math guy to drop in.
1 August 2010 at 6:39 am
But you can see why this paper is moving a lot of big things around for me.
1 August 2010 at 12:58 pm
I'm reading a book right now that would probably help you in this area. 'On Equilibrium' by John Ralston Saul. Have you read it?
1 August 2010 at 2:35 pm
Democritus and Leucippus and other atomists favor empiricism ad Platonic and Continental rationalism and unfounded intuitions and revelations don't lead to that more abundant life!
Modern rationalism depends on empiricism.As Carneades notes, answers are probable, what we now call tentative knowledge. Whilst evolution and its natural selection are well-confirmed, aspects therefo aren't.
2 August 2010 at 2:43 am
drops in
It's well-understood that axioms are starting assumptions and not "self-evident" truths, and since Godel it's been especially evident that demonstrating that particular axioms hold from within a system is futile (this applies to ideas about the universe, since we're already embedded in it).
The Newtonian position put forward by Alder is that it's not worth discussing propositions for which there are no tests (whether those tests are empirical or purely logical). Alder only denies the value of pure logic in deducing the "truth about the universe". He plays a bit with semantics by claiming maths only gives "consequences" and not "truths": those consequences are true given their axiomatic system. Hence Euclidean's results are still true, it's just that you can't find planar surfaces in nature.
Even then Alder's overlooked some of the great purely-logical results: Godel's Incompleteness Theorem, the Turing Problem, and most recently the paper "Physical Limits of Inference" by Wolpert. These all have ramifications for anyone reasoning about the universe (contact me if you can't get the appropriate journal access).
11 August 2010 at 6:07 pm
I would like to exchange links with your site goodreasonblog.blogspot.com
Is this possible?
21 August 2010 at 6:26 am
I would like to exchange links with your site goodreasonblog.blogspot.com
Is this possible?