– What makes a thing a thing?:
We all have a philosophy which shapes the way we see the world. Humans like to categorise things and divide things into absolutes so as to make them clear to us in our minds. We do this to enable us to live easily. If things are given a category we can assign them a word and refer to that thing with a word consistently so that everyone in our language group knows what we are talking about. If a few planks of wood are arranged into a thing we can sit in then we will assign it in English the name ‘chair’. Then we will look to categorise all things we can sit in as chairs and call them all such. But what makes something a chair? I once had a humorous conversation at a bar with some friends on this topic. Were we sitting on stools or chairs? One of my friends settled the dispute by declaring “well they’re not bloody teacups”.
Plato had a different answer. He thought the way we divide things up in our minds and language was to do with real metaphysical differences between things. Something is a chair because it possesses an aspect of the Form of the chair. And this is what distinguishes a chair from a stool, which possesses the Form of the stool. Plato came up with his theory of Forms to address this problem of universals. What is it that things have in common that enables us to categorise them together? Some dogs look more like cats, but we still call them dogs, why? Because they contain the Form of dog.
For Plato, the Form of something is the perfect representation of that particular thing. The differences between dogs is due to the fact that dogs exist in the physical world. The physical world is imperfect. It never can be perfect. All dogs we see are imperfect copies of the Form of the dog, which, if it exists, doesn’t exist in the physical world (it may be just an idea or it may actually exist in heaven or somewhere).
– Dualism:
The differences between the physical world and a more perfect non-physical world have been looked at quite a bit in western (and Indian) philosophy. This perspective is called dualism. It says there are two distinct substances in the world; physical and metaphysical. The body, the senses, and all physical things are imperfect and located within the physical realm. The soul, God, morality, Forms or whatever else, are located within the metaphysical realm. Historically the physical realm has often been condemned by dualists as corrupting. From Plato straight through St. Paul all the way up to modern times, the physical world, especially the body and the temptations it provides (lust, gluttony etc.) have been something we should escape and transcend.
Descartes really made the dualist distinction explicit. He really believed strongly in the ability to use one’s mind to come to know things about the metaphysical realm. This philosophical trend is called rationalism. He didn’t think knowledge should be bound by what we can detect with our senses. In fact in his Meditations he came to explain the whole world from scratch independent of his sense perceptions of the physical world. He underwent this exercise after adopting the position of a total sceptic and he tried, and claimed to have succeeded, to use pure reason and his mind to prove the sceptic wrong.
The philosophical sceptics approach is to doubt everything. They doubt the accuracy of our senses. They say ‘what if the computer in front of me doesn’t exist?’. How can we really know anything? Maybe I just think I’m sitting here typing on a computer, maybe I’m really stuck in the Matrix. Descartes said maybe he’s being fooled by an evil demon into thinking the world looks the way it does. Perhaps he doesn’t even have two arms and two legs. Descartes said the only thing he can be sure of is that he exists. The mere fact that he was thinking about this proves that he exists; “I think therefore I am”.
– Rationalism (knowledge from logic):
Once he had convinced himself that he existed, Descartes was confident he could use pure reason to prove the existence of God, and from there everything else. Descartes took inspiration from a thinker five hundred years prior, St. Anselm, the Archbishop of Canterbury under William the Conqueror’s son and successor. Anselm defined God as the greatest possible being we can conceive. He suggested that the greatest possible being must exist in reality because a being that exists in reality is greater than one that exists only in the mind. Ten real dollars is greater than ten imaginary dollars. Therefore, he thought pure logic, without reference to ones experience of the real world, could prove the existence of God. It’s called the ontological argument for the existence of God. The greatest imaginable thing wouldn’t allow an evil demon to trick us into thinking we were had two arms and two legs and were sitting reading right now, so the sceptic is wrong!
The Benedictine monk Gaunilo of Marmoutiers, a contemporary of Anselm, thought the ontological argument was ridiculous. Gaunilo said such an argument could be used to prove the existence of anything, such as a perfect island. I’m not sure the analogy is quite apt because I don’t think that we can conceive of the perfect island. How many beaches would it have? And trees? I get Gaunilo’s point though. It’s one of those arguments that leaves you feeling uneasy and unconvinced even if you can’t put your finger exactly on where it goes wrong. Probably all it actually proves is that words and logic can be used to prove anything.
– Empiricism (knowledge from senses):
Descartes’ and Anselm’s rationalism has gone rather out of fashion in a lot of philosophical circles today. In the same way that Gaunilo doubted Anselm’s style of reasoning, philosophers more broadly have doubted the ability of humans to reason out purely in our minds things about the world. The rise of science led to a lot of new information about the world which was much more useful than rationalist thinking. This fact led to many adopting empiricism – the idea that we can only know things by reference to our senses. Major empiricists include John Locke, George Berkeley and David Hume. They argued that rationalist reasoning gets us nowhere; for us to have knowledge we must study things we can actually see, hear, feel or touch, as science does. The senses provide the only gateway to the real world and any attempts at learning about the world without using the senses are conjecture at best.
For the empiricists, beliefs in God, souls or a metaphysical realm are nonsense. You might as well believe in a giant purple floating hippo following you at all times. We have equally little empirical, or physical, knowledge about either of them. For many these days, empiricism and the closely related materialism (which as mentioned in the previous chapter asserts that if it can’t be known scientifically then it doesn’t exist) have become a matter of fact. The Physics building at the University where I studied had a sign with the declaration that ‘physics tells us all that there is’. Never forget, though, that this statement is a statement not of science but of philosophy of science. They may or may not be true, but materialism and empiricism are not proven by science. They are beliefs which do seem to go hand in hand with science but they are not, and do not necessarily need to be, adopted by all scientists or advocates of science. They are also beliefs systems which are more controversial then they may first appear. It is not just God which cannot be known empirically. If you rule out all non-empirical things as nonsense then where does that leave morality? What about discussions of art and beauty? Love? The empirical world is a lot less of a world than the world we are used to.
– Kant’s synthesis:
Immanuel Kant, in the second half of the eighteenth century, tried to synthesise rationalism and empiricism. Kant, who declared that he was awoken from his ‘dogmatic slumber’ by reading David Hume, was afraid of how limiting empiricism could be. If we can only know things through experience then we are forced to be very sceptical in regards to generalisations and universal claims. For example Kant thought that empiricists could never assert with confidence that every event has a cause because they have not experienced every event. Put another way, we cannot know that gravity causes a ball to fall towards the ground every time it is dropped because we will not be there every time a ball is dropped to see. At best, the empiricists can say that it is likely that a ball falls every time it is dropped.
Kant was not a fan of rationalism either. He thought that reasoning divorced from sensory experience allows us to make equally justifiable yet contradictory claims about the world. This of course suggests that such claims aren’t worth all that much. Indeed he explicitly argued against the ontological argument for the existence of God.
Kant argued in his Critique of Pure Reason that knowledge of the world begins with sensation and experience. However he added that our mind does contribute something to our knowledge of experience. It contributes organising principles without which we would not be able to understand our sense perceptions. These organising principles are things like cause and effect, space and time. We cannot know things outside of way we experience them, but we can, through reason, and without experience, know the way our sense perceptions will necessarily appear to us.
This is what Kant called, with deserved immodesty, his metaphysical ‘Copernican revolution’. Rather than assume that the way the external physical world appears to us in our mind conforms to the external physical world, let us assume that the way external physical objects appear to us conform to our mind. The rules which govern our understanding of things pre-exist any possible experience of external physical objects. This is because our experience of events depends on things like time and space. We can, hence, come to know some things (the way the world will appear to us), using pure reason, independent of our senses.
– Nietzsche’s perspectivism (we can only view the world from our own perspective):
Friedrich Nietzsche, the king of the postmodernists, agreed with Kant’s starting point. He agreed that we cannot know individual things outside of the way we experience them. He disagreed with Kant, though, by refuting his idea that we necessarily see the world the way we do. Nietzsche argued that everything about us as individuals is socially constructed including the way we see the world. If we do see the world as a world of cause and effect, this is only because that is the easiest way for us to view the world. It is not rationally necessary for us to see the world this way. It is certainly possible that at one stage or another people have not seen the world in this way. So, for Nietzsche there is no objective way people see the world. Each individual has their own perspective on the world and they are stuck in that subjective perspective. There is no way of knowing if we see the world in similar ways as others do; in fact, we probably don’t.
Even when we talk to each other to try and share our perspectives, we are very limited. Language after all, for Nietzsche, does not refer directly to external things as they exist. Words are merely socially constructed generalisations. Nietzsche is the antithesis of Plato; there is no Form of the chair. We only call what we’re sitting on a ‘chair’ because our particular social group has decided we should name it a chair in order for us to communicate about it. And by calling something a ‘chair’, we are not really referring to the specific chair we’re sitting on. We are talking about a generalised and socially constructed version of a chair we have in our mind. We rarely go beyond generalisation and look at specific individual things. Even if we did look at specifics, we are very limited in our ability to communicate these specifics to others, since language can only largely operate through generalities. The generalities we focus on are determined socially, according to what is useful to us as people. After all, we only ever describe chairs as things for sitting, never for climbing. From a snails perspective though, chairs are things for climbing. We shouldn’t be arrogant enough to think that our human perspective is an objective perspective on the world. This is, I think, what Ludwig Wittgenstein was getting at when he wrote that “if a lion could talk, we could not understand him”. The language the lion would use would be too different to ours, because of its different perspective. Neither we, nor the lion, have God’s objective perspective, and for Nietzsche there is no God’s perspective.
Wittgenstein, an Austrian Jew who went to school with Adolf Hitler around the time that Nietzsche died, discussed in his Philosophical Investigations the issues around defining things, for example a ‘game’. He said that we don’t have a definition and we don’t need a definition. Even without a definition, we use the word correctly. It is indeed, for him, the use of a word which gives it its meaning.
– Pragmatic theory of truth:
For William James, it is the usefulness of a perspective, a world view, which gives it its truth. James, along with John Dewey, Charles Sanders Peirce and others, helped establish the nineteenth century American philosophical trend called pragmatism. Forms of pragmatism have become popular again since the sixties. In general, James asserts that truth is pluralistic and subjective. Truth is good, and what’s good, for the pragmatists, is what is individually useful. Therefore what is individually useful is true, for that individual anyway. Put another way, a system of beliefs that is practically more useful to believe is better to believe. Since it is better to believe, we ought to believe it. Furthermore, if we ought to believe it, it is true, because the only thing we ought to believe is the truth. James abandons the rationalist hope of finding objective philosophical truths but, he thinks he makes it possible to find any truth at all (which he doubted rationalism did).
It is very controversial to apply this theory to scientific truth; its main purpose is to provide a way of resolving seemingly endless theoretical and metaphysical debates in philosophy. It is not particularly practical to be a philosophical sceptic and doubt everything, so for the pragmatists, such a belief is wrong. Now we can move on. That was easy. Descartes would be annoyed he spent so long on the issue! If there is zero real world practical difference between two philosophies, then the two views are the same and we needn’t debate them. James recognises flaws in rationalist thinking but also wants philosophy to be able to answer questions like ‘how should I live my life?’. He doesn’t think such questions should be forgotten, as the empiricists usually do, just because the scientific method cannot answer them. He just thinks such questions are personal and the truth in the answer subjective.
Still, Bertrand Russell thinks the method can justify people in believing anything they want including things that are false and obviously not true. He argued that it would allow people to believe in Santa Claus if such a belief made life easier for them. I think this is a straw man argument though. Whether or not Santa Claus exists can be discovered empirically pretty easily; just go to the North Pole and have a look. Most wouldn’t apply the pragmatic conception of truth to science. Yet even if you did apply it, it’s still not a knock out argument. James didn’t talk about individual beliefs but whole belief systems. Although the individual belief in Santa Claus may cause some sort of short term enjoyment or hope, it would not mesh well with other beliefs which are necessary to function, such as the belief that people can’t teleport down chimneys. Overall it seems necessary to continue to believe that teleportation is impossible, for everyday life, and so belief in Santa Claus could not be useful and should hence never be adopted. An individual belief must be coherent with other beliefs. So the pragmatic view of truth does not justify anyone in believing anything they wish. Having said that, it would justify anyone in holding any coherent world view they wish. A coherent and useful world view could, for example, include a belief that God exists. Yet surely whether or not God exists is a matter of fact independent of an individual’s beliefs. It’s hard to know, maybe Russell was on to something.
These arguments, of the pragmatists, and of Wittgenstein, can be seen as a part of a general push to get philosophy out of the metaphysical realm and into the realm where we live, where it can be, the idea is, more relevant.
Stay tuned for parts 4, 5 and 6.
Elliot Brice's musings. 