Scepticism

My main philosophical interest for the last 20 years or so has been epistemology, the study of what we can and cannot know, what the limitations on knowledge are. My natural inclination is to be sceptical of claims to knowledge. In my view there are good reasons for suspecting that our confidence in what we think we know is not well founded, and that the greater the confidence someone has in a position the more likely they are to be on very shaky ground.

Recently I have noticed that other fields of study are coming up with work that underwrites the sceptical position. For instance, a few years ago I read 3 books by the biologist Andrew Parker. The books are mainly about vision, and describe his work particularly in the evolution of colour vision. In these volumes he describes in great detail both the seeing end in different versions of the eye, and also the seen end and the physics of the different ways nature has evolved that give us colours to see. (I'm not really happy with the way I've phrased that, but it'll do.) This convinced me that the colours we see are created by the brain - they represent something out there, but we cannot be sure exactly what. Cannot, in the previous sentence, indicates a fundamental barrier to knowledge. Certainly colour does not exist in the accepted sense: it's a creation of our brains.

I have taken an intelligent interest in cosmology, as much as a non-physicist can. One thing we can be reasonably sure of is that there is a whole lot out there we do not understand. There are theoretical reasons for thinking that there must be dark matter, dark energy, but so far we are not able to detect either directly. Gravitational lensing of distant objects makes us think that there must be a massive something between us and it. But we cannot actually detect that something itself. Who knows what else there might be out there, and who knows how accurate our present understanding of the natural world is? But if we have good reasons for suspecting that we are ignorant of something in excess of 90% of what exists, how can we claim to have secure knowledge of the other 10%? All we can say is that what we think we know represents what is actually there well enough to produce effects we can repeat and describe, whether in my toaster, or by flying the Atlantic and sending space-craft to Saturn, or in the Collider at CERN. We can trust what we think we see well enough to support our evolution, but perhaps (necessarily) no better than that.

Then there is all the interesting work going on in Neuroscience and Psychology. There is experimental evidence that seems to show that limb movements which we take to be the result of conscious decisions are in fact initiated in the brain long (up to 6 seconds) before we become aware of them. Miles's TV series shows, among other things, how pre-conscious emotions determine what we take to be rational decisions. Work by psychologists with illusions is also convincing that a good chunk of perception is in the brain, not the sense organs. For example, the subject is shown a face saying either BAH or PAH. The lip movement is clear and distinct. He also hears the speaker's voice saying either BAH or PAH. But the sound played is always BAH. Even the researcher who described this, after 20 years of working on it, always hears what the mouth seems to say, despite the fact that he knows very well what sound is actually reaching the ears. It always works. For some reason the brain hears what the eye sees, not what comes in the ears. There is a lot of work along these lines showing similar things. In other words, our perceptions are, to a larger extent than we would want to think, constructed in our brains, and are not a reliable reflection of the world as it is.

Now the BBC has reported some work with painkillers described in Science Translational Medicine. In short, people acting as experimental subjects are hooked up to a system that delivers a powerful pain killer, and are also subjected to some pain. The experiment seems to show that the subjects' experience of pain is greater or less depending on what they are told is happening, and not on the pain given or the pain killer administered. The brain's expectation of pain can completely wipe out the effect of the pain killer, for example. It's well worth reading the item.

The point is, of course, that our experience of the external world and how it impinges on us is created in the brain, and is not directly connected to our experience itself. What we think is what we experience, not what happens to us.

The idea that we can be certain of anything outside our own heads appears more and more ridiculous.

Humanism, Science and Knowledge

Ollie! I have had an epiphany. I now understand why i am not a humanist - it is the humanist love of LOGIC. I do not love science, I no more believe in an objective world that we can uncover through recourse to logic and scientific investigation than I believe in god. It's all just another way of seeing the world, any of which can be correct for anyone. I believe that we construct meaning about our worlds. I'm surprised its taken me this long to be able to articulate it. The reason i was uncomfortable with humanism is because it required faith in logic. So while I don't believe in god, I can't get overly excited by logic either. Kayte.

Sounds like you've been visited by the Spirit of Thomas Kuhn, Kayte, in paper form (The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 1962) maybe! This isn't the place for a discussion of his ideas. There are plenty of learned critical articles on the web. Suffice it to say that Kuhn himself denounced some of the applications of his ideas that his less level-headed followers espoused, and that non-Western critics accuse him of being taken in by a totally Western paradigm.

Now, I'd better take your main points seriously - Humanism and Logic, and belief in anything.

I don't think it is true that Humanists necessary love Logic. I do think it's true that Humanists say that they are rational, and that they reject the irrational. But that's not the same thing. Formal Logic, it seems to me (and I am not a Logician) holds irrespective of time and culture in the same way that arithmetic and algebra do. Thus 365 and 101101101 are the same thing whether a culture uses decimal or binary numbers. But whether they agree it is the number of days in a year (which also has to do with Solar and Lunar calendars) is another matter.

Rationality is more woolly than Logic, and what appears rational to one person may not appear so to someone from a different thought background.

That leads many Humanists into a problem, because Humanists assert that they are ethical. I don't know if any research has been done about what is meant by this, and how individual Humanists deal with conflicts between the different ethical schools. But because they tend also to be humane, many of the Humanists I know are caught between a respectful approach to cultures that leads to relativism in ethics, and a desire for absolutist ethics, so that some things (at least) can be condemned as unethical and definitely wrong at all times and in all places.

Fortunately most Humanists are tolerant, and as far as I know there are no schisms in Humanism along these lines, just lively and healthy discussions. For me one of the main attractions of Humanism is that this discussion can take place, founded on a general agreement that Humanity is somehow important and that people are valuable in themselves.

So I think there is a link between Humanism and Rationality, but quite where it leads is another matter.

Now about belief - you use the phrase "I believe that we construct meaning..." As you know, I am a Sceptic in the tradition of Pyrrho. Their position was to criticise beliefs without advancing any of their own, because if they claimed to believe anything they were vulnerable to their own criticism. In general Scepticism is not convinced that we know what we think we know. That's a bit of an understatement. Some Sceptics would go much further. I'd be prepared to defend the position that it borders on the ridiculous to advance a belief without any sort of evidence. Is that what you're doing? How do you know we construct meaning, for example? What makes you think that? There are arguments, but is there any evidence?

Beware - I am not claiming that evidence justifies a belief, far less proves it. But it does make one work harder to disprove it. There is a better (more rational) case for accepting a belief that has some supporting evidence than for one that has none, and better still if the evidence against is strong.

For as long as I've been thinking seriously at all I have started from the Sceptical point of view: it has long seemed to me that the general arguments are strong, and for even longer I have been impressed by the ease with which some cherished beliefs turn out to be built on sand. But now - really recently - there are at least 3 types of evidence that make the Sceptical position appear stronger still.

First there is work of the kind done by the biologist Andrew Parker who seems to show that colour is created in our brains and does not exist in the external world, or even in the eye. Second there is the kind of work done in Cosmology which seems to show that we cannot detect at least 75% of the Universe that is actually out there (and all around us). What we can detect is necessarily a selection that proved enough for evolution, and what we make of it is necessarily an interpretation of that selection. Third there is the kind of work done by Psychologists working with Illusion - how we can be quite sure that something is before our very eyes (or another sense) when demonstrably it is not.

So I am leaning towards the view that, at very least, we create a lot more of the world than we think. What we think we know is a lot less certain than we normally assume. I could go further and cite the work done with twins that seems to show that our decisions, interests and habits of thought are much more influenced by our genes than most of us would find comfortable. Certainly we do not choose what we are thinking about, what we like, or to whom we are attracted. Nor do we choose what arguments we find convincing. These things come, somehow, from below.

With this background, belief becomes a far more dangerous and interesting topic! But what has any of that to do with science? I think there are a few things to say.

1. Science uses reason to test knowledge, but reason cannot establish knowledge. Great advances do not come from deduction or induction but imagination. There is first the hypothesis, and then the prediction of what will be the case if the hypothesis is correct, and then the testing regime. But then, you knew I am convinced by Karl Popper.

2. The results of science exhibit certain charactistics:
* they work - we fly the Atlantic and use computers and microwave ovens and go to doctors and undergo cardiac surgery.
* they are repeatable, i.e. they can, in principle, be tested independently by anyone, anywhere, any time.
* they are provisional, always ready to give way to a better explanation of the observed facts.

3. It isn't true, as some people think, that new discoveries overthrow old. At least, not necessarily. The Phlogiston Theory was demonstrably wrong. But Einstein did not disprove Newton. He did show that Newton's assumption of a fixed space and time was inadequate at speeds close to that of light, but Newton's Laws of Motion are incorporated in General Relativity and work perfectly well at normal speeds. And neither General Relativity or Newton's Laws of Motion are susceptible to cultural changes.

And what has that got to do with Humanism? Humanism respects Science in a way it cannot respect religion because the characteristics of Science place it on the side of reason, and religion is on the other side. But it is more concerned with Ethics, and living life well, giving people as good opportunities to live their lives to the maximum of their potential as possible. I find that to be something I am enthusiastic about.