Claudio Costa BASIC EPISTEMOLOGY (rough draft)
Preface
I.
Origins of
Knowledge
II.
Definition of
Knowledge
III.
Justifying
Evidence
IV.
The Web of
Beliefs
V.
Truth as
Correspondence
VI.
Limits of
Knowledge
Una vez que tenemos
un sistema, podemos passar a demontarlo. Primero el árbor, déspués el sérrin. Y
uma vez alcançada la etapa del sérrin, hiemos de passar a la siguiente, a saber
la construcción de nuevos sistemas. Hay tres razones para ello; porque el
universo es, él mismo, sistémico. Porque ninguna idea puede tornar-se completamente
clara, a menos que se halle incluida em algún sistema y porque la filosofia del
sérrin es bastante aburrida.
[Once we have a
system, we can set to dismount it. First the tree, then the sawdust. Once we
reach the sawdust, we can turn to the follow, namely, the building of new
systems. There are three reasons for this: first the universe is, in itself,
systemic, because no idea can become sufficiently clear, unless it is included
in some system, and because the philosophy of the sawdust is quite tedious.]
Mario Bunge
PREFACE
Central concepts of
epistemology are to a very great extent interconnected. My aim in the present
book is to offer an analysis that shows these interconnections under the most
central concepts. In this way these central concepts show their consilience
in Susan Haack’s sense of the word. That is, under the conciliative assumption
that the nature of knowledge is unified, a unified treatment of its central concepts
equates to a more cogent analysis. (To be completed...)
I
SOURCES OF KNOWLEDGE
Darwin’s idea is like a universal acid: it eats through just about
every traditional concept, and leaves in its wake a revolutionized world-view,
with most of the old landmarks still recognizable, but transformed in
fundamental ways.
Daniel Dennett
Epistemology is usually
defined as the investigation of the sources,
nature and limits of knowledge, that is, from where knowledge comes from,
how it is constituted, and how far it is able to go… I begin by considering from
where knowledge comes.
Some sources of knowledge are always
mentioned in the literature: experience,
a priori access, memory, and testimony. The
first two sources are primary, while the second two are secondary since they can
be shown to be tributaries to the first ones. If I have the memory of having
let my car in the parking lot, it is because I had the experience of having let
it there. If I remember the modus ponens, it is because I have learned
this logic rule as part of my supposed a priori knowledge. False memories are
not rare; they are not real memories, because they do not correspond to their
sources. However, memory is mandatory: a person who loses her memory will have
her capacity for knowing practically eliminated. Testimony is also an important
secondary source of knowledge. We often gain reliable knowledge by means of
information given by other people. Moreover, testimony has been amplified nowadays
to a plethora of new methods of obtaining information given by others, like
radio, television, newspapers, books, and all the massive amount of information
at disposal at the internet. Testimony is but a secondary source, since ultimately
all this information will be based on the primary sources of sensory
experience, which are intuition and reason. No doubt, experience and a priori access are the chief candidates to the
role of primary sources of knowledge.
The main divide between rationalist and
empiricist philosophers in the philosophical tradition concerns the extension
of the a priori knowledge. Rationalists (Plato, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz,
Hegel, Popper…) always tended to emphasize the importance and extension of the
a priori knowledge, if possible eschewing experiential knowledge. Empiricists
(Locke, Hume, Stuart Mill, Quine…), on the other hand, tended to emphasize the
role of experience, reducing the a priori knowledge to non-substantive
propositions, if not trying to eschew this form of knowledge completely or
almost completely. The distinction is inevitably vague, since there is a range
of levels and kinds of rationalism and empiricism. Later in this chapter I will
try to show how both traditions, rationalist and empiricist, are partially
right.
Our next questions are: “What experience
is?”, and “What a priori access is?”
The first question is apt to a
more straightforward answer. It gives us the so called a posteriori empirical
knowledge. When we speak of experience, we usually refer to the perceptual
experience given by the five senses of the world around us. Example is a
statement like “This computer is on”. But we can also refer to the
reflexive or introspective knowledge we have of our mental states like
sensations, feelings and thoughts. Statements like “I feel pain” and “I think
that Schliemann discovered Troy”, are of this kind. Even occurrences of thought
are experiential, since like the other cases, they are contingent and occur in
time and space. And as Laurence BonJour noted, even the cartesian cogito
é experiential.[1] Moreover,
much of our knowledge is indirectly obtained from experience, as our knowledge
that the tyranossaurus was a carnivorous reptilian or that gravitational waves
can change the spacial dimensions of physical objects.
The second question is
philosophically more difficult. It concerns the nature of the a priori knowledge.
Kant seems to be the first person to have suggested the term ‘a priori’ applied
to judgements. He has defined the a priori judgement negatively, as a true
knowledge that does not need to be justified by experience, even if it
presupposes the experiential learning of its constitutive concepts. In
order to make it clear, I give the following list of candidates of a priori
statements:
1.
Bachelors are not married. Triangles have three sides.
If Mary is the mother of John, then John is the son of Mary. a = a.
2.
1 + 1 = 2. A
cube has 8 edges. The sum of the angles of a triangle is 1800.
3.
P = P. ~(P & ~P). P v ~P. P & (P → Q) → Q. (P
& Q) → P. (~P v Q) → Q. A > B, B > C, hence A > C.
4.
We should not cause suffering to innocent people. Social
justice is equity. Moral action must search the highest happiness to the
majority.
5.
A colour has extension. The same surface cannot be
read all over and blue all over. Any event must have a cause. The universe is
uniform.
Consider (1): they are cases of a priori knowledge typically called
analytic. We can define an analytic statement as the statement that is true in
virtue of the arrangements of the meanings of its semantic components.[2] A
property of these statements is that their negation produces a contradiction or
an incoherence. Triangles do not have three sides contradicts the definition of
triangle as a closed plane geometric figure with three internal angles and
three sides. These kind of statements are easily transformed in logical tautologies
by replacement of synonymic expressions (pace Quine) like “[Non-married
adult males] are non-married” in the place of “Bachelors are non-married”. (Most
empiricist philosophers try to reduce the knowledge a priori to this more
innocuous case.) The examples given in (2) and (3) are respectively from
mathematics and logics. Many believe that at least the principles of these
formal sciences are intuitively given a priori. (4) exemplifies some ethical
principles. (5) exemplifies some candidates to what we could call synthetic a
priori judgements, which would be statements a priori but able to tell
something about the world.[3]
Their identifying criterion is that, differently from analytic statements, they
can be negated without contradiction.
Difficulties in defining a priori truths
Kant has seen necessity and strict universality as the marks of a priori
truth. Contemporary epistemologists have weakened this exigence. For many, the
a priori knowledge can be fallible.[4]
This failure can occur, not only because it can be mistakenly accessed, but
also because it can be defeated, either by the emergence of other a priori
knowledge or by the cumulation of recalcitrant experience.
We saw Kants negative
definition of a priori knowledge. Necessity and strict generality would be
positive traits, but we have abandoned them. In the case of experience, we can
give a positive characterization by saying that the access is experiential and
speak of external or internal spatiotemporal entities that cause it. But there
is no analog concerning the a priori. Instead of experience we can recur to
terms like ‘aprehension’, ‘insight’, ‘intuition and reason’. Terminologically, it
is helpful to distinguish two kinds of a priori access: intuition, when
it seems to be directly given to us, and reason, when it demands a
reasoning process beginning with intuitions. Consider, for instance, the two
following examples of a priori knowledge: “1 + 1 = 2”, and “29,324 + 18,916 = 48,240”.
The first is intuitively reached, since we do not need to use reasoning in
order to aprehend its truth. The second one, however, demands reasoning in
order to be seen as true, at least in the case of normal human beings. An
important point to be noted is that the distinction between both cases is
variable according to the epistemic agent and to a certain extent to her
training. God would have only intuitive knowledge of the a priori, since he
would not need to use reasoning to know the results of what we inferentially
know. It is useful to preserve this understanding of the word ‘intuition’.
Traditional rationalist philosophers tried
to furnish a corresponding simile to the perceptual experience appealing to
mystic-religiose explanations. Thus, Plato suggested that we acquire knowledge of ideas through reminiscence.
Hence, if I see a triangular object, it contains an imperfect copy of the idea
of tringle; this makes me remember the abstract idea of the tringle, with which
my soul has been in contact when it was hovering in the world of ideas, before
its incorporation in a human body (notice that interpreters doubt to what
extent Plato’s resource to this wat not an elucidative resource). Hence, knowledge
results from recollection (anamnesis).
Anticipating the opposition between rationalism and empiricism, he classified
the former as “friends of ideas” and the latter as “earth-born giants”, Augustin defended the doctrine of divine illumination. We learn the
truths of mathematics, of aesthetics and morality because God illuminate us,
making us to remember them when we look at the interior of our souls. For
Descartes things could not be much different. We have the idea of God as the
being that has all the perfections. As we are imperfect, this idea cannot be originated
from ourselves. Hence, God exists, and he placed since the beginning his idea
in us as an innate idea. As an infinitely good being, he allows that we have
access to a priori truths that possess the marks of clarity and distinction
that we find in the (a priori) ideas of mathematics. Although very few today
accept this kind of explanation, it is important to see that it always appeals
to innatism. Leibniz was well-known by regarding innate ideas as
dispositional. According to him, experience is like a sculptor chiselling away
at a block of marble to expose the sculpture already present inside it, namely,
the innate ideas[5]
1. Different methodological sources
It is worth to
notice that rationalist philosophers have historically assigned great value to formal
sciences. They tried to import the kind of deductive reasoning used in
mathematics into philosophy itself, insofar as they could infer knowledge
deductively from adequate intuitions. Plato required knowledge of geometry as a
condition for admission to his academy. Descartes was a great mathematician who
invented analytic geometry. Leibniz invented the infinitesimal calculus.
Spinoza was not a mathematician, but he tried to give an axiomatic structure to
his Ethica.
Empiricist philosophers didn’t have a great
difficulty with the epistemological access to the empirical world, since it
seems to be natural. Their view was that experience is the source of all (or
almost all) our substantive knowledge. Real knowledge should be a posteriori. Above the mathematics,
they tended to praise the inductive reasoning of empirical sciences, as Locke,
who lauded the incomparable
scientific work of Newton at the beginning of his Essay. Locke can be seen as a kind of prototype of an empiricist
philosopher. His metaphor of the new born child’s mind was a blank sheet (a tabula rasa) waiting to be filled by
experience. This metaphor illustrates as much the force as also the weakness of
the empiricist view. The force lies in its openness: nothing is warranted
beforehand. The weakness lies in the fact that it gives us no idea of how it is
possible that a whole edifice of knowledge can be constructed from nothing
beyond random experience. (As Karl Popper once wrote, if someone asks us simply
“to observe…”, this question will make no sense until the person tells us what to observe, giving us in this way
some direction.) Empiricism also does not explain how these resulting contents
can contain enough similar grounds to allow interpersonal agreement. As a
defender of rationalism, Popper ridiculed empiricism, suggesting that it is a
theory of the mental bucket. Empiricists, he wrote, believe the mind of a new born
is like an empty bucket. In time this bucket is slowly filled with material
coming from our senses, this material accumulates and becomes digested as
knowledge, though no one would be able to tell how.[6] Against this
naïve theory of the empty bucket, Popper proposed his own view: the spotlight
theory of knowledge. We are predisposed to inquire about the world in
determinate ways, and by allowing our ideas to be refuted by experience, we
make ourselves able to create new and better ways to understand it.
Against rationalism, it makes sense to point
out the religious or mystical ingredient that is often – though not necessarily
– involved. Nietzsche was the philosopher who identified in Socrates-Plato what
he called the negation of life, an attempt to escape from the hard vicissitudes
of human existence into a transcendent world outside space and time.[7] Philosophers, as persons
used to the life of thought much more than to the life of action, are
particularly prone to this form of escapism.
Nonetheless, this susceptibility alone is
certainly not what sustains rationalism. For some problems it was rather the
only explanatory way available before the Darwinian revolution. The mystical
ingredient can be false and rationalism true, and many contemporary friends of
rationalism (Carl Jung, Karl Popper, Jean Piaget and Noam Chomsky, to name just
a few) have nothing mystical in their worldviews. In what follows, I intend to
show that we can capture the important element of truth in the rationalist
persuasion without having to necessarily embrace any form of mysticism.
2. Evolutionary induction
It is not
difficult to agree with the empiricist when he says that much of our knowledge
is a posteriori. But the thesis that all our knowledge is a posteriori has
always been seriously questioned, at least for the reason that the mind must in
some way construct and organize the empirical experience in order to achieve
knowledge. However, one cannot today explain the origin of the a priori
intuition appealing to the world of ideas, where the soul lived before being
incarnated, like Plato, or to God’s will to insert innate concepts in our minds
in the form of clear and distinct ideas, like Descartes. It is at this point
that the theory of evolution comes into play.
Daniel Dennett has often noticed
that the pre-Darwinian explanations of the origin of species were of the kind
“Top-Down”.[8] For
instance: God created the man and all other species once and for all. On the
other hand, post-Darwinian explanations of the origin of species are of the
kind “Bottom-up”. According to them, the human being is the result of more than
a million years of a blind process of trial and error called natural selection.
Now, the same idea can be applied to our propensions to cognitively build a
priori knowledge, or, to be more careful, a priori beliefs. A priori truths can
be originated from our innate capacities and dispositions.
In our times the most plausible way to
defend rationalism, even if in a modified form, consists in the appeal to
natural evolution. Carl Jung posed the idea of an inherited collective
unconscious, built by archetypical structures that work as innate trigger
mechanisms, even if later speculatively exaggerating the role of these
structures.[9] Popper has called our
attention to the philosophical relevance of filial imprinting in animals.[10] As Konrad Lorenz observed,
in the critical period between 13 to 16 hours after hatching greylag geese
develop the disposition to follow the first object that moves before them,
which normally is their own mother. However, it can be any unexpected moving
object, such as Lorenz’s moving boots. After imprinting, they followed Lorenz
wherever he went. Popper noticed that we also have innate dispositions to form
some primitive “theories” about the world. But unlike Lorenz’s geese, we are
able to correct them. This is a kind
of flexibility that has proved very helpful to our survival. In fact, something
near to imprinting in human beings might be reverse sexual imprinting, which
would be the tendency of children born and raised together not to feel sexual
attraction to one another.[11] In human beings there are,
however, many other manifest inborn dispositional traits, like the disposition
of small children to look to the eyes of their mothers when called, which makes
possible the also innately determined capacity of reading facial expressions,
which plays a crucial role in the socialization process.[12] Another interesting case is
that of a rare deficiency called prosopagnosia (face blindness). People with
severe prosopagnosia are unable to identify the faces of other people,
including their own image in a mirror. This means that the ability to construct
images of many different faces and retain them in memory is innate[13]. More theoretically, Jean Piaget’s well-known
four stages of children’s cognitive development must to a great extent be
genetically programmed[14]. Furthermore, we need to
explain how children are able to learn their mother tongue rapidly from the
ages 2 to 5 years. It seems necessary to posit some kind of what Noam Chomsky
called a language acquisition device in order to explain this ability[15], particularly when we
consider that those children later lose this ability.
Doubtless, we have a multiplicity of complex
innate dispositions and capacities that lead us to react in this or that way,
and may cause us to develop cognitive responses that might correspond to what
rationalist philosophers understood as innate ideas and thoughts, insofar as we
are adequately stimulated. Since the first goal of natural selection is not
truth, but mere survival, we cannot expect that all these selected dispositions
and capacities are those that make us to acquire prima facie true
beliefs. But some of them must do precisely this, since knowing the truth is a
key to survival. As Michael Devitt noted[16], if a belief is
beneficial to the survival, it is to expect that the process of natural
selection makes with the time innate a disposition to entertain it. This does
not mean that the belief must be true. Devitt’s example is that of religion; it
may be that we have a predisposition to adopt a religious belief, which can
help us to collectively survive, without this religious belief being truth. Another
example could be the defence mechanisms considered by the psychoanalysis, as
the negation, the projection, the repression, the rationalization and the
sublimation. These mechanisms might have nothing to do with the search of
truth, but they are necessary to protect the psychological structure of a
person. However, as Devitt also noted, it may be that the disposition to
form a belief is beneficial precisely because it is true, being by this reason
selected. This is an important point only that Devitt consider this
argument as complementary to his view that there is no a priori belief.[17] I take a different stand; I
think this argument shows the empirical origin of our priori beliefs.
If we apply this kind of reasoning to the
concepts and thoughts prized by rationalist philosophers like Plato, Descartes
or Kant, we would have an evolutionary explanation for the role they give to a
priori knowledge. This knowledge would not be the result of some intellectual
intuition of essences, or of the soul’s grasping of eternal ideas in the
Platonic realm, or something innately given to us by the Cartesian God, but
simply the result of a displaced form of induction that I wish to call evolutionary induction.
This idea of evolutionary induction must be explained
and justified. In order to do this, I begin by considering a trivial case of inductive
numerical generalization. We can formulate this kind of induction using the
symbols F and G in the place of physical and cognitive events respectively, and
↑P in the place of ‘very probably’, numerical generalizations can be roughly symbolized
as:
Fx → Gx
Fx → Gx
(…)
↑P (x) (Fx → Gx)
For instance: if
a first fire makes warms, a second fire makes warms, and so on… one can
conclude that (very probably) all fire warms.
It is true that our knowledge of the
empirical world is often and more primarily reached by cognitive numerical
induction, namely, from the experience of frequent association of different
facts in time and space, like fire with light or warmth. In order to illustrate
this, suppose an imaginary case of a cognitive being not endowed with any
geometric intuition, using rules to discover what kind of line covers the
shortest distance between two points. This inductive reasoning could receive
the following canonical form:
Schema A
Numerical inductive generalization:
- [Fx] The line covering
the shortest distance between these two points, [Gx] then it is measured
as a straight line.
- [Fx] The line covering
the shortest distance between these other two points [Gx], then
it is measured again a straight line.
(…)___________________________________________________
- Hence, probably: [Fxs]
All the lines covering the shortest distance between two points are [Gxs]
to be measured as straight lines. In symbols: ↑P (x) (Fx → Gx)
Now, one can
argue that our innate dispositions, prompting us to react to adequate stimuli
building some kind of intuition or reason (generating a priori concepts,
judgments, and reasonings) had a similar inductive source, not in epistemic
subjects, but in the evolution of the species. As we have seen, at least in
some cases, natural selection chose the members of a population that have
phenotypical traces more adequate for survival in their surroundings, at least
until the age of reproductive maturity, simply because they react by having
thoughts that are true in the sense of corresponding with reality. However, it
seems clear to me that in this case we also have an inductive process. It is
inductive at the evolutionary level. We can suggest that this occurs in animals
and particularly in human beings, even if in the latter case with results that
can be further treated in much more flexible ways, since handled by the
intervention of many contextually and culturally developed variables, so that
instead of speaking of stimuli we should here rather speak of adequate circumstances,
cultural contexts, life forms.
I think I can give a convincing example of
evolutionary induction that goes beyond a mere analogy. It concerns the
well-known fate of applied Euclidian geometry. Kant considered its principles
to be examples of synthetic a priori judgments, ways the mind is able to legislate
on the phenomenal world of experience. For him, statements like “a straight
line is the shortest distance between two points”, “through a point outside a
straight line only one parallel can be drawn”, or “the sum of the internal
angles of a triangle is 1800.”
This certainty disappeared soon after Kant’s
death, with the discovery of non-Euclidean elliptical and hyperbolic
geometries. This has shown that there were at least logically possible worlds
where the principles of Euclidean geometry do not apply. Worst of all, in 1915
the general theory of relativity showed that real physical space does not
follow a Euclidian geometry, but an elliptical Riemannian geometry which
changes depending on the curvature of space-time under the influence of gravitational
fields.[18] This curvature, however, is
too small to be perceived by us in our surroundings. It can be measured only as
the result of gravitational fields in cosmological dimensions. Thus, if you
draw a triangle between the Earth, Mars and Jupiter, you will see that the sum
of its internal angles is greater than 1800.
The conclusion is that natural evolution has
endowed us with the intuitions of Euclidean geometry because it is not only
simpler but also precise enough to allow us to deal successfully with our surroundings,
and this is what mattered for our ancestors’ survival. Hence, it is easy to
understand why we were selected by evolution to understand and see Euclidian
geometry in a more direct and natural way as part of our genetic endowment. We
have the a priori intuition that we can draw only one straight line between any
two points. We see by some “natural light of reason” that we can draw only one
parallel line through a point outside a straight line and that the sum of the
internal angles of a triangle must always be 1800. I understand
these proclivities as legitimate results of evolutionary induction in the
following way. Across many generations, natural selection has eliminated those
members of our species without any ability to think using Euclidean geometry,
and preserved those members more or less endowed with the capacity for thinking
with this geometry. Notwithstanding its own limitations, Euclidian geometry had
the great advantage of furnishing us a sufficiently reliable point of departure.
(Bertrand Russell wrote in his Autobiography that as he was a child, he deduced
most of Euclidian theorems without having read the Elements; he had a
better innate endowment to understanding Euclidian geometry than most of us.)
At first view, ‘evolutionary induction’
might seem a strange expression for a strange form of induction. However, this
impression disappears once we see that the inductive result does not need to be
restricted to the psychological experience of an existing epistemic subject, or
even of any collaborative community of epistemic subjects. To restrict
induction to a psycho-social phenomenon is a chauvinist prejudice. Inductions
are logical inferences that by chance instantiate cognitively in human
epistemic agents. But this is a contingent fact. Induction can be instantiated
in an adequately programmed computer. In a similar way, induction can be
instantiated in the process of natural selection in order to produce shared
innate propensions to reach a priori beliefs. We only displace the experience
of the individuals to the “experience” of a species. The above described result
of evolutionary induction isn’t structurally different from our normal
processes of induction by enumeration, except for the fact that it is coupled
with a process of natural selection in which the social disposition for the
inductive conclusion, which appears to us in the form of intuition or reason,
can take many thousands of years to fully develop. Here is a schema regarding
the shortest distance between two points provided in the long run by our
evolutionary induction:
Schema B
Evolutionary inductive generalization:
A member of the species is able to
survive [Fx] by seeing straight lines as [Gx] the shortest
distance between two points.
Another member of the species is
able to survive by [Fx] seeing straight lines as [Gx] the
shortest distances between two points.
(…)___________________________________________________
Hence, very probably: The selected
members of the species have the intuition that always that [Fx’s]
straight lines are seeing, they are [Gx’s] the shortest distances
between two points. In symbols: ↑P (x) (Fx → Gx)
The structure of
schema B is similar to the structure of schema A, not as an individual
induction but as a fragment of our own species-induction. It seems that we have
good reasons to think that cognitive dispositions and capacities that at first
view seem to be the result of the natural light of reason are in fact an
inductively grounded end-product of natural selection. Evolutionary theory has
made plausible the idea that rationalism can be understood as having after all
an empiricist inductive basis in the general process of evolution.
Finally, the idea of
evolutionary induction – a species-induction – is supported by the view
according to which species are spatiotemporally enduring individuals.[19] If
it were possible to bring to the earth an animal from another galaxy that were
identical to our tigers, having the same genetic layout and being able to
inter-crossing with our tigers, we would resist to classify this animal as a
tiger. After all, tigers are animals that have developed in Asia. Because of this,
we should treat a species as an individual that develops itself during the
time, in a similar way as we can treat a colony of ants as an individual. This
is an additional reason to think that species are able to select their members
in an inductive form.
The final conclusion is that
the theory of evolution suggests that the origin of our so-called a priori
intuitions and reasonings is not a mystical one. This origin lies in inherited
proclivities. It is these proclivities, along with adequate experiential
stimuli, which lead us to have intuitions and reasonings that we see as a
priori justified. A priori justification is the justification settled by the
experience of our species.
Joining the two sources of
knowledge, we come to the following naturalistic conclusion: there are two ways
to obtain supposedly true belief: by means of sense and by means of reason, by
means of individual/social sensory-perceptual induction and by means of
species-induction. Consequently, at the button there is no true belief that is
not inductively achieved.
3. Examining supposed counterexamples
One could object
that this conclusion is too hasty, since most intuitions and reasonings that
are important for the rationalist philosopher seem to have little, perhaps
nothing at all to do with most of the dispositions and capacities initially
considered. They are moral views, logical principles, arithmetical judgements
and, mainly, metaphysical principles like the view according to which all
events must have causes, or the libertarianist view of free will as
transcending causal constraints. At first view, such abstract ideas do not seem
to have as their source innate dispositions resulting from natural evolution.
Moreover, we also have seemingly unavoidable metaphysical concepts, like those
of substance, property, number and existence, which do not seem to be
empirically explainable.
One can answer this objection by saying that
many of these intuitions have indeed an evolutionary source, some of them being
of such a general kind that they must belong to any evolutionary endowment, but
this does not prevent them from being illusory. In what follows, I will
consider them separately.
1.
Analytical statements. There is the more trivial
case of conventional definitions like “A square is a special kind of rectangle”
or “Bachelors are not married”, and even stipulative trivialities like “a = a”. They are analytical
because true in virtue of meaning. The kind of a priori called analytical in
the Fregean sense, that is, able to be transformed into logical tautologies by
substitution of terms. Thus, since “A square (Df.) = a rectangle with equal sides”, we can derive the tautology
“A rectangle with equal sides is a rectangle”, and since “A bachelor (Df) = a non-married adult male”, we can
derive the tautology “A non-married adult male is non-married”. Something
important to see about analytic statements is that most of them are not
arbitrarily built. The above convention exists and is useful because there is a
difference in the world between married and non-married adult males. In
themselves, analytic statements are frozen as eternal truths; what might occur
is that their application can be eroded by changes in the world and
consequently in our conceptual system. In a society where there is no place for
marriage there will be no usefulness for the concept of bachelor. However, their
truth-value should not be confused with their usefulness (pace Quine).
2.
Moral proclivities. Moral dispositions clearly have
evolutionary origin. Men are social animals. Consider the moral rule: “Do not
harm innocent people”. Even if this can be object of critical thinking, it
serves as a rule of thumb. We are endowed with moral dispositions, and if we do
not follow them and we do not lack these dispositions (as in the case of
psychopaths), we are damned to feel bad conscience. Moral principles like “We
should act in order to increase the general well-being” or “We should not do to
others what one would not like to get done to ourselves” are selected because
they further the collaboration in a community and human society does not thrive
without this collaborative element.
It is interesting
to see that all these rules can be seen as a priori, though fallible. We can
always imagine situations in which their application can be wrong. But we feel
that there is something redeemable in them and that it is the task of moral
philosophy the attempt to refine them in order to make them undeniable.
Finally, one should pay attention to what is called epistemic
overdetermination: the possibility that our a priori justification is
reinforced or weakened by experience, through induction or refutation. In this
sense, epistemic overdetermination can be as old as
Plato’s teaching of geometry in the Phaedo, and as common as we might
suspect.
3.
Mathematical Truths. An interesting case is that of mathematical truths. I already considered
the case of geometry, showing that we were selected to have a priori intuitions
concerning Euclidean geometry, which seems more natural to us, though physics
has shown that it is not the real geometry of physical space in the universe.
We could here introduce the distinction between applied and abstract geometry[20]. As an applied geometrical
statement, “The sum of the internal angles of a triangle is 1800” is
not a synthetic a priori truth, as Kant would like us to believe, that is, an
informative necessary truth concerning objective physical space achieved
independently of experience. It is synthetic a posteriori and in addition
false. On the other hand, this same statement can be abstractly interpreted as
an analytic or self-contained a priori truth, insofar as we understand it as
the result of the abstract construction derived from the Euclidian system of
geometry, leaving out of consideration its applicability to the real world.
This abstract geometry can also be considered necessary in the sense that it
cannot be false within the abstractly considered Euclidian system.
Although some
would disagree, I do not see much difficulty in applying a similar kind of
reasoning to arithmetic. Consider the sentence “2 + 3 = 5”, which is usually
considered an a priori truth. We do not learn it directly. We must first have
the experience of counting objects like two pears and three apples in order to
get five fruits. Later, we learn to think that 2 + 3 = 5 is the abstraction of
any empirical counting. It is clear that the first capacity is innately
determined, allowing us to establish a later convention abstractly considering
2 + 3 = 5. In this way, 2 + 3 = 5 not only finds support in our everyday usage,
but if considered as an abstract convention (only conceived and never applied)
it can be seen as true by definition.
Now, suppose that we are in a possible world
called Omega, where when making any applied sum, a similar additional object
suddenly appears before us. For example, in the process of adding two pears and
three apples, what I see before me are six pieces of fruit: two pears and, say,
four apples, two of them exactly identical.[21] In this world, the applied
sum 2 + 3 = 5 would be false. In fact, 2 + 3 = 6 would be the right result, the
same occurring with the result of 7 + 5, which would be 13... The difficulty we
have to accept this conclusions rests in the fact that we guess that this
possible world would contradict all our physical laws and it would be barely
conceivable. Anyway, it remains at any rate a logical possibility. In such a
logically possible world, we would probably need to produce an abstract
conventional concept of sum that would need to be a different one, supported by
changes in applied arithmetic.
Like us, a
mathematician from the world Omega could make the mistake of supposing that
this form of applied addition is necessary and universal, so that it could be
extended to all possible worlds based on his mathematical intuition. However,
as we know from our own world, this would be faulty. And this suggests that
although he remains free to conclude, based on conventions, that 2 + 3 = 6 and
7 + 5 = 13, he cannot say that he can generalize this result as necessarily
applicable in all possible worlds, unless he interprets these sums
independently of their applications, as abstract arithmetic. In this case, he
could say that these results are necessary in the sense that they could not be
different in any possible world within his assumed abstract system of rules.
4.
Logical Principles. The cases of fundamental
logical principles seem different. Think about the principle of
non-contradiction: ~(p & ~p). Ontologically formulated, it means that it is
impossible that something is the case and isn’t the case at the same time and
from the same perspective. Logically formulated it says that a thought (a
Fregean proposition) cannot be true and false at the same time and under the
same interpretation. This principle can be seen as a priori and analytic (in
the sense that it cannot be denied without contradiction): it is too
fundamental to be falsified.[22] Locke was of the opinion that we learn the principle of non-contradiction
from experience. For reasons already given, this cannot be true. In fact, we
must be evolutionarily so constituted that we cannot do anything, except to
follow the principle of non-contradiction inevitably inbuilt in our cognitive
mechanisms, since without this principle he would be unable to have any
cognitive experience. As Aristotle wrote, a person who denies this principle
would be mute like a tree. One cannot simultaneously affirm something and its
proper denial and claim to have said something. This applies to any cognitive
being. A cat cannot catch a mouse if it sees a mouse and a non-mouse at the
same time. A zebra that sees a lion and a non-lion at the same time will soon
have a difficult time. Hence, the necessity of the principle of
non-contradiction isn’t based on something like its intuition, but on its
universality. If we are not wild metaphysicians, we will feel our cognitive
inability to find an exception. Generally spoken, in cases as fundamental as
the principles of thought or the modus ponens, we cannot make a
distinction between applied and non-applied logics. And the reason is that
logic, in its fundamentals, is ubiquitous. This remembers us Wittgenstein’s
thesis according to which the possibility of representation is indebted to what
is ultimately common between representation and world, which for him was the
logical form or structure.[23] The principle of
non-contradiction cannot be contradicted because as well our thought as what it
represents must be in accordance with it, the community between both being
justified by the natural selection. (Our capacity to apply the principle needs
to be distinguished from the kind of introspective act of recognizing the
principle in the thought. This act isn’t a priori. This act of recognition was
instantiated for the first time, it seems, by Aristotle in his Metaphysics.)
5.
Inductive Principles. Evolutionary induction has
also taught us inductive logic. It seems that we have intuitive belief in
principles like those saying that the future will preserve sufficient likeness
to its past to allow inductive inferences, because we are disposed to form
inductive habits, and this disposition cannot be other than a result of
evolutionary induction.[24] The same applies regarding
something more sophisticated but equally important, abduction, the inference of
the best explanation. In order to make this inference, we need a fact or set of
facts leading us to infer the best explanation for something. For instance, the
best explanation for the different phases of the moon, after considering
different positions of the moon relative to the earth and the sun – the sun
always seen on the opposite side – was that different angles of illumination
through the sun were the cause. This kind of inference must assume a multitude
of previous numerical inductive inferences in order to be possible. But the
more sophisticated ability to make inferences about the best explanation could
also be the result of a selected disposition. Those individuals able to
associate several inductive evidences and see the common explanation had better
chances of survival and passing this ability on to their offspring.
6.
Metaphysical Principles. Concerning legitimate
metaphysical concepts like those of properties, numbers, existence, external
reality, it is plausible that we also have inborn capacities to form them,
consciously or not. They are framework metaphysical concepts, and their
necessity is justified by their universality. We are not able to conceive any
possible world in which they would not be applicable. Consider, for instance,
the concept of external reality: we could say that the observance of natural
laws belongs to it in an aprioristic way.
More on the
opposite side, there are conventions that doubtless aim to reflect metaphysical
properties of empirical reality: “Red is a colour”, “Everything red is coloured”,
“Red is not green”, “The same surface cannot be red and green at the same
time”, “A physical body must have some extension”, “If A is taller than B, and
B is taller than C, then A is taller than C”... Although these statements all
seem to be true by convention, these conventions are more solidly anchored in
our grasp of the ways the world is constituted (the ways the world has selected
us to divide it up). Because of this, we feel the ease with which we can apply
the correspondence view of truth in order to warrant these statements: “Red is
a colour” corresponds to the fact that all reds are colours, “A physical body
must have some extension” corresponds to the fact that all physical bodies have
some extension.[25]
There is also a
pragmatic point to be considered. These a priori statements, like the
linguistic systems to which they belong, must be useful insofar as they are
applicable to reality. The conceptual relations in these statements can be seen
as necessarily true, insofar as the corresponding systems apply to the world,
otherwise they will be unmasked as false and not necessarily true. But there is
no crucial difference between these cases and a statement like ‘Bachelors are
unmarried men”, since it could lose its point in a society in which bachelors
cannot be factually distinguished from married people. The only difference is
that statements like “Everything red is coloured” or “Things that are red are
not blue” require the acceptance of a more sophisticated system of rules that
in their cases define red patches as colours, and different colours as mutually
exclusive. A provisional conclusion is that we do not need to consider
conceptual truths as detached from reality only because of their usually
conventional character. Their conventions are not arbitrary; they can often be
seen as reflecting the metaphysical structure of reality as we are able to
conceive.
There are also
metaphysical principles cherished by philosophers as “The future will be like
the past” (Hume) and “All events have a cause” (Kant). They would be easily
called synthetic a priori judgements. We can suspect overdetermination at work
in them: they can be learned through experience and at the same time be the
result of inherited proclivities. As stated above they are clearly wrong. Why
cannot an event occur without any cause? Why must the future be like the past?
Anyway, this does not mean that they cannot be refined in ways that make
difficult to deny them without incoherence. Since I will discuss the first
principle in the last chapter, I will try to refine the second one here. We can
first consider a minimalist form of it: “At least one event must be caused”.
Since our own experience is causal, this principle is verified by experience.
This is, obviously, a too weak principle to sustain causality. But we can
reformulate it as follows:
Causal
relations must be at least sufficiently common to justify our expectative that,
given one event, we might expect to find its causes.
Although we can
reject this version, we do it with a heavy hearth. We see that its rejection
makes natural laws impossible, making them impossible even concerning the
causal relation between objects and their perception. Since we cannot conceive
a world in which this relation would not be a causal one, it seems clear that
the reformulation (2) cannot be denied without incoherence being therefore an
analytic-conceptual truth.
7.
Illusory philosophical beliefs. Finally, there
is a lot of illusory philosophical knowledge. As hopelessly illusory, I would
choose the concept of substance as a kind of “I don’t know what” support for
the sensible qualities of material things that lie beyond any experience[26]. We can replace it by the
material things themselves, maybe understood as bundles of spatiotemporally
located tropical properties, including what physicists call ‘rest mass’[27]. Another hopeless case is
the synthetic a priori principle that all events must have causes[28]. We don’t need the appeal
to Hume’s authority to say that this view has no intuitive support. It is not
difficult to imagine events without any cause and the generalization to all events
seems to be a philosophical fancy. (However, if you say that at least some
event must have a cause, I will tend to agree, since it seems impossible to
conceive the world without this assumption.) Consider, finally, the “feeling of
freedom”. Libertarians have appealed to this feeling as evidence that we are
able to transcend causal determinism in our decisions: we feel that we could
decide to do otherwise. However, plausible compatibilist theories of free will,
by explaining our freedom of decision as constituted by the lack of
restrictions on human decisions, justify this feeling of freedom as caused by
the intrinsic incapacity of our conscious minds to become aware of all the causal factors involved in the
decision process.[29]
Evolution shows
that cognitive beings that were selected as able to make the right kind of
association are able not only to protect their lives, but also to form ideas
that are often true. In the last case we have the process of evolutionary
induction. The evolutionarily selected cognitive beings have learned to
correlate their representations with the enduring associations of events under
adequate circumstances, reaching truths in the sense of correspondence, at
least to a relevant extent, even abstracting them in the form of analytical
truths. There is no absoluteness in these truths; but they are able to give us
points of departure. This is the real source of all our a priori intuitions and
reasoning. Plato’s anamnesis was a “Top-Down” foreshadowing of the end-product
of evolutionary induction, which is in fact a “Bottom-Up” process.
4. Conclusion
What should we
conclude from all these considerations? One could conclude with Devitt, that in
the end empiricism wins, since it seems that the ultimate source of our
knowledge is in both ways inductively originated from the interaction between
the senses and empirical reality. However, I am afraid that this conclusion
does not do justice to rationalism. Rationalism, like any philosophical
position, should be evaluated not by its errors, but by its insights. Plato was
in error by appealing to mythological explanations, but he was not to blame
regarding this, since they were the only clue that his time could bring. But
Plato was also prescient in believing that there is something innate steering
our experience. On the other hand, a rationalist system like that of Spinoza,
which is naturalist and treats the extended physical world as a different way
of presentation of the mental world, both of them belonging to the infinite attributes
of God or Nature or Substance, is compatible with evolutionary theory. A
proponent of evolutionary induction could reconstruct this system without
falling into contradiction.
Moreover, we can accept a considerable
amount of innately determined intuitive or rational a priori knowledge, insofar
as we admit, against old fashioned rationalists, that what we are assuming to
be knowledge is fallible. The belief in infallible a priori truths belonged to
a time when philosophers didn’t have any Darwinian option. Furthermore, there
is nothing in rationalism forcing us to reject induction. These would be naïve
and committed forms of rationalism. What really distinguishes rationalism in
its modern form seems to be its emphasis on the role of innate dispositions and
capacities in the construction of knowledge. And what distinguishes empiricism
is the emphasis on our minds’ ability to react before the accumulation of
empirical evidence, making use of the different forms of inductive reasoning in
order to develop or challenge our original dispositions and capacities.
Traditional empiricism, by rejecting innate knowledge also rejects Darwinian
answers, like the products of evolutionary induction, falling into the
exceeding poverty of mental buckets theory. More plausibly the two elements,
inborn propensities and inductive experiential procedures, must have a
complementary role to play in the development of human knowledge. In the same
way as psychology has overcome the opposition between inborn influences and
influences of the external world by admitting the unavoidable interaction
between the two, epistemology informed by evolutionary theory overcomes the
opposition between rationalism and empiricism. Insufficiently aware of the
evolutionary link, traditional rationalism and empiricism have respectively
over-emphasized either one or the other, according with the inclinations of
philosophers and philosophical movements. So considered this is a dichotomy
fated to disappear.
II
DEFINING KNOWLEDGE
Knowledge is not simply justified true
belief, but it is justified true belief justifiably arrived at.
Robert Fogelin
Before analysing
knowledge, we need to make a pre-philosophical analysis of the meanings of the
concept-word ‘knowledge’. Although one can find a variety of definitions in
dictionaries, there are at least three main meanings or concepts of knowledge
usually selected by epistemologists.
The first concerns ability knowledge, often called knowing how (to do something). It is the
knowledge one has of swimming, bicycling, walking, speaking a language, playing
the violin, cradling… Even animals have this kind of knowledge: a bird knows
how to make a nest. The form is: “the living being a knows how to perform the activity x.” This procedural kind of knowledge is for us less relevant, not
only because it is shared with animals, but because it is usually devoid of
conscious awareness. It often appears after a process of automatization: one
thinks about the movements one makes in cycling only in the beginning; soon one
learns to make them automatically, without any conscious awareness. But in some
cases, it is innately established. Consider the sequence of movements a human
being makes when crawling. Are you able to specify the exact, true sequence?
The second selected sense is acquaintance knowledge. In order to have
it, one needs to be personally acquainted with a person or a thing. Examples
are given by sentences like “I know Mary”, “I know Paris”, “I know Niagara
Falls”. However, one cannot have this type of knowledge relative to something
one has no personal acquaintance with. I cannot say that I know Moscow or that
I know China, because I was never in these places. All I can say is that I know
some facts about Moscow and some other facts about China. Of course, I can say
that I know Aristotle, but this is an extended sense of the word. I do not mean
that I was ever introduced to this philosopher. It is an indirect way to say
that I have studied his philosophy. The form of knowledge by acquaintance is “I
know x”, where x is a singular term like Mary or China. (French has different
verbs for this type of knowledge, namely, ‘connaȋtre’ as opposed to ‘savoir’,
which is also the case with other Romance languages, e.g., Spanish: conocer vs.
saber. In German: wissen vs. kennen.)
The third and by far most important sense of
knowledge is that of propositional knowledge.
It is also called knowing-that, because very often (though not always) in its
verbal expression, after the verb ‘to know’ comes the preposition “that”, and
after the preposition “that” comes a declarative sentence expressing a
proposition that can be true or false, which is essential to this kind of
knowledge. Examples are “I know that 7 + 5 = 12”, “I know that the Eiffel Tower
is located in Paris”, “I know that neutrons have no electrical charge”.[30] Propositional knowledge is
fundamental to us, because most of our sciences, most of our culture, and even
our everyday knowledge is of this type. When epistemologists speak of analyzing
knowledge they are usually referring to propositional knowledge. It has a
complex nature that will be analytically deciphered in a satisfactory way in
the course of this chapter.
A well-placed question here would be: is
there enough semantic proximity between these three types of knowledge to
justify the use of the same word ‘knowledge’ to classify them? I think the
answer is ‘yes’. One characteristic of knowing-how is that in humans it is
usually learned and that in the process of learning we begin by becoming aware
of the sequence of things to be done, for example, the right physical movements
made in cycling or swimming. There must be some knowing-that at first, even if
afterwards these movements become automatic and we lose any awareness of them.
(Another example: When people learn to touch type they at first learn the
keyboard, but with experience they are able to find the keys without looking at
the keyboard but cannot state the sequence of letters.) Hence, knowing-how is
often a result of knowing-that. Concerning knowledge by acquaintance, it is
associated with propositional knowledge, since it entails the latter. If I know
Mary or if I know Paris, this entails that I know a good number of true
propositions or facts about that woman and that city. Finally, it is important
to remember Russell’s view, according to which acquaintance knowledge would be
the primary form of knowledge (Russell 1912, Ch. V). We must first have some
kind of sensory-perceptual acquaintance with empirical things in order to reach
a basis for forming propositions detached from the existence of the facts they
should represent.
1. Traditional definition of knowledge
A further point
is how to analyze propositional knowledge. Plato seems to have been the first
person to make this kind of analysis. According to him (propositional)
knowledge is true belief with a logos, a reason[31]. Understanding the ‘reason’
as a justification, we come to the definition of knowledge as justified true
belief that has passed through the whole history of philosophy until it was
challenged by Edmund Gettier in a famous short article (1963). This
traditional, standard or tripartite definition of knowledge is intuitive. You
cannot know that the statement p is true without believing in its truth,
and if you believe in its truth usually you have some kind of justification: A
school-boy who professes to know that Columbus discovered America not only
believes in the truth of this claim, but must also be able to tell us something
in order to justify this statement. Before going into the details of this
definition, I will consider more closely each of these three conditions.
Consider first the condition of truth. We
cannot properly say that we know the false. Anna cannot know that the moon is
made of Swiss cheese. It is true that we can say that the old Greeks knew that
the Gods lived on Mount Olympus or that we once thought we knew things that
turned out to be false. But in both cases the verb ‘to know’ is not used in its
literal sense. This is shown when we replace the word ‘knew’ in those sentences
by the literal expression, which is ‘believed to know’.
Concerning the condition of belief, it is
important to see that a belief is an attitude towards a proposition. A
proposition (or thought) is what is said by a declarative sentence. The two
declarative sentences “Arminius defeated the Romans” and “The Romans were
defeated by Arminius” are different, but they say the same, that is, they
express the same proposition. Consequently, if we believe in its truth, we
believe in the truth of the proposition expressed by them.
One cannot know that something is true
without believing that it is true, except in a deranged state of mind in which
the degree of belief is distorted by feelings. One case is that of stress: in
an oral exam a nervous student does not believe he knows, but he often answers
questions correctly. Another case is that of wishful thinking: an elderly
English lady believed the impostor Tom Castro was her long lost son, despite
all evidence to the contrary.[32]
However, these are not the kind of beliefs
meant in the traditional definition of knowledge as justified true belief. Our
proper epistemic beliefs must be grounded on some positive probability of truth
that we rationally give to a proposition; they must be rational beliefs.
In this epistemically relevant sense, beliefs not only come in degrees, but we
are even able to find words approximately corresponding to these degrees: if
the probability is 1 or above 0.9, we often use words such as ‘certainty’,
‘conviction’, ‘confidence’; if it is around 0.7 or 0.8, we use the words
‘opinion’ or ‘standpoint’; if it is somewhat higher than 0.5 we use words like
‘hunch’, ‘inkling’, ‘suspicion’; if it is around 0.5 we use the word ‘doubt’ or
‘hesitation’ (or ‘suspension of belief’), and if it is below 0.5 we use the
word ‘disbelief’. Disbelief is the belief that a proposition is false, which is
the same as belief in the negation of the proposition.
When we feel ourselves able to see our
degree of belief as proper to knowledge, we say that we are certain of
its truth. ‘Certainty’ is the key-word here. But what is the criterion for
certainty? To this, I would suggest that the answer must be pragmatic: it must
be a probability that for me or for anyone who thinks to know has the warrant
for the expected practical consequences. Practical certainty
means, I suggest, a bet in the probability 1, even if it cannot empirically
reach it. Formal certainty, on the other hand, is the belief that
warrants probability 1. For instance, I think that my belief in the principle
of non-contradiction is warranted with probability 1.
There is here a distinction between invariantist
philosophers (Williamson, 2005), who suggest that the standard of probability
demanded for knowledge is always the same, and what we could call variantist
philosophers, who suggest that the standard of probability demanded for
knowledge changes with the context (Lewis 2000, DeRose 2005) or with the internal
demands of the subject (Stanley 2005). The following example shows what the
contextualist has in mind. Suppose my girl-friend ask me if I closed the door
of my apartment as I left it. I answer that I know that I closed the door,
since I do it automatically. But if a policeman asks me if I know that I closed
my door, I will be more cautious, answering that I really do not know, though I
believe I did. The external context is different. Now an example of different
internal situation: I am flying through the Atlantic during the night and there
is considerable turbulence. I know that the aircraft will not fall (the chances
are 1 in 5,4 million). However, on my side there is someone who never take a
flight before, and this person is visibly afraid. By his behaviour, I see that
does not know that the aircraft will not fall. Our subjective experiences and
knowledge (and not the external context, which remains the same) make us reach
different evaluations.
A more radical example, in my view an
exceptional case, is the paradox of lottery. If I buy a lottery ticket, I am
not allowed to say that I know I will not win, even if the probability of winning
a lottery is much lower than the probability that my aircraft will crash (1 in
13 million for the lottery). Why don’t I say I know I will not win a lottery
prize? The contextualist answer is that in the lottery context the demands of
probability are much higher. However, why is this not similar to the case of
the airplane flight? Why the lottery context seems to be for some reason
extremely demanding? The answer is not difficult. In the case of the airplane
flight practical certainty is demanded, while in the lottery ticket case
logical certainty is demanded. What really changes is the content of thought
(proposition), which is too vaguely expressed by the declarative sentence. The
thought expressed in the first case is: “I know [with practical certainty] that
my aircraft will not crash”, while in the second case the thought must be
expressed as “I do not know [with logical certainty] that I will not win the
lottery”, since the measure of knowledge here is a statistic inference
that demands probability 1 to be known, namely, that my ticket was really drawn
under the other 13 million tickets.
Nevertheless, a better answer would be that
in the first case what is demanded is practical certainty, while in the second
case what is demanded is logical certainty. What really changes is the content
of thought (proposition), which is too vaguely expressed by the declarative
sentence. The thought expressed in the first case is: “I know [with practical
certainty] that my aircraft will not crash”, while in the second case the
thought must be expressed as “I do not know [with logical certainty] that I will
not win the lottery”, since it is a statistic inference that demands
probability 1 to be known.
I think there is a way to satisfy the
invariantist view without underrate the variantist insights. All that we need
to do is to distinguish what is said from what is thought and rephrase the (spoken
or unspoken) statements in accordance with what is really thought. The first
sentence could be more precisely paraphrased as: “I know that [I am nearly
certain] that I closed the door”. The thought, which is the real bearer of the
truth-value, demands the cognitive certainty that I am nearly certain. In the
second example there are two different thoughts: my own thought is: “I know [by
experience and information] with certainty that the aircraft will not fall” and
the thought of my neighbour, which is:
“I do not know [I am not sure, because of my lack of experience and information]
that this aircraft will not fall”. With the lottery sentence the problem is
different. Here we have a case of a closed statistical probability, demanding
probability 1 that I will not win or 0 that I will win (similarly, I cannot say
that 2 + 2 = 3,9999, but only that 2 + 2 = 4”). That is, I could paraphrase the
statement more precisely as “I do not know [with probability 1] that I will not
win the lottery”. Important is to notice that it is not a difference in the probability
required for knowledge: it continues to be high enough to confer empirical
certainty. The difference lies in the roughness of our usual language, which
does not reflect carefully enough what we really think. The non-spoken variation
in the standard of precision or some other factor is what we really think and
can be easily reflected in a more explicit restatement of the sentence.
Another objection to the condition of belief
is a well-known counter-example offered by Colin Radford (1966):
Jean is a French-Canadian who claims not to
know any English history. He is given a verbal quiz on English history. He
answers questions hesitantly, but gets many answers right. One question asks
the date of Elisabeth I’s death. Jean says, I’d just be guessing, but, um, lets
say, 1603. This is the correct answer. Suppose in fact that Jean did learn this
answer, along with many others long ago in school and that his present “guess”
is based on a vague memory that in fact traces back to his learning the date of
Elisabeth I’s death.
The suggestion is
that Jean knows the date of Elisabeth I’s death without believing it. Although
this counter-example has embarrassed many, I think that in a real case we would
see in Jean’s answers a serious problem of likelihood. As admitted, he does not
get all answers right… Thus, in the same way as he said 1603 he could perhaps
someday say 1613… Hence, he is not that much wrong in saying that he is just
guessing. What he has is a belief with a probability that is somewhat higher
than 0.5, enough to be called a good hunch, but not enough to afford knowledge.
He does not have knowledge, not because he lacks belief, but because he lacks
the degree of rational belief required for knowledge. In a similar way, if an
experienced psychiatrist says she can recognize a schizophrenic patient just by
looking at him, she is resorting to hyperbole. She only believes, since she
lacks the level of rational belief that this case requires for knowledge.
Finally, there is the condition of
justification. Most knowledge-claims clearly require justifying evidence. I
know that the Apollo XI mission landed on the Moon, because I saw it in the
film they transmitted back to the earth. I know that ‘The 5th Symphony’ was
composed by Beethoven, because I have read about the composition of this work.
I can say that I know that my car is at the university, because I remember
leaving it in the parking lot an hour ago. We can all call these epistemically
acceptable justifications good or reasonable. However, not all
justifications are good in this sense. One cannot justify my statement that a
person will die soon, just because one read this in the life line on her palm
or the statement that one flew to the moon last night only because one dreamed
to have visited the moon. We can define a good or reasonable justification as
something that is prima facie acceptable by the majority of people
belonging to the epistemic community to which the knowledge-claimer belongs. Moreover,
what counts as a good or reasonable justification varies with the culture of a
human society. We are free to imagine a different society, where reading the
life line in a person’s palm and the dream that one has flown to the moon are
very good justifying evidence of the expected life of a person and of a real
visit to the moon. Finally, the fact that a justification is good or reasonable
does not mean that it produces true belief: it can be good and produce false
belief. The Newtonian gravitational law, for instance, was considered perfectly
justified in the nineteenth century, and all the contemporary epistemic
community of physicists would have agreed with the truth of this law. However,
after Einstein presented his general theory of relativity, Newton’s
gravitational law came to be considered strictly speaking false, since it has
been shown to be merely approximately true. Moreover, compared with the
justifications given for general relativity theory, the justification for
Newtonian gravitational laws has turned out to be deficient as well.
3. Formulating the standard definition symbolically
Symbolic logic
has allowed us to formulate the traditional definition of knowledge
symbolically. Calling ‘p’ a proposition in question, ‘a’
a knowledge-claimer, ‘B’ his or her belief in the truth of p,
‘K’ the knowledge-operator, and ‘E’ the justifying
evidence for the truth of p given by a, we can say that: (i) that
aKp → p (If a knows p, then p is true); (ii) aKp → aBp (if a knows p, then a believes in the truth of p); (iii) aKp → aEBp (if a knows p, then a has justifying evidence for the truth of p). Combining these three conditions, the traditional or standard
or tripartite definition of knowledge can easily be formalized as:
(i) (ii) (iii)
aKp = p & aBp & aEBp
We can call (i)
the condition of truth, (ii) the condition of belief, and (iii) the condition
of justifying evidence or justification. Each of them should be considered
necessary, and the conjunction of the three should be seen as a condition
sufficient to establish knowledge. It is true that we can simplify the
definition by excluding the condition of belief, since it is repeated in the
condition of justifying evidence (which it is a justification for a belief in
the truth of p) and write: aKp = p & aEBp. This would be more
economical, though less transparent.
Important exceptions are so-called basic
propositions, which offer justifications like “I have headache” or,
maybe, “I am seeing a blue sky” and “~(p & ~p)”. We know the truth of these
statements because they impose themselves on us in a non-inferential way,
assuming that expected adequate conditions (I am not being induced to believe
that I have a headache… I am looking at the sky outdoors on a sunny day…) are
all fulfilled. We can formalize the knowledge claim of such basic propositions
simply as:
aKp = p & aBp
At least from the
usual perspective , knowledge of basic propositions does not need
justification, because they are self-justifying in the sense that they have
what we see as a non-cognitive, non-doxastic evidential source.
5. Gettier’s problem
Now we will
consider the pain in the neck of contemporary epistemology: the so-called
Gettier problem. In 1963 Gettier presented two cases in which the three
conditions of the tripartite definition of knowledge seem to be satisfied,
although there is in fact no knowledge, rendering this condition insufficient.
The result was a flood of articles and books, either trying to add a fourth
condition to the tripartite definition of knowledge, or trying to offer a
substitute for it, or even claiming that a definition of knowledge is
impossible. All this work created a new sub-field of epistemology called
‘analysis of knowledge’. I will first explain Gettier’s problem, and then I
will show how it can in my view be successfully answered.
There are many counter-examples of Gettier’s
type. I will choose one of them. Suppose that yesterday Professor Stone said to
Mary that he would be at the University this morning in order to hold a
doctoral examination. Now, since Professor Stone is an extremely correct
professional (hard as stone), Mary has a very good justification to believe
that he is at the University now (10 a.m.). Moreover, when Mary says that she
knows that Professor Stone is at the University, he is indeed at the
University, which makes her statement true. Hence, we see a justified true
belief. Nevertheless, in fact Mary does not know it! And, the reason is that
Professor Stone’s three teenage children were involved in a severe car accident
last night and he has cancelled all his appointments today in order to stay
with his children in the hospital. However, by mere coincidence, Professor
Stone briefly returned to his office at the University to fetch some documents
and then hurry back to the hospital. Since the justification given by Mary does
not have anything to do with what makes the proposition true, we reject her
knowledge claim. However, even though the three conditions of the traditional
definition are satisfied, they do not constitute taken together a sufficient
condition of knowledge, which means that there is something wrong with the
traditional definition as we have understood it.
6. Path to a
solution
It is often said that the paths to the false are many, while the path to
the truth is only one. The first time I read about Gettier’s problem the real
answer seemed obvious: the justifications given in these counter-examples to
the classical definition, though good, were not adequate, because none of them
was able to make the proposition true. Since I felt that this answer was too
intuitive not to be noticed, I went through the literature on Gettier’s
problem, searching for someone who had said something similar. And indeed, I
found what I was looking for.
As far as I know, the first attempt to
develop this insight appears in Robert Almeder’s papers, written in the
Seventies. And a later attempt appeared in a book written by Richard Fogelin,
published in 1994. The answer was there, though incomplete and more complicated
than it seemed at first view. I was not the only author to see things in this
way. Here is a passage in an old introductory text from Brian Carr and D. J.
O’Connor with which I am in full agreement (1984: 81):
For a justified belief to
constitute knowledge it would appear that there should exist a connection
between the truth of the proposition believed and the grounds on which it is
believed. The reason why the proposition is true must not be independent of the
facts asserted in the propositions constituting the grounds for the belief. Or
to put it in different terminology, those justified true beliefs which
constitute knowledge are those in which it is not just a coincidence that the
believer is right but where the belief has been arrived at on the basis of
facts which are relevant to the truth of the belief.
Further, they
notice that it is a flaw of traditional analysis that it allows the three
conditions to be independently satisfied. This flaw in the standard analysis
can be eliminated, they write, “not by adding some fourth condition to the
other three, but by insisting that these three previously recognized conditions
should not be independently satisfied.” (1984: 82). And they conclude, though
still in need of clarification, this straightforward effective way to solve
Gettier’s problem should be further developed: “It is somewhat surprising,
therefore,” they comment, “that it is not a response to the Gettier problem
which has found much support in the considerable literature on the subject.”
(1984: 82)
Now, the next pages are dedicated to the
development of this program. I will first discuss Robert Almeder’s and Richard
Fogelin’s solutions, which have different focuses. Then I will develop what
seems to me a sufficiently complete conservative analysis of the idea of
knowledge as justified true belief, able to answer Gettier’s problem without
leaving unsolved difficulties behind.
7. Almeder’s and Fogelin’s attempts
As I noted, a
first step in the right direction was made earlier by Robert Almeder (1974).
His solution emerged from the perception that in Gettier’s examples the
justification given by a has nothing
to do with what makes the proposition p
true. Consequently, what the traditional definition needs is to show the right
relationship between the condition (iii) of justification and the condition (i)
of truth. According to Almeder, this relationship should be one of entailment.
The justification must entail the truth of p.
Using => to symbolize entailment, we can formulate Almeder’s version of the
traditional definition as:
aKp = p & aBp & aEBp & (E => p).
There is,
however, a serious problem with Almeder’s solution. The requirement of
entailment is too strong. The solution works well for formal knowledge, when
the justification is deductive. In this case, the justificational evidence
allows us to make the proposition true by means of something like entailment.
But it does not work with empirical justification, since this justification has
an inductive form and cannot have the strength of entailment. We do not wish to
have a solution that precludes empirical knowledge.
A more hopeful solution is that of Richard
Fogelin. This author avoids the attempt to establish a precise logical relation
between conditions (iii) and (i). All he demands is that justification E makes
proposition p true for us. Consequently, his version of the traditional
definition of knowledge can be informally stated as:
a knows p
=
(i)
p is true
(ii)
a believes that p is true.
(iii)
a has a justification E for her belief that p is
true.
(iv)
a’s justification E makes p true.
This would not be
a great contribution if Fogelin had not considered a more important point. As
he writes, person a has a certain
body of information by means of which she comes to her justification E for p. We, however, have more information than a possess, and based on a wider
informational set, we see that the grounds given by a do not justify p. Then
he concludes (1994: 23):
I think that this double
informational setting – this informational mismatch between the evidence
possessed by a and the evidence we
are given – lies at the heart of Gettier’s problem.
Indeed, we know
that Mary in the above example does not know that Professor Stone is at the
University now because we are aware of information that she lacks, namely, that
there was a car accident the night before and he cancelled his appointments at
the University in order to be at the hospital.
Almeder suggested the necessity of
establishing a relation between the condition of justification and the condition
of truth, even if he does not give us
the right logical relation. Fogelin introduced a third person, whom we could
call the knowledge-evaluator s, who will judge whether the justification
given by knowledge-claimer a makes the proposition p true or not, in the first
case deciding that a knows p and in the second case denying a’s
knowledge of p. But Fogelin does not explain how this conclusion is
arrived at. That is: in this aspect Almeder’s solution is too stringent, while
Fogelin’s solution is too loose. The search for a more precise and therefore
more adequate relationship between the condition of justification and the
condition of truth is the problem that will occupy us now.
8. Perspectival definition of knowledge
We can summarize
Fogelin’s view as follows. In Gettier’s examples there is a mismatch between
what we could call the informational background of knowledge-claimer a and the informational background of
knowledge-evaluator s (who often
represents a community of ideas, but can instead be the same a at a later time). Knowledge-evaluator s is better informed. Because of this
difference, knowledge-evaluator s
does not accept the justification given by a
for the truth of p, even if the
knowledge evaluator has his own sufficient reasons to assume the truth of p.
For instance: Carl (knowledge-evaluator s), who is speaking with Mary, met
Professor Stone some minutes ago, and he told him about the accident. He knows
that by chance Professor Stone is at the University now, but he is also
informed not only about the accident, but also about Professor Stone’s decision
to cancel his activities at the University today. As Carl hears Mary’s
statement p = “Professor Stone is at
the University now”, and he hears as justification the information that
yesterday Professor Stone told her that he would hold a Ph.D. exam in this
morning, Carl refuses to accept Mary’s justification, because he knows that it
is completely inadequate as a way to make the proposition p (that Professor Stone
is at the University now) true, and consequently he rejects Mary’s knowledge
claim. He would accept Mary’s justification and the consequent knowledge-claim
if she said she had met Professor Stone in the corridor of the University, or
if she said she had seem Professor Stone’s car parked where he always left it,
since these justifications would be consistent with Carl’s informational set.
This insight can be made more precise in the
form of what could be called a perspectival definition of knowledge[33]. This definition requires a
revision of the condition of truth (i) and of the condition of justification
(iii) of the traditional definition of knowledge.
I begin by reconstructing the condition of
truth. It is common to consider the condition of truth as the truth-value of
the proposition independently of any epistemic agent. This is, however, an
illusory fata morgana. It is the illusion that we can give any actual use to
the absolute truth-value of a proposition. Only God, the infallible
knower, would be able to tell us the ultimate truth value of any or almost any
proposition. But since our communication with the infallible knower is as
unverifiable as his own actual existence, we are fated to remain in the dark
about this. Indeed, if the absolute truth-value of p were demanded, we
would not be able to know anything, since the ultimate truth-value of our
propositions would always remain beyond our reach. Of course, we might have the
normative concept (a Kantian idea) of absolute truth, and we pragmatically
proceed as if we had reached the final truth when we accept something as true,
but we are painfully aware that this final truth can always vanish in thin air
when it bumps into some obstacle along the way.
For such reasons, the only way to understand
the condition of truth is to relativize what real epistemic agents are be able
to determine as truth. In order to get this in the traditional definition, we
demand that the knowledge-evaluator s must offer a set of reasons
(equivalent to justifying evidence) for truth, each element of the set being
evidence sufficient for the acceptance or non-acceptance of p’s truth, a set that we might call the justifiability
body of evidence E* for p or
E*p. Assuming that the knowledge-evaluator is rational, either he has a
body of evidence in which each piece of evidence is considered sufficient to
make the proposition true, or he has a body of evidence in which each piece of
evidence is considered sufficient to make the proposition false (it would be
unreasonable to have evidence sufficient for the truth and also for the falsity
of p in the same set). An instance of the first case (the only one that
interests us) makes the point clear. If p
is the statement “The earth is round”, s can have accepted this as evidence
for p: E1 = “We have authentic photos of the earth taken from telescopes in
outer space”, E2 = “Ships sailing
away from us always seem to eventually disappear below the horizon, beginning
with the hull”, E3 = “There are many
stories of circumnavigation of the earth”. Each of these justifications is for
s sufficient to warrant the truth of p. If p = “The earth is round” and E*p is
the body of evidence for p, this set is made up of{E1, E2, E3}. Calling the
sign ‘~>’ an attribution of probability able to give certainty (that is, of
1, for the cases of formal evidence, or at least sufficiently near to 1, for
cases of empirical evidence), which could be called the probability of epistemic
acceptance[34], we can rewrite the
condition of truth p (i) as E*p &
(E*p ~> p) or (i’). Indeed, if s has an E*p and from any
evidence belonging to E*p (assuming his rationality) he is able to
derive the certainty of p, then he must accept the truth of p. In
other words:
(i) E*p & (E*p ~> p)
After making
explicit what was hidden in the condition of truth, we move to condition (iii),
the condition of justification, which we hope to be able to link with the new
formulation of the first condition. The condition of justification must be
written so:
(iii) aBEp & (E ∈ E*p).
This condition of
justification requires that the evidence given by any knowledge-claimer a either
belongs to a pre-existent E*p accepted by the knowledge-evaluator s
at t or can be accepted by s at t as belonging to an
extended form of E*p, which includes E. With the help of these
few formal devices, and adding to s the time of evaluation ‘t’, we get
the following epistemic equivalence, establishing the conditions that must be
fulfilled for s’s attribution of knowledge to the knowledge-claimer a;
(1) stK
[aKp] = stK
[E*p & (E*p ~> p)] & aBp & [aBEp & (E*p ∈ E*p)].
Here we can clearly see how the condition of justification is related to the
condition of truth. If an s has an E*p that gives him certainty
of the truth of p, and the justifying evidence E given by a
is such that it belongs or is able to belong to the s’s E*p, then the
justification is not only good but also epistemically adequate.
Gettier’s cases are based on good justifications that are not epistemically
adequate, since they lack the expected relation to E*p.
It is important to see the role of ‘t’,
which is the time of the evaluation. It is essential because the E*p that s gives to a belief can vary from time to time. For instance: When
Columbus discovered the New World, he claimed p = “I discovered the sea route
to India”. Most evaluators accepted this sentence as true in 1492. But ten
years later, the relevant informational set of people had changed. Columbus
continued to believe he had discovered the sea route to India until his death
in 1506, although around this time most evaluators would have judged his claim
false. They would not have accepted his justifications as sufficient to make
the proposition true, based on the increasing amount of information showing
that he had in fact discovered a new continent.
We see that the time of evaluation is
essential for the acceptance of epistemic equivalence from the evaluator’s perspective.
The next step is to place epistemic equivalence at the level of an assumption.
Since stK is present on
both sides of the equivalence, we can bring it to the background and formulate
the following definition:
(2) aKp
(for s in t) = [E*p & (E*
~> p)] & aBp & [aBEp & (E ∈ E*)].
Finally, if you
wish, since the condition of belief is repeated in the condition of
justification, we can elide it and get the shorter formulation:
(3) aKp
(for s in t) = E*p & (E*p
~> p) & aBEp & (E ∈ E*).
The point of any
of these formulations is to link the condition of justification to the
condition of truth in the appropriate way. In the case of the statement “The
earth is round”, if someone, as a knowledge-claimer, says that the earth is
round because of the many artificial satellites orbiting the earth, we, as the
knowledge-evaluators s, will accept this, even if we have not thoughts about
it, since we know that our knowledge allows its inclusion as an element of the
justifying corpus E*. Some examples will show that if this response is
well-understood it is seemingly flawless.
Consider now the Gettierian cases under the
light of the perspectival definition. Mary claims to know that Professor Stone
is at the University now. Since her justifying evidence E cannot belong to
Carl’s body of evidence for the truth of this claim, not even to its possible
extensions, as the evaluator of Mary’s knowledge claim, Carl rejects Mary’s
knowledge-claim.
Another example is that of Bertrand
Russell’s stopped watch. Suppose that at time t1 you look at your watch. It
shows 11:15 a.m. Then you look the church clock on the other side of the
square: it also shows 11:15 a.m. It seems clear that that you are
well-justified. But then, in the following moment you remember that your watch
was not working properly yesterday. You look at the watch again and see that it
has stopped. Probably it stopped last night at 11:15 p.m. Now, at first you had
good justifying evidence for a true belief, since the hands of our watches are
normally reliable. But after you noticed that something was very wrong with
your watch, you conclude that your evidence for the time was flawed and you
didn’t really know the time.
In this case the knowledge-evaluator is
yourself at a later moment. At time t1 you accept the usual justifying evidence
E you have given to yourself. But at time t2 you have the information that the
watch is not working and you come to the conclusion that E cannot belong to
your present E*, according to which only the time shown by the church clock
gives the right justification for your present knowledge that now it is 11:15
a.m. Your first evidence was good, since our watches are normally reliable, but
it was not adequate for knowledge, since it was unable to make p true, making
your first knowledge-claim a Gettier case.
A good perceptual example is the following.
Carol is visiting a region of the country she does not know. The driver of the
car, Mr. Smart, knows the region from living there a long time. After crossing
a bridge, Carol, glancing out of the car window, comments, “What a beautiful
red barn we see in this field!” This exclamation includes the knowledge-claim
of p: “There is a red barn in this
field”. However, it is only by chance that what she sees is really a red barn –
for with the exception of this one, all the red barns in the vicinity are
really only barn façades, which were built for a film, although they are
convincing enough to fool even the most observant traveller. Although a satisfies the conditions of justified
true belief as stated in the traditional definition, for Smart, the knowledge
evaluator, a does not satisfy these conditions as demanded by the
perspectival form. For in this form, the knowledge-evaluator Smart needs to
consider the reasons for belief in the truth of p, which always arises from a knowledge evaluator’s point of view.
Now, since Smart lives in the region and knows that Carol is not aware of the
story of the fake barns, he knows that Carol has identified the only true Barn
by chance and that her justifying evidence isn’t sufficient. In order to have
justifying evidence that could be incorporated into Smart’s body of evidence E*
for p, Carol should give evidence like the examination of all sides of the
barn, or, for instance, telling Smart that she already knew about the barn
façades and that the only real barn would be this one after the bridge.
The last counter-examples to be examined –
admitting that I am already testing your patience – are those of Gettier’s own
article. He gives two counter-examples to the traditional definition of
knowledge. In the first one, two persons, Smith and Jones, have applied for a
certain job. Since the president of the company has assured Smith that Jones
would be accepted, and since Smith knows that Jones has ten coins in his
pocket, Smith has the best evidence for the knowledge claim (a): “Jones will
gain the job and Jones has ten coins in his pocket”. Moreover, from (a) Smith
infers (b): “The man who will gain the job has ten coins in his pocket”. However,
against all expectations, Smith and not Jones gets the job. Furthermore, by
pure coincidence Smith also has ten coins in his pocket. According to Gettier,
Smith has a justified true belief that sentence (b) is true, satisfying the
traditional definition. But at the same time, it is clear that he does not know
the truth of (b), since he misleadingly infers it from the false sentence (a).
Now, applying our perspectival definition of
knowledge to Smith’s claim, we can say the following. There must be a person s to evaluate Smith’s knowledge claim of
(b). This person, say, Meg, knows that Smith got the job, because, e.g. she has
seen the document of his approval E1, and also knows that Smith has ten coins
in his pocket, since she has counted the coins (E2).
Now, the E*p that s is disposed to accept as sufficient to make the conjunctive
statement (a) true is the justification {E3} constituted by the conjunction E1
& E2. Meg is disposed to extend her set, as far the justification given by
Smith is consistent with {E3}. For instance, Smith justifies (b) by saying that
he was informed that he has got the job and he has counted ten coins in his
pocket. But to her dismay, the justification Smith gives to (b) is completely
different; he says that (b) is true because (a) is true, using as justification
the knowledge claim that Jones has got the job and that Jones has ten coins in
his pocket. But this justification neither belongs to the body of
justifications acceptable by Meg as belonging to E*p nor as belonging to a
reasonable extension of E*p to be made by Meg. Meg would give the same negative
evaluation to Smith’s justification of (a) by reference to Jones’ justification
that the president of the company has told him Jones would get the job, even if
he is right in saying that Jones has ten coins in his pocket because he has
counted them: in order to be true, the conjunctive sentence (a) must have both
component sentences adequately justified.
A second and last counter-example given by
Gettier is more complicated, but it also exhibits no real difficulty. In case
Smith has strong evidence for the truth of (a) “Jones has a Ford,” since he has
always met Smith with this car, given lifts, etc. But about Brown, Smith knows
nothing. Then Smith constructs the three following sentences:
(b1) “Either Jones owns a Ford, or
Brown is in Boston”.
(b2) “Either Jones owns a Ford, or
Brown is in Barcelona”.
(b3) “Either Jones owns a Ford, or
Brown is in Brest-Litovsk”.
Smith is sure
that these three disjunctive statements are true, even if he has no idea about
where Brown is, since he uses the disjunctive syllogism to infer their truth
from the truth of (a).
But then Gettier adds the following. In
fact, Smith is now driving a rented car and by coincidence Brown is in Barcelona.
In this case (b2) is true. Smith has a justified true belief regarding (b2),
but he does not know (b2).
Our perspectival answer follows the same
path. In any real situation there must be an evaluator s who has more information than the knowledge-claimer a. This evaluator, Julia, knows that
Jones’ Ford is rented and that Brown is in Barcelona. She knows that (a) is
false because she is the person who rented the Ford to Jones, since he does not
have a car. This information serves as justification for her knowledge that (a)
is false, which constitutes this E*p and would not accept Smith’s
justification.
Regarding (b2), it is true because it is a
disjunctive sentence in which the first disjunct is false, but the second true.
And Julia knows that Brown is in Barcelona, say, because she went to the
airport with Brown (E1), and she later received a call from him (E2), so we can
say that Julia’s set of evidential justifications E* is made up of sufficient
conditions {E1, E2}. Now, in order to evaluate Smith’s knowledge claim of (a),
Julia asks Smith his justification for (b2). To her dismay he says that he
derived his knowledge from his knowledge that Smith owns a Ford. She cannot
accept Smith’s justification as belonging to her corpus of justifications E* {E1, E2} for (b2) or even as able to be
included in it, simply because she does not accept his justification for his
last statement, neither as belonging to her E* nor able to be assimilated into
it as its extension.
Another advantage of the perspectival view
is that it explains two conditions of knowledge posed by Robert Nozick as
necessary to knowledge: (i) if p were not the true, a would not believe in p;
(ii) if p were true, a would believe in p. In fact, if p were not true for the
evaluator s, the negative evidence given by a for ~p would be accepted in the
J*, and s would be see as knowing that a knew ~p and therefore would not
believe in ~p. Moreover, if p were true, and a knew p, the positive evidence
given by a for p would be accepted by s as belonging to J*, and a would be seen
as knowing p and therefore believing in p. Nozick’s conditions can also be
derived from the perspectival approach.
9. Objection of
relativism
At this point the following objection could be made: “Your perspectival
analysis of knowledge embraces epistemic relativism. The justification given by
a knowledge-claimer will be considered adequate for knowledge or not according
to the informational set of a knowledge-evaluator, which can always vary.
Hence, if the knowledge-evaluator changes, the evaluation of a knowledge-claim
can vary. Since there is no infallible knowledge-evaluator, knowledge is
relative to the knowledge-evaluator we arbitrarily chose.”
In order to answer this
objection, we need first remark that we should not transform an often-present
difficulty into an impossibility. Restricting ourselves to Gettierian cases, it
is easy to agree that the knowledge-claimer will be convinced when acquainted
with the more complete information available to the knowledge-evaluator. But
regarding a comparison between knowledge-evaluators – who can treat one another
as knowledge-claimers – things can turn out to be less obvious. We can defend
the view that there are indeed more privileged knowledge-claimers (or
knowledge-evaluators) and that the criterion to find them is to submit these
knowledge-claimers to a critical dialogical situation, similar to what
Habermas has called an ideal speech situation (ideale Sprachsituation)
(1976). This means that knowledge-claimers must be located in an interactive
speech situation in which the following conditions must be sufficiently
satisfied:
1.
the participants must have a truth-searching
commitment,
2.
they must
have similar rights of informational exchange and questioning,
3.
they must
have similar competence and capacity to evaluate information,
4.
they should
be subject to no pressure, neither external nor internal, except the pressure
of the best argument (…)[35]
Assuming that speakers satisfy this ideal to a sufficient degree, it is
reasonable to conclude that the balance will tend to fall upon the most
reasonable side.
For instance, according to
anthropologists, North American Natives colonized the region around 10,000
years ago, originally coming from Siberia. There is much evidence that they
originally came from Siberia: at that time there was a land bridge across the
Bering sea; there is no evidence of people living in America at a much earlier
time; moreover, DNA evidence has shown that Native Americans are genetically
related to populations that lived in Siberia. The explanation of the origins of
the Native Americans given by the Natives themselves is, however, very
different: in ancestral times supernatural spirits prepared the world for humans
to live there. Then the earth opened and their ancestors emerged from the
subterranean world of spirits. The anthropologists and natives can play the
role of knowledge-claimers or knowledge-evaluators, and (assuming that they are
not cultural relativists or social constructivists (see Boghossian 2006)), they
will inevitably disagree: the first believe to know p: “The natives originated
from earlier Siberian populations”, while the second believe to know q: “The
natives originated from the subterranean world of spirits”. Nevertheless, the
situation is very asymmetric. If a native comes to Harvard University and
studies anthropology, we can bet that – assuming that she has accepted the
conditions of a rational dialogical situation – in the end she will agree with
the anthropologist, coming to consider the story she learned as a child as
nothing beyond beautiful ancient mythology. The informational set of the
anthropologist, under the assumption of the best of our scientific and humanist
culture, can explain the informational set of the tribes, while the opposite is
not the case. Hence, they are not relative. Hence, we can consider that factors
such as a larger well-confirmed informational set, containing a higher amount
of more precise and varied scientific information, will be seen as advantageous
when examined by both sides, insofar as both sides sufficiently satisfy the
conditions of a critical dialogical situation.
Beside this, our truths, as well
as our knowledge of truths, are always relative to the best or privileged
knowledge-evaluator of a dialogical situation. We cannot, in this or any other
way sustain the ideal of finding indisputable absolute truth, proper to
absolute knowledge. The best we can do in this direction is to sustain absolute
truth and knowledge as a normative ideal, something similar to what Kant
called an ideal of reason, useful to make comparisons and to measure the growth
of our knowledge in a non-relativist way.[36]
10. Comparing with some other attempts
Assuming the
perspectival account of knowledge, I will now explain and criticize a few
interesting attempts to answer Gettier’s problem.
Among the first ones, there was the attempt
to solve the problem by rejecting false justificatory evidence[37]. It is false that Professor
Stone would be at the University today to give an examination. However, this
answer does not work very satisfactorily. A well-known example of true
justifying evidence is the following. Mr. Nogot tells Smith that he owns a Ford
and even shows him a deed to that effect. Since Nogot was always reliable and
honest, Smith concludes p: “Someone in my office has a Ford”. However, it is
false that Nogot has a Ford. He is a compulsive liar and is driving his
sister’s Ford. Nevertheless, the conclusion p is true, since there is another
person in Smith’s office, Mr. Jones, who really does own a Ford, and Smith does
not know that. In this case the evidence is false. However, one needs only to
change the evidence a bit, applying an existential generalization, in order to
get true evidence, Thus, suppose that Smith uses as justifying evidence for p
the statement q: “Someone in my office told me that he has a Ford, showing me a
deed to that effect, and up to now has always been reliable and honest with
me”. Although the evidence given by statement q is true, this is a Gettier’s
case in which Smith has a justified true belief without knowing that someone in
his office owns a Ford. In a similar way, it is true that Professor Stone told
Mary he would be at the University to give a doctoral exam.
One could try to refine the no-falsity
answer by considering that non-important falsity could be involved in the
justifying evidence, though it is difficult to see how we get this.
Nonetheless, the real shortcoming of the non-falsity solution is that it is too
coarse-grained. It does not contribute to explaining the difference between
wrong justifying evidence (“You are wrong in believing you saw a sheep on the
mountain”) and the justification that provides us with a Gettier’s case (“There
is indeed a sheep on the mountain behind a stone, but what you in fact saw was
only a large furry dog”). Our proposed solution shows the difference: when
someone believes he can see a sheep on the mountain, but there is actually no
sheep there, the false justification cannot be accepted in E*p, because
there is no E*p. But if someone believes he can see a sheep when he is
really only seeing a furry dog, even though there is indeed a sheep there, the
false justification cannot be accepted in E*p in a case where there is E*p.
A more interesting solution is that we need
to add a fourth condition, namely, that the justification must have no defeater (Lehrer 1965). The defeater
of the justification in our first given example was the fact that the children
of Professor Stone are in the hospital in a critical state and he decided to
cancel his activities at the university in order to be there. However, the
non-defeater condition is also insufficient, since any defeater can also be
defeated. For instance, suppose that the information regarding Professor Stone
is mistaken. Suppose it really applies, but to another professor also called
Stone, a botany professor from the department of biology in the next building,
who also is scheduled to give a Ph.D. examination today and has in fact
cancelled his activities in order to remain in the hospital. Concerning the
Professor Stone meant by Mary, he is actually in the department giving a Ph.D.
exam. In this case, the knowledge-evaluator will accept Mary’s claim of knowing
that Professor Stone is at the University now. This defeating of defeaters by
new defeaters can in principle continue indefinitely. In conclusion: Mary would
have to know all the truth in order to neutralize any possible defeater. Even
in a case where there were no defeater, she could only neutralize the
possibility of a defeater if she knew all truths.
Keith Lehrer and Thomas Paxon (1969) tried
to emend the no defeater definition by defining knowledge as completely justified undefeated true
belief. The only way to explain a completely justified true belief, however, is
to see it as a belief that is ultimately undefeated relative to the set of all
truths (Pollock 1986). Yet, this means that in order to know p, the
knower must know all truths! Omniscience is not, however, a human attribute.
And this means that by taking this approach we cannot reach a plausible
solution to Gettier’s problem. The non-defeater solution solves Gettier’s
problem only by creating a greater one.
A very different attempt to solve Gettier’s
problem was to replace the condition of justification with the condition of appropriate causal connection suggested
by Alvin Goldman (1967). The intuition was clear: I know, for instance, that
Emperor Nero killed his mother because there is some appropriate causal chain
that begins with a fact and ends in my writing this sentence. I know there must
be a causal chain because I know that the facts of the world and our
consciousness of these facts must be causally related, even if I am only aware
of some few links of those causal chains. To see how it works against Gettier’s
counter-examples, consider again Mr. Nogot’s counter-example. He says he is the
owner of a Ford. But since he has no Ford, this cannot be the cause of the knowledge
that he is the owner of a Ford. The real cause of this knowledge should be the
fact that Mr. Jones, also employed in Smith’s firm, is the owner of a Ford. If
Smith has made the existential generalization based on the fact that Jones has
told him that he has a Ford, we would agree that he knows.
In this article Goldman manages to show that
some kind of causal connection is present in all cases of knowledge. This seems
plausible. But even if we admit its existence, there are serious problems with
his solution: there seems to be something wrong in divorcing knowledge from the
cognitive procedure of justification. More specifically, it seems that we
cannot find the links belonging to the appropriate causal chain without first
knowing the justifying procedure. Because Smith knows that the justification
for his knowledge that an employee in his firm owns a Ford is based upon the
fact that Mr. Jones told him he has a Ford, and we know that there is a correct
causal connection between Mr. Jones’ claim of knowledge and the fact that Mr.
Jones has a Ford and not the other way around. In other words, putting the
causal process before the justification is putting the cart before the horse,
since it is through the procedure of justification that we can find the corresponding
causal process. This is also valid for supposed external justifications: it is
because we know that there are many possible justifications for my knowing that
George Washington was the first president of USA. Although I cannot remember
when and where I learned this, I know that there is an appropriate causal chain
between this fact and my knowing and not the other way around. Even if Goldman
has shown us that there is no knowledge without appropriate causal connections,
and that the appropriate causal connections are pointed out by the adequate
justification, to put causal connections in the place of justification is to
fall into a petitio principii.
Goldman rejected his causal theory ten years
later, influenced by the perceptual counter-example of Gettier’s type of the
barn façades (Ginet, 1975) that we have already considered, in which Carol
really sees a barn that luckily is the only real barn in a region of seemingly
real barn façades, a reason why her justification cannot be accepted. This example
seems to run against Goldman’s causal theory. Carol’s belief that the barn-like
structure is a real barn seems to be normally caused by the presence of the
barn in a normal perceptual process. Consequently, according to the causal
theory Carol should know that she was seeing a real barn.
Goldman’s response was to develop the new
theory of justification in terms of reliability that we have already discussed,
a theory that requires that a justified true belief must be produced by a
reliable causal cognitive process defined as an empirical mechanism that makes
the truth probable. Goldman also expects in this way to
answer Gettier’s problem. To the reliabilist understanding of justification,
the barn-facades are located in an unreliable environment regarding the
distinction between real barns and mere barn façades. This Gettier’s case is
not one of knowledge because Carol’s belief that she is seeing a real barn can
be demonstrated as unreliable. To be reliable, the barn-case demands the
exclusion of relevant alternatives. One of them is that it is not a barn
façade, which is left unconsidered. Hence, Carol’s justification is not
knowledge-producing, because it is unreliable (Goldman, 1988: 63).
To this response, we can object
that changing our justifying evidence by means of process reliability does not
seem to bring any real improvement, since in any case (also in the causal
theory) one could say that because of the special environment the knowledge
evaluator should demand a careful examination of all sides of the barn, even
its interior… in order accept Carol’s knowledge-claim that it is a real barn to
Smart’s E*p, excluding the alternative of a barn façade.
Moreover, Goldman’s
process-reliability explanation of justification, as much as his causal theory,
is open to the same objections presented against the non-defeasibility view of
justification: in order to know p, one needs to know that the reliable
process cannot be defeated by another reliable process, and in order to know
that it cannot be defeated, one would need to exclude all possible defeaters
and defeaters of defeaters, that is… one needs to have omniscience. Our answer
to Gettier’s problem solves this problem neatly: the required extended
knowledge remains within the extension of the informational set of the
knowledge-evaluator which constitutes his body of acceptable evidence E*p.
An attempt to define knowledge that is
similar to Goldman’s is Robert Nozick’s tracking theory.
According to Nozick, if someone is able to track correctly the truth of a
proposition p, this person knows that p is true. The way to find
the right track is the satisfaction of two subjunctive conditionals:
(i)
if
p were not true, a would not believe
in p;
(ii)
if
p were true, a would believe in p.
In
fact, under the circumstances of our Gettierian case, if Professor Stone were
not at the University, Mary would still believe he was there, conflating
against the subjunctive conditional (i).
However, considering (i), how do we know
that if Professor Stone were not at the University, Mary would still believe he
was there? The reason is given by the perspectival definition: Assuming that
Carl (s) accepts the evidence given by Mary (a) as making p true, namely, that
for Carl Mary knows p, then if p were not accepted by Carl as true, Mary would
not believe in p in a way that makes her know p. Moreover, assuming that for
Mary knowing p, p being true for Carl, it is to be expected that Mary would
believe in p.
III.
JUSTIFICATIONAL EVIDENCE
Spring over the problems is not the same as
solving them.
Joseph Bengali
We have used the
expression ‘justifying evidence’ without further explanation. But what is the
nature of epistemic justification? There are today two main competing theories:
reliabilism [38] and evidentialism [39]. Evidentialism emerged in
the eighties, in declared opposition to reliabilism. In what follows, I will
present some arguments favouring a liberal form of evidentialism and showing
that, though reliability theories alone are unsustainable, some form of reliability
is an indispensable element in a justificational process. Evidences must be
reliable and the process by means of which evidences determine justified belief
must be reliable. Before coming to this conclusion, I will try to make a fair
summary of each theory.
1. Evidentialism
Evidentialism is the
view endorsed by the philosophical tradition. It is intuitive, since it seems
that there is no justification without some kind of evidence. Evidence and
justification seem to be rather twin concepts, internally related in the sense
that the bearers of these concepts would not be what they are without this
relation, as much as a wife cannot be a wife unless suitably related with her
husband. Evidentialism can be summarily defined as follows:[40]
[EJ] An epistemic agent a is
justified in believing that p in time t iff the evidence E that
a has for p supports his belief in p, and his belief is
determined by this support.
Richard Feldman
and Earl Connee noted that evidence is necessary to justify belief, suspension
of belief, and disbelief. For them, evidence can be any information
relevant for the truth or falsity of a proposition. This information can be
provided by beliefs that are used as evidence for other beliefs or simply by
experiences that are direct evidence for beliefs. Thus, my evidence for the
belief that my car is at the university can be my visual memory of having left
the car in a parking lot, which is another belief. But my evidence that I am
seeing my car in front of me should be simply be the experience of perceiving
my car in front of me. For these authors, evidences must be mental states in
the believer’s mind, even if he is unable to have introspective awareness of
them. This means that their theory is internalist, since internalism requires
that the justification of a belief is after all internal to the believer.
Important in [EJ] is the support relation. Evidence must be able
to support the belief corresponding to it, giving to it a probability higher
than 0.5 (which, as we saw, in the case of epistemic certainty should be near
or equal to 1.0). A final point is that we need to distinguish at least three
kinds of evidence: (i) evidence that is ‘before our minds’ (I am seeing the
blue sky), (ii) evidence that is stored in memory, but that is able to be
actualized when necessary as a way to support the belief (I remember where I
left the keys), (iii) evidence that is stored in memory, but that is unable to
be actualized, though able to determine the belief (I believe this is the right
path).
2. Goldman’s
process reliabilism
Consider now
reliabilism. The most successful reliabilist theory to date is Alving Goldman’s
process-reliabilism. According to him, all that a justified belief must have is
to be produced by a reliable causal cognitive process, which can be
defined as an empirical mechanism that makes the truth of the belief probable,
that is, with a probability higher than 0.5. Considering that empirical
justifications can usually be defeated or overridden by other competing
reliable cognitive processes, Goldman defined justified belief in a broad way
as[41]:
(RG) The belief of a in p in t is justified iff it is (i) causally produced by a
reliable cognitive process, and (ii) there is no reliable cognitive process accessible
to a so that if applied it would
result in the negation of a’s belief
in p.
Goldman adds that there are conditional and non-conditional
reliabilist processes. Conditional reliabilist processes have beliefs as inputs
and beliefs as outputs (these output beliefs are what we used to call non-basic
beliefs). Non-conditional reliable processes are those that have experiences as
inputs and beliefs as outputs (these output beliefs are what we used to call
basic beliefs).
Goldman’s reliabilist theory of
justification is externalist, which means that the believer does not need to be
able to have any awareness of the reliable causal process that leads to his
belief. Some of his examples show the appeal of his theory. Consider one of
them: Mary reads in a magazine called Gossip that her favorite Hollywood
couple is divorcing[42].
After one week she still thinks that her favorite couple will divorce, but she
has forgotten where she has learned this. However, since this process of belief
acquiring and belief retention is reliable, Mary is justified in her belief
that the couple will divorce. Another example: Goldman reliably knows that
Lincoln was born in 1808, but he does not need to be able to justify this
knowledge. Indeed, we all know a lot without remembering the evidential sources:
things like telephone numbers, passwords, historical dates, equations, melodies.
The evidential sources can be completely forgotten. Moreover, animals and small
children know a lot, but they would not be able to justify, even for
themselves, their knowledge. It seems that a reliabilist theory of
justification has the advantage of demanding only the existence of those
reliable cognitive processes that lead to these different instances of
knowledge, without demanding any actual or possible introspective evidential
access. This is why reliabilism is an externalist theory of epistemic
justification. Even if evidences are internally often accessible, what really
matters is the reliable causal process that originated the belief, even if this
causal process is only externally accessible. This is the case of Mary. She
knows about the impending divorce, which can be acknowledged by a third party.
But its evidential origin she has completely forgotten.
3. Defending an inclusive form of evidentialism
There is something wanting in Goldman’s vague appeal to process-reliabilism.
Of course, there must be a reliable process from input-experience to
output-belief or from input-belief to output-belief. But although this process
is an element of the justification it is not all that accounts for the
justification of a belief. Clearly there must be added justificatory evidence.
It is so, not only because the justification and evidence are, as it was
beforehand noted, twin-terms, but because even in the reliabilist most
convincing examples of process-without-evidence, it is always possible to find
the evidence lurking somewhere.
In order to convince you that
this is the case we need to analyze more carefully the examples. Consider,
first, the case of Mary. What is the evidence she has that her favorite Hollywood
couple is divorcing? It is not the memory, since she has lost any memory of
having read something about that. This can be well the process that has
reliably brought her to this belief, but it is not the evidence. However, she
has evidence. She knows that a strong belief like that does not pops out from nothing.
She must have heard or read this somewhere. That is, the evidence is in the
circumstances: she knows that, considering that she is in a normal awaken
state, always that she has a strong belief like that, this belief must be
probably true; moreover, this belief must be reliably caused, even if she has
forgotten the source. Other similar examples can make this point clearer. I
inductively know that the fixed memories of my telephone number, my password,
or of an historical date. I know that Cabral discovered Brazil in 1500. But the
evidential source of this in my childhood is probably completely forgotten.
This would serve as an argument only against a naïve form of evidentialism that
insists in searching the evidence in a past causal source. If questioned about
the evidences for my firm belief that Cabral discovered Brazil in 1500, I would
appeal to the facts that in normal conditions any person who had learned some
history of the country would be able to remember correctly, what is assured by
the fact that others knowledge agents in similar conditions would confirm my
belief. This is the evidence, what also shows that the evidential history does
not need to be straightforwardly the causal history. But it could be. A
school-child who have learned about the history of the discovery of Brazil
yesterday would give as evidence what the professor has told them. Another
example: I remember that my telephone number in Rio de Janeiro thirty years ago
was 2250016, even if it is impossible for me to check this old number or find
someone who also knows or to remember the moment I memorized the number.
Probably I have completely forgotten it. Nonetheless, I am sure that I know the
number. But why? What is the evidence? The evidence is not in the past, but
well placed in the present. I am able to remember the number of my telephone
because it has the property of returning to my memory always when I try to call
it up. I know all these things because I have already checked the truthfulness
of my memory numerous times in objective (potentially intersubjective) ways,
for example, storing the password in my computer, or recalling correctly to
other historical dates, writing down my old telephone, and this is a kind of
experience often subject to interpersonal checks. These are my justifying
evidences, which in these cases are not the causal sources, even if by
reflection I am sure that they have had reliable causal sources. Moreover, once
one begins to fail in such checks, e.g. because of Alzheimer, they cease to be
considered justified, since they cease to cope reliable with the reality. All
these things can be presented as evidence for the trustworthiness of memorized
information, without the need for the resource to historical sources of
justification.
There are also many cases of
knowledge in which the agent isn’t able to give any justification at all, but
that are behaviorally recognized as cases of knowledge by a third person. For
instance, I know that a child is able to identify her mother’s face, because
the child always smiles as she approaches, and I know that a dog senses that
his owner is arriving because he hears the sound of the car and he runs to the
front door. These behaviors are complex evidence that we arrive at as a third
person by means of reliable evidence that gives us real beliefs producing
verifiable behaviors by ourselves and consequently by children and animals.
Consequently, these behaviors are also complex evidence by analogy that the
baby and the dog have mental states that work for them as evidence like ours,
which like ours justify their beliefs. The baby recognizes the visual evidence
of her mother’s face, and the dog applies the evidence of the sound of the car
as the inductive warrant of the arrival of his owner. These are actual reasons
for their beliefs. The point buried in the discussion is that it is by means of
third person (internal) reconstruction of internalist justifying
evidence of others that we conclude that they know, even if they are unable to
be reflexively aware of what they are really doing. Internal justifying
evidence or evidence of evidence comes first.
Another case is that of Sam.[43] He
thinks that affirmative actions are not just, because they do not give the
place that one rightly deserves. But this is a rationalization. The reason why
he is against affirmative actions is that he was prevented to enter in the
university because of them. It seems that the justification for the falsity of
Sam’s affirmation is given externally, by us, while his own justification is
flawed. However, the answer can be doubled. Sam gives an internal justification
that for him is a good one. We, knowing more about Sam, are able to give the
true unconscious justification that lead to Sam’s badly justified opinion. But
although we get this in third person, the badly justified opinion of Sam is
completely internal. Moreover, Sam could in principle have internal access to
it. The whole deal of psychoanalysis is nothing more than an attempt to give
the people access to the true justifications of their beliefs and actions.
Consider, finally, the following
intriguing case. Henry loves meat and always eats all kinds of meat when he
goes to a restaurant. One day by mistake he enters a vegetarian restaurant
called ‘Food for Thought’, and when he asks for meat the waiter tells him that
the last thing they would do in this restaurant would be to serve meat. Upset,
he leaves the restaurant. Many years later he receives a call from a friend
inviting him to have dinner in a beautiful restaurant called ‘Food for
Thought’. Although he had this incident stored in his long-term memory, he
fails to recall the name of the restaurant and, based on his knowledge of the
fact that most restaurants serve meat, he immediately agrees. Later, informed
that it is a vegetarian restaurant, he remembers the incident and rejects the
choice. At first view, it seems that there is a problem for the evidentialist
here. Henry should already in the beginning reject the invitation, since he has
evidence that it is a vegetarian restaurant in his long-term memory. However, I
think the change of attitude only shows the diversity and limits of the
relevant justifying evidence. At first, the knowledge that most restaurants
serve meat was evidence for the view that ‘Food for Thought’ would serve meat.
Later, the information that ‘Food for Thought’ was a vegetarian restaurant
triggered Henry’s memory of the earlier mistake, which now serves as the
justifying evidence for the conclusion that this is the wrong restaurant for
him. The example speaks for access evidentialism under the possibility (iii),
since it demands that the unconscious evidence determines the belief. Only
after the unconscious evidence determined the belief San was justified in
thinking that this was the wrong restaurant for him.
I can justify my point further,
turning on its head one example often used by reliabilists against
internalists. The example is the following: suppose I am a brain-in-a-vat with
my afferent and efferent nerves linked to a super-computer on the planet Omega,
and that the program of this super-computer gives me the impression that I am
looking at this screen now. The internalist justification, they say, fails, because
the evidence is a kind of forgery: I am not writing a real sentence in a
notebook in a room situated in a city on a planet called Earth. The only way to
show that this internalist justification fails, they say, is externalist.
People from the planet Omega, for example, the programmers of the
super-computer, know on external grounds that my justification is based on
false evidence, since the evidence is only electronic patterns produced by the
program running in the super-computer. The point, however, is the same as
above. People from the planet Omega only know that (from their perspective) my
justification is inadequate because they have their own internalist
justification for their judgments based on their own internal evidence. They
know that my evidence is insufficient because they have access to a much larger
information set, able to overthrow it. In conclusion: the original mechanism of
justification is always internalist. The fact that others can have reasons to
reject my justification does not change this state of affairs.
Reliability is expected in
several places. The justificatory evidence must also be reliable. It most cope
with external evidence in order to be credible. Moreover, the process from
internal evidences to the generation of beliefs must be reliable, as Goldman’s
saw. To proove this, we need only re-examine Goldman’s examples from the point
of view of what these words are called for. Consider his example of Reginald, adding
that r = “This is a chihuahua”, p = “This is a dog”, and q = “This is a
mammal”.
(i)
p → q
(ii)
q
(iii)
r → p
(iv)
r
Provided with this informational set, Reginald concludes p. But he
concludes p erroneously, since he justifies his belief in p based on (i) and
(ii), namely, by means of the affirmation of the consequent as: “[(p → q) &
q] → p”, which is obviously fallacious. Goldman see this as a case of
unreliable thinking process. If Reginald were based on (iii) and (iv) to
conclude p, using the modus ponens as “[r & (r → p)] → p”,
this would be a reliable thinking process.
Now, if
asked for his evidences, what would Reginald answer? He would answer that his
evidences for conclusion p (“This is a dog”) were his knowledge of q (“This is
a mammal”) and of p → q (“If this is a dog, this is a mammal”) – assuming he
would then apply the affirmation of the consequent. Moreover, if his process of
thought were the right one, he would give as evidences r (“This is a chihuahua”)
and r → p (“If this is a chihuahua, then this is a dog”) – assuming that he
would apply the modus ponens. My conclusion is that what Goldman’s example
shows that a good justification not only demands the right evidences, but also
a reliable reasoning process.
In fact, for all given examples
we can find decisive internal evidence, even if we admit that in the perceptual
case these internal evidences should cope with externally given evidences, that
is, evidences belonging to the external world and, therefore, able to be
interpersonally observed. Indeed, what needs to be reliable is not the causal
process through which we form our beliefs – this process must be reliable
anyway, assuming our cognitive mechanisms are not in disarray. What we call
reliable or not are more often the evidence in itself or the belief.
Reliability is not in any relevant way the property of a process, but more
properly an intrinsic property of the evidence and, of course, an
extrinsic property of its effect, namely, the resulting belief, except when
this belief is treated as evidence. A further point is to know what makes the
evidence reliable. And here there is a question regarding probabilities again:
an internal evidence is reliable when it copes with the external or even
internal fact that it is intended to be evidence for. Here is a schema of how
things can be:
Independent
> reliably > evidence > reliable
process > justified
fact (causal) (internal) (causal) belief
The causal process from evidence to the final belief has, at least in
this case, a minimal importance (if it were a long reasoning, one could give it
an importance, but its probability is already decided locally, from case to
case). What Goldman does is to emphasize the reliability of the process against
the reliability of the evidence: both need to be reliable.
Reliabilism hides a persistent
lack of explanatory power. The role of the input, which we might call
justifying evidence, is underscored in this theory. Goldman’s theory focuses on
the causal cognitive reliable process but has nothing relevant to tell us about
the process. If it is a reasoning process, it can fairly belong to what we call
evidence, for instance, when someone makes a mathematical calculation, the
evidence for the result extends itself through the whole procedure. Moreover,
what we typically call ‘reliable’ is not a psychological process, but own
evidence, and it is the evidence that makes the psychological process relevant,
insofar as it retains the evidential information (e.g., “I still remember the
address”). We say, “Tutankhamun really lived, because we have reliable evidence
of his existence”, but we do not say “Tutankhamun existed because there are
reliable causal cognitive processes that make probable the belief in his
existence”. Even if I do not intend to deny the existence of these causal
processes, it is curious that we usually have nothing to say about them when we
present a justification. It also seems that it is not by means of a causally
reliable process, but rather by means of reliable justifying evidence (that may
include a reasoning process) that we measure the probability of a belief.
Moreover, there are many causal processes involved, and it is because we are
able to detect reliable evidence that we have the thread to find the relevant
causal process, and not the other way around.
I conclude that evidentialism,
at least as understood above, is the best way of giving a fundamental role to
evidence, and that this evidence must make itself reliable by cognitively
causing belief. Evidence and evidential processes work causally, of course. And
although they must be internal, in any perceptual case they are only able to be
reliable insofar as they are seen as corresponding to external evidence. We can
summarize these conclusions in the following definition of justification:
[EJ*] An
epistemic agent a is personally justified in believing that p in t
iff p is for a at t causally supported by some
reliable evidence E (which can be another reliable belief or a
well-grounded experience), and if there is for a no counter-evidence able to defeat
the reliability of E for p in t.
Notice that a personally justified belief does not need to be true. It
show itself to be false from a non-personal perspective.
4. Externalism versus Internalism: a false dichotomy
An epistemic
justification is said to be internal when the epistemic agent is able to have
cognitive access to the justifying evidence or reasons for the belief in the
truth of the proposition. Ideally, the agent must be able to make discursively
explicit his justifying evidence. This is the rich standard case around which
the more limited cases are aggregated, going further until reaching those
borderline cases in which one does not know if the word ‘justification’ is
still appropriate. Vagueness inevitably belongs to the semantics of the word.
This is the case of the Gettierian examples
we gave and many others and the justifying evidence was all internal. In what
follows however, I will consider some borderline cases, showing that their
justification is internal and evidential in the proper sense of these words
and, furthermore, that they can serve as justifying evidence for our
perspectival definition of knowledge.
We begin with cases of memories in which the
original evidential link has been lost. For instance, how can I justify my
belief that my phone number is 035-216? I have a bad memory for numbers. All I
can say is that after I repeated this number many times it was finally anchored
in my long-term memory. If pressed to produce a justification, I could check my
memory, looking again at the note pad where I wrote it down. What about my
knowledge of my old telephone number 225-00-16? I have had this number
imprinted in my memory for many years. My old telephone is gone now and it is
impossible to check it. Nevertheless, I feel myself justified to affirm that
this was my telephone many years ago. However, I know by induction that
memories that always repeat themselves are usually correct. Moreover, in order
to test my memory, I can write it down and later recall it and look to see if
the remembered number is the same one I wrote down. Furthermore, the telephone
number is associated with surroundings like the old apartment where I lived in
Rio de Janeiro, which agrees with my life history. The inductive justifying
evidence of such memories is sometimes confirmed. Some days ago there were a
quiz on television, where it was asked who was the president who forbade women
to wear bikinis on the beach in Brazil? I knew the answer: J. Q. This
reinforces my inductive belief in my old long-term memories. Repetitively
confirmed induction is the evidence that justifies our belief in our long-term
memories. But these are internal reasons, even if they are not the result of
direct introspection. Direct introspection is the case when I justify that my
car is at the university because I remember leaving it in the parking lot: the
memory of a perceptual experience. My conclusion is that cases in which I
remember my password or my telephone number or some historical facts are not
really different from the case where I know that my car is at the university.
The only difference is that in this last case the introspection of a perceptual
memory is what serves as evidence. The fact that once in my childhood I had an
introspective memory of the source of my knowledge that America was discovered
in 1492 does not change anything. It only serves to confuse our minds by
focusing on one kind of evidence, which is causally but not factually
necessary.
There are more difficult cases. It is said
that there are persons who can know with relatively great precision the sex of
a chick simply by feeling the animal. Closer consideration shows that there are
simple physical techniques that can be used to recognize the sex of a chick by
feeling it. Even if this requires practice, it already has the character of
cognitive (or pre-cognitive) internal justifying evidence, which, like most
such evidence, must indicate an external fact.
Another case is the knowledge we attribute
to animals. A dog hears the sound of its owner’s car and runs to the door,
where it stands barking. In fact, the dog knows its owner is there, but it does
not know reflexively, although we know that it knows. And the justification for
our knowing that it knows is through its behavior, added to induction by
analogy, considering that the dog is sufficiently similar in behavior to humans
able to have cognitions and feelings. This can lead to the mistaken conclusion
that the justification is external. Nonetheless, though made from a third
person perspective – our own – the justification remains internal, since we are
assuming that the dog runs to the door because it has taken as evidence of its
owner arriving the sound of his car. Another example, only to explain the point
decisively, is a real case:
As I was in Germany, I rented a
room in a house of a French woman. The owner was a had an intelligent puddle
dog. Always, when I went from the supermarket to my home, I brought some food.
The nice dog run to me and made all kind of gambols with me, in order to get
some meat. As the owner knew that she warned me not to do it, because the dog
was allergic to meat. Next two times as I went with food to my room the dog
came together, made all kind of gambols, but I gave him only the smallest
portion of meat possible. In the third time I came with food to my room. The dog
didn’t come. He remained on the stairs barking to me. He was angry. It is as he
wished to say: “You will foul me once more!” This was his belief. Based on
what? Obviously, inductively based on the evidences that I would not really
give him meat. These evidences stocked in his memory were, of course, based on
factual evidences.
A last example of
this kind is that of a child who knows that she is in the presence of her
mother. We know this by her smile, by behavioural reactions. We justify this in
the third person, knowing by her behaviour that she is justified in believing
that she is in the presence of her mother. She evidentially re-identifies her
mother’s face and behaviour. Moreover, in both cases, as knowledge-evaluators,
we know that if the dog and the baby were able to have reflexive access to
their cognitive processes, and could linguistically express what is going on,
they would say: “I know that my owner is coming because I hear the sound of his
car” and “I know that my mother is with me because I recognize her face”. These
justifying pieces of evidence are ones we would immediately accept as able to
be included in our justifying body of evidence. We know that they have evidence
able to make these propositions true. Still a case to consider is that of
generalizations. Scientific laws are the inductive (mainly abductive) results
of cumulative experience. But these experiences, though having external
counterparts, must as justifying evidence be internally accessible.
A last but also important case is that of
testimony. When we are informed by reasonable and trustworthy people, even if
indirectly by means of radio, television, internet, books, or other media, we
accept information about things we are unable to actually experience.
Nevertheless, the testimonial origin has its own evidential grounds, which are
cognitively, that is, internally accessed. We only borrow the results, which
still makes justification an essentially cognitive phenomenon. These non-actual
third person pieces of evidence can also be accepted or rejected as belonging
to our body of evidence as knowledge-evaluators in conformity with the
perspectival definition of knowledge exposed in the last chapter.
IV
JUSTIFICATIONAL WEB
Justification and truth are
more intimately connected than we can think at first view. We have found a way
to solve Gettier’s problem that saves the old definition of knowledge as
justified true belief, uncovering unsuspected complexities buried in an apparently
simple formal definition. We already know enough about epistemic beliefs to
deal with the concept of belief in the definition. But we still do not know
enough about justification and truth in their relation to the system of beliefs
and factual experience. There is an utterly curious parallelism between
these two concepts: The two main theories of justification are coherentism and
foundationalism. The two main theories of truth are coherentism and
correspondentialism. Correspondentialism seems to have similarities with
foundationalism. Justification is grounded on the so-called ‘justifiers’, which
according to foundationalism are understood as evidences. Truth, in the
correspondence theory is grounded on ‘truth-makers’, which can be seen (pace
Strawson) as facts in the world. This parallel is neatly reflected in our
justifying evidences E for the truth of p for a in t,
and the conditions of justifying evidences E*p that s must have
for p in our proposed perspectival definition of knowledge. The
suggestion is clear:
Working-Hypothesis:
The process of truth-making and the process
of justification-making are in themselves the same. What changes is only their
place in our collective epistemic workspace.
In other words, what we use
to call justification is a particularized process by means of which a
knowledge-claimer arrives to what he believes to be the truth. What we call the
process of truth-making (a verifiability process) is the process by means of
which the knowledge-evaluator arrives to what he (normally not only he or she,
but a society of ideas belonging to a culture) believes to be the truth; this
is a generalizable process, at least from the perspective of the culture taken
as reference. The first justifiability process can be true or false relatively
to the results achieved by the second one. The second process, the process of
truth-making, is always accepted as producing a true statement, at least at the
time of evaluation of the first one. Nonetheless, what we have are the same
kind-processes with different names. Different names because these same
processes have a different place in the collective epistemic workspace.
In order to strength our working hypothesis,
I will proceed systematically, beginning by exposing the coherence theory of
justification and comparing it with the coherence theory of truth; then
exposing the foundationalist theory of justification and comparing it with the
correspondence theory of truth. These comparisons should confirm the supposed
views
1. The structure of
justification
Children sometimes bore
adults reiteratively asking “why?”, until the adult does not know what to
answer or simply loses the patience. Without realizing, the child is touching
on an old problem of epistemology: the problem of justification. We see that
there are chains of justification. Belief p1 is justified by belief p2, which
can be justified by belief p3… Assuming that we are not sceptics who reject the
possibility of justification, the question is: what is the ultimate form of
these chains? Excluding scepticism, there are traditionally four possible
alternatives:
1. Infinitism: The chain of justifications is
infinite.
2. Decisionism: The chain of justifications ends
up in a non-justified belief.
3. Coherentism: The chain of justifications is
circular.
4. Foundationalism: The chain of justifications ends
up in basic beliefs.
The alternatives (1) and (2)
(infinitism and decisionism) are implausible. Infinitism seems to be
impossible, not because we cannot entertain a potential infinitude of beliefs (e.g.,
we know that the series of natural numbers is infinite), but because we will
not be able to end any potentially infinite chain of reasons. Decisionism is
arbitrary; one does not wins a discussion simply by deciding to stop arguing. Alternatives
(3) and (4) (coherentism and foundationalism) deserve a more serious
consideration. According to coherentism, what produces justification is nothing
but the coherence between different beliefs in a system of beliefs. According
to foundationalism, our beliefs are ultimately justified by basic beliefs,
which are not properly justified by any other belief, but are in some way
immediately justified. There are several forms of coherentism and
foundationalism. I will begin by considering the so-called classical
foundationalism.
2. Classical
foundationalism
Classical foundationalism
was historically defended by Descartes and championed in the XX century mainly
by C. I. Lewis. In what follows will be presented what I think to be a fair general
exposition of classical foundationalism. It can be defined as follows:
Classical foundationalism (Df.) = the theory of justification
according to which the non-basic beliefs are all in the end deductively
justified by basic, immediately justified beliefs, which are infallibly true.
The distinctive point is
that according to classical foundationalism, basic beliefs are infallible in the sense that by having them we cannot be
mistaken about their truth. The reason for this assumption is that it seems the
surest way to stop the regression. If the basic belief were not warranted as
true, it could be false. If the basic belief were false, it would demand a more
basic belief to show its falsity. However, since this last basic belief would also
not be warranted, there would be a regression of unwarranted basic beliefs.
Now, which would be the candidates to basic,
non-inferentially grounded beliefs? The answer is that they would be the
beliefs about what looks like. For instance: “I seem to see a book before me”.
If I think this, I am not affirming the that I am seen a real book before me,
but that it is being given to me at least the appearance of a book. According
to the classical foundationalism, these appearances or phenomena are
indubitable: we cannot be mistaken about them. Basic would be sensory beliefs
and all kinds of contents of our own minds like our beliefs about sounds,
tastes and smells. Also beliefs about elementary logic-conceptual truths, like
the belief in the principles of identity and non-contradiction would be basic.
2. Objections
A first objection against
classical foundationalism is the difficulty to derive our beliefs about the
external world from our basic knowledge of appearances. Most of our beliefs are
about the external world, and it does not seem easy to explain how from the
supposed basic belief that I seem to see my hands now that I can gain the
non-basic belief that I am really seeing my hands. On the contrary, the
direction seems in this case to be the opposite one. Because I believe to see
my hands, I come to the belief that I have the internal sensorial impression of
seeing my hands. It seems implausible to think that our beliefs on the external
world are grounded on beliefs about our inner states.
A more obvious problem with the classical foundationalism
is that we are not infallible regarding our knowledge of our own mental states.
They are not really as indubitable as traditional philosophers have considered.
It isn’t difficult to find counterexamples. We can easily be mistaken about our
feelings. In Shakespeare’s piece A and B believe to hate one another, but in
fact they loved one another. But we can be mistaken also about our sensations.
A child with too much fear in the chair of the dentistry believes to feel pain
when in fact she is feeling only the friction of the brook on his tooth.
Persons who are hypnotised can be induced to believe they are feeling terrible
pain. The classical foundationalist can answer that these people are really
feeling pain, because pain is what we think we feel in the moment we feel. But
we have external reasons to believe that the feeling, if there was, was not
really a feeling of pain. Hence, it seems that we can always be wrong about
phenomenal states and that the classical foundationalist cannot sustain his
thesis.
A final problem with the classical
foundationalism resides in the idea that the justification is always deductive.
Our formal conclusions are deductively arrived at. But our knowledge about the
external world is the result of empirical experience and consequently essentially
inductive. Classical fundationalism is implausible.
3. Coherentism
Since classical foundationalism
does not work, we will now consider the coherentist alternative. We can
summarize the coherentist view in the following definition:
Coherentism (Df.) = The theory of
justification according to which every belief is justified only in virtue of its relations to other beliefs.
According to coherentism,
our system of beliefs builds a complex web of beliefs that reinforce one
another. Since only beliefs can justify other beliefs, there is no basic belief.
The justified beliefs are those that increase
the coherence of the belief-system as a whole, while the non-justified
beliefs are those that decrease the
belief-system as a whole. Imagine, for instance, the following very small
system of beliefs A:
1.
It
is raining very heavily the whole day.
2.
Cars
are moving with the lights on.
3.
The
river was full.
4.
The
airport was closed.
Consider the statement (4) “people
are using umbrellas on the streets”. If we add the belief in (4) to the above
system we increase the coherence of the whole system. Hence (4) is more probably
true. Now, consider the following statement: (5) “The sky was entirely blue”. Confronted
with the belief-system A, this belief diminishes the coherence of the system.
Consequently, (5) is unjustified. Of course, A is a sub-system (It is a problem
for the coherentist to determine the extent in which a belief must be measured
against a sub-system or against the whole system of beliefs sustained).
Another question concerns who sustains the
whole system: a person or a group or community of persons? It seems that a public system of beliefs is more
trustful than a system of beliefs held by only one person and that when we
appeal to justification we assume that either is this justification public
acceptable or able to be made publicly acceptable.
One important problem concerns the nature of
coherence. Coherence demands consistence.
A set of beliefs is consistent when it is possible that all its beliefs are
true. A set of beliefs of the form {p, ~p} is obviously inconsistent because
the conjunction p & ~p is contradictory: both cannot be true. It has been
noticed that our system of beliefs is not fully consistent. This must be true,
since we are surelly not fully rational beings. But if our system of beliefs
were openly inconsistent, it could not be coherent. Although a sufficient
measure of consistence is necessary, it is obviously insufficient to define
coherence. The set of beliefs {Sweden is a country, Water is made of H2O,
4 + 4 = 8} is consistent, since all these beliefs can be true without interfere
with the truth-value of others, but is not coherent. Indeed, any set of
completely unrelated beliefs is consistent. On the other hand, the set {It is
raining very heavily, the sky is grey, the cars are moving with the lights on,
the airport is closed} is not only consistent, but also coherent. What is the
source of the difference? The answer isn’t difficult: these statements are all inferentially associated one another.
If someone saw that today is raining
heavily, this makes more probable to found people using umbrellas. If the
streets are all wet, this makes more probable that it is raining… These
statements reinforce inductively one another, leading to the very probable any
of these beliefs. Based on this we can define coherence as a property of a
system of belief as follows:
A system of beliefs is coherent insofar as
the beliefs compounding it are associated in ways in which they give
inferential support one another.
A coherentist can suggest
that the beliefs belonging to a system of beliefs deductively or inductively in
some measure increase the coherence of a system of beliefs, while the system of
beliefs deductively or inductively increases the probability of its individual
beliefs.
4. Objections
There are two objections
against coherentism that are always addressed: the objection of alternative
systems and the objection of isolation. The first can be in my view circumvented,
the second not.
Consider, first, the objection of
alternative systems. There are numerous alternative coherent systems. If this
is so, then we can take any arbitrary belief and make it justified as far as we
place it in a belief-system in which this belief increases the coherence. For
instance, “Dorothy’s house landed in the Munchkinland”. Outside any context
this statement makes no sense and have no justification. But in the The Wisard of Oz history, this sentence
not only makes sense, but it is justified not only by the tornado that has
lifted her house to a journey until this place of the magical Land of Oz, but
also by many other fictional facts. Inserted in the context of the story this imaginary
belief is inferentially attached to the whole while the whole inferentially
reassures it.
One solution is to consider that we cannot
really have two incommensurable systems. The
Wisard of Oz is a story imagined by Frank Baum, a person who lived in the
real world. Since we have a system of beliefs representing the real world, and
the story was created by a person belonging to this real world, The Wisard of Oz is a meta-system of
imaginary beliefs produced in the dependence of what we call the real world.
The same could be said to any imaginary system of beliefs. We could then
distinguish in the totality of the belief systems a belief system that could be
called the belief-system of reality,
in relation to which any fictional system would be dependent. The number of
fictional belief-systems that the belief-system of reality can produce is uncountable,
but the beliefs belonging to them are imaginary beliefs and not true beliefs, what
considerably limits what we can accept as a coherent real belief. It is true
that the belief-system of reality can change in the space and time, according
to cultural and historical changes. The system of reality of the European
Middle Age was different from ours. Thus, it is correct to say that a
justification is made within a belief-system of reality, although it is
questionable the idea that different systems of reality cannot be compared one
another. The present belief-system of reality as a whole contains enduring
rests of the belief-system of reality of the Middle Ages, together with its own
partial systems of beliefs. This allow us to address the objection of
alternative systems: they are all anchored in our belief-system of reality. And
even if you have different belief-systems of reality in different times and
places (for example, the belief system of a community totally isolated from our
civilization), they are not only to a great extent similar, but also not
completely incommensurable in their differences. If this argument is
reasonable, then we can build the following diagram:
The system
of all systems:
B. The imaginary or fictional or false systems
A. The system of reality (as
it is presently conceived by us).
Note that the system of
reality is also subdivided in a multiplicity of sub-systems, though the
broadest ones are the system of our ordinary beliefs and the system of
scientific beliefs.
The second and serious objection is that of isolation. If only beliefs justify
beliefs, as the coherentist claims, then we cannot distinguish a set of beliefs
that corresponds to the reality from a set of beliefs in which one or even all
beliefs do not correspond to the reality.
It is
easy to conceive examples. Richard Feldman (2003: 68-69) imagined the following
case. There is a small, physically weak, but too imaginative philosopher called
Feldman who has a great admiration to the strong two meters high basketball
player Magic Johnson. Now, when he teaches epistemology, although he gives a
good speech (for the students), the whole time he thinks he is Magic Feldman,
playing basketball. Each new sentence is for him a new movement in the quad.
When he finishes an argument (for the students) he launched the ball in the
sac. Since he interpret the reactions of the students as movements of the other
baseball players, all that occurs for him is coherent. However, from the point
of view of the students, what is going on is completely different. There is a
complete mismatch between the system of beliefs of Magic Feldman and what he is
doing as a professor. Since his beliefs from a coherent whole, they should be
true. However, they are false and the coherentist is unable to explain why.
A coherentist attempt to answer this
objection would be once again to consider the whole system of beliefs. If you
consider the whole system of reality you must consider the beliefs of the
students who are watching the speech and compare it with Magic Feldman’s belief
that he is playing basketball. In the end it will be clear that Magic Feldman’s
beliefs do not fit (or fit negatively) with the whole system of reality, which must
be a public system of beliefs. We should see that his beliefs are effects of
hallucination. Thus, maybe it is not so easy to catch the coherentist.
Another example illustrating the same point
is the following. Irma always comes Saturday. She said to Carl she would come Saturday.
Carl knows that she works Friday. But unexpectedly Carl sees her in front of
her door this Friday evening. Now, if Carl is a coherentist, should he not
believe that Irma is not in front of his door now, since this belief is
incoherent with several other equally coherent beliefs, like the fact that she
always comes Saturday, has called him Thursday saying she would come Saturday,
that she works on Friday, etc.? The coherentist lack the resources to explain
the observation of the emergence of the unexpected.
Finally, there is the case of two twins that
claim to have a terrible headache, feeling bad, and having a bad day (see Sosa
1980). But only the first twin has these things. Since both have coherent
beliefs, for the coherentist must be true that both have headache, while for
the foundationalist only the first twin has headache. The coherentist should
look at the secondary evidences in the system of reality able to show the
difference.
My conclusion is that the objection of
isolation isn’t the most decisive. The fatal objection, however, is still to
come. It is simply, as we will see, that there is no evidence that coherence
alone has any justifiability power. Coherence can be linear or holistic.
In the linear form we can have a belief B1 that is justified by belief B2…
until belief Bn, which is justified by B1. This is clearly circular, as in the
case in which someone justifies his believe in God by saying that he believes
in the Bible, and justifies his belief in the Bible by saying that he is
religious, and justifies his religiosity by saying that he believes in God. In
the holistic kind of coherence, the credibility of a particular belief is
reciprocally and multi-directionally supported by the complete system of
beliefs (Bosanquet 1920). One can compare this case with the kind of support
offered by and to each letter in a crossword puzzle. The above given example
can be interpreted as exemplifying the holistic system. In this case, belief B1
is justified by B2, which is justified by B3, which is justified again by B1.
But we can add that B2 is also justified by B1, that B3 is also justified by B1,
and that B2 is also justified by B3. Putting this in words, the person says
that she believes in the Bible because she believes in God, that she has
religion because she believes in God and that she believes in the Bible because
she believes in God. This symmetric and reciproque support, however, does not
seem to contribute to increase the truth of any particular belief. It only
makes the circularity more complicated (Huemer 2010: 25).
In order to make this point clear, imagine a
system of beliefs composed only by P1, P2, and P3 serving as premises and C as
the conclusion. If the belief-conclusion C is deductively inferred from the
premises P1, P2, and P3 in a valid good form, then the premises must be true
beliefs. But if P1, PB, P3 and C form a circular system, these premises will
only be true if C is already true. The same can be said about the inductive
inferences. If P1, P2 and P3 inductively
warrant the conclusion C, the induction will only be strong and cogent in the
case in which the premises are true, but in a circular system they will need to
take this truth also from the conclusion C. It does not mind how complex are
such inferences, if they are circular, they will be unable to produce true
beliefs.
There are, finally, another problem: why the
system of reality must have a predominance against the fictional systems? Why
are they appendicular to the first one? Why not the opposite? Why, within the
system of reality, we tend to believe more in (1) sensory experiences, (2)
normal perceptual experiences, (3) truths of logic? The only answer at hand
seems to be that the system of reality is the only one that is anchored in the
empirical reality by means of its basic beliefs, like sensory experiences,
while the other systems lack this property. If this is the case, then we need
to appeal to a more sophisticated form of foundationalism to have a better
chance to provide the right answers.
5. Modest
Foundationalism
Comparatively, the most
probable theory of justification seems to be a foundationalism that admits
mistakes. Is is the so-called modest
foundationalism. According to this view, not only internal states of mind can
be accepted as basic, but also the external objects of perception, what increases
the basis of justification in a more reasonable way.
Modest foundationalism gives a fair room to
fallibilism. The basic beliefs do not need to justify deductively. Normally, what
we have are strong inductive justifications. The inductive justification can be
enumerative, but they are also frequently inference from the best explanation.
When we have a basic belief that is of the same kind of many others already
associated with the same non-basic belief, we have a case of enumerative
induction. When we have a belief that makes several others very probable, this
belief is the result of an inference from the best explanation. Moreover,
justified non-basic beliefs can be used to justify new non-basic beliefs
further, even if these new non-basic beliefs are not justified by basic
beliefs. Finally, it is important to realize that a justification can be
defeated by new information. If someone is in a desert and sees a lake, this is
a basic belief until the moment in which she perceives that there are counter-evidences
showing that this is only a fata-morgana. We can define modest foundationalism
as follows:
MF (Df) Non-basic beliefs are in the end
justified by basic beliefs deductively and/or inductively, insofar as these
justifications are not defeated by other beliefs.
In this way, what we have is
a kind of pyramid settled on a large basis of basic beliefs.
It is important to find criteria to
distinguish the basic belief from the non-basic ones. Basic beliefs are called
self-justifiable. But it is not clear what this means. Maybe it means that it
is immediately justified: basic beliefs aren’t properly grounded upon
any other belief. We do not have a positive definition of what means immediate
justification. But we can say that from the outside we can explain that
beginning with external or internal stimuli we have such and such neuronal
activation until gradually we reach the proper complexity and sophistication
that constitutes a basic belief, while from the inside we simply experience
imediaticity. Another criterion is spontaneity.
It isn’t sufficient, since a hallucination is also spontaneous, though
hallucination is a basic hallucinatory belief, though misleading interpreted.
Finally, is seems important to add the appropriate connection to experience
(Feldman 2003). Contextual adequacy is important to the identification of the
right basic belief. If I enter in my room and face a pink elephant, there must
be something wrong with my perception. This includes a point concerning discrimination.
It is easy to identify a human face of in front of me; it is not so easy to
identify a human face in the darkness.
A further point is that for a basic belief,
though properly grounded on immediate experience, also receives support from
others non-basic beliefs. A basic belief isn’t totally independent of others
non-basic beliefs, even if these others non-basic beliefs are in the end based
on other basic beliefs. Imagine that you are in a hotel in a different country
and in the morning you go for a walk in a wood near to your home and you see a small
white horse with a horn. It corroborates precisely the image of unicorns you
have seen in the books. Your first reaction is to form the basic belief: “this
is a unicorn!” However, this is soon disavowed by the remembrance of all that
you have learned about horses and the inexistence of true unicorns. Asking
about what you have seen, you learn that there is a set of films nearby and
they glued a horn in the front of a white pony in order to take some sets of a
film on mythology. However, in the interval between the taken they let the
animal grazing in the wood. Possessing this information, which is based on
other basic beliefs, you will be able to disavowal completely the idea that you
could have seen a unicorn. The belief you were seen a unicorn has shown to be
contextually inadequate.
Based on these considerations, we can define
a basic belief as follows:
A basic belief (Df.) is a belief that is
essentially based on immediate experience, which is spontaneous, non-defeated
and contextually adequate.
Finally, there is a
well-known objection against modest foundationalism from Laurence Bonjour that
teaches us something. Since basic beliefs must be based on immediate
experience, we can ask: are these experiences cognitive or not? Suppose that
these experiences are cognitive. In this case, considering that this cognition
amounts to another belief, the first belief cannot be considered basic anymore.
Now, suppose that the experience producing the basic belief isn’t cognitive at
all. Now, in this case the experience isn’t able to ground anything and there is
no basic belief.
The objection is pressing, but not unanswerable.
The experience can begin with non-doxastic physiological and physical phenomena
that are gradually organized until they are apt to produce a cognitive basic
belief. To have the basic experience of seeing a vase of flowers does not
requires that the experience that causes this cognition is itself cognitive. It
is true that the basic belief can be shown to be false. But in this case it is
not through the experience that produced it, but by means of another beliefs
that, grounded on new basic beliefs, are able to defeat the first one.
An important question is how
the edifice of knowledge can be build on modest foundationalist foundations.
Concerning empirical knowledge, two possibilities comes first to our minds: the
phenomenalist and the physicalist ones. According to the phenomenalist, we
begin by identifying things like mental sense data and afterwards we learn to
distinguish these sense data from the externally given physical things. We
could try to apply traditional criteria like the following of natural laws, the
possibility of intersubjective access, the greatest intensity of experience and
the independence of the will… then we see that the things are not only sense
data, but physically real (at least outside sceptical scenarios).[44] According to the
physicalist, we begin by directly accessing the physical world. Only later we
learn to distinguish those phenomenal things that are cornucopias of the world like
(supposedly) the sense data, or that are products of our imagination, since
they are not intersubjectively accessible, they do not follow the expected
natural laws, they are sometimes dependent of our will, etc. There is, however,
a third possibility that I would like to point out here, which breaks with this
traditional dichotomy. It is possible that child in the beginning does not
distinguish between the internal and the external world, but gradually learn to
separate the physical from the psychical, insofar as the physical follows some
criteria of third person external reality. In this case the physical and the
phenomenal basic beliefs would be gradually distinguished one from the other,
building two inter-related foundational pyramids. Genetically they are
simultaneously created and interdependent. Nevertheless, we can insist that logically
the phenomenal world comes first, since without the phenomenal world the access
to the physical world would not be possible.
Finally, we have yet not explained our most
usual justifications: those we give in daily basis, which do not necessarily
end in perceptions or sensory appearances or a priori. For instance. A school
boy justifies the absence in an exam by bringing a medical certification saying
that he was with cold. The school teacher will not need to ask for perceptual
evidences. He will be happy with this justification. Now, the way we could have
to deal with our usual justification would be to appeal to what Wittgenstein
called language-games or practices. A language-game can be roughly defined as
any identifiable segment of our language that is constituted by syntactic,
semantic and pragmatic rules. Our language can be viewed as an immense cluster
of language-games, which vary from simple speech acts to more extensive ones,
like the ‘language of history’. Wittgenstein explain this by means of metaphors,
like that of a great nebula of language-games in the Brown Book:
a massive nebula, the natural language, surrounded by more or less defined
language games: the technical languages (1984b: 122). Or, in the more vivid
metaphor of the Philosophical Investigations:
Our language can be seen as an ancient city:
a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses, and of houses with
addition from various periods; and this is surrounded by a multitude of new
boroughs, with straits, regular streets and uniform houses. (1984, sec. 18)
A language-game can have its own basic
propositions. These are propositions that cannot be questioned within the
games, but that are able to justify moves in the game. Considering
justification from this perspective, it turns out to be something highly context-dependent.
To make this point clear I can appeal to
what we could call the game of cardiology. Suppose that in a course of
cardiology the professor sustains that aspirin helps to prevent the occurrence
of hearth attach. To the question “Why?” he answers “Because Aspirin diminish
the formation of atheroma in the walls of the vases. To this answer the student
can also ask “why?”, and the answer will be “Because it diminish the frequency
of the inflammation in the walls of the vases, which is believed to produce the
atheroma. Arriving to this point, the student who understands the game of
cardiology will give herself for satisfied without feeling the necessity to ask
a new question. She knows that she has touched the soil of the linguistic
praxis, what makes unnecessary to deep further, except if the intention were to
play another game, for example, the game of the biochemistry.
The advantage of this kind of contextualist
approach is that it makes justice to what we usually do by justifying
something. The disadvantage seems to be that this view fragments the unity of
the system of beliefs that we saw by considering the phenomenalist and
physicalist foundationalism. One can argue, however, that this disadvantage is
only apparent. We can choice the kind of justification according to the level
of our interest: if it is of our ordinary life, if it is of the deeper physicalist
level, or if it is of the deepest level of phenomenalism, supposing that the
three are compatible and complementary.
IV.
TRUTH AS CORRESPONDENCE
There are some reasons that
recommend the correspondence theory of truth: it was the chief and practically
the only theory of truth in the history of philosophy beginning with Plato’s Sophist,
only seriously challenged after Hegel with the coherence theories of truth. One
can find it in the dictionaries and it seems common-sensical: truth seems to be
simply agreement with reality. Aquinas’ formulation “veritas est adaequatio
intellectus et rei” is today more precisely formulated as “Truth is the
correspondence between the proposition and the fact”. Hence, we can begin by
investigating the three components of this formulation: proposition, fact
and correspondence.
We begin with the concept of proposition or
propositional content or thought. It can be defined as what a declarative
sentence says, what it cognitively means. This is often
called ‘proposition’, something whose only equivalent in the ordinary language
is what Frege called ‘the thought’ (der Gedanke), which is an ambiguous
word, meaning the psychological occurrence of a thought or thought-content or
“thought-in-itself”, abstracted from its spatio-temporal psychological
instantiation as an occurrence. The problem is that this “thought-in-itself”
seems to be an abstract entity, something like a platonic idea, with all its
oddities. In my view, it does not need to be so. We can define the
thought-as-proposition or the thought-content as by means of the trope
theory, namely, by the consideration of some spatio-temporal occurrence of trope-thought
or any other trope-thought that can be seen as belonging to a qualitatively
similar type. More precisely:
A thought-content (Df.) = any
occurrence of trope-thought x or any other occurrences of trope-thought
qualitatively identical in type to x, independently of the last
occurrences be given in the mind of the epistemic agent who is making this
consideration or in the mind of any other epistemic agent.
If we consider the
proposition in this way the ontological mystery disappears. The occurrences of
thought can be seen as mental tropes, that is, spatio-temporally located
particulars and there is nothing really abstract in the issue. Of course, this
consideration of the occurrence of some thought or any other qualitatively
similar occurrence of thought generates an extension, but no epistemic agent is
committed to know this extension. The only commitment is with the already
mentioned capacity of consideration. The same definition given above serves to
contents of beliefs: a thought-as-proposition is the same as a belief-content,
insofar the belief-content is considered not as a personal occurrence of a
belief-content, but as the consideration of any belief-content x or any
other occurrence of a belief-content qualitatively similar to x. This
will be relevant to us because shows that by speaking of a verified
thought-content we are also speaking of a justified belief-content.
A propositional content, as well as the
belief-content, is also the primary truth-bearer. The reason is that the
thought-content is the only thing that has the same permanence as the truth,
co-varying with the variation of the truth-value. For instance: “I have
headache” expresses a different thought-content according to the person
uttering the sentence. The truth-value will remain the same as the
thought-content in question and it might change with the chance in the
thought-content. On the other hand, sentences like “It is raining now”, “Es
regnet”, “Il pleut”, “Chove”… must have the same truth-value although they are
morphologically different simply because they express the same propositional-
or belief-content.
One could object that there are many
thought-contents that were never thought by anyone, but they are neverthe-less
true: consider the case of a world without epistemic agents. A world without
epistemic agents would not have thoughts, but it would still have possible
thoughts and even possible true thoughts. In other words:
A possible thought-content will be true iff
any possible occurrence of this thought-content x or any other possible
occurrences of a thought-content qualitatively identical to x, independently
of the last occurrences be given in the mind of the epistemic agent who is
making this consideration or in the mind of any other epistemic agent is true.
This means that even if an occurrence of thought does not exist, the
possibility of a thought-occurrence might exist and even the possibility of a
true thought-occurrence. In this way propositions and their truth-values can go
far beyond psychologically and physically limited epistemic agent.
What about facts? Facts are traditionally understood
as combinations of elements, usually contingent ones. P. F. Strawson suggested
that facts are mere ‘pseudo-material correlates of the statement as a whole’
and not something in the world. According to him, empirical facts, unlike events or things, are not spatiotemporally localizable. One reason for this
is that the description of a fact usually begins with a that-clause. For
instance, I can say ‘the fact that
the book is on the table,’ but not ‘the fact of a book on the table,’ although
‘the fact of a book being on the table’ might be in order. Conversely, the
description of an event typically lacks a that-clause: I can say ‘the event of a tsunami in Japan,’ but not properly
‘the event that there was a Tsunami
in Japan.’
This distinction was in my judgement an undeserved influential, maybe
because they allow philosophers to speak about truth without committing
themselves with the problems generated by its relation with a world of
empirical facts.
In what follows I will summarize my key-argument against Strawson’s
view, regenerating the idea that empirical facts are correlates of true
thoughts, namely, contingent arrangements of elements in the world, as the
correspondence theory of truth has held.
My argument against Strawson’s opposition between facts and events
begins by showing that it contains confusion. He treats facts (states of
affairs, situations) as opposed to
events. However, every event can be called a fact, but not every fact can be
called an event. For instance: I can replace ‘the event of the sinking of the Titanic’ with ‘the fact of the sinking of the Titanic,’ but I cannot replace ‘the fact that the White Haus is in Washington’
with ‘the event of the White Haus
being in Washington.’ Strawson’s opposition isn’t symmetrical. Now, since
events can be called facts, it is more reasonable to consider events as
particular kinds of facts than to oppose the two. Thus, my proposal is that the word ‘fact’ is an umbrella term
that encompasses situations, states of affairs… as much as events, occurrences,
processes… And the reason for this proposal is that we can call all these
things facts, but we cannot call them states of affairs or events. Assuming
this, we are free to distinguish two great sub-classes of facts:
1.
STATIC FACTS: Can be formal or
empirical, the latter when clearly located in space and time. As a whole,
static facts do not change while they
last. Typical of static facts is that the relationships between their
components do not as a whole change during the period of their existence. They
are truth-makers of a static kind. They are usually called (with different
nuances) ‘states,’ ‘situations,’ ‘conditions,’ ‘circumstances,’ ‘states of
affairs,’ etc.
2.
DYNAMIC FACTS: These are always
empirical. They change while they last.
They are defined by changes in the overall relations among their components
during their existence, so that they have a beginning, followed by some kind of
development that comes to an end. They are truth-makers of a dynamic kind. And
usually they are called (with different nuances) ‘events,’ ‘episodes,’ ‘occurrences,’ ‘processes,’
‘transformations,’ etc.
Examples of static facts are my state
of poor health, the situation that I
am lying in bed, the circumstance
that the airport is closed, the state of
affairs that the Mona Lisa is in the Louvre. Examples of dynamic facts are
the event of the explosion of a
grenade, the occurrence the Twin
Tower’s fall, the more extended process
of the World War II.
We are now able to find what
seems to be the real reason why we use a that-clause in the description of
facts, but not in the description of events. When we speak of dynamic facts, we
avoid a that-clause. We can speak about the process of climate change, but not about the process that the climate changes… Differently, static facts are usually
(not always) described as beginning with that-clauses. So, I can speak about the state of affairs that my book is on the table or that
I am lying on the bed, although I can also speak about the state of affairs of my book being on the table and of my lying on the bed. Hence,
that-clauses seem to have the function of
excluding dynamic facts as much as to a certain extent emphasizing static facts.
The conclusion is that, since the term ‘fact’ can be applied to both cases, it inherits the property of being used
indifferently, with or without a that-clause. Indeed, you can say, ‘It is a fact that Mount
Vesuvius is located near Naples’ (referring to a state of affairs), as much as
‘It is a fact that Mount Vesuvius has
erupted’ (referring to an event).
The relevant conclusion is that
by having the broadest scope, the so often vilipended word ‘fact’ remains the
ideal candidate for the role of ultimate truth-maker in a correspondence theory
of truth. Facts are indeed the universal truth-makers.
Now we need to explain what is
correspondence. In his Tractatus Wittgenstien suggested that in order to
be possible, there must be something common between the representation and what
it represents. A photography must share the two-dimensionality spatiality with
the three-dimentional photographed thing. If someone sings a melody heard once,
the temporality is shared. If we abstract space and time, what remains is the
logical structure or logical form. This is the ultimate shareable thing, since
logical form is ubiquitous. There must be a possible identity of structure
between the thought-content and the fact it represents, and when this identity
is present there is correspondence. Thinking in this way Erik Stenius
interpreted the Tractatus using the idea of structural isomorphism,
which I will understand here as follows. A thought-content A is structurally
isomorphic with the fact B iff each element of the thought-content has a
biunivocal relationship with each element of the fact. I will give an example:
“Peter is the father of Mary and Mary is a dancer”. We can symbolize this as
follows: pFm & Dm. If this is true, then there must be a fact with the same
structure as it is shown in what follows:
pFm & Dm (thought-content)
pFm & Dm (factual content)
This is certainly not enough for correspondence, for there are
innumerable statements with this same structure, for instance: “The
Sainte-Chapelle is near to the Conciergerie, which was a prison.” The logical
form is the same. What we need is, consequently, to interpret the symbols. We
need to attach to each symbol a rule of interpretation, that is, a criterial
rule, linking it biunivocally with the corresponding objects, properties and
relations belonging to the possible of actual factual content. In the case of
Peter and Mary, we must have a rules of identification that give us the
criteria for their identification. In the case of the relation ‘be a father of”
we must have rules of application of this relational predicate that give us
criteria for the identification of paternity. We can easily think of criterial
rules for the identification of Conciergerie and the Sainte-Chapelle, as much
as the identification of spatial nearness in the Ille de France. If we have all
that, we have the content, the thought-content. What we still do not have are
two elements that are external to the structural isomorphism: intentionality
and causality. Intentionality because the epistemic agent must intend that the
correspondence has a mind-to-world intentional direction of fit. Oppositely,
the correspondence must have a world-to-mind causal direction of fit. These are
the essentials of the correspondence relation.
The next point is to find a
logical formalization for the identification of truth with the correspondence. Symbolizing
proposition as p, the property of being truth as V, and the property of correspondence as C, we can say the
following:
(1) V“p” = C“p”
An essential point here are
the quotation marks. What is under the quotation marks belongs to the object
language, while what is outside the quotation marks belongs to a metalanguage,
more precisely, to a semantic metalanguage, since it is not referring to the
sentence p, but to its content or propositional content. The predications of
truth and correspondence are second-order predications or meta-predications.
One example to illustrate is the sentence “Themistocles won the battle of
Salamine” is a historical statement. Here the ‘…is a historical statement’ is a
meta-predicate that has as reference the proposition expressed by the sentence
under quotation marks.
One objection to this identity would be to
say that the predicate ‘…is true’ is a monadic predicate, while ‘…corresponds
to…’ is a dyadic predicate. This objection loses its point when we remember
that monadic predicates are often in fact dyadic predicates. For instance: ‘…is
a father’ can be also expressed as ‘…is the father of…). In our case ‘…is true’
can be expressed as the dyadic predicate ‘…is true of the fact that…’. Thus, we
can symbolize (1) as:
(2) “p”V“q” = “p”C“q”
What this means is that the
proposition expressed by p is true to the fact q means the same as to
say that the proposition expressed by p corresponds to the fact q (I use
the underscore ‘_’ to show that the proposition can be also interpreted as a
fact. One example to illustrate this is the sentence would be ‘“Themistocles
won the battle of Salamine” express the same historical occurrence as the
sentence “The battle of Salamine has been won by Themistocles”’.
Finally, if we think the present kind of
correspondence as a verifying procedure, we can introduce the predicate F to
symbolize ‘…is verified by the fact that’, as follows:
(3) “p”V“q” =
“p”F“q”
Truth, correspondence and
verification are in this view all the same, even if by speaking of verification
we normally mean a set of distinguishable verifying procedures (always based on
correspondence) that can be used to make a proposition true.
Much more important for our aims here is to
consider what I call the pragmatic of the correspondence theory, which can be
developed based on some ideas that seem to be originated from Edmund Husserl
and which I will introduce it recalling Moritz Schlick’s empiricist
understanding of it.
The idea is that
correspondence would be incomplete without its pragmatic or dynamic dimension,
which deserves to be explored and cannot be captured by static or formal
definitions like the antecedent ones. This is an idea that should not sound
strange to those who wish to combine
correspondentialism with verificationism. We can begin by considering
that very often we can establish an idealized sequence of three or (as I chose)
four successive moments, which we may call: (1) suppositional, (2) evidential
(3) confrontational and (4) judgmental or conclusive. Together they constitute a very usual form of correspondentialist
verification procedure.
The best way to introduce the
idea is by means of examples. Schlick used the example of Le Verrier’s
prediction of the planet Neptune’s existence based on orbital perturbations of
Saturn: Le Verrier first developed a hypothesis, which was later confirmed by
observation, since the contents of
both were the same. I next offer a more trivial example. Suppose that it is the
rainy season in Northeastern Brazil, where I normally
live, and that I ask myself: ‘Will it rain in Natal tomorrow?’ This is a
suppositional moment. Now, when tomorrow comes, I open the door of my house and
see that, in fact, it is raining heavily outside. This is the second, the
evidential moment. Once I do this, I compare my earlier question with the
observational evidence that it is in fact raining and see that the content of the question is like the content of my observation. This is the
confrontational moment. Finally, considering that these contents are
qualitatively identical (in fact, satisfying conditions (i) to (vi) of
adequation), I conclude that the thought-content of my earlier hypothesis is
true by adequation with the fact that today it is raining in Natal. This is the
judgmental or conclusive moment. Now, if instead of seeing rain outside I see a
very blue sky, the content of my observation contradicts that of my
supposition. Seeing that the content of my observation in this proper context
diverges from the content of the supposition, I conclude that p must be false:
it is not raining in Natal today.
Examples like these are
common, and an analogous procedure, as we will see, applies to non-perceptual
truths. But for now, restricting myself to perceptual judgments, I can say that
at least regarding cases like those considered above, we can formulate the
following action-schema with four moments:
1) The suppositional moment: what I call ‘supposition’ can be a thesis, a
hypothesis, a conjecture, a suspicion, a guess, a question, a doubt... In
this first step we ask ourselves whether some thought-content-rule is true,
that is, if the verifiability rule that constitutes it is not only
imaginatively, but also definitely applicable in its proper context. We can
express this as ‘I suppose that p,’
‘It is possible that p,’ ‘I guess
that p,’ ‘Is it the case that p?,’ where p expresses a content that can be perceived. This moment can be
formalized as ‘?p’ (call ‘?’ the operator for supposition). This
supposition is always made in the context of some linguistic practice.
2)
What follows is the evidential or perceptual moment: the
realization of a perceptual experience in an already more or less specified observational context gives us a
perceptual content, which may or may not correspond to the content
of the supposition.
Here we try to verify the truth of the supposition by finding a
perceptual content that is identical to the content of the supposition. In the
case of observational truths, this step is very simple. We look for an expected
adequate perceptually reached content of thought that, in a suitable context,
we simply read as a truth-maker (verifier), which can be rendered as ‘I perceive
the fact o,’ call it ‘!o’ (where ‘!’ is the evidence operator). Phenomenologists have called this
moment registration or fulfillment (Cf. Sokolowski 1974, Ch. 9). As we will see, there can be no
question about the truth-value of o:
it must be assumed as ‘evidence’ or ‘certainty’. In fact, it must be stipulated as
indisputable within the context of the practice, the language game in which it
occurs; otherwise we would be daunted by the question of the truth of o! which would also need to be
grounded, leading us to an infinite regress. (The ontological problems
concerning o! will be
discussed only at the end of this chapter.)
3)
Confrontational moment: it is the comparison between
the suppositional content and the factual content of the perceptual experience
which makes possible the verification or falsification of the suppositional
content.
Here we ask whether the supposition matches the evidential result of the
perceptual experience. In the case I considered, I asked myself whether the
thought-content-rule of the hypothesis was sufficiently similar to the factual
content directly given to me in the perceptual experience (satisfying
conditions (i) to (vi) of adequation). In the case of a perceptual experience,
the positive answer can be summarized as p
= o. As will be better
explained and justified later, here also we underscore o as o, so that it
can be read as either the thought-content-rule (a proposition) (o) or the actual factual content
(presented by o) fulfilling
it, which involves an arrangement of external tropical criteria given in the
contextually expected sensory experience. If the expected similarity of content
between p and o is lacking, we have p
≠ o. (In its concrete
details it is more complicated: as we already noted, usually the fact presented
by o is only partially and
aspectually experienced, which does not prevent me from saying, for example,
that I see that it is raining all
over Natal. Moreover, in practice it is often the case that we must have more
than only one perceptual experience and in more than one way...)
4)
Judgmental or
conclusive moment: Finally, in the case in which p = o, the thought expressed in the supposition will be
accepted as true, otherwise it will
be rejected as false. When p = o, there is adequation and
the conclusion is an affirmative judgment that can be symbolized as ├p. In the case in which p ≠ o, that is, in the absence of
the expected adequation, the thought p is
false. This can be expressed by the negative judgment symbolized as ├ ~p.
Now we can summarize the four steps of this whole verifiability process
regarding the discovery of perceptual truths of the simple kind considered
above in the following temporal sequence:
?p, !o, p = o /├ p
This analysis shows that in many cases one finds adequation
(particularly as identity of content) between some suppositional
e-thought-content-rule ?p (which is
only a considered or imagined verifiability rule in its possible application)
and some perceptual e-thought-content-rule !o
(given by the definitely applied verifiability rule) that within the linguistic
practice in which it is stipulated is regarded as indisputable.
In other cases, the adequation is only between the supposition and an imagined,
non-actualized fact, being therefore distinct from what can be found in the
observation. In these cases, the statement must be false.
It is also worth noting that
the standard statement of ├p (a
judgment) has the form of the report of
an assertion that is settled. However, this assertion can always be
questioned again. In this case, new verifying procedures can reconfirm the
judgment or detect some inadequacy refuting it in an at least virtually
interpersonal way (Cf. Sokolowski 1974, Ch. 9).[45]
Now, how can we understand
the adequation relation as a qualitative identity of
content (structural isomorphism, identity of cognitive rules, intentionality…)
in terms of the application of verifiability rules?
Here is my suggestion. When I first perceive that it is raining in Natal, the
indexical phrase ‘now in Natal’ expresses the building and application of an
indexical identification rule of a spatiotemporal region to which the predicate
‘…is raining’ is applied. This predicate expresses an ascription rule
definitely applicable to the region by the satisfaction of configurations of
tropes constituted by the countless drops of water falling from the sky above.
This combination of satisfactions gives me the arrangement that constitutes the
sub-fact that is the truthmaker which allows me to infer the content building
the grounding fact o! that it is raining in (all parts of) Natal today. Now, p = o
means that the contents of both e-thought-rules are identical. In more detail,
there is an adequation between both e-thought-content-rules or, in still more
detail, the identification rule of p
has a one-to-one relation with the identification rule of o, the ascription
rule of p has a one-to-one relation
with the ascription rule of o, the concatenation between the rules of p and of o is the same, there is categorical match, intentionality and
causality; p is intended to fit o, and o has a causal direction of fit
concerning p, since it makes p true. Consequently, the verifiability
e-thought-content rule p adequates to
the verifiability e-thought-content rule o,
even if in details this can occurs by means of the most diverse sub-factual
isomorphic matches of criterial configurations.
Now one could object: must
we have a qualitative identity
between p and o? It is true that between the ?p of yesterday and even the ?p that
I made to myself as I awakened today and the !o there is indeed
qualitative identity. However, I cannot believe that at the
moment when I perceive that it is raining, p and o are qualitatively distinct. It seems to
me more plausible that the identity p = o in the perceptual moment have
a numerical identity, which means that Husserl was in his own
way right in understanding correspondence as a form of identity (See sec. 31 of
this chapter). Moreover, it is always possible to interpret o as a real external fact and not
propositionally, as we can do with the mere identification
p = o.
11. Retrograde procedures
Now, what was presented above is what we may call an anterograde way to achieve truth. I call
it so because we went in a temporal sequence from the supposition containing a
conceivable e-thought-content-rule to the perceptual evidence that confirms the
supposition by the application of a perceptual e-thought-content-rule that is
qualitatively identical with the supposition. However, a move in the opposite
direction is equally feasible. We can have a truth-value attribution that has
its origin in perceptual experience, progressing from evidence to the
affirmation of a supposition – a way to discover truth that I call retrograde.[46]
Here is a simple example of a
retrograde verification procedure. I open the door of my home in Natal with the
intention of going out and unexpectedly see that it is raining. Since I need to
go out, I go back inside to look for an umbrella, aware that it is raining… In
this case, the perceptual evidence comes first. However, it seems clear that
the recognition of truth does not occur as a direct product of sensory
experience since I could see rain without consciously perceiving it. This
suggests that the initial rough and pre-conscious sensory-perceptual state was
different from the state of awareness that immediately followed, namely, the
conscious awareness that it is raining. (Suppose I open the door to get some
fresh air although I see I do not even pay attention to the fact that it is
raining outside. If someone then asks me if it is raining, I will pay attention
to the already non-reflexively roughly applied conceptual rule for rain,
compare it with a similar now fully conscious rule and answer in the
affirmative). Thus, it seems that we can explain the process of arriving at the
truth included in the judgment of the given example in the following way:
First, I have the rough, non-reflected observational experience ‘o!’ of
rain. This momentary experience makes me immediately recall the fully
conceptualized ascription rule for ‘it is raining,’ which together with the
localization rule for ‘the city of Natal today’ forms the supposition ‘?p.’
Finally, I compare the content of my first observation with the content of this
recalled e-thought-rule of raining in Natal today. Once I see that o =
p, I am led to the conclusion that it is true that it is raining or ├p. If I am
right, then this process is normally completed very quickly, which accounts for our lack of awareness of its different steps.
Anyway, this is a retrograde
discovery of truth, which I believe that can be summarized in the following
sequential formulation:
!o, ?p, o = p /├ p
Clearer cases of retrograde awareness of truth occur when we have an
unexpected sensation or perception that we only slowly come to be aware of in its true conceptualized nature. To illustrate I give two examples.
The first is related by Paul Feyerabend in his auto-biography. He writes
that once when he was sleeping he at first mistakenly identified a feeling with
a cramp, and only when he woke up did he see what he was really feeling: a
severe pain in his leg. We may call the first sensation ‘!s,’ mistakenly
taken as a cramp. In the process of waking up, he must have been led to recall the most appropriate conceptual rule for pain as ‘?p.’ As he
clearly identified s with p,
he realized that he was feeling pain in his leg, reaching the conclusion ├p.
The second example is of an
experience that I myself once had. A nice woman gave me a teacup
at her home containing a sweet beverage, without saying what it was. I was sure
I knew the taste, though I could not identify it. Hence, I must have applied a
mugh ascription rule, which I call !t. However, since the context gave
me no clue as to what the liquid in the cup was, I needed about a minute to recall the taste of juice from pressed sugarcane, that is,
‘?p.’ Then, by comparing this conceptual memory ?p with the taste of the liquid
!t in the cup and seeing that t = p, I came to the obvious conclusion:
the liquid was pressed sugar-cane juice. Here the action-schema is:
!t, ?p, t = p /├p.
The retrograde procedure seems to be the inverse of the anterograde,
also because the first moment of both seems loose, unsettled, insufficiently
determined.
12. A more complex case
The cases I have considered until now are the simplest
sensory-perceptual ones. However, the pragmatics of adequation can be extended
to the truth of non-observational e-thought-rules, which I will here call mediated thought-contents. Suppose that
Lucy is at Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris, waiting to board a flight to
Dakar. The flight lasts approximately five hours. She calls her daughter, who
lives on a farm in Senegal and asks her how the weather is in the city of Dakar. She wonders if it is sunny. This is supposition ?p. Suppose that after a while her daughter
answers that the weather in Dakar is and will remain mild and warm enough. There is no significant reason for doubting this
information, which she takes as providing adequate evidence. The factual
thought-content expressed by ‘!q’ that she had after she heard about the
weather in Dakar is the same as the thought-content belonging to her hopeful
question ‘?p.’ Consequently, since p = q, she concludes that p is true, that the weather in Dakar is
and will remain mild. But the thought-content-rule
expressed by !q is not observational! It is the result of testimonial
inferences that are unknown to Lucy. Suppose that her daughter got this
information from her husband, who had read a weather report, and that this
information had its origin in meteorological observations of weather conditions
around Dakar. In this case, putting ‘>>>’ in the place of some chain
of reasoning unknown to Lucy that led to the factual judgment expressed with !q,
and putting ‘!o’ in the place of the observational meteorological
thought-contents that in some way led to !q (which will probably be
similar to those that she will have when she arrives in Dakar five hours
later), we can formally structure the verification process in which p is
presently made true for Lucy as follows:
?p, (!o >>> !q), !q, p = q /├ p
Important to note is that the evidential character of the observation !o is taken as preserved in the supposed
inferential chain that leads to !q
(I put the process in parentheses in order to show that it is unknown to
Lucy and even to her daughter). The informational content is transmitted from
thought-content to thought-content up to the conclusion !q, which
inherits the evidential character of !o, and then
!q is compared with the question expressed by ?p. Thus, contrary to our most natural expectation of how adequation should work, the truth of
?p isn’t directly confirmed by the
observational fact represented by !o, but by something derived from it, namely, by !q, understood
as also representing a fact, a personally non-experienced state of affairs in
the world. The adequation is between unfulfilled and fulfilled thought-content
rules, the last ones also understood as being fulfilled by a factual content
composed of external tropical arrangements.
The foregoing example is one
of an anterograde verifiability procedure, beginning with one supposition (the
question) and ending with a comparison between the supposition and a derived evidential thought-content of an
unexperienced fact. However, we may also have a retrograde procedure with a
chain of reasons that ends by matching a derived piece of evidence with a
supposition. So, imagine that at the beginning of the flight to Dakar the pilot
informs the passengers that the weather in Dakar will be mild and warm enough. Each passenger will be led to the conclusion that the
weather in Dakar will, in fact, be mild by means of another indirect
and for them also unknown evidential chain. However, in this case, it is the
evidence that recalls the concern regarding weather conditions. This concern is
satisfied by means of a comparison of contents from which the final judgment
results that the weather in Dakar will be mild.
This retrograde process can be summarized in the following temporal sequence:
(!o >>> !q),
!q, ?p, q = p /├ p
We see that the opposition between anterograde
and retrograde verification repeats on mediated levels. We may guess whether
the intuitions of some researcher who still does
not know how to prove some hypothesis, though having a glimpse of its truth,
depends on unconsciously noticing that the knowledge of some factual content
expressed by !q might be
derived from evidential observations or postulates.
13. General statements
General statements of e-thought-contents – universal and existential –
are also involved in the pragmatic process of adequation, as an identity
between the contents of the hypotheses and contents of sets formed by the
respective conjunctions and disjunctions, often resulting from inductive
inferences ultimately based on observational facts. So, suppose that ├p is the assertion: ‘All the books on
this shelf are in English.’ Further, suppose that I reach this generalization
casually in a retrograde form from earlier observations ‘!o1,
!o2… !on,’ of each book on the shelf. The
action-schema is the following:
{!o1 & !o2
&… & !on } → !q, ?p, q = p /├ p
Of course, it can be different. It can be that I first ask myself if all
the books on the shelf are in English. Then I look at each of them, concluding
in an anterograde procedure that this hypothesis is true:
?p, {!o1 & !o2
&… & !on } → !q, p = q /├ p
Now, suppose that for another Mrs. Hildish asks: ‘Is there at least one
book in Italian on my shelf?’ Now, after searching, she finds just one. We call
it ‘!o1.’ This enables her to affirm that there is at least
one book in Italian on her shelf, concluding by means of an anterograde
procedure:
?p, {!o1 ˅ !~o2 ˅…
˅ !~on } → !q, p = q /├ p
As in the previous cases, this example deals with a general deductive
conclusion, but it is easy to see that inductive generalizations should also
have similar structures, given that they are also restricted to some more or
less vague domain (See Appendix to Chapter V, sec. 3).
Now we return to the old
question of knowing if there must be general facts – the all facts – over and above singular facts (Russell 1918; Armstrong
1997, Ch. 13; 2004, Ch. VI). Bertrand Russell, who seems to have discovered the
problem, defended their existence as follows:
I think that when you have enumerated all the atomic facts in
the world, it is a further fact about the world that those are all the atomic facts there are about the world, and that
is just as much an objective fact about the world as any of them are. It is
clear, I think, that you must admit general facts as distinct from and over and
above particular facts (Russell 1956: 236, my italics).
It seems to me that this is much more a worldly question than Russell supposed,
since it can be shown that his all fact is not a fact hanging over any other. In the examples above, all
that is needed to get the totality of facts is an additional limiting fact restricting the extension of the generality, first to books
belonging to my first shelf and then to books belonging to Mrs. Hildish shelf.
I agree that descriptions of such limiting facts need to be added to the given
sequences of particular conjunctions or disjunctions in order to close their
domain. But these limiting facts are nothing but ordinary empirical ones. And
the harmless affirmation ‘those are all’, meaning ‘there is nothing beyond
these’ can be inferred as a consequence of adding the conjunction or
disjunction of the singular facts to the corresponding empirical singular
limiting facts, in the given case the facts established by the spaces the shelves have for their books! Using a still simpler example, if I say that I have only three
coins in my pocket, the ‘all fact’ is given by the
domain established by the fact that there is a pocket in my pants that I use to
carry coins. Moreover, the only difference between the examples given above and
an extensive fact like ‘All men are mortal’ is that the delimitation of the
last domain is probably the whole earth during the whole existence of the
species Homo sapiens, which is a much
larger and more vaguely delimited domain. This is how Russell’s
mysterious and inconvenient all fact
disappears.
14. Some funny facts
There are a variety of puzzling ‘funny’ facts, and I will only select a few to give some
indicative explanations. One of these is that of self-psychic (self-reported)
truths. It is easy to know the truth-value of the thought p: ‘I am in pain.’ I believe that here as well there is adequation.
But first,
I need to learn the rule. A first step to this is that
I interpersonally learn to identify the location of pain. Then, helped by a
considerable network of other concomitant, previously and later observable
occurrences, along with the fact that I am told by others that pain is none of
these, I discover, by means of induction
by exclusion, that pain must be an invisible but physically located feeling
of intense discomfort… Even if others cannot have interpersonal access to the
subjective feeling of my pain in order to confirm it, I am able to make my
verifiability rule for pain highly plausible, even if the
logical possibility of interpersonal access to my pain itself cannot be
excluded.[47]
Now, suppose that I have a headache. The first thing I have is an unamed feeling of pain: ‘!s.’ Then comes ‘?p’: the actualization of the
memory of what the feeling of having a headache means (the conceptual rule),
which is what I associate with the word. Then I make the identification s
= p, being led to the conclusion ├p:
!s, ?p, s = p /├ p
Here I discovered the truth that I have a headache in a retrograde way.
An anterograde way to reach the same truth would be the case of a woman who
guesses that she will have a headache because she has drunk red wine, and she
knows she always has a headache after drinking red wine.
Wittgenstein offered, as is
well known, an expressivist explanation for such cases. For him the utterance
‘I am in pain’ is nothing more than an extension of natural expressions of pain like ‘Ouch!’
(Wittgenstein 1984c, I, sec. 244). In this case, our schema would be something
like ‘!s ├ p’ without adequation. I
do not reject this possibility. But I find it easier to believe that this could
be the expression of a more direct reaction that turns out to be seen as true
only after the exercise of the
previous, more elaborate cognitive process of induction by exclusion concerning
auto-psychic states and induction by analogy concerning the hetero-psychic
states (Costa 2011, Ch. 4).
Another odd case is that of
true counterfactual conditionals. Consider the
statement (i) ‘If Evelyn were the queen of England, she would be a public
figure.’ The objection is that there appears to be no fact that can make this
sentence true, since Evelyn isn’t the queen of England. However, statement (i)
seems to be true! Nevertheless, the solution is easy. Although there is no
actual fact that can make statement (i) true, this is not what the conditional
requires. What statement (i) requires as its verifier is not an actual fact,
but only a possible fact. The
possible or conceivable fact that makes the statement true is that under the assumption that the antecedent were
true, namely, that Evelyn is in fact the queen of England, the truth of the
consequent will be unavoidable, that is, she will surely be a public figure.
That is, the truthmaker of (i) is a modal
fact that could also be expressed
using the vocabulary of possible worlds. In other words, suppose that We is any nearby possible world where
Evelyn is in fact the queen of England. Since in our world all queens of
England are public figures, we can infer that if someone is the queen of
England in We, this person will also
certainly be a public figure. Assuming that Evelyn is the queen of England in We, she is also (certainly) a public
figure in We. We conclude that it is
certainly true that if Evelyn were the queen of England she would (certainly) be a public figure, because the expressed thought-content certainly corresponds with the expected fact
belonging to a conceived counterfactual circumstance given in We. Understanding (i) as the supposition
?p, and calling the certainty that in any nearby possible
world Evelyn would be the queen and therefore a public figure q, we can
summarize the anterograde process as follows:
?p, (We)q, p = q,
/ ├p
A second similar example is, (ii) ‘The Dalai Lama never slept with a woman, but he could have.’ This is certainly true because it
means the same thing as (iii) ‘Although the Dalai Lama never slept with a woman in the actual world, there is a nearby possible world Wd (our world
with some differences) where he slept with a woman.’ The statement
(iii) is true, since it corresponds to the conjunction of an actual and a
possible (conceivable) fact, this conjunctive fact being conceivable as a
highly probable physical possibility (ontologically, an association of actual and
possible tropical arrangements).
One could also ask about
ethical truths. Consider the statement (iv) ‘Dennis should help the drowning
child.’ Suppose that despite being a very good swimmer, Dennis didn’t even try
to help the drowning child, because he is a sadist. We would not be inclined to
say that (iv) is true, but rather that (iv) is right. It is right in a similar way as an illocutionary act like ‘I
promise to go to your anniversary celebration’ can be felicitous. The statement
about Dennis would be morally right because it is in conformity with a
utilitarian norm, let us say, the rule according to which:
UR: One should help another person in mortal danger,
insofar as one does not put oneself in real danger.
Note that what counts in this case is not truth, but normative correctness – adequation with a norm, though the mechanism of
validation is similar. Statement (iv) is validated by what could be called the moral norm UR
(an equivalent to the fact regarding
truth). Finally, there is still the case of the validity of such utilitarian
norms. In an attempt to achieve this, consider the following utilitarian
normative principle:
UP: A morally correct rule is one that when applied
under normal circumstances brings the greatest possible amount of happiness to
all participants, without significant unhappiness to anyone.[48]
Suppose it is a fact that when
people act in accordance with this principle the well-being of their whole
community increases. Assuming that this is our ultimate goal, this principle
can be considered correct or true, and we can say that UP validates UR, which
validates (iv). (Note that the normative principle UP as much as the norm UR
are moral facts that should be also instantiated as arrangements of tropes.)
Obviously, this is just an
illustration. The greatest problem faced by ethical statements is the same as
with any other philosophical statement. Unlike the statements of natural
sciences, they belong to those speculative domains wherein we are only able to
make the truth of our statements more or
less plausible.
15. Expansion to formal sciences
Analogous logical structures and dynamic procedures can be found in the
formal sciences, allowing us to generalize adequation theory to a domain
traditionally claimed by coherence theories of truth. The main difference is
that while for empirical truths inferences are mainly inductive, for formal
truths they are normally understood as deductive. Suppose we want to
demonstrate that the sum of the angles of any Euclidean triangle is 180°. We
can do this by first proposing that this could be the case: ‘?p’ and then searching for proof. One
proof would proceed by drawing a straight line through one of the vertices of
the triangle, so that this line is parallel to the side opposite to this
vertex. Since the three juxtaposed angles formed by the parallel and the vertex
of the triangle are the same as the internal angles of the two opposed vertices
of the triangle plus the angle of the first vertex, and their sum is obviously
180°, we conclude that the sum of the internal angles of this and indeed of any
Euclidean triangle must be 180°. This deductive conclusion is the evidence ‘!q’ – the truthmaker as a geometrical fact constituted, I suppose, by geometrical tropes (Cf. Appendix of Chapter
III, sec. 4). Since we see that the content of !q is the same as the content of the hypothesis ?p, we conclude ├p. Using ‘as’ for the
axioms or assumptions (the formal data), the form of this anterograde procedure
can be summarized as:
?p, !as >>> !q, p =
q, /├ p
It is important to see that !q,
stating the fact that makes the thought-content p true, as in the case of Lucy’s question, should not be placed at
the beginning, but at the end of a
chain of reasoning. Unlike Lucy, a geometrician can (and should) go through the whole procedure.
Now, an example from
mathematics: we can prove the arithmetical identity statement (i) ‘2 + 2 = 4’
in a Leibnizian manner.[49] We
begin with definitions (which here correspond to basic perceptual experiences
in empirical sciences). First, we define 2 as 1 + 1, 3 as 2 + 1 and 4 as 3 + 1.
We call this set of definitions ‘d.’ Replacing in statement (i) the numbers
2 and 4 with their definiens, we get
(ii) ‘(1 + 1) + (1 + 1) = (3 + 1).’ Since 3 is defined as 2 + 1, and 2 as 1 +
1, we see that 3 can be replaced by (1 + 1) + 1. Now, replacing the number 3 in
its analyzed formulation in (ii), we get the arithmetical fact represented by (iii)
‘(1 + 1) + (1 + 1) = (((1 + 1) + 1) + 1),’ which is the same e-thought-content
as ‘2 + 2 = 4.’ In this way, we have derived confirmatory evidence for the
hypothesis ‘?p’ posed by statement
(i), which is the (supposedly tropical) factual content of ‘!q’ described in (iii). This
confirmatory evidence serves to check the hypothesis ‘?p’ that 2 + 2 = 4. Again, abbreviating the definitions as ‘d,’ we have the following anterograde
verificational action-schema:
?p, !d >>> !q, p = q
/├ p
Once more we see that the factual content expressed by the identity !q, which serves to check the hypothesis
?p that 2 + 2 = 4, is not the same as
the definitions of 1, 2, 3 or 4, as might be initially assumed. It is the result of a deductive reasoning process
based on these definitions, a reasoning process deductively derived from its
definitional premises. This result, expressed by !q, represents the arithmetical fact represented by the supposition
?p, so that p = q, which makes p true.
Finally, we can give examples
involving logic. Consider the following theorem of modal logic: P → ◊P. This
can be seen as our hypothesis ?p.
How do we prove it? In the S5 modal system, we can do this by using as assumptions the axioms AS1, ◊P ↔
~□~P, and AS3, □~P → ~P. Taking these axioms and a few rules of propositional
logic as the evidence ‘as’ we
construct the following anterograde proof of the theorem:
The hypothesis is: ‘?p,’ where p = P → ◊P
The proof:
1
□~P → ~P (AS3)
2
~~P → ~□~P (1TRANS)
3
P → ~□~P (2~E)
4
◊P ↔ ~□~P (AS1)
5
~□~P → ◊P (4
↔E)
6
P → ◊P (3,5 SD)
Now, the conclusion (6), P →
◊P, is the ‘!q,’ which represents the
derived logical fact that serves as a verifier for ?p, and since p = q, we conclude that p is true, that is, ├ p.
Using our abbreviation, we get the following anterograde verificational
action-schema:
?p, !as >>> !q, p =
q, /├ p
Since the logical fact
represented by !q, which carries with
it evidence derived from the assumed axioms, is presented by the same
e-thought-content-rule as the hypothesis ?p,
we conclude that we have adequation.
We conclude that p is true, or ├ p. – Also relevant is to note
that in the case of formal facts we do not need to underline statement letters
like a or d or q: there is no need to distinguish between
the conceived and the real-actual facts, since here both can be regarded as the
same.
Of
course, one could also find a retrograde form regarding any of the three above
exemplified cases. Considering only the first, suppose that someone, having the
strong intuition that the sum of the internal angles of an Euclidean triangle
is 180°, decides
to draw a straight line that touches the vertex of a triangle, this line
being parallel to the opposite side. This person could then easily prove that
this triangle and in fact any Euclidean triangle would have 180° as
the sum of its internal angles. But in this case, the person would have the
following retrograde verification procedure:
!q, !as >>> !q, ?p,
q = p, /├ p
The !q would work here as the insight
into the truth of a conjecture, something to be compared with an unexpected
observation.
The upshot is that the procedures with which we demonstrate the
adequation of formal truths are structurally analogous to the procedures with
which we demonstrate the adequation of empirical truths. Even so, there are
some differences. The most obvious is that formal truths are deductively
inferred, while empirical truths unavoidably include inductive inferences.
16. Why can analytic truths be called
true?
Finally, we can apply a similar procedure to
analytic-conceptual statements, showing that they are also
called true because of adequation, even if this is a limiting-case. It is
possible to say, for instance, that the analytic statements ‘It is raining or
it is not raining’ and ‘Bachelors are not married’ are true because they
correspond to the respective facts that assuming the principle of the third
excluded it must be either raining or not, and that by definition it isn’t
possible for a bachelor not to be unmarried. But to what extent are we entitled
to say this?
Assume first, as we did in
our objections to Quine’s argument against analyticity, that analytic
statements are true due to the proper combination of the component senses of
their expressions. In this case, our question is: are there facts that make
analytic statements true? And if they exist, how do they make these statements
true? To find an answer, consider the
following analytic statements:
(1) Either it is raining or it is not raining.
(2) If John is the brother of Mary, then Mary is
the sister of John.
(3) Bachelors are males.
(4) A triangle has three sides.
(5) A material body must have some extension.
Surely, these statements are all true in themselves:
if there is a fact making them true, it is not a fact in the world. However, we
are still allowed to say that they are made true by logico-conceptual,
conventionalized facts. Thus,
statement (1) is made true by the logical fact that ‘j ˅ ~j’ (the law of the excluded
middle), which it instantiates. Statement (2) is made true by the conceptual
fact that the brother-sister relation is reflexive. Statement (3) is made true
by the conceptual fact that a bachelor is conventionally defined as an unmarried
adult male. Statement (4) is made true in Euclidean geometry by the conceptual
fact that a triangle can be defined as a closed plane figure with three
straight-line sides. And statement (5) is made true by the conceptual fact that
part of the definition of a material body must include the requirement of some spatial extension. These are conceptual facts supposedly
instantiated by arrangements of our mental tropes and their combinations.
In all these cases the
statements are self-verifiable, that is, the intertwining of rules that
constitutes the verifiability rule of an analytic statement is verified not by its application to the world, but by means of an application of
one rule to the result of the application of the other in a way that makes the
whole true independently of any state of the world. For instance, ~(P & ~P)
is tautologically verified by its truth-table, in which we combine the rules
for the application of the negation and the conjunction in ways that always
gives as a result the value true.
Moreover, we can summarize
this process of self-verification of the above statements by applying the same action-schemata we did with the statements considered
in the last section. Thus, in case (1) we can begin with the question ?p1 = ‘is it the case that it is raining or
not raining?’ Faced with this, we immediately realize that the sentence
instantiates the principle of the excluded middle or ‘j ˅ ~j’, and that this
instantiation, like any other, can be symbolized as the instantiation of the logical
truth or fact represented by ‘!p2,’ which is proved true by the
application of a truth-table to the sentence. This suffices to make ?p1
true, because we can see that independently of any sense given to its
constituent parts, its logical structure warrants its truth. We can summarize
the self-verifying action in which we find the
adequation in the same anterograde way as in the first of our examples:
?p1, !p2, p1 = p2 /├ p
Putting differently: in this case, the thought-content is identical with
an instantiation of a logical truth of propositional logic, a logical fact that
makes (1) true by self-verification.
In other cases, reasoning may
be necessary. In case (3) the suppositional moment ‘?p1’ is: ‘Are
all bachelors males?’ To verify this, we first need to take the definition of a
bachelor as our point of departure: ‘!d’ (Df.)
= ‘A bachelor is an unmarried adult male.’ From !d we can infer the conceptual fact !p2 = ‘All bachelors
are males.’ Summarizing the steps of this anterograde self-verificational
procedure, we get:
?p1, !d → !p2, p1
= p2 /├ p1
It is correct to say that analytical thought-contents are true by
courtesy, since they cannot be false. But despite this, it is not senseless to
speak of their truth as correspondence or adequation with facts. The reason is
clearer in cases like the last one. For even if these cases are all ones of
self-verification, the procedure is not always direct and transparent, often requiring a reasoning process.
Finally, what about
contradictions like (6) ‘It is raining and
it is not raining’? Suppose we call the statement of this contradiction the
supposition ‘?p,’ which is shown to be opposed to the true statement ‘~p,’
asserting the factual content that it cannot be the case that it is raining and
simultaneously not raining at the same time and place, which is derived from the principle ‘!q’ of non-contradiction: ~(j & ~j). In this simple case, the anterograde verifying procedure will be:
?p, !q, q → ~p, p ≠ ~p, ├ ~p
The conclusion is that p is false, since the principle of
non-contradiction shows that p cannot be the case and that strictly speaking
there can be no fact in the world able to verify p. The verifying procedure
that falsifies p is the self-falsifying cognitive action that gives the contradiction its contradictory meaning.
17. The insufficiency of coherence
That truth has something to do with coherence is beyond doubt. If Mary
says that she was breathing while she was asleep last night, we accept her
statement as obviously true. We believe Mary, even if we did not watch her
sleeping last night, because her statement is coherent with our accepted
belief-system. We are certain that people will die within a few minutes if they
cannot continuously breathe oxygen. If Mary tells us that she visited the Moon
while asleep last night, almost everyone would consider this statement to be
false, because it clashes with the generally accepted commonsense understanding
of what is possible or impossible under ordinary life circumstances, together with our system of scientifically confirmed beliefs. Coherence
is obviously related to truth, and according to most coherence theorists, a
belief is truer the more it is integrated into our system of beliefs, which
also means that truth is a question of degree
(e.g., Blanshard, 1939, Ch. XXVII).
Bernard Bosanquet (2015: 24)
once gave an interesting example intended to show that a greater amount of
supporting information makes a statement more
true, which seems to vindicate the
idea that some kind of integration of a statement within a system of beliefs is
what makes it true. He noted that the sentence ‘Charles I died on the scaffold’
seems quite true when said by a leading historian and far less true when said
by a mere schoolboy. The child has at most a name and a picture in his mind,
while the historian knows from documents and historical studies a wealth of
meanings associated with the sentence (Cf.
also Blanchard 1939, Ch. XXVII, sec. 4-5). The aim of this example is to show
that increasing the coherence of a statement increases its degree of truth.
Nevertheless, there is an
alternative interpretation. We can say that the example only shows that the
historian’s claim to know the truth has a better chance to be confirmed. In
other words, it is his truth-holding
(Fürwahrhalten) that has a higher chance of achieve truth. This alternative is
better, since there is no indication that our ordinary view of truth has
degrees. Hence, the example only confuses the degrees of probability that a
person knows the truth – the probability of truth-holding that can be
attributed to the person – with an illusory degree of truth in itself.
The best
known objection to the coherence theory of truth is the
following. Since countless possible belief-systems can be constructed, any
proposition p could be true in one
system and false in another, violating the non-contradiction principle. This
objection, however, was never regarded as a major difficulty by coherence
theorists (e.g. Bradley 1914; Blanshard 1939, vol. 2: 276 f.; Walker 1989:
25-40).
One could, for instance,
answer the objection that some thought-content p can be true in one system and false in another in a way that eliminates the contradiction. One can introduce the idea of the system of all systems, namely, the most encompassing system of
beliefs agreed upon by a community of ideas at time t (preferably the best informed and trained community that we are
able to consider…). To this can be added the fundamental subsystem contained in
the system of all systems, which is the
real-world belief-system, so that this system generates all the other
derived sub-systems that might fall under the epithet ‘fictional.’ The novel Madame Bovary, for instance, is for us a fictional subsystem belonging to
the all-encompassing system of systems. That at the end of the novel Charles
says, ‘C’est la faute de la fatalité,’
is true in the context of the novel,
but false for the real-world system, because in our real world there was never any Charles Bovary married to Emma Bovary and able to say this sentence regarding the series
of events that led up to her suicide. The admission
that Charles made this comment is thus true in the novel
and false in the real world, which does not lead to a contradiction, not only because these are two
belief-systems, but also because they do not conflict, as
what counts is the real-world system, where this sentence was never uttered in
a proper context.
Consider now a second example, the statement that the sum of the angles of a triangle is 180°.
This is true in the system of Euclidean geometry, but false in Lobachevsky’s and Riemann’s systems. And it is in the end false regarding the
physical real-world system. Consider, finally, the statement that the value of a good is determined by the
importance people assign to it as a means to achieve their
desired ends. It is considered true in the subjective economic theory of value and
false in the labor theory of value, since for the latter the value of a good is
determined by the amount of labor required to produce the good... Nonetheless,
regarding the real-world system, the first theory seems to be (according to the
great majority of economists) more probably true.
Surely, this view relativizes truth to a
certain extent, by limiting it to a time and a community of ideas, making
truth-theory to a certain extent subordinate to our taking things to be true (das
Fürwahrhalten).[50] However, in
the end this would not be a problem if we agree that ‘the truth,’ that is, absolute truth, is actually nothing
but a kind of directive idea that helps us evaluate our holding something
to be true, but has no decisive identity with what we
normally accept as true or false. – As already noted (Ch. IV, sec. 30), even if
by chance we were to discover an absolute truth, we would not be able to know
with any certainty that we had really found it (See Popper 1972, Ch. 2). That is, when we say that p is true, we only assume that p is the final
truth until we find some sufficiently good reason to falsify p (if p is empirical) or abandon p
(if p is a formal statement). Because
of this, a true theory of truth is a theory of what leads us to take something to be true rather than a
theory of absolute truth. The same can be said regarding the concept of
knowledge. We pragmatically treat our truths and knowledge of truths as if they
were the ultimate ones, simply postulating or assuming we have achieved final
truths and knowledge. But concepts like those of final, ultimate or absolute
truth and knowledge can serve only as directive
ideas. They are ‘as if’ concepts
since they cannot possibly have experienceable objects
that allow us to see if we have achieved them.[51]
A strategy like that of admitting
a system of all systems that includes a real-world system as the most
fundamental seems to overcome the objection of
contradiction. Nonetheless, even so coherence theory remains problematic, since
the insurmountable problem of this view is located elsewhere. I call it the problem of circularity.
The
problem of circularity arises when we try to define coherence. Traditionally
coherence has been conflated with consistency.
A set of propositions (thought-contents) is said to be consistent when the
conjunctions of propositions belonging to it do not generate a contradiction.
Consistency may be a necessary condition for coherence, but it is surely not sufficient. For instance, consider the elements of the consistent
set {Shakespeare was a playwright, lead is a heavy metal, 7 + 5 = 12}. They do
not contradict one another. But since they do not have anything in common,
taken together the elements of this set increase neither the coherence nor the
truth of its elements; and we could create a set of this kind as large as we
wish with ‘zero’ coherence. Consistency may be a necessary, but it is
not a sufficient condition of truth. And worst than this is when we perceive
that any definition of truth based on consistency alone would be circular,
since consistency, being defined as the absence of contradictions generated by
the elements of a set of propositions, assumes that their conjunctions cannot be false, in this way requiring the concept of truth-value in its own definiens.
More than just being
consistent, coherence must be defined as inferential.
The coherence of a belief system, of a system of propositions, is in fact determined by the dependence of this system on the inductive and/or deductive relationships among its propositions. This means that the degree of
coherence of a proposition p should be
determined by its inductive and/or
deductive relationships with the system to which it belongs (Cf. Bonjour 1985: 98-100). Indeed, we
know it is true that Mary was breathing the whole night long, because this is
inductively supported by everything we practically and scientifically know
about human metabolism and behavior,
and this is a truth concerning our system of reality.
However, if we consider
coherence as the only and proper mechanism able to generate truth, this last
definition also leads to circularity, since the concepts of inductive and
deductive inference used in the definiens
of coherence are also defined by means of
truth! A strong inductive inference is defined as an argument (or
reasoning) that makes a conclusion probably true, given the truth of its
premises, while a valid deductive inference is defined as an argument (or
reasoning) that makes its conclusion necessarily true, given the truth of its
premises. Consequently, the coherence account of truth can only generate the
truth of any proposition of the system by assuming the independent truth of at
least some of its other propositions, which makes the coherence view clearly
circular. Any form of pure coherence theory is the victim of a petitio principii, as it simply assumes
what it aims to explain.
18. Coherence as mediator
The view of coherence that I wish to propose here enables us to
circumvent the difficulty. The reason is that in my understanding, coherence
must be seen as a complementary dimension of adequation theory, namely, the condition that enables the transmission of truth in a network of
thought-contents, usually beginning with those that are based on empirical
(sensory-perceptual) experiences and/or some assumed formal
evidence/assumptions (axioms or postulates).
Such view allows us to accept
some factual content that should make some proposition true without the need
for reducing this factual content either to some corresponding formal axiom or
to an obvious perceptual or self-psychic
thought-content. For instance, we know that the statement ‘Mary was breathing
when she was asleep last night’ is true, and it is true because it corresponds
to the factual content that Mary was breathing during her sleep. But usually we
reach our belief that such a statement is true by adequation to a fact, not by means of direct observation, but by means of coherence, that is,
by means of inferences derived from our system of beliefs. These inferences
transmit what we may call veritative force – which we may define as any
probability of truth higher than 0.5 – from one proposition to another. However, this veritative force cannot arise from propositions
without truth-value, but instead is derived from propositions whose truth-value
is ultimately based on (in Mary’s case) a myriad of past judgments. These
correspond to perceptual experiences that are the ultimate sources of our
knowledge of biological laws, as well as our common awareness that Mary is a
living human being like us and subject to the same natural constraints.
We begin to see that even if
coherence cannot be regarded as defining truth, it plays an important role as a mediating procedure whereby adequation
is an indispensable ground. For example: the modal proof of P → ◊P in our
formal example does not come directly from AS1 and AS3 plus some rules of
propositional logic. We first take a series of deductive inferential steps, and
these steps are already constitutive of a linear coherential dimension of the
verification procedure, which some coherence theorists erroneously saw as the
proper criterion of truth for the formal sciences. In this modal proof
coherence is constituted by implications transmitting veritative force – here
understood as material implications from logical-conceptual,
self-verifying truths postulated as axioms – but, as already noted, inevitably
containing inductive inferences in the case of the verification of empirical
thought-contents.
19. Roles of empirical coherence
The trouble with the coherence of empirical truth can be better
illustrated by examples able to make clearer the relationship between coherence
and correspondence or adequation.
First, suppose that someone
anonymously sent me a package per post. I open it and see
that it contains a book called The Cloven Viscount
by Italo Calvino. I wonder if a friend named Sylvia sent it to me. I once knew
Sylvia as a literature student in Rome, and at that time I gave her a copy of
Calvino’s book The Invisible Cities. However, the package was mailed
from Rio de Janeiro. Thus, I realize that this book could have been sent to me
by someone else. But then, I remember that Sylvia told me that she was born and
lived most of her life in Rio de Janeiro. Hence, she could well be back at home in Brazil. An advocate of the coherence theory of truth would say
that the thought-content of the statement ‘p,’ understood as abbreviating ‘My friend Sylvia sent me a copy
of The Cloven Viscount,’
is made true by its coherence with other thought-contents, which can be ordered
in the following way:
1.
I received as a present the
book The Cloven Viscount by Calvino.
(r1)
2.
Sylvia was a literature student
when I knew her in Rome. (r2)
3.
I gave Sylvia as a present a
copy of Invisible Cities by Calvino.
(r3)
4.
(from 1, 2, 3) The book could have been sent
by Sylvia. (s)
5.
But the book was mailed from
Rio de Janeiro. (t)
6.
(from 4, 5) The book wasn’t
sent by Sylvia. (u)
7.
Sylvia told me she had lived
most of her previous life in Rio de Janeiro. (v)
8.
(2, 7) Sylvia finished her
studies in Rome and returned to Rio de Janeiro. (w)
9.
(1, 2, 3, 5, 8) My friend
Sylvia sent me a copy of The Cloven
Viscount. (q)
What we really have here is an indirect procedure by means of which
adequation is verified via coherence. To see this better, we need only revise
the above reasoning, rejecting the partial conclusion u because of v. As a
result, I can build the following coherent set of beliefs: {r1,
r2, r3, t, v, w}.
Together, these belief-contents inductively make the conclusion q very
probable. This anterograde set of reinforcing premises makes me – starting with
the guess ‘?p’ (‘Was it Sylvia
who sent me the book?’) – see the identity of thought-contents p = q and
conclude with practical certainty ├ p,
affirming that it was Sylvia who sent me Calvino’s book. However, each element
of the coherent set of beliefs {r1, r2, r3,
t, v, w} has its truth directly or indirectly based on
correspondence.
To sum up, I agree with
Stephen Walker’s argument that a pure coherence theory is impossible (1989).
Coherence could only exist independently of adequation if we were able to assume that e-thoughts could acquire probability or formal certainty
independently of any anchorage in sensory-perceptual/self-sensory experience or
in the axioms or postulates of a formal system. But, as our examination of the
nature of coherence has shown, this would be circular. Moreover, consider again
the example offered above. The thought-contents expressed by the statements
that by means of coherence make the correspondence between p and q
probable are all in some way observationally anchored. Either they describe a
perceptual thought (‘I knew her in Rome,’ ‘I gave her a book…,’) or report
testimonial information (‘She told me she lived all her earlier life in Rio’)
or describe a personal experience (‘I read the book…’) or an inference (‘She
may be back home in Rio…’) from testimony (‘She told me…’) based again on the
sensory experience of others.
What was given to me as a fact in the above example was an indirect product of correspondences of
other thought-contents with their own factual contents. And the increase of the
veritative forces resulting from these experiences is what inductively warrants
q to me as the derived proposition representing the fact that
Sylvia sent me the book. The assumed warrant of q, in turn, is what makes the e-thought-content of p true for me. In summarized
form, introducing the symbol ‘~>’ to represent strong inductive and/or
deductive inference, the anterograde reasoning that leads to this attribution
of truth can be symbolized as:
?p,
{r1, r2, r3, t, v,
w}~> !q, p = q, / ├ p
This helps us to understand better how coherence plays a role in the
truth-discovery process. And it shows us why the coherence of our claims would
have no force if it weren’t anchored in perceptual experiences taken as
evidence in the case of empirical truths, and in axioms or postulates in the
case of formal truths. This is also why a fictional text can be perfectly
coherent without in this way representing any factual truth concerning the real
world: its anchors are only imaginary ones.
This kind of reasoning
invites us to think that adequation comes first, since this kind of
correspondence is what reveals truth. Moreover, in cases like, say,
sensory-perceptual knowledge, we can in a sense have correspondence without
coherence, while there is no coherence without correspondence. However, this
conclusion can be considered simplistic for the following reason.
Correspondence without coherence must be impossible because of the fact
emphasized by philosophers of science that all
observation is conceptually charged or theory impregnated
(Duhem, 1906, Ch. 6, sec. II; Popper, 1972, Ch. 2, sec. 18). In order to be
conceptualized, experience already requires coherence with at least one
sub-domain of our belief-system.
Nonetheless, I think that I
can give a stronger justification for the indispensability of correspondence as
the origin of veritative force by considering the real origins of the own input
that a particular sensory-perceptual observation receives from our belief
system. Suppose you go for a walk in a beautiful nearby field and you cannot
believe what you see there: you think you are seeing a live unicorn! Soon you
will begin to distrust your own senses, since you have learned that unicorns do
not exist. Later the mystery is solved. You hear that it was actually a fake unicorn: a film production team had attached a horn to the forehead of a small white horse to create the illusion of a
real live unicorn. Between scenes, the make-believe unicorn is allowed to graze
in the field. The defender of coherence theory would say this proves that even
sensory-perceptual observation can be falsified by our system of beliefs alone.
But this argument is completely refuted when we consider that what was really
responsible for your mistrust was not our system of beliefs alone, but the
adequation of other perceptual experiences belonging to this same system or
sub-system of beliefs. Indeed, we all know that unicorns are mythological
creatures, and there have been no scientifically confirmed observations of
unicorns or their physical remains, such as bones, fossils, tissue, etc. Nor have we found depictions of unicorns in cave paintings from
prehistoric times, while we have found paintings of aurochs, for example.
Moreover, we also know that evolutionary classifications of animals like horses
and goats rule out the possible existence of unicorns. But these firm
convictions against the existence of unicorns were all reached with the aid of
induction by means of a multiplicity of other testimonial sensory-perceptual observations
that were historically and scientifically made and passed on to us! This means
that your sensory-perceptual observation of a unicorn was in the end
discredited not by your system of beliefs independently of adequation, but by
counter-evidence derived from the veritative force of other beliefs, all of them anchored in their proper adequation to perceptual
observation.
Now, suppose we call ‘!u’
the factual statement ‘I am looking at a unicorn’ and ‘~u,’ its
denial, based on the firm belief that there are no unicorns, which is grounded
on the accepted zoological system of beliefs that is in its essentials based on
a multiplicity of observational experiences ‘e,’ questioning the possibility of
!u, and we call ‘i’ the supplementary information given to you regarding the
make-believe unicorn. We can symbolize the procedure that leads you to conclude
the obvious falsity of u in two steps that jointly form a
retroanterograde verification procedure:
(1) !u, (e ~> ~u), ~u,
u ≠ ~u / ├ ?~u,
(2) ?~u, i ~> ~u , ~u = ~u / ├
~u
Putting my argument in other terms: I certainly agree that
sensory-perception is the immediate origin of the veritative force of a
perceptual judgment, and this judgment can gain or lose
veritative force due to greater or lesser coherence with our system of beliefs.
However, this confirming or rejecting coherence acquires its
own veritative force only by means of
other sensory-perceptual observations whose truth is based on adequation. And
reflection on this leads us to the inevitable conclusion that in one way or
another the real ultimate origin of the veritative force of empirical judgments
is always sense-perception, giving coherence the secondary, even if
indispensable role of transmitting the veritative force gained by means of
sensory-perceptual experiences of adequation. My conclusion is that under closer scrutiny the supposed counter-example shows that correspondence comes
first, simply because it is the only real source of truth. Thus, instead of
defending an impure coherence theory, as Walker endeavored to do, I defend what
he would probably classify as an ‘impure’ adequation theory – what I more accurately prefer to call an adequation theory that incorporates coherence.
20. Reverend David’s case
To reinforce my point, I now offer a second, more distinctive empirical
example of the incorporation of coherence in correspondence/adequation. It
concerns a judge’s verdict. It is well known that court rulings in criminal
trials frequently cannot rely on direct perceptual evidence supplied by
witnesses. Because of this, they are often heavily dependent on coherence, on proof by means of circumstantial evidence. This was the case with an
American minister named Reverend David, who shortly after marrying a certain
Mrs. Rose was admitted to a hospital suffering from severe abdominal pain.
Since examination showed a high level of arsenic in Reverend David’s blood, a
thought-content that we abbreviate as ‘!r,’ the following
suspicion arose as the result of abductive reasoning: ‘Did Mrs. Rose try to
poison Reverend David?’ in short, ‘?p.’ The following additional factual
evidence later confirmed this suspicion:
s: Mrs. Rose had the habit of
preparing bowls of soup for her husband, even bringing them to him in the
hospital.
t: Traces of arsenic were found
in the pantry of Mrs. Rose’s house.
u: The bodies of Mrs. Rose’s
first three husbands, who all died of unknown causes, were exhumed, and it was
not so surprising that high levels of arsenic were found in their hair.
We can now construct the following retroanterograde verification
procedure:
!r ~> ?p, {!r & !s & !t & !u}
~> !q, p = q, /├ p
Certainly, the conjunction of the statements r, s, t,
and u gives us a strong inductive inference
assuring us practical certainty that !q, which states an unobserved
dynamic fact (namely, that Mrs. Rose did indeed try to poison her husband).
This inferred factual content confirms our initial suspicion ?p derived from !r.
However, a crucial point to be noticed is that factual statements r, s,
t, and u are all considered true either by direct adequation with
public factual observation or by derivation from publicly observable perceptual
factual contents. Again, what is shown is that the element of coherence cannot
stand alone. The plausibility of q
is grounded on the conjunction of the observational statements r, s, t and u by means of coherence. But these
statements are all true because of their direct or indirect adequation with
perceptual contents, even if they may also rest on empirically grounded
theoretical assumptions, the latter in some way also derived from other
perceptual experiences. As we see, coherence alone cannot prove truth, because
inductive and deductive coherence relations are ways of preserving and not of
finding truth.
The conclusion is the same:
coherence relations work like the high voltage power lines of an electrical power grid: though they are not able to generate
electricity, they are able to transmit it over long distances. A plausible coherent system is not an independent mechanism, but only
an inferential network over which the truth arrived at by means
of originary adequation is transmitted. In other words: coherence
only transfers the veritative force generated by the adequation of the contents
of more basic beliefs concerning empirical or formal facts to derived beliefs
or thought-contents. This transference of veritative force within a
belief-system can act to produce an e-thought-rule that we believe corresponds
to a non-observed fact, which in my present example is q: the attempted
murder using poison. The thought-content p is accepted by us as representing
the factual content q, because both have the same
content (structural isomorphism, etc.) which makes p true. Because in various ways q is reinforced in its
application, we accept it as factual evidence of p’s truth. And statement p is
true because it corresponds to the
fact that Mrs. Rose poisoned her husband, Reverend David, even if we know this
fact not by observation, but only indirectly,
from its coherence with other thought-contents that are observational and match
their facts in a direct way. The thought-content q, the truthmaker of p, as I intend to explain, has a kind of Janus
face: on the one hand, it expresses here a
basal thought-content (an e-thought-rule or
proposition), and on the other hand, it represents what we by indirect means
are sure is an objective factual content, namely, the fact that Mrs. Rose tried to poison Reverend David. All this shows
that coeherence is nothing but an interdoxal mechanism by means of which
adequation can transfer its veritative force. It is by this means that
coherence helps in confirming the truth of statements.
Now, concerning the truth of
the observational statements r, s, t, u, we return
to the point already made when we analyzed our first example.
Each of these observations is embedded in at least some subsystem of beliefs.
Although a given observation r makes its own
contribution to truth by means of direct adequation with a fact (the high level
of arsenic in the blood), it can be reinforced by its coherence with the
accepted subsystem of beliefs in which it is embedded (like s, t,
u together with the hypothesis p), or even be refuted by other beliefs
of this same system. But here again, the consideration of this network of
giving and taking among sensory-perceptual and derivative beliefs leaves no
room for a veritative force arising from coherence.
The important question that
remains open is about the precise status of the statements of factual evidence
(like of q) in our examples. It is the expression of an
e-thought-content-rule, but it must also be seen as able to represent the
actual factual content, namely, a cognitively independent external criterial
tropical arrangement. Are these two possibilities reconcilable?[52]
This crucial question will be tackled in the following sections.
21. What about the truth of the
truthmaker?
One of the most serious problems for the adequation theory of truth
concerns the infinite regress that arises from factual evidence that verifies
suppositions, that is, verifiers or truthmakers. We can pose the problem in the
form of a dilemma: Either the truthmaker – the evidential fact, the real or
actual factual content – is unquestionable, or it can be doubted. Suppose (a)
that the evidential fact is unquestionably true. In this case, we seem to be
guilty of dogmatism, because we treat our normal perceptual truths and even
purely self-sensory truths[53] as
if they were beyond any possibility of being false. But this would be to deny the fallibility of sensory-perceptual knowledge. We cannot be
absolutely certain about the evidence for any (or maybe almost any) empirically
given factual content. Even formal axioms always have a degree of arbitrariness
in their choice and can lose their applicability after changes in our broader
system of reality. Now, suppose (b) that we consider the evidential content
believed to be a fact (which shows itself as a
thought-content) as open to doubt. In this case, it seems that we need to
search for new evidential content (another thought-content) that would warrant
its truth. Since this new factual content will likewise not be beyond doubt, we would have to look for further evidential content and
so on endlessly. Since we cannot stop this regress, we have no way to ground
our suppositions, because any ground we find will lack the necessary solidity.
The upshot is that neither alternative (a) nor alternative (b) is satisfactory.
Restricting myself here to
the cases of external empirical truths, I think we can solve the dilemma if we consider examples in sufficient detail.[54]
Consider the following example of an observational statement !o:
‘There’s a dolphin swimming in the sea.’ Imagine that the truth of this
sentence depends on the observation of a dolphin surfacing from time to time –
an observation that can be interpersonally shared. For the first person who
sees the dolphin, the procedure has a retrograde form:
!o, ?p, o = p /├ p
For a second person, already informed by the first and trying to locate
the dolphin in the sea, it will have a retroanterograde form:
p ~> ?p, !o, p = o /├ p
But this does not mean that !o,
the given evidence, is absolutely warranted! It can be defeated. Suppose that due to a scarcity of real dolphins and in
order to entertain tourists, a diver is hired who swims just below the surface
with a rubber dolphin mounted on his back, surfacing from time
to time in a way that gives dolphin watchers the illusion that they are seeing
a real dolphin.[55] In
face of this, the factual content !o that should ground the verification
of ?p is defeated. Those aware of the
deception could correctly point out: ‘It is false that there is a dolphin
swimming in the sea.’
However, it should not be
hard to find a solution to the problem. What we believe to be factual content
need not be regarded as absolute. It can be seen as a
thought-content assumed to
unquestionably represent an actual factual content (the ultimate truthmaker) within the context of a practice that
typically assumes that we do not have atypical circumstances that if present would defeat the
assumption. Thus, consider the linguistic
practice (A), in which we recognize things in normal daylight that are large
enough and near enough to be identified as dolphins, and they are employed in
the context of a tourist beach where people expect to see dolphins swimming in
the water offshore… In this practice we are allowed to assume that the observational content ‘I am watching a dolphin that has just emerged from the sea’ can be taken as unquestionable evidence expressible by !o. It is thereby a real-actual
fact, a truthmaker or verifier that we accept as giving practical certainty to
the thought-content that there is a dolphin in the sea near where the observer is
standing. Assuming the information content and the
context at our disposal in this practice, and assuming that all other things
remain the same, seeing a dolphin must undoubtedly be accepted as the
truthmaker of the hypothesis ?p.
Assuming that o also has
internal phenomenal content (with psychologically given sensory impressions),
we could say that in this case we are allowed to assume that the
e-thought-content-rule of o,
that is, o without the underline
(expressible as: ‘I am having visual impressions of a dolphin emerging from the
sea’) can be considered the vehicle of the experience of the real-actual fact o given in the world
(representable as: ‘Being a real dolphin that has just emerged from the sea’).
Summarizing: in practice, our willingness to accept evidence is dependent on a ceteris paribus, namely, on the assumption
that the observation isn’t being defeated by some condition extraneous to all
that is expected for the working of the given practice.
Now, in the given case there
is a defeating extraneous condition, which begins with the scarcity of real dolphins in the vicinity and ends in the training of a diver to swim just below the surface with a
rubber dolphin mounted on his back, sometimes rising
to the surface in a way that gives people on the shore impressions of seeing a
real dolphin… Assuming that some observer S is aware of this information, what
is given to him isn’t the practice (A) but a different observational practice
that we can call (B), which includes information about the very unusual
background circumstances. In this (B) practice, we cannot postulate the
observation of a real dolphin merely because we see what appears to be a
dolphin emerging from the sea. Under the circumstances presented by (B), in
which a rubber dolphin is often carried on the back of a diver swimming just
below the surface, to know with certainty that
one is observing a real dolphin would require closer and far more careful
examination. Closer underwater inspection, for instance, might reveal factual
evidence of a fake rubber dolphin, which can be symbolized by o’. In this
new practice, the thought-content expressed by p could not be verified by the
fact able to be represented by !o, because !o isn’t really given
to S, since we already know that in its context !o cannot be trusted to be a
real dolphin. However, ?p could be falsified by the more careful observation
provided by o’, as the following retroanterograde schema shows:
p ~> ?p, !o’, p ≠ o’ /├ ~p
What this example shows is that our usual certainty regarding
experienced factual content, despite not being absolute, must be postulated as certain or irrefutable!
This is assumed as a practical
certainty and must be treated as beyond the level of a merely
probable truth, under the assumption that the factual context does not involve
unknown evidence able to defeat the
linguistic practice in the context of which the perceptual judgment is made. If
we obtain
information indicating different background circumstances
able to discredit the practice sustaining the perceptual judgment, as in the
case above, the assumed evidence vanishes.
I can offer a second, similar
example, only to reinforce the point. Yvonne is driving a car through a desert,
and she thinks she sees a lake, but it is really only a mirage. At first, she
believes the lake she sees on the horizon is real. We can symbolize this
through the following retrograde verification procedure:
!o, ?p, o = p / ├ p
However, it soon becomes clear to her that she has made a naïve mistake;
what she really sees is nothing but a so-called inferior mirage. This is caused
by the refraction of sunlight passing through a
layer of hot air near the ground. In this way, she adds to the background
conditions the easy graspable unusual circumstances able to invalidate normal perceptual evidence. As she has learned that these unusual
circumstances defeat the rules of normal observational practice (A). Instead of
thinking !p, ‘I see a lake’, she thinks ├ ~p ‘I do not
see a lake,’ eventually concluding:├ q, which asserts the sentence ‘I see an
inferior mirage’ (or ‘I see the refracted blue of the sky’), which represent a
different factual content that can be represented as o.’[56]
Consequently, what was at first accepted as external evidence is now viewed as
an erroneous interpretation of phenomenally given data, since practice (A) was
replaced by the new practice (B). The gained awareness of the context allows the invalidation and replacement of
what was at first assumed as an unassailable truthmaker. We can symbolize this
change through a sequence of the two following anterograde verification
procedures belonging to practice (B):
?p, !o’, p ≠ !o’├ ~p,
?q, !o’, q = !o’├
q
It is worth noting that in both interpretations the phenomenal content
of perception remains the same: an impression of seeing the color blue near the
horizon. But the interpretation of this content is very different, once o’
is read as a new factual content: a mirage existing in the world. And Yvonne
understands what she sees differently because a more complete awareness of the
background information given by the surrounding circumstances (including the
fact that the blue band always keeps the same distance to the car) is able to
defeat the seemingly reasonable initial interpretation of the
visually-given content as o.
22. Objection of the
linguistic-cognitive circle
Probably the most influential epistemic objection to the correspondence
theory of truth is the so-called problem of the linguistic-cognitive circle:
Propositions can only be compared with propositions. If we compare hypothetical
propositions with propositions representing evidential contents, even if these
are taken as irrefutable, we remain trapped in our language and thought. Even
if we find the strongest factual evidence, this evidence could only be
considered in the form of linguistic expressions of propositions, but in no way
do we find evidence by direct comparison of propositions (even if understood,
as we do, as e-thought-rules) with real facts, states of affairs or events in
the world (Neurath 1931: 541; Hempel 1935: 50-51). Here again, we would be in
danger of ending up in an infinite regress with epistemic skepticism as a
corollary.
A prima facie general reply to this objection is that saying we are
trapped in an intra-linguistic or intra-cognitive world already assumes we know
there exists an extra-linguistic and extra-cognitive external world – a
knowledge that remains unexplained.
Philosophers like Moritz
Schlick (1936) and A. J. Ayer presented a more focused reply. Here is A. J.
Ayer’s well-known reply:
We break the circle by using our senses, by actually making
the observations as a result of which we accept one statement and reject
another. Of course, we use language to describe these observations. Facts do
not figure in discourse except as true statements. But how could it be expected
that they should? (1963: 186)
Ayer’s argument contains a strong appeal to common sense. Nevertheless,
this appeal seems to contradict another enduring idea, which is also not alien
to common sense. It is the idea that the whole content of our usual perceptual
experience should be some kind of conceptually articulated belief-content and
therefore should be mental in nature.
Consequently, it remains not entirely unreasonable to think that we
could never have direct and unquestionable access to anything referred to by a
perceptual thought, even if considered as e-thought-rules, namely, external
facts as they are in themselves (Cf.
Blanchard 1939, vol. 2: 228).
One reaction to this dilemma
would be to accept the kind of last resort solution called idealism (e.g., Foster 2000). But today idealism seems to be an almost forbidden solution. According to idealism, all
reality is in some sense mental. This view conflicts with one of our chief modest commonsense principles, namely, that we are surrounded
by a cognitively independent external material world. In fact, our empirical
knowledge (particularly our scientific knowledge) has told us that the mental
is in some sense a minuscule emergent portion of the physical world, dependent
on it to exist, just as the phenotype is dependent on the genotype. In other
words, the mental appears to supervene the physical insofar
as experience – scientific or otherwise – has shown. Moreover, if we
stay on the side of our principle of established knowledge (Ch. II, sec. 5),
idealism will remain anathema, since it denies not only the modest commonsense
truth that the external world is non-mental, but also the scientific truth that
the external world as a whole is overwhelmingly
non-mental. In some non-mystical
sense of the word ‘emergent,’ science has shown that mind is an emergent
property of life, which is an emergent property of organic chemistry, a rare
carbon-based chemistry emergent from our atomic and sub-atomic
physical world. And all our astronomical knowledge conspires to show
that this minuscule accidental phenomenon of the emergence of the mental is
destined to disappear with the unavoidable process of death of
the universe, which is foreseen by the laws of thermodynamics.
Finally, from an anthropological perspective, idealism is very often motivated
by wishful thinking, as is argued in the philosophy of culture and the
humanities by authors ranging from Nietzsche to Freud and from Hume to Marx and
Durkheim. It seems that human beings pay a high price for having
acquired consciousness. In some way, it recalls the price paid by Prometheus
for his theft of fire to benefit Mankind. Even if
consciousness makes us better able to survive, it
also gives us an increasing awareness that we live in an unpredictable and
dangerous world, along with a clear sense of our own physical vulnerability and finitude. Idealism, by making the external world in some way
mind-dependent, can be helpful in supporting those illusions of control over the external world that could give us some hope of beating the
odds, a thought that is made explicit in Berkeley’s writings. Summing up, due to all the knowledge we
have at our disposal today about the physical world and
ourselves, more than ever before we have strong external reasons to reject idealism in favor of epistemic realism.
(The internal reason is what I intend to expose later.)
23. Answering the objection of the
linguistic-cognitive circle
Epistemic realism concerning the external world can be understood as the
view that preserves the natural opposition between the mental and the material
worlds in the sense that we can roughly characterize the internal mental world as only experienceable
in the first-person, while the external physico-material world can be mainly characterized as able to be experienced in the third-person.
Assuming epistemic realism, in what follows I will defend direct
realism as able to give us the kind
of epistemological framework that will make it possible to break the
linguistic-cognitive circle. Direct realism is the view that our senses provide
direct awareness of the external world, showing it pretty much as it is. Direct
realism differs from indirect or representational realism, which is the
view that we have direct experience only of our own sensations,
which inform us about the external world, so that the latter is never directly
experienced. Both, direct and indirect realisms, differ from a third
traditional epistemological position, called phenomenalism. According to this last view, we can have
experiential access only to our sensations or sense-data, since there is no
sufficient reason to postulate an external world independent of actual or
possible sensations. This view leads almost inevitably to idealism and to
rejection of a really existing non-mental external world (Cf. Ch. IV, sec. 20).
My defense of direct realism
begins with the suggestion that everything experienced in real perception has a
kind of Janus face, able to explain the double nature of !o, as the thought o
and as a fact in the world underlining o.
What I mean is that what is given to us in proper sensory-perceptual experience
of the external world can always be understood as two different types of
interrelated entities: one psychological and the other physical, as follows:
(A) The merely psychological experience of
cognitively-dependent internally given
sensory content, the so-called sense-data.
(B) The proper, physically understood cognitively-independent, externally
given perceived content (that is, the
external real entities understood as physically particularized property-tropes,
material objects as clusters of tropes, simple or complex facts as tropical
arrangements…).
Psychological experience (A) gives us what we may call sensory impressions or sensory contents (also called
sensations, sensa, sense-data, percepts, phenomena, representations, ideas…).
It seems commonsensical that sensory contents are always present in perceptual
internal tropical experience (even if we are usually unaware of them) as I
intend to show later. But experience (B) also seems beyond doubt: it is the
view that in addition to sensory experience, when we really perceive something,
this something is given to us as an external, physico-material kind of entity.
Indeed, it is also commonsense knowledge to say that we usually perceive the
external world directly and as it really
is. And this external world, as we have shown, is originarily accessible as
constituted by physical, external tropes (properties) relatively dependent of
clusters of relatively independent compresent external tropes with some form
and mass, most of them called material objects, and by arrangements of both,
also called facts.
The clearest evidence
favoring this double view is given by tactile experience. Suppose I touch a hot
stove with my hand. I can say I have a
sensation of heat: this
sensory-impression is the psychological (criterial) sensory-content of
experience (A). Alternatively, I can also say that I have perceived that the
stove is hot; this is the
correct perceptual experience of the (criterial) perceptual content, that is,
an externally given physical tropical state of a material object (B). The most
important point is that in the normal case we cannot phenomenally and descriptively
distinguish experience (A) from experience (B) (Cf. Searle 2015: 24). In spite of this, we can always conceptually
distinguish the two cases, as the following examples of tactile experience
show:
(A)
[I have the feeling that] the
stove is hot.
(B)
The stove [I am touching] is hot.
In a similar way, I can say:
(A)
[I have the feeling that] I am
holding a tennis ball in my hand.
(B)
I [am aware that] I am holding a tennis ball
in my hand.
Now, from auditory experience, I can say:
(A)
I [have the auditory impression
that] I hear thunder.
(B)
I hear thunder [outside and over there].
And of the most common visual experience, I can also
say:
(A)
[I have the visual impression
that] I am watching a fishing boat entering the mouth of Pirangi River.
(B)
[I am aware that] I am watching a fishing
boat entering the mouth of Pirangi River.
As you can see, although what we could call linguistic descriptions of contents outside the brackets are the same in cases (A) and (B),[57] in
(A) cases I speak of merely sensory
(criterial) contents occurring in my head, while in (B) cases I speak of objectively real physico-material external
contents – perceived factual (independent criterial) contents
pre-existing in the external world. Note
that in cases of perceptual contents, I speak of contents such as the
distinguishable objects found in a drawer, that is, of objectively real
tropical entities given to experience, which should not be confused with semantic contents understood as rules
whose dependent criteria should be satisfied by the first ones). Furthermore,
on the one hand, the real perceptual content (B) is epistemically dependent
on mere sensory content (A), because without sense impressions (A), one couldn’t know (B); on the other hand, sensory content (A) is ontologically dependent on the real external things constituting perceptual
content (B), since (B) causes (A).
Accepting the above dual
understanding of perceptual experience is not hard and does not compromise
direct realism. I can illustrate how harmless the duplicity is by comparing it
with our interpretation of objects that I see in a mirror. What I see in a
mirror can be understood as: (A’) a simple image of things, for instance, the
image of a vase of flowers on a table. But it can also be understood as (B’)
the vase in itself that I am looking at in a mirror. For instance, I
can point to the object I see in a mirror, and you can ask me if I am pointing
to the reflected image of the vase of flowers or to the real vase of flowers.
That they belong to different domains of experience is made clear by contextual
differences: the image isn’t considered real, because I cannot touch or smell
it. The real vase of flowers, on the other hand, can be touched, smelled,
directly seen from all sides, manipulated, broken; its weight and its size can
be accurately
measured and shown to remain constant, independently
of the changeable apparent size of its image… Alternatively, I can change the apparent size of the image by bringing
the vase closer to the mirror. And this apparent size always doubles the real
distance of the vase from the mirror… Nevertheless, to a reasonable extent,
qualitative properties and relations of both image and reality will be alike or
correlated. Moreover and unavoidably, looking in the mirror I would not be able
to see and locate the vase on the table without
the help of its image.
In fact, access to the real
vase is dependent on access to its image. As in cases like (B) above, (B’) is epistemically
dependent on (A’), because without the image (A’) I could not see (B’).
Alternatively, (A’) is ontologically
(causally) dependent on (B’). This is why when I pay attention to an object in
a mirror I interpret it as perceptually dependent on its image, but when I pay
attention to the image I see it as causally dependent on the real object. I can
easily say I see the reality by means of
the image. But I will never say that I cannot see the actual object only
because what I really see is just its image.
Like all analogies, the
mirror-image analogy has its limits. For instance, I can always be aware of the
image in the mirror as an image, but I am normally unaware of my own sense-data
(except, for instance, in cases like those of lucid dreams). However,
even here we find something similar: I am aware of the
image qua image externally, mainly
through conditions like the restriction to visual access and the relations to
other things, not due to the image itself. Anyway, the
mirror-analogy reinforces the idea that we can answer the objection of the
linguistic-cognitive circle by saying that the content of any real experience
can be understood in two ways:
(A) Internally and psychologically, as a first-person
sensory-based e-thought-content-rule (a sensory-perceptual
e-thought-content-rule with its internally fulfilled criteria).
(B) Externally as a third-person physico-material fact (the referred
non-semantic factual content constituted by arrangements of external tropical
criteria).
Now, insofar as we are also able
to read in the given phenomenal content
an external factual content, we should be able to escape the
linguistic-cognitive circle.
A complementary but also
indispensable point that I have dealt with many times already is that we almost
never have a complete sensory-perceptual
experience of external factual content. Our perceptual experience is
typically perspectival. We experience only facets, aspects, sub-facts. If from
a position on shore I see a fishing boat entering the mouth of Pirangi River, I
may experience (see) only one side of the fishing boat. However, based on this
dynamic tropical sub-fact (an aspect of a process), I am able to say not only
that I see one side of the boat – the
sub-fact – but also that I see
the whole boat and that I am
following the whole process of the real
fishing boat entering the mouth of Pirangi River – a dynamic grounding fact
(See Ch. IV, sec. 25-27; Ch. VI, sec. 6). All these descriptions might be true
and their truth derives equally from adequation.
Another complementary point
is the unavoidable admission that sensory content (sense-data) really accompany
all our perceptions. That this purely sensory content exists can be illustrated
by a phantom pain from a missing limb, after-images, and lucid
dreams. A person can feel pain in an amputated limb as if the limb were still there. An after-image
appears when someone closes his eyes after looking briefly at the sun. A lucid
dream is a dream controlled by a person who is aware that
she is dreaming. Furthermore, for those still skeptical of the existence of
internal sense-data in normal perception, experiments with vision
reconstruction, which involve computationally reconstructed brain experiences
of scanned moving images by means of fMRI (e.g., Nishimoto et al. 2011), are
more than proof that these sensory contents in the brain really exist, as in these
experiments subjects experience their own sensory images and
interpersonally compare them with what they see in the external world![58] The
dichotomy considered above is also important because it is a necessary
condition for the already noted defeasibility of observational evidence: under
perceived anomalous conditions we can reinterpret experience by withdrawing
from what we believed to be real perceptual content to mere sensory content
reinterpreting the lost one.
Conclusions
There are two main theories
of justification: coherentism and foundationalism. There are two main theories
of truth: coherentism and correspondence theory. According to the coherentist
theory of truth, the truth of a proposition is achieved by its coherence with a
system of propositions. According to the correspondence theory, the truth of a
proposition comes from its correspondence with a fact (which I broadly read as
a situation, a state of affairs, an event, a process…). Is this parallel
between theories of justification and theories of truth only a coincidence or not?
If not, where this parallel begins, and where it ends?
I think that my treatment of the definition
of knowledge in the chapter on the definition of knowledge has a key to the
answer. My use of the term ‘justifying evidence’ for what justifies and for
what makes true was purposeful. The justifying evidence for the knowing-claimer
justification is called a justifier. The justifying evidence that allows
the knowledge-evaluator to conclude that p is true is called a truth-maker.
Both are facts in the above explained sense.
Now, having more explicitly considered the
structure of justification, we can return to the problem. In fact, the
conditions that need to be satisfied in order to make a belief or statement
true are parallel to the conditions that need to be satisfied in order to make
a belief justified, at least insofar as we accept a moderate kind of
foundationalism in theory of justification and a correlative correspondence
theory of truth. After all, truth is based on truth-makers, justification is
based on justifiers, and both are facts.
There is, however, an important difference,
and considering our perspectival reconstruction of the traditional definition
of knowledge we are now able to see what is different and what is identical
between the verifying procedure of truth-making and the justifying procedure of
justification. The conditions of truth, namely, those possible facts that
justify our ascription of truth to statements (or to belief-contents) are those
that belong to the usually broader point of view of the knowledge evaluator (or
the knowledge-evaluators), which in most cases means that the satisfaction of
conditions or truth are those that are shared among people enough qualified to
make the best possible judgement. The procedure that shows the correspondence
between the truth-maker, the fact, and the belief-content or proposition is a
verifiability procedure, which is similar to a procedure of justification,
notwithstanding all the misunderstandings regarding verifiability procedures.[59] The conditions of the
justification of a belief, on the other hand, are normally those restricted to
a knowledge-claimer or of a smaller set of associated knowledge-claimers. From
the perspective of the knowledge-evaluators, they only become truth-makers when
they are accepted by him (or by the community of ideas represented by him) as
belonging or able to belong to the set of justifying evidences E*p that are
individually seen as facts in the world able to make the proposition p true.
Only when they are accepted by the knowledge evaluator, they turn to be
satisfied conditions of truth.
We can extend the conclusion of this
chapter, suggesting that the element of coherence belongs to the
foundationalist theory of justification as much as it also belongs to the
correspondence theory of truth. I have already shown this point regarding the
coherence theory of truth (Costa, 2018: 408 f.). This last theory says that a
true proposition can only be made true by its relationship with a system of
propositions, which can be deductive or inductive or both. Now, suppose it is
deductive. In this case it will demand the truth of the premises in order to
warrant a true conclusion. On the other hand, if the argument is inductive, the
probable truth of the conclusion will demand that the premises are also highly
probably true. In any case, the inferential force of a conclusion, any
conclusion, will demand the truth of the premises. This is, however, something
that coherence alone is unable to warrant. It doesn’t mind how long or
complicated a circular inferential chain is, it cannot confer to any premise truth
or probable truth in order to warrant any conclusion. The veritative force of any proposition must in the end come, by direct
or indirect ways, from something outside the chain of propositions, and this
can only be made by a priori truth-makers for a priori statements (logical,
mathematical, definitional) or by empirical truth-makers for empirical (perceptual,
introspective) statements. This means that coherence is nothing but a interdoxastic
mechanism working in the construction of the correspondences between our
propositions and the world.[60]
Finally, the concepts of the system-of-all-beliefs
and of the system-of-reality can be applied to both cases: the personal
justification and the usually more interpersonally achievable verifiability
procedures leading to truth. In the last case the system-of-reality concerns
the truth concerning the real world, while the system-of-all-truths also
contains the fictional truths relative to the sub-systems of propositions that
are in some way or other dependent of the system of reality.
V
LIMITS OF
KNOWLEDGE
The difficulty is
to realize the groundlessness of our believing.
Wittgenstein
Scepticism is
doubt regarding the indubitable. Philosophers have constructed arguments that
lead us to questioning things we normally consider certain, like knowledge by
testimony, existence of other minds, existence of the external world, inductive
knowledge, and even the existence of knowledge (with the exception of the
knowledge that there is no knowledge, of course, in order to save them from
self-contradiction). Those sceptical arguments are important for epistemology,
not as much because they seem to be sound, but mainly because they represent a
challenge to the epistemologist, since much philosophical progress is
dialectically tributary to interesting challenges. Moreover, they help us to
establish the limits of our meaningful language and knowledge. Answering the
sceptics might allow us to distinguish real questions that can be reasonably
answered from pseudo-questions that only invite us to produce pointless
pseudo-answers. The last ones are only apparently meaningful, because they exceed
the limits of what can be cognitively questioned and answered. In what follows,
I will restrict myself to the discussion of two such cases: scepticism about
induction and scepticism about the external world.
1. Scepticism about induction
Scepticism about
induction was introduced by David Hume, entangled with his analysis of
causation[61]. Since I am interested here
in scepticism about induction, I will separate his argument from his analysis
of causation. Moreover, I will reconstruct and improve it a bit in order to show
its forcefulness.
First, you probably know the form of an
enumerative inductive argument: we have a thing[62] A that is associated
with another thing B in n% in a sufficient number and random circumstances, which
allows us to conclude that this association will be preserved with a probability
similar to n% in the next case or, generalizing, in all cases. Considering a
simple example: we know that under random circumstances fire was always followed
by heat in the past (here n = 100%); this serves as the premise for the
conclusion that the next time there is a fire, it will very probably heat its
surroundings, or even for the generalization that fire will always very
probably produce heat (I say ‘very probably’ because the mark of the inductive
reasoning is that the truth of its premises never warrants its conclusions, in
opposition to deductive reasoning).
Inductive inferences can be not only from the
past to the future (as in the case above), but also from a recent past to a
distant past (fire has always heated its surroundings), and from known
locations to new ones, actual or not (like the fire in Europe, fire in Burma also
heats its surroundings, as much as a fire in Kamchatka heated its surroundings
during the last Ice Age…).
Another
important form of inductive reasoning is the so-called inference to the best
explanation (abduction). We came to the conclusion that the moon is illuminated
by the sun, causing its different phases, because we always saw the sun on the
side of the sky opposed to the illuminated side of the moon. More than any
other hypothesis, this is the best explanation for the phases of the moon.
Since premises can be true and despite this the conclusion false, this
inference is also inductive. Moreover, it seems very plausible to think that
this kind of inductive inference is based on numerous previous enumerative
inferences, like the view that rightly placed luminous physical bodies always illuminate
dark bodies… If this is the case, as it seems, then Hume’s argument also applies
to the inferences to the best explanation. Furthermore, being inference to the
best explanation logically subordinated to the enumerative induction, any
attempt to justify the induction appealing to the inference to the best
explanation is from the start obliterated.[63]
Arriving at our reconstruction of Hume’s
argument, his first question is: how do we know that the premises of a strong (>50%)
inductive argument make its conclusion probable? For Hume, the natural answer should
be the appeal to a metaphysical principle of the regularity or uniformity of nature, which concerning
the causal relation can be expressed in the statement that the future will be
like the past. We can express an instance of the argument as follows:
A
1. The future will be similar to the
past.[64]
2. Fire has always heated its surroundings.
3. Hence (very probably) the next
fire will heat its surroundings.
or
4. Hence (very probably) fire will
always heat its surroundings.
Although Hume has
restricted himself to arguments like A, since we wish to contemplate the
different extensions of induction in time and space, we can state the principle
of uniformity of nature more broadly as follows:
PU: (i) The future must be similar
to its past, (ii) the less recent past must be similar to its more recent past,
(iii) the next location of space must be similar to the already known ones.[65]
Based on PU we
can extend our justification of induction to past cases, as in the following
example in which we apply PU(ii):
1. The less recent past must be similar
to its more recent past. (PU(ii))
2. In the recent past fire has always
heated things.
3. Hence (very probably) in the
remote past fire also heated things.
Concerning
PU(iii) we can also give a similar example:
1. The next region of space must be similar
to the already known region of space. (PU(iii))
2. In the already known regions of
the earth fire has always heated.
3. Hence (very probably) fire heats
in unknown regions of the earth.
We can also combine parts of PU, as PU(ii) an
PU(iii) in the following example:
1. The less recent past must be similar
to the more recent past. (PU(ii))
2. The next region of space must be similar
to the already known region of space. (PU(iii))
3. In the already known regions of
the earth fire has always heated.
4. Hence (probably) fire also heated
in Kamchatka during the Ice Age.
In this way, I
think we have extended the principle of the uniformity of nature to its outer limits.
Now, consider the epistemic status of PU(i):
if it is warranted as true, then the inductive force of the argument A is
warranted. The first problem noted by Hume, however, was that PU(i) is not what
he used to call a ‘relation of ideas’. In saying this he was arguably telling
us that PU(i) is not an analytic principle, since the most well-known
mark of the analytic sentence is that it cannot be denied without contradiction
or incongruency (in Hume’s words, denials of relations of ideas are
‘impossible’ or ‘unconceivable’). Hume saw, PU(i) can be denied without
contradiction, what we can easily extend to each subdivision of PU. “The future
will not be similar to its past” is a perfectly meaningful sentence. If it is
so, then PU(i), along with PU, must be a synthetic statement. But this seems to
mean that the statement is based on experience.[66] This was Hume’s first
consequential result: a non-uniform world is conceivable, hence the uniformity
of nature cannot be an analytic principle.
Reflecting on this, one can go further, posing
the following question: how do we achieve our belief that the nature is uniform?
Indeed, we can achieve a firm belief regarding PU(i), but the only way we can
achieve this belief seems to be experientially. In what follows, I present the
only plausible way to make PU(i) plausibly true[67]:
1. All the futures of our pasts were similar
to their own pasts.
2. Hence (probably) the future (of
our present) will be similar to its past.
There is,
however, a serious problem with this argument: it is an inductive one.
That is, we are trying to warrant our inductive arguments by means of a
principle based upon induction, and this is circular. We are trying to justify
something using what we intend to justify in the procedure of justification.
The Humean conclusion, based on an analysis
restricted to PU(i), was downright sceptical: we cannot warrant our inductive
arguments. This conclusion can be also extended to PU(ii) and PU(iii), since
these parts of our version of the principle of uniformity can be easily proved
to depend on inductive reasoning to be established.
The conclusion is that we have no reason to
believe that the sun will rise tomorrow, that in the fire also heats things in Burma…
or that fire heated things in Kamchatka during the last Ice Age. Neither our
empirical science nor our common sense knowledge of the world have any rational
warrant.
According to Hume, our inductive expectances
are a whimsical result of imagination. We have a psychological disposition to
believe in our inductive results, since we have the disposition of forming a habit or custom based on repetition. Hence, we have the habit to expect that
the next fire will heat things or that the sun will rise tomorrow in the same
way as insects have the instinctive tendency to follow light. However, with the
queer exception of Karl Popper, few philosophers have followed Hume up to this
point.
1.2 Critical
summary of some attempted answers
Before proposing what
seems to me clearly the right path for the solution of Hume’s problem of
induction, I will summarize some attempts to solve it and their difficulties.
This helps us to dimension the problem.
A first and more radical response consisted
in the acceptance of Hume’s conclusion. Karl Popper was probably the only
important philosopher who followed this path. For him, induction does not
exist. Nonetheless, science is possible because according to him science is not
based on induction: Science is based on the creation of new theories, as
imaginative as bold, which are assumed as true insofar as they resist to
empirical tests potentially able to falsify them.[68]
This answer contains a difficulty that was
noted by many critics, namely, that it surreptitiously appeals to induction.[69] After all,
what reasons would we have to believe in a theory that has resisted the tests as
being more plausible than any other, except if they were inductive reasons?
Worst yet: how can we know that a theory that has resisted the refuting tests
in the past will continue to resist them in the future, except if we believe
that it is inductively assured? Without a principle of induction, we do not
have even reasons to believe that theories refuted in the past will not be
well-succeed in the future!
Another attempt to deal with Hume’s problem that
makes concessions to his skepticism was the pragmatic vindication of induction
proposed by Hans Reichenbach.[70] Like
Popper, he also accepted the Humean argument as unassailable, but suggests a
pragmatic response, which treats inductive reasoning as a wager or bet.
According to him, either the nature is uniform or not. Suppose that the nature
is uniform. In this case, the inductive procedure will be successful, while
alternative procedures, like the watching a crystal-ball or the reading of tea
leaves, will be successful or not. Now, imagine that the nature is not uniform.
In this case, no procedure will be successful. Consequently, it is better to
bet in the inductive procedure!
The
objection against this kind of reasoning is that it is exceedingly pessimist. Inductive
procedures are bets without any previous warranted probability. In this sense we
are in a worse situation then people betting in a casino roulette. We are, in Reichenbach’s
own view, like a blind person lost within a forest, trying to find a way out.
It is difficult to imagine a more despairing situation.
There are also inductivist answers based on
the fact that when asked why we believe in inductive arguments we are tempted
to answer that it is because they were well-succeed in the past. Philosophers
as Max Black[71] and F.L. Will[72] have attempted to show that this
reasoning isn’t a circular because we can appeal to the same principle that the
regularities observed in the past will tend to repeat in the future applied in
a second level, justifying this last principle with the same principle applied in
a third level and so on ad infinitum. However, it does not seem rational
to justify an argument appealing to the same argument applied in a higher
level. If this kind of justification were possible, then anything could be
promptly justified. The case remembers us a similar problem concerning the
justification of deductive inferences by means of higher order identical
deductive inferences exemplified by Lewis Carol’s famous discussion between
Achilles and the turtle. The turtle refuses to accept the modus ponens: “p
& (p → q) ⸫ q”. Achilles justify the use of the modus ponens by means of a
second level rule of identical to the first one: “p & (p → q) ⸫ q”. Since
the turtle refuses to accept this new rule, they are taken to a quarrel without
end. The moral of the story is that it the attempt to justify a rule of
deductive inference by applying the same rule on a higher level is a helpless deal.
Why should this moral not be applied to the inductive attempts to justify
induction altogether?
A curious but in my view also failed attempt was made from Donald
Williams.[73] He departed from the statistical
syllogism, according to which if n% of a population has the characteristic F,
then a random sample of the population will have approximately n% members with
characteristic F. This can be seen as a logically intuitive inference, which
goes from the already observed to the already observed. Williams strategy,
however, is to reverse this argument in order to deal with the problem of
induction: if it is given to us a random sample in which n% of the members have
the characteristic F, this means that the whole population probably has
n% of its members with the characteristic F, which is a inductive inference going
from the observed to the unobserved.
Although from an inductivist
point of view William’s reasoning is reasonable, it makes nothing to solve the
problem, since his solution still presupposes the regularity of the universe.
This is made particularly clear when we try make the same inference from one
place to other (PU(ii)) or from the past to the future (PU(i)). The first case
can be exemplified by the generalization that all swans were white. In the
Middle-Ages it was truly made for European swans. Afterward, however, they have
discovered black swans in Australia. Consider now the second case. We are very
sure that 100% of the present penguins do not fly. But nothing warrants us that
penguins will not tomorrow begin to fly in flocks, except by presupposing that
the future will be like its past, which is obtained by means of induction.
There are also deductive attempts to justify induction. Bertrand Russell
once suggested the existence of an inductive principle that grounds deductive
inferences with probabilistic conclusions.[74] We can arrive at something of this kind
proposing the following inductivist principle of induction or PI:
PI: If under random circumstances the
thing x has been always observed in a certain association with the thing
y in the proportion n%, (i) if x will be observed in the future,
it will very probably preserve the same association with y in a similar
proportion, the same association between x and y being very
probably preserved (ii) in another unobserved places and (iii) in another
unobserved pasts.
With this formulation, I am
attempting to show that PI is in fact a linguistic-cognitive counterpart of PU,
which is its ontological formulation. Because of this, we can use PI in the
same way as PU, replacing the argument A by the analogous argument B that
follows:
B
1. If under random circumstances the
thing x has been always observed in a certain association with the thing
y in the proportion n%, if x will be observed in the future, it
will very probably preserve the same association with y in a similar
proportion. (PI(i))
2. Fire is something (some x) that
was always observed in association with the heating its surroundings (the y).
3. Hence (very probably) the next observed
fire (an x) will be observed in association with the heating of its
surroundings (an y).
or
4. Hence (very probably) all
observable fires (as x’s) will always be observed in associated with the
heating of its surroundings (as y’s).
The problem with this PI is the same
as the problem with PU. In the same way as PU, it seems clear that any
formulation of this kind can be denied without contradiction, what means that
it is not an analytic truth. Indeed, if the world loses its uniformities, then
not only PU will be false, but also its linguistic counterpart PI will be made
false. If PI is no analytic principle, it must be a synthetic one. It could not
be an empirical or a posteriori synthetic principle, since in this case it
would require induction to be confirmed. Therefore, it must be either a
postulate or some kind of synthetic a priori principle in the sense of an
informative principle about the world; something necessary though born from own
minds. The first alternative is inviable, since it sounds like a dogmatic ad
hoc solution; we are saying that the word follows PI by a fiat. The
second alternative falls into the old Kantian anthropomorphism: the external
world must follow the principle simply because, say, the human reason commands
it to do so, what is utterly unreasonable.
A last attempt to solve the problem of induction is to dissolve it,
trying to show that it is only a pseudo-problem. Philosophers like Paul Edwards[75] and, mainly, P. F. Strawson[76], have attempted this. According to
Strawson the so-called problem of induction is a pseudo-problem resulting from
an equivocal use of the concepts of rationality and justification. If we ask
someone to justify why the sun will arise tomorrow, the person will answer that
this will occur because it has always periodically arisen, and we all will
consider this particular inductive justification perfectly rational. This means
that the acceptance of inductive reasoning is part of our standards of
rationality. Consequently, it makes no sense an attempt to justify inductive
logic, since it is part of our source of rational decisions. Rejection of
inductive logic would be intuitively perceived as irrational. It would be like
an attempt to justify deductive logic; there is no proper answer, insofar as it
grounds our rationality.
But then, why philosophers insist
in trying to find a justification for the inductive logic? The reason is that
they are looking for a deductive justification for induction. But this cannot
be found, simply because there is no way to assimilate induction to deduction.
According to Strawson, this confusion results from the assimilation of
rationality with success. The rationality of induction does not warrant
success. It is, according to him, perfectly possible that the world turns to be
chaotic in such a way that our inductive procedures become unsuccessful. But
this does not make induction irrational, since this conclusion results to the
application of a higher order inductive reasoning.
Against this, one can object that
Strawson is accepting that the induction follows a synthetic a priori principle
warranting its probable results. Strawson’s dissociation between rationality
and success is an attempt to evade from this conclusion. However, if we
dissociate induction from success, then the problem of induction returns with
all its force, since what Hume and others have tried was precisely to explain
why we should believe that our inductive reasoning could be successful.[77]
Although all these attempts are imaginative and able to teach us
something, regarding the problem in itself they sound as inadequate as attempts
to kill a brontosaurus with the help of a slingshot. I think, however, that
there is an alternative view that promises to pay the bill.
1.2 A new start
The argumentative
strategy that seems to me to touch the very heart of the problem was never really
developed, but it is in some way summarized in the words of Jenny Teichman and
C. C. Evans, in an unpretentious introduction to philosophy[78]:
It would be impossible to say
truly that the universe is a chaos, since if the universe were genuinely
chaotic there would not be a language to tell it. A language depends on things
and qualities having enough persistence in time to be identified by words and
this same persistence is a form of uniformity.
The philosopher
Keith Campbell made this same point earlier. He noted that the world must have
sufficient order to allow us to reapply a concept, since if our concepts
could not be reapplied, they could not be checked, and therefore could not be
established as concepts[79]. To this could be added
that without the possibility of reapplying our concepts, they could not be associated
with conceptual words in order to be intersubjectively shared in a common
language: a world without enough order to allow induction would be unspeakable.
Although emphasizing language, what these
authors have grasped is that it doesn’t matter how disordered a world is, if it
is recognizable as a world, it must have enough order in space and time to be
open to some kind of inductive access. Put differently: A possible world must
be at least conceivable (that is, in some sense imaginable). But any
conceivable world must be open to induction. Therefore, openness to induction
is a condition of possibility for any possible world.
We can order these intuitions about the
relationship between world (or universe), conceivability and induction in the
form of the following argument:
1. Any possible world must be at
least conceivable.
2. Any conceivable world should have
at least some degree of regularity.
3. Any world that has some degree of
regularity must be open to some kind of inductive procedure.
4. (1-3) Hence, any conceivable world
must be open to some kind of inductive procedure.
5. Our world is a possible world.
6. (5, 1-3) Our world is open to some
kind of inductive procedure;
The central idea of
the argument is that the existence of a fully chaotic world is impossible,
since such a world would be inconceivable and we cannot speak meaningfully of
worlds that are inconceivable, since this does not belong to the concept of
world as we understand it.
One reason why this idea can meet resistance
is that the literature on the problem of induction is full of references to
chaotic worlds which are inaccessible to inductive procedures. This is,
however, a disastrous mistake, and I regret to say that that culprit was Hume
himself. The mistake arose because his objection against the justifiability of
induction was restricted to his analysis of causality, which is based on UP(i).
Causality is typically what we could call a case of diachronic regularity, which happens when in a regular way an event
A occurs temporally earlier than an event B. This is clear in Hume’s causal-inductive
examples. One of them is that of Adam, who seeing water the first time could
not have inferred from its fluidity and transparency that it would suffocate
him, and seeing fire from the first time could not infer from its light and
warmth that it could consume him.[80] Another examples
are those of unexpected changes in the curse of nature, when the uniformity of
nature is not preserved, as it would be the case if snow falling from the
clouds unexpectedly tastes like salt and burns like fire, or when the all trees
unexpectedly flower in winter and decay in summer[81].
If induction were restricted to diachronic
regularities, it would suffice to imagine a frozen world – a world without any
diachronic regularity – and this world should be impervious to induction. But
why should be a frozen world impervious to induction? The point is that,
focusing on diachronic regularities leads us to forget another, equally
important form of regularity also assumed by UP, namely, synchronic regularity. The state of affairs that Notre Dame is on
the Ille de France, the situation that the Tower of Pisa leans and the supposed
fact that Cleopatra had a big nose are all synchronic regularities. When entwined
one another, these synchronic regularities are usually called structures. Gothic cathedrals are
perhaps the best examples of very complex and harmonic synchronic structures,
and they have already existed over a long period of time without relevant
changes. Synchronic regularities are, however, objects of induction as much as
diachronic regularities, since only induction allows us to foresee that
synchronic regularities perceived in the past will endure in the future. Thus,
Notre Dame will remain on the Ille of France, the Tower of Pisa will continue
leaned, the gothic Cathedrals are expected to preserve their structures through
the next centuries, and all this we believe as result of induction. In the same
way, we expect as result of induction that similar things in different places
will have a structure similar to the already known, projecting this kind of
permanence inductively also to the unobserved past.
When we realize that our world is made up as
much of diachronic regularities as also of synchronic regularities, then it
becomes clearly impossible to think that we are able to conceive a world
without regularities. We can conceive several world courses: (i) a world
sustaining its usual regularities, (ii) a world gaining regularities, (iii) a
world losing regularities. But we cannot conceive (iv): a world that would have
no regularity, a completely chaotic world. In the following passage of Sartre’s
novel Nausea, he conceives a world losing regularities:
It can happen any time, perhaps right now: the omens are present.
For example, the father of a family might go out for a walk, and, across the
street, he’ll see something like a red rag, blown towards him by the wind. And
when the rag has gotten close to him, he’ll see that it is a side of rotten
meat, grimy with dust, dragging itself along by crawling, skipping, a piece of
writhing flesh rolling in the gutter, spasmodically shooting out spurts of
blood. Or a mother might look at her child’s cheek and ask him: "What's
that – a pimple?" and see the flesh puff out a little, split, open, and at
the bottom of the split an eye, a laughing eye might appear. Or they might feel
things gently brushing against their bodies, like the caresses of reeds to
swimmers in a river. And they will realize that their clothing has become
living things. And someone else might feel something scratching in his mouth.
He goes to the mirror, opens his mouth: and his tongue is an enormous, live
centipede, rubbing its legs together and scraping his palate. He’d like to spit
it out, but the centipede is a part of him and he will have to tear it out with
his own hands. And a crowd of things will appear for which people will have to
find new names—stone-eye, great three-cornered arm, toecrutch, spider-jaw. And
someone might be sleeping in his comfortable bed, in his quiet, warm room, and
wake up naked on a bluish earth, in a forest of rustling birch trees, rising
red and white towards the sky like the smokestacks of Jouxtebouville, with big
bumps half-way out of the ground, hairy and bulbous like onions. And birds will
fly around these birch trees and pick at them with their beaks and make them
bleed. Sperm will flow slowly, gently, from these wounds, sperm mixed with
blood, warm and glassy with little bubbles. (…)
These are deep
and disturbing changes. Nonetheless, there is nothing in this report (or in any
report of the kind) that makes the world really chaotic. Although the living
rotten meat crawling to the family father is indeed a strange creature, its
unexpected properties are all already well-known. Moreover, even the
individuals suffering changes, like the child, the eye, a man, a tongue, birch
trees, birds, can be also identified by their structures, although their also
well-known new properties are unexpected and frightening. The centipede behaves
like a centipede and human beings react desperately as expected in such
situations. What Sartre describes is based on a considerable number of
well-known synchronic and diachronic regularities combined in unexpected ways,
and the only reason why we are able to fully understand the description and
react to it is because of our acquaintance with all these already well-known
regularities. In fact, if all regularities could be erased, no intelligible
text could be composed. The future, at least in proportion to its greater
proximity to the present, must maintain sufficient similarity to its past to
allow an application of inductive procedures, making us recognize the
continuity of the same world we know today, notwithstanding how many unexpected
and undesirable changes come to pass.
We can do some thought-experiments in order
to reinforce these conclusions. Imagine a frozen world without any diachronic
regularities. This world would still have the regularity of the permanence of
its own structure, allowing us to apply inductive reasoning to foresee that it
would remain the same world, preserving this same constitution in the next
moment and over the whole period of its existence. Imagine by contrast (as if
it were possible) a minimalist world formed by a note of a single pitch or a
blinking red light that repeats itself at aleatory intervals. Once it ceases to
repeat, this world ceases to exist. But this minimalist world still has the
regularity of repetition. Hence, one could inductively expect this repetition.
One can complain that it may be difficult to
apply induction when the regularities are few. But this remark ignores a
logical point. Induction is potentially flexible. The required inductive search
can be calibrated in conformity with circumstances. When the probability to
find a regularity is lower, we expand the inductive search. Consider, as
illustration, the wild camels of the Gobi’s desert. The expanse of the Gobi’s
desert is immense. It includes the north of China and the whole of Mongolia.
And these shy camels are rare, supposing they have not yet become extinct. One
can visually survey a vast expanse of desert, searching up and down the hills of
sand with powerful binoculars until you find a Gobi camel, if you have luck. Here
the pressure of inductive calibration must be very high.
Finally, one can ask after all what is the
advantage of adopting an analytic-conceptual solution instead of, say, a
synthetic a priori solution? The answer is in the hand. As we saw in the first
chapter of this book, the analytic sentence cannot be falsified within the
system to which it belongs, though the whole system can be falsified (e.g. the
Euclidean geometry was falsified regarding its application to the physical
world), neutralizing the analytic sentence. In the present case, however, the
analytic principle is so wide in its application that the system to which it
belongs is the whole world as we can conceive it, which means that this system
cannot be even falsified, since there is no other world, not even a possible
world, able to falsify such a system.
The general conclusion is that some
principle of uniformity must be applicable, insofar as we might assume
cognitive access to the world. As we will see, we lack a formulation of this
principle that is sufficiently precise and adequate instead of vague and
misleading.
1.2.1 Searching for more appropriate formulations
When we more carefully
consider the temporal dimensions (i) and (ii) and the spatial dimension (iii)
of PU, within which we apply inductive reasoning, we see that much more must be
taken into consideration.[82] Consider PU(i): the
principle that the future will be like its past. What is meant with PU(i) is
vague. Suppose we take it literally (like Hume) and deny this by saying that
the future will not be like its past. This denial does not seem to
contain any contradiction, which means that PU(i) is not analytical. This is
not desirable, since PU(i) cannot be synthetic a posteriori or empirical, and
since we do not wish to accept a principle of uniformity that is synthetic a
priori. Such a principle would counteract the very plausible view according to
which all (or almost all) our empirical knowledge is fallible. Moreover, a
reading of PU(i) as telling us that all of the future will be similar to
its past is obviously wrong. Not only does nothing prevent great unexpected
changes (a great meteor collides with the earth, etc.), but considering the
infinitude of time, a very distant future can be utterly different from our
past. Suppose, for instance, you could observe the world some micro-seconds
after the big-bang. The future in which there would be myriads of galaxies with
stars and planets, some of them with life and consciousness like we find on the
earth, would be utterly different from what was going on at that moment.
However, there is something analytically
right in PU(i). Although the future can be different from its past, it cannot
be completely different from its past, at least when seen as a sufficiently
near future. For in this case, how could we identify a future as the future of
its own past? Suppose that we propose
the following version of PU(i):
PU(i)*
The future must have at least some similarity with its past.
This seems to be
conceptually true, its denial leading to contradiction. For if the future had
nothing to do with its own past, it could be the future of any other past!
We can pose the point more accurately. We
can understand what we usually call ‘the future’ as the temporally successive
sets of regularities constitutive of the world after the present, while the
‘past’ can be understood as the temporally successive sets of regularities
constitutive of the world before the present. Assuming this, we can say: it
belongs to the concept of future that it must be the future of its own past in
order not to be the future of any other past. Putting this in terms of possible
worlds: the future F of the actual world w can only be the future of w,
that is, Fw, which only can be the future of the past of w, that
is, of Pw. It cannot be the future of the numerous other possible worlds
w1, w2, w3… Therefore, it is necessary that there is
something that identifies Fw as the future of Pw And this
something cannot be other than some margin of similarity. That is: the concept
of a future must be in some way conceptually linked with the notion of its past
in at least some minimal measure in order to warrant the temporal association
between Fw and Pw. This is why PU(i)* satisfies our
characterization of analyticity: to say that PU(i)* is false means to reject
the relation of complementarity between the concepts of future and past in the
sentence, making the denial of PU(i)* inconsistent. (Moreover, this related
transition from past to future must be spatially located. For instance: one
cannot imagine the suddenly replacement of a sunny day in Los Angeles by the
afternoon in Calisto, a satellite of Jupiter.)
If we wish to warrant induction, we must
read the principle that the future must be like its past in a more precise and
adequate way. We must refine PU(i) so that it shows itself as something
analytic-conceptual and a priori in this harmless sense. In order to show that
such a reading is possible, consider the following example:
Presently, at time T0,
there is a piece of wax. This piece of wax is warmed and in T1 it
changes from a solid to a liquid state. Until now, most things have remained
the same, not only the atomic constitution of the wax, but also the molecular
constitution that makes up what we commonly call wax. Then, in T2
the wax is warmed much more, so that what remains are only ashes. The chemical
constitution of the wax is now lost, the atoms of oxygen and hydrogen have
disappeared, only the atoms of carbon are still there. Now, suppose that the
process of heating continues and that the carbon ash is heated by hundreds of
millions of degrees, so that in T3 the atoms disintegrate and all
that remains is a plasma of sub-atomic particles.
It is easy to
understand what this progression shows: the nearer the future is to the
present, the more properties it still has in common with the present, until the
point of junction of the future and the past – which is the present – a point
of complete identity, where all properties are the same. The same rule is valid
considering the relation between the present and its past. Furthermore, the
example with the piece of wax can be generalized. It can be applied to any
domain of our world. On any level, this same pattern repeats itself: Natura non facit saltus. Another example
from a completely different domain: the industrial revolution began in the
second half of the XVIIIth century. But if we consider the changes in a short
period of time, such as from 1760 to 1800, we can find only a few alterations,
like the introduction of mechanized weaving machines in England and a small
rural exodus. Large-scale iron and steel production, steam power, steamships,
locomotives and railways, the great rural exodus and serious social tensions…
had to wait until the next century. Certainly, there are anomalous progressions
in which a near future can for a while be more different from the present than
a more distant future, but in this case, you can consider only the nearest
future, or you can consider a broader interval that includes this kind of
anomaly in a way that makes it irrelevant to the whole. To give an analogy, consider
the following anomalous progression: {1, 2, 3, 2, 3, 4, 3, 4, 5…}. The fact
that some numbers are unexpectedly nearer to 1 does not change the fact that
this is a positive numerical progression, and many variants, also anomic ones,
can be added. Looking for a real empirical example, consider the continued
economic development of a country, with all its booms and busts.
Using the word ‘tendency’ to discard
possible anomalies, the principle that the future will be similar to its past
can be improved as follows:
UP(i)* Tendentially, the nearer
the future is to its point of junction with its past (i.e., the present), the
more similarities will be held with its past, being both the same at the point
of junction.
I would
understand this reading of UP(i) as analytic-conceptual. We cannot deny it
without saying something incongruent or contradictory. We cannot deny that
there is a tendency to the annulation of the differences between future and
past, the nearer they approximate to the present. Now we can warrant inductive
probability by means of an analytic-conceptual (a priori) principle:
1. Tendentially, the nearer the
future is to its own past, the more similarities it will have with its past.
2. In the past fire always heated
things.
3. The next fire will (probably) heat
things.
This seems to me
sufficient to inductively warrant that the next fire will probably heat things.
Consider now the other sub-principles of
uniformity. Sub-principle UP(ii) represents no problem, since it is UP(i)
projected onto the past. But sub-principle (iii) still requires some
explanation. The principle that one region of space must be like another, taken
literally, is certainly false. The region of the Côte d’Azur must be very
different from the region of a black hole. We are in fact speaking of proximal
regions. Thinking in this way we can state the principle of spatial uniformity
in a way that is analogous to the above principles of temporal uniformity:
UP(iii)*: Tendentially, the nearer
one spatial region is to the spatial region we have already considered, the
more similar this spatial region will be to the spatial region we are
considering, both being the same in their point of junction (i.e., the spatial
limit).
For instance:
suppose that we can see part of a checkerboard surface. You can be fairly sure
that the next segment we see of the same surface will also have a checkerboard
pattern. We expect based on experience that unknown space will preserve
regularities in the same way as time. UP(iii)* is also analytic-conceptual: you
cannot deny this tendency without contradiction.[83] Indeed, if this principle
is constitutive of the way we are able to access any possible world in its
temporal dimension, it cannot be logico-conceptually refuted.
1.2.2 A question
without meaning
Outflanked, the sceptic could appeal to a
drastic objection. Even if we concede that a world, in order to be a world,
must have enough uniformity to make possible the use of inductive procedures,
there is nothing that absolutely warrants the continuity of anything. Suppose
that our whole world disappears five seconds from now. Nothing in our principle
of uniformity PU(i)* prevents this possibility! To this consideration one has
the inclination to answer in the affirmative, admitting that there is nothing
to warrant the permanence of our world. Hume was, after all, right!
Nonetheless, when we consider this sceptical
objection more carefully, we see that the true answer is a different one. The true
answer is that this sceptical objection is devoid of sense, because it
requires a completely unverifiable answer. If the universe as a whole disappears
in five seconds, there will be no one to verify this disappearance (or to
falsify its supposed permanence), since there will be nothing. It makes
no sense to speak about what you logically cannot know. The idea that the world
as a whole disappears only seems to be possible because we, without noticing, imagine
the world disappearing, as if we could remain as transcendent observers of this
disappearance. By doing this we forget that we, the observers, also belong to
the world, and as such should also disappear with the world, what makes the
observation of this disappearance logically impossible.[84] In other words, we have
arrived at the limits of what we can meaningfully think and know. The sentence
“We and our whole world could disappear in the next five seconds” is like the
sentence “The whole world doubled its size last night” or like the question
“Why is there the world instead of nothing?”. Sentences like these might be
dizzying, but they have only a grammatical sense and the power to produce an
emotional effect – not a cognitive meaning.
A different question concerns the meaning of
the negation of the negation that the world will remain existing. Are we
justified in posing this question? Assuming a verifiability view of cognitive
meaning, the answer is in the affirmative. We can verify that our world will
remain existing in the future. Curiously enough, the sentence “The world will
no remain existing in the next minute” has a meaning, while its negation, “The
world will not remain existing in the next minute” lacks cognitive meaning.
Isn’t this paradoxical? One can argues that this isn’t paradoxical. One can
argue that this is the way language works concerning this particular kind of
statement.
To what I said above one could emphatically object
that the principle of verification was long since been debunked, first by the
positivists of the Vienna Circle and then by smart philosophers like W. V-O.
Quine. This is in my view one under the greatest blunders of mainstream
contemporary analytic philosophy. The story I have to tell is a very different
one.[85] The person who first
suggested what came to be called the principle of verification was Wittgenstein,
what the members of the Vienna Circle were the first to recognize, and he was
much more properly accomplished as a philosopher than the members of the Circle.[86] The original idea was to a
certain extent still retained by Moritz Schlick and Friedrich Weismann.
However, having as goal to use it as a really efficacious anti-metaphysical
device, positivists like A. J. Ayer and Rudolph Carnap have tried to state the
principle in precise logical terms, misinterpreting the original message.
Afterwards, these misinterpretations were correctly criticized by members of the
logical positivism and their offspring. But what the inherited wisdom has
missed was that what they have criticized was in fact a straw-man of the
principle, as originally understood by Wittgenstein! If we read him carefully,
we see that the “principle” was in his writings much more flexible and
modulated. I can give here only one example:
Consideration of how the meaning of a
sentence is explained makes clear the connection between meaning and
verification. Reading that Cambridge won the boat race, which confirms that
‘Cambridge won,’ is obviously not the meaning, but is connected with it.
‘Cambridge won’ isn’t the disjunction ‘I saw the race or I read the result
or...’ It’s more complicated. But if we exclude any of the means to check the
sentence, we change its meaning. It would be a violation of grammatical rules
if we disregarded something that always accompanied a meaning. And if you
dropped all the means of verification, it would destroy the meaning. Of course,
not every kind of check is actually used to verify ‘Cambridge won,’ nor does
any verification give the meaning. The different checks of winning the boat
race have different places in the grammar of ‘winning the boat race.’[87]
That
is, what we could call the ‘verification rule’ of a declarative sentence,
identifying it with its cognitive meaning is presented in the example like a
tree that can have a greater or smaller amount of branches, being its trunk in
the present case the official observation of Cambridge winning. The structure
of this verification rule must be complex and liable to suffer changes from
sentence to sentence, having nothing to do with the formal simplifications
arrived at by the logical positivists. Its investigation would demand a detailed
pragmatic research, which to my account was never attempted[88].
Finally, after having answered the question
of the disappearance of the whole world in a glance, we can also put a somewhat
different question: what about the disappearance of only a part of our world,
or of a considerable portion of its regularities? This seems again conceivable.
Assuming the permanence of the world, we can, against this background, make
probable the persistence of more particularized domains of regularities
belonging to it. For instance, it is improbable to suggest that the sun will
not rise tomorrow, since the disappearance of this regularity seems to undermine
a vast domain of other regularities.
2. Scepticism
about the external world
The second most
well-known sceptical argument aims to show that we cannot know the existence of
the external world. I call it the argument
for ignorance about the external world. This argument makes use of
sceptical hypotheses about the external world. Hence, in order to explain it I
begin by giving three examples of this kind of sceptical hypotheses:
h1: The external world is a dream.
h2: I am a soul being deceived by
a malign genie that produces in me
the coherent hallucination of an external world.
h3: I am a brain-in-a-vat with all
afferent and efferent nerve fibres linked to a supercomputer on the planet
Omega; the program of this supercomputer makes me believe that I am living a
normal life on the planet earth.
The argument for
ignorance is based on the fact that it seems impossible to prove that the
sceptical hypotheses are false. This might seem strange, but it is at least
logically possible, a possibility that is explored in science fiction films
like Matrix and The Real Thing. Now, applying hypothesis h3[89], the sceptic can argue as
follows. If I cannot know that I am a brain-in-a-vat, then I cannot know that I
really have two hands or that I am typing on a real computer keyboard; hence,
since I cannot know that I am not a brain-in-a-vat, I cannot know that I really
have two hands or that I am typing… Putting this argument in conventional form
we have the following modus ponens:
Instance of AI:
1. I do not know that I am not a
brain-in-a-vat.
2. Since I do not know that I am not
a brain-in-a-vat, I cannot know that I have two hands.
3. Hence, I cannot know that I have
two hands. (MP 1, 2)
Indeed, if I
cannot know whether or not I am a brain-in-a-vat, then I cannot know if I have
two hands, since a brain-in-a-vat does not have hands (but only imagines having
them). Hence, if I do not know that I am not a brain-in-a-vat, I cannot know
that I have two hands.
Now, replacing any trivial proposition about
the external world by p, and using K as a knowledge-operator applied by
some epistemic subject a, we can symbolize
in a generalized form the argument for ignorance, with the purpose to show that
in fact we know nothing about the external world:
AI:
1.
~a(K~h)
2.
~a(K~h) → ~aKp
3.
~aKp (MP 1, 2)
The argument of
ignorance seems to show that since we cannot know that the sceptical hypothesis
is false, we cannot acquire any substantive knowledge about the external world.
This shares with other sceptical arguments a property noted by Hume: they do
not admit of answers and do not produce conviction[90].
There is a contrapositive to this argument,
made famous in an article by the English philosopher G. E. Moore. His approach
was to begin by acknowledging that we at least know with certainty that many
trivial things around us do exist. As he wrote:
I can
prove that two human hands exist. How? Raising my two hands and making a
certain gesture with my right hand: “Here is a hand”. And then making the same
gesture with the left: “Here is another hand”.[91]
We can modify Moore’s statements a bit, from an argument to prove the
existence of the world to an anti-sceptical argument – call it the argument for knowledge regarding the
external world. The conventional form of this argument will be the following modus ponens:
Instance of AC:
1. I know that I have two hands.
2. If I know that I have two hands,
then I know that I am not a brain-in-a-vat.
3. I know that I am not a
brain-in-a-vat. (MP 1, 2)
Or, in a
generalized symbolic form:
AC:
1.
aKp
2.
aKp → ~a(K~h)
3.
~a(K~h)
The two arguments
seem to have the same force. The question, however, persists, since it is
contradictory that we have two equally powerful arguments leading us to
opposite results. Moreover, the anti-sceptic is not satisfied in knowing that
the sceptic argument may be wrong; he will have a guarantee.
2.1 Critical summary of some attempted answers
There are many
attempts to answer the argument of ignorance about the external world. Hilary
Putnam’s answer, for instance, would be that we cannot be brains in vats
because according to his externalist theory of meaning we would need to have causal
experience of things in the world in order to know their meaning. Now, if we
can imagine that we are brains in vats, then we cannot be brain in vats, since
if we are able to imagine brains, vats, water, trees, then we must have had the
experience of real external things like brain, vats, water, trees and the like.[92] In the end, all that the
brain-in-a-vat causally experiences are patterns-images of trees and other
things that are originated from electrical patterns from the supercomputer. One
could answer that at least the people who manufactured the supercomputer and
created its programs had the causal experience of trees and vats and brains. In
this case, they would be caused by these things to create the programs that
indirectly caused the electronic patterns we read generating our idea that we
could be brains-in-vats. Putnam’s answer to this would be that the
brain-in-a-vat and the supercomputer could be created by a mere cosmic
accident, without any living beings producing the brain, the computer and its
program!
There are ways to circumvent Putnam’s
argument. One is that it only works against the brain-in-a-vat sceptical
hypothesis; one could instead use the dream hypothesis. Another is to accept
Putnam’s argument, but supposed that we are dealing with recently envated
brains (these brains would already have causally experienced our world)[93]. Putnam’s argument has,
however, a more serious flaw. It not only disregards the flexibility of
language, but the fact that states of mind can be the same without having the proper
causes. A person can feel tickling, because she is tickled, feel a smell
because something is smelling, see a light flash because there is flash of
light outside; but she can have these feelings and sensations simply because a
neurosurgeon is stimulating areas of her brain with an electrode.[94] One can suppose that the
scientists that have programmed the supercomputer have had personal contact
with brains, vats, water, trees… Because of this they have programmed the
supercomputer in ways that produce electronic patterns that reproduces in the
mind of the brain-in-a-vat the states equivalent to those they have when they
have the experience of brains, vats, water, trees… In this case it is easily
conceivable that the brain-in-a-vat would have the experience of a fictional
world without direct causal experience of it. Furthermore, even if a cosmic
accident produces a brain-in-a-vat powered by the program of a supercomputer,
then it is also possible that the electronic patterns that cause the mental
states of this brain-in-a-vat are the same that caused the mental states of
that we ourselves have when imagine or experience brains, vats, water, trees,
etc. In the end, it is not very difficult to challenge the argument, except for
a dogmatic defender of meaning-externalism.
A different answer to the sceptical problem
consists in the denial of the so-called principle of closure. According to this
principle, if person a knows p and also knows that p entails q, then a also knows q. Symbolically, we can state the
principle of closure as:
[aKp & aK(p →
q)] → aKq
This principle is
very intuitive, though less in cases where the conclusion is a shortcut ofr
many intermediary steps (say, [aKp & aK(p → p1 → … →pn→q)]
→ aKq), which we might leave out of consideration.
However, in order to object against the sceptic, one can suggest that in
certain contexts the principle of closure does not work. This is the case of
answers to the sceptic appealing to the principle of relevant alternatives.
According to them, one alternative possibility should only respect the
principle of closure when it is sufficiently relevant to the context of the
utterance. The well-known example of Alfred Dretske is that of someone, say,
Mary, who, by visiting a zoo, identifies a zebra. Then a sceptic comes to the
her and says that she cannot really know that she is looking at a zebra, since
it is possible that it is only a mule cleverly painted in a way that makes it
seem to be a zebra.[95] In fact, Mary is not a
zoologist and is not equipped to distinguish zebras from mules cleverly
disguised by the zoo authorities to look like zebras. Moreover, it is
improbable that the authorities of the zoo would disguise mules in order to be
confused with zebras. This alternative is too implausible to be relevant. Hence,
according to the relevant alternatives view, “I am seeing a zebra” does not need
to entail “This is not a mule cleverly painted in order to be mistake with a
zebra”. In this case the principle of closure does not apply.
Following a similar reasoning, the sceptical
hypotheses would also be irrelevant alternatives, which means that the
principle of closure should not be extended to them. In other words, the
defender of a relevant alternatives account of the closure principle could argue
that it is very implausible to think that the statement “I cannot know that I
am not a brain-in-a-vat” would entail something as “I cannot know that I have
two hands”. The context that would allow this possibility is too strange and
remote – the possible world is too distant.[96]
The
problem with this argument is that it does not make clear that one cannot apply
the closure principle in order to build the argument of ignorance. If Mary knows
that she is looking at a zebra, and she knows that if it is a zebra then it is
not a mule, then it seems that she also knows that it is not a mule cleverly
painted in order to seem like a zebra! Indeed, she knows that it is not a mule because
she is supported by contextual information, e.g., she knows that she is
visiting a serious zoo and not a circus. She knows not only that the proposed zebra-alternative
is irrelevant; she knows that it must be false.
Another attempt to deal with the sceptical
argument is contextualism. As we have already noted, according to
contextualism the word ‘knowledge’ can be used with different degrees of
precision when placed in different contexts. It is like the word ‘empty’ or the
word ‘flat’: things can be very empty and very flat, but not absolutely empty
and absolutely flat; we say that something is empty or flat according to some
reasonable standard of emptiness or flatness. With this idea in mind, the
contextualist will say that in the context of daily life the standards of
knowledge are very low, which means that we can claim knowledge of things
around us, like our hands. But in sceptical contexts we cannot say that we know
that we have two hands, since the standards of knowledge are too high.
Consequently, both are right, the sceptical and the anti-sceptical, since they
claim different things using appealing to very different standards of
knowledge.
The major problem with this last kind of argument
is that it is not clear that the sceptical hypotheses does demand much higher
standards of knowledge. These hypotheses are so remote and different that they
do not provide any comparative basis of measurement. They are nothing but
logical possibilities.
2.2 A more appropriate way to deal with the problem
The solution I
will propose takes as its assumption the notion that problems and their
solutions concern the “deep grammar” of the used concepts, hiding complexities
that cannot be seen. Consequently, the above suggested answers, despite their
originality, do not really solve the problem, since their formulations are
unsatisfactory as a way to render these complexities visible on the
argumentative surface.
More precisely, the solution I intend to
present is based upon a demonstration that the two arguments – for ignorance
and for knowledge – implicitly contain two different concepts of external reality. These concepts, however, change their meaning from the
premises to the conclusion, which makes both arguments equivocal and
consequently fallacious. This solution is motivated by Rudolph Carnap’s
distinction between internal and external questions of existence.
According to him, internal questions are those regarding elements of a system
and are answered by placing the elements adequately within the system. For
example: “Is there a number 2?” is an internal question regarding the system of
natural numbers. “Are there physical objects?” is an internal question regarding
the system of physical things (the ‘Thing-World’). These questions are
legitimate. External questions are ones regarding the existence of systems in
themselves. These questions only allow pragmatic answers. We decide to accept
the system of natural numbers; we decide to accept the system of physical
things. These decisions arise from a pragmatic fiat. Philosophers such as P. F. Strawson[97] and Barry Stroud[98] have with reason criticized
Carnap on the grounds that our decision of accepting a system, in particular
the system of physical things, obviously does not arise from a pragmatic
decision. The external world simply imposes itself on us, independently of any
wish or advantage its acceptance gives us. The analysis I will propose
circumvents this kind of objection, though maintaining that there are two kinds
of attributions of external existence or reality.
The first thing to do in order to reach our
goal is to show that the arguments for ignorance and knowledge have implicit
commitments to attributions and disattributions of external existence or
reality. This is easy to show. Concerning the argument for ignorance, we can
give the following paraphrase:
Instance of AI:
1. I do not know that I am not in reality
a brain-in-a-vat.
2. Since I do not know that I am not in reality a brain-in-a-vat, I cannot
know that I have two real hands.
3. Hence, I cannot know that I have
two real hands. (MP 1, 2)
While with the
argument for knowledge the paraphrase is:
Instance of AC:
1. I know that I have two real hands.
2. If I know that I have two real hands, then I know that I am not in reality a brain-in-a-vat.
3. I know that I am not in reality a brain-in-a-vat. (MP 1, 2)
There is no doubt
about this: any statement concerning an external world contains a commitment to
the assumption of the external reality for what it affirms or the assumption of
a lack of external reality for what it denies.
What should be noted, however, is that the
expression ‘external reality’ in our most common uses has a sense very
different from the expression ‘external reality’ as used in sceptical
scenarios. To show this, all we need is to note that after being liberated from
a life as a brain-in-a-vat, a person will presumably not say that her earlier
world was not real. She will say that in a sense her earlier world was very
real for her or “had a perfect degree of reality” for her at the time, although
in another sense it was indeed not the ultimately real world, as she
subsequently discovered. This means that the person is using the word ‘real’ in
two very different senses: in the first one she affirms the existence of the
previous real world of the supercomputer, in the second she denies its existence.
I call the first the inherent sense
of external reality, a sense that allows the attribution of external reality to
the contents of experience of the brain-in-a-vat when it still was a
brain-in-a-vat, while the second I call the adherent
sense of external reality, a sense that does not allow the attribution of
external reality to the contents of experience of the brain-in-a-vat when it
still was a brain-in-a-vat. In order to make the distinction clear I will
separately examine the criteria of application constitutive of each of these
senses of ‘external reality’. After all, by knowing the criteria of application
of these words, we can better understand their meanings. Or, as Wittgenstein
once said, criteria “give our words their common meaning”[99].
Consider, first, the inherent sense of
external reality. It is the usual sense which is applied when we
attribute/disattribute external existence in everyday life. For instance, when
we ask about the existence or reality of something we are looking for. This sense
is made by a group of criteria that ordinarily must be experienced together,
and it was frequently and in various ways considered by modern philosophers
like Descartes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Kant, Stuart Mill, and even by analytic
philosophers like Frege. G. E. Moore wrote an article about these criteria,
summarizing them in the following sentence:
The real is something independent
of the mind that is verifiable by others, continuously connected with other
things, and in this way has certain causes, effects and accompaniments (I would
say that it ‘displays regularities’) with the highest degree of reality.[100]
I think, I can
summarize the most fundamental criteria as follows:
a. The sensory experience of them has
the greatest intensity (normally this experience is co-sensorial),
b. They are independent of our will
(typically),
c. They are interpersonally checkable
by anyone in the right position,
d. They display regularities imposed
by natural laws (on various different levels).
Separately, these
conditions are not sufficient for the attribution of inherent reality to
objects outside us. (Laurence Bonjour was right when he wrote that Locke’s
criteria were alone insufficient to warrant external reality[101]). However, my point is that
if you join together all those criteria, they are sufficient to confer inherent reality on what they apply to during
the time when they are applicable. They are sufficient for the following
reason: they simply define what we
all understand by external reality in the inherent sense of the word.
Consider, for example, my hand-computer. I
can see it, touch it, and hear it with the maximum expected intensity,
differently from the images I can form in my mind when I close my eyes.
Moreover, its existence and properties are not directly dependent on my will
(my mental image of it is directly dependent on my will). My hand-held computer
can be an object of interpersonal experience: others can come to me, see it,
and agree about its existence and properties. Finally, my computer obeys the
laws of nature. It needs electrical energy to work, to respond to my commands,
it will break if it is dropped from a high place, etc. If we join the four
criteria of external reality together, it is impossible to imagine any enduring
situation where we cannot say that the object of experience is (inherently)
real. Even if I were a brain-in-a-vat or if I were subjected to a very highly
developed experience of artificial reality, my hand-computer would be very real
in this sense of the word.
What about things too small or too distant
to be presently observed by us? Could we say that they are real in the inherent
sense? Yes, of course, and by means of a very common mechanism of semantic extension of the four above
given criteria. In an indirect way, a thing that is too small is said to be
real because it is causally related to other things with which we can have
sensory-perceptual contact (like tracks left by elementary particles in a cloud
chamber). Things that are too far distant, either because they were once
objects of perception and are retained in our memories (like my great-father’s
house), or that were once objects of sensory perception by others (like Angkor
Wat, a place I have never visited), satisfy the four criteria considered above,
because we know by testimony that these things would satisfy those criteria to
us, given the right circumstances of access. Finally, since we have always
experienced new things in such ways, we inductively expect that we will
continue to have new experiences of new things (the world is open). We can even
join all these things in order to produce a proof of the external world as a
whole, insofar as we understand it as possessing inherent reality. Indeed, this
is in my view the long sought proof of the external world’s existence! This is
the reason why people say that only philosophers and madman deny that our world
exists. They all have implicitly made such inferences, and what they mean is
that the external world is nothing but the sum of all these implicit extensions
of applications of the concept of inherent reality.
These inherent attributions/disatributions
of reality are the usual ones: without perceiving this, we apply them all the
time. But there is another attribution/disatribution of reality that is sometimes
made, which concerns what I called the adherent
sense of reality or existence. This is the sense of reality that we
attribute/disattribute to things like fictional reality and sceptical
scenarios. We can say that the sense is different because the criteria of
application have nothing to do with the four criteria of inherent reality
considered above, though they assume they are applied. Suppose, for a moment,
that the world is a dream or that you are a brain-in-a-vat. In this case, the
world continues to exist for you in the inherent sense of the word. If you fall
from a tree and break a leg, your pain is as real as any other, and the leg is
really broken and in need of immediate medical attention. All things appear to
you with maximum sensory intensity, interpersonally and following the laws of
nature (since the supercomputer program is the best on the market), which
warrants the inherent existence of things around you. But in some other sense,
these things are not real, and this sense is that of adherent reality. Although
the world of the dreamer or the brain-in-a-vat has no adherent reality, in the
inherent sense it continues to be perfectly real.
The question now is about criteria for
adherent reality. How can one know that a world is adherently unreal? The
answer is: comparatively and by reasons
of coherence. The concept of adherent reality is a comparative (or relative) one. The mark of a comparative concept is
that it changes its applicability in conformity with the context. For instance,
the words ‘small’ and ‘big’: a baby elephant is small compared with an adult
elephant; however, it is a big animal compared with a mouse (Copi). Now,
suppose that you have lived your whole life as a brain-in-a-vat and that now
you are liberated. Your brain was inserted in the head of a person on the
planet Omega and you awake in your new world, meeting other people who resemble
you as you now appear. They reveal that the experiment was motivated by the
desire to create cultural diversity on the planet… Moreover, they show you the
empty vat and the supercomputer, together with other fellow brains-in-vats
being nourished and formatted. Surely, if all this does not drive you mad, you
will compare and see that the world where you lived was a kind of sub-product
of the truly real world, the world of the planet Omega, since this is the best
way you have to make the information you have received until now seem coherent.
Knowledge of adherent reality is only
comparative. It demands the emergence of a sceptical scenario or something of
the kind. Before you were liberated from the vat, it would have made no sense
to ask if you were a brain-in-a-vat or not. The same is true concerning
ourselves and our world. To question its adherent reality makes no sense
without the advent of a sceptical scenario that endows us with the expected
comparative criteria. The question: “Is our world the ultimately real one?”
makes as much sense as the question “Is this stone sad?” This is reinforced
when we perceive that also the comparative sense of the adherent
attributions/disattributions of reality is defeasible. You cannot be sure that
the new world of the planet Omega is the ultimate one: there is no criteria for
this. It is even possible that you are once more being deceived. It is possible
that they only changed the program. As you awoke, the program running in the
supercomputer was “being awakened from a brain-in-a-vat experiment”.
It is important to see that there is no absolute sense for adherent reality, but
only a comparative one. Because of this, the question “Is our world adherently
real? – is it the ultimate world?” is cognitively meaningless, since the
comparative criteria are not at our disposal. The question “Is our world
adherently real?” could be paraphrased as “Is our world the ultimately real
one?” But this is a pseudo-question that can only work as a metaphysical trap
that could have and has often lead to pseudo-answers. It
sounds like the question, “Why (for what reason) does the world exist?”, which
has also a grammatical sense and an emotive effect, but lacks cognitive sense,
as much as any attempt to answer it. Then, why does it seem to be meaningful?
Here Wittgenstein’s remarks in On
Certainty can be helpful. He considers knowledge-claims that are devoid of cognitive
meaning, for instance, if in daylight in the presence of another person one
suddenly says, “I know that you are in front of me” without any purpose[102]. He thinks we tend to
confuse the use of this sentence in this case with its use in those cases in
which this sentence had a real application, for instance, in a place without
light. I think, we have such a case here. We tend to confuse it with another
question that lurks in our imagination, namely: “Could our world, caught in a
sceptical scenario, be comparatively classified as an adherently non-real one?”
This question makes again full sense. For this reason, “I know that our world
is adherently real” is a senseless pseudo-affirmation, differently from the
similar statement, “If I were liberated in a sceptical scenario, I would
(comparatively) know that the actual world is the adherently real one”. With
pseudo-questions like “Can we know if our world is (adherently) real?” the
philosopher often intends to use the word ‘real’ in an adherent absolute sense
– what philosophers have often meant – we have already transgressed the limits
of what can be meaningfully questioned.
Now, having understood the two senses of the
word ‘external reality’ (or ‘existence’), we are prepared to see why both, the
sceptical argument of ignorance and the anti-sceptical argument of knowledge,
are equivocal and consequently fallacious.
Before
we do this it is maybe good to pause in order to remember what is an equivocal
argument. Consider the following one:
Only men are rational.
Women are not men.
Hence, women are not rational.
This argument is
equivocal because the word man is used to mean the human species in the first
premise, while it means a human being of the feminine sex in the second
premise. If we replace the terms, we will see that this argument is not valid. Equivocal
arguments come often in philosophy, though they are more refined and difficult
to be coughed. This will be exemplified in my rephrases of the sceptical
argument.
My take is that in both arguments – from
ignorance and knowledge – we imperceptibly pass from a commitment to one sense
of ‘external reality’ to a commitment to the other sense of ‘external reality’.
In order to make the point clear, definitely breaking down the arguments, all
we need to do is to make explicit the commitments to reality/non-reality
implicit in each argument.
The first sentence of the argument of
ignorance will be as follows:
Instance of AI:
1. I cannot know that I am not an adherently real brain-in-a-vat.[103]
2. Since I cannot know that I am not an adherently real brain-in-a-vat, I
cannot know that I have two adherently
real hands.
3. Hence, I cannot know that I have
two inherently real hands. (MP 1, 2)
This is the most
natural way to interpret the argument, choosing the sense of reality in
accordance with each statements’ semantic context. In the first two statements
we have a sceptical scenario, and the senses of external reality contextually
suggested are adherent ones. In the conclusion, however, the sceptical wish is
to convince us that we cannot attribute inherent reality to anything. The
sceptic intends to give us the comforting sense that our hands, like all other
external things, are ethereal objects like ghosts in haze and that we are
living in a fictive world without material reality. If the conclusion were,
“Hence, I cannot know that I have two adherently real hands,” the argument
would be sound, but trivial. Indeed, this we cannot know, since outside the
awareness of a sceptical scenario we have no way to use comparative
attributions of reality or non-reality. Obviously, this result can be extended
to the generalized formal version of the argument of ignorance.
Curiously, a similar fallacy plagues the
argument of knowledge. Once we expose the implicit assumptions of reality, it
looks like this:
Instance of AC:
1. I know I have two inherently real hands.[104]
2. If I know that I have two adherently real hands, then I know that
I am not an adherently real
brain-in-a-vat.
3. Hence, I know that I am not an adherently real brain-in-a-vat. (MP 1,
2)
The anti-sceptic
makes an equivocal step from the first to the second premise of the argument in
his attempt to prove that he knows that this is our ultimate world, resistant
to sceptical doubts. But his equivocal conclusion lies beyond the limits of our
knowledge. It makes no sense to ask for something that lacks any verifying
criteria, since the statement requires an absolute attribution of adherent
reality.
In conclusion, scepticism about induction and
scepticism about the external world have something in common. Both are epistemically
challenging fallacious arguments disregarding limits of our knowledge, which
are those of cognitively meaningful language and thought.
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[1] Laurence Bonjour: 2011: 284
[2]
Kant defined them as judgements in which the concept of the predicate does
belong to the concept of the subject. Consequently, the analytic judgement only
unpacks the meaning of the subject term. The deficiency of this definition is
that it applies only to subject-predicate statements.
[3]
Kant defined them as judgements in which the concept of the predicate does not
belong to the concept of the subject. Thus, in the statement “All events have
causes”, the concept of cause does not belong to the concept of event. Hence,
it is synthetic, though according to him is known a priori.
[4]
See Bonjour, 1998.
[5]
Leibniz, 1981, 153.
[6]
Popper, 1974, 61 f.
[7]
Nietzsche 1999
[8]
Daniel Dennett 2018
[9] Anthony Stevens: On Jung, Ch.
2.
[10]
Popper 1992, 6
[11] This tendency, called the Westermark effect, though probable, is however disputable. It contradicts
Sigmund Freud’s suggestion of the universality of the Oedipus complex. See
Shor, Eran, Simchai, Dalit (2009), 1803-1842.
[12] Autistic children lack this disposition,
along with the absence of the innate ability to read social behavior (See
Attwood 2007).
[13] Sacks, 2010.
[14] Piaget 1977.
[15] Chomsky 1965.
[16]
Michael Devitt, 2010, 272
[17]
Michael Devitt, 2005.
[18] There are challenges to this view, but
they are not the most convincing. (e.g., Bonjour 1998, Appendix).
[19] David Hull: “Are Species really
Individuals?”
[20] Pappineau, 2012: 4.6.
[21] C. I. Lewis (1995: 288) noted that this
would be a physical, not a mathematical phenomenon. But the increase of the
internal angles of a given triangle is also a physical phenomenon. Applied
arithmetic isn’t abstract, precisely because it includes physical objects as
its subject matter. Therefore, concerning applied arithmetic there is nothing
wrong in this kind of mental experiment, originally conceived by J. S. Mill.
See also Casullo, 2010, p. 47.
[22] There is, obviously, objections against
this conclusion. A contemporary example is dialetheism. But this kind of
paraconsistent logic seems to be less plausible always that we try to pass from
the mere manipulation of symbols to its application in supposedly real cases.
[23] Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 2.2.
[24] For a discussion and refinement of this
assumption, see Costa, 2018, Appendix to Chapter V.
[25] A curious point is that our innate
predispositions seem to be able to influence the chosen metaphilosophy. If you
are an empiricist or a rationalist is something that might be in part
determined by your gens and in part, of course, by the external determinants of
your intellectual growing.
[26] Locke, 1975: I, iv, 18.
[27] Costa 2018: 169-172.
[28] Kant 1929, Second Analogy.
[29] Dennett 1984, p. 112.
[30] One can find propositional knowledge
statements using words like ‘when’ or ‘whether’ in the place of ‘that’. But the
sentences can be paraphrased in ways that these words are replaced by ‘that’.
For instance: “Hank knows whether the bull is dangerous” can be replaced by “Either
Hank knows that the bull is dangerous or Hank does not know that the bull is
dangerous”. (See Feldman 2003: 9-10)
[31] As Socrates says in the dialogue Meno:
“true beliefs… are not worth much until one ties them down on account of the
reason why they are tied down… After they are tied down, in the first place
they become knowledge, and then they remain in place. (1997: 895) See also Theatetus
(1997: 223)
[32] See J. L. Borges tale, ‘Tom Castro, the
implausible impostor’, in his book, A
Universal History of Infamy. The tale is based on a real occurrence.
[33] See Costa, 2011, 2014. The term was suggested to me
by John Cottingham.
[34] A probability of acceptance can vary in
accordance with the context. In the exceptional context of a lottery, for
instance, the “I know that I will not win” remains below acceptance, even when
the probability of not winning is extremely high. The reason is in my view that
the probability required by this closed system must be 1.
[35] Complete
failures in the satisfaction of such dialogical conditions are catastrophic to
science: examples are Catholic dogmas that led to the condemnation of Galileo,
the Marxist genetics of Lysenko in the Stalinist USSR, and Nazi Aryan science.
[36]
Popper 1963, Ch. 10.
[37]
Clark, 1963.
[38]
Armstrong, 1973. Goldman 1979, 1986, 2010, 2015.
[39]
Feldman & Connee 1985, 2004. Kevin McCain 2014.
[40] I added to Feldman & Connee’s
formulation the clause that the belief must be determined (adequately caused)
by the support.
[41] 1979. There are a variety of alternative
definitions proposed by Goldman. I consider this because it is the most
widespread and maybe the clearest.
[42] 2015, pp. 35-36.
[43] Jack Crumley, 2009, p. 169.
[44] For a more detailed and adequate explanation of the
role of these criteria, see the section on scepticism on the external world in
the last chapter of this book.
[45] An at least virtual
interpersonal confirmation is here important. In my view, truth must be able to
ultimately satisfy an interpersonal consensus made authentic by its achievement
through adequate agreement within a critical
community of ideas (a community with equally competent members, with the
same rights of interaction, etc.), a point particularly relevant in regard to
the collective acceptance of complex law-like generalizations (Cf. Habermas 1983).
[46] I believe the
anterograde and retrograde procedures are a more explicit version of a
distinction already present in Husserlian phenomenology: the distinction
between ‘truth as correctness’ (Wahrheit
als Richtigkeit) and ‘truth as discoveredness’ (Wahrheit als Entdecktheit) respectively (See Sokolowski 2000, Ch.
11).
[47] See my objections to the
private language argument in Chapter III, sec. 13 of the present book.
[48] My preferred moral theory is
two-tiered utilitarianism. According to this view, we should apply
rule-utilitarianism in ordinary situations, although in extreme situations,
utilitarian rules are defeated and we must turn to act-utilitarianism. (Hare
1981, Ch. 2)
[49] Leibniz’ original proof can
be found in his 1765, liv. IV, Ch. 7, Sec. 10.
[50] I say ‘to a certain extent’
because different communities of ideas are
not incommensurable, as the relativist philosopher would like us to believe. As Searle once noted, the
Inuits’ historical origins as told by
anthropologists (crossing the Bering Strait circa 13,000 years ago) is nearer
to the truth than the Inuits’ own creation myth (thrown out
of a
great crater that opened up in the earth…). And this is obvious to anyone who knows
both belief-systems, just as it would be to an Inuit who had studied anthropology at
Harvard.
[51] Popper treated absolute truth as a
directive concept in Chapter 10 of his Conjectures
and Refutations. Kant originated the view that there are directive concepts
which lack a possible basis in our experience, but are still able to perform
the pragmatic function of guiding our intellect in the direction of further
syntheses. This was the case of his ideas
of reason. According to the Critique
of Pure Reason, they are concepts that reason uses in its striving to unify
our knowledge, though unable to find satisfaction in sensory intuitions (1787,
A 484, B 612).
[52] If q were only the direct expression of a factual content, we would
fall into a kind of strong externalism
that admits that part of our content-thought-meaning is a directly given fact
in the world (a ‘structured proposition’ or something of the kind). However,
without further qualification this view would demand too much from our
epistemic powers, leaving unexplained not only the possibility of falsity, but
also the inevitable fallibility of our supposed knowledge of truth.
[53] When I write of purely sensory truths, I am
thinking of cases covering false sensations and feelings, such as imaginary pain induced by hypnosis or an
emotion that someone defensively substitutes
for the
true one.
[54] A deeper understanding will demand a
response to the problem of perception that will be attempted later in this
chapter.
[55] I read this story many years
ago, although I am unable to find the source.
[56] Even though the phenomenal contents of o
and o’ are similar, the whole
factual context must be very different, since at least the dispositional properties of ‘the blue there’ must be
completely different.
[57] Searle uses the expression ‘phenomenal
appearance,’ but then we should distinguish the psychological phenomenal appearance from its correlative physical phenomenal appearance.
[58] It is true that fMRI measures brain activity by
detecting changes in blood flow, but blood flow and neuronal activation are
coupled.
[59] I made a detailed examination of the way
verification works and of the correspondence theory of truth (understood as
complementary with verificationism) respectively in chapters V and VI of my
book Philosophical Semantics: Reintegrating Theoretical Philosophy.
[60] A detailed, though not exhaustive,
correspondence theory of truth that includes coherence is developed in the
chapter VI of my book Philosophical
Semantics: Reintegrating theoretical Philosophy.
[61] Hume, 1739, Book I, part III, sec. 6; 1748, sec IV.
[62] Hume used the word ‘object.’ Most authors
call the causal relata ‘events.’ But it seems that facts, states of
affairs, processes, can also have causal power. In order to avoid inadequate
language, I will call them simply ‘things’, as Russell has done.
[63] Contra Armstrong 1983 and Bonjour 1998.
[64] A less abbreviated way to state the
principle would be: “Associations of things belonging to the past must be
similar to associations of things belonging to the future”.
[65] For reasons of simplicity of exposition, I
am also using abbreviated language in PU(ii) and PU(iii). What I mean is rather
“Associations of things in the recent past must be similar to the associations
of things in the more recent past” (PU(ii)), and “Associations of things in a
next location in space must be similar to associations of things in the already
known space” (PU(iii)).
[66] Except, of course, if it were a Kantian
synthetic a priori principle. But this would render its necessary character
seemingly arbitrary.
[67] See Russell 1980 (1912), p. 36.
[68] 1936, 1959, pp.
1-31; 1989, Ch. I, viii.
[69] O’Hear 2010, cap.
III. See also Newton-Smith, 2016, cap. III.
[70] Reichenbach 1938.
[71] Black 1954.
[72] Will 1947.
[73] 1942.
[74] Russell 1980 (1912),
p. 37. Russell wrote that a principle of induction cannot be either proved or
disproved by experience. But this is not true, as we will see. See also Russell
1948, chap. 6, and Bonjour, 1999.
[75] Edwards 1949.
[76] Strawson 1952, pp. 248-263.
[77] This
critical evaluation of the dissolution attempt can be found in Skyrms 1966. See also Salmon 1966 and Bonjour 1998,
Ch. 7.
[78] 1999. In my view the common-sensical character of
this view shows that the philosophical discussion was since Hume diverted from
the right way to search the answer.
[79] 1974, pp. 80-83.
[80] 1764, sec. IV, 23
[81] 1764, sec. IV, 30.
[82] I always keep in mind a spatio-temporally
unified system of reference. I need to say this because relativity theory has
shown that present, past and future vary according to systems of reference
moving at great speeds in relation to each other.
[83] What we could do is to search for a still
more precise treatment. It seems plausible to think that the approximation of
future and past tends to have a form of two opposed exponential curves that touch
at the point called the present, etc.
[84] In On Certainty (1984a)
Wittgenstein gave several examples of how our imagination can betray us, making
us see meaning where there is none.
[85] See Costa 2018, Chapter V.
[86] 1984d
[87] 2001, p. 29.
[88] I told this story in details in Costa,
2018, Ch. VI. Not all philosophers were deceived by the inherited wisdom. Ernst
Tugendhat, for instance, defended that the content of a predicative statement
should be its rule of verification (Verificationsregel) in his classical
work from 1976.
[89] For an answer to Hilary Putnam’s argument
against h3, see the next section.
[90] David Hume, 1748, p. 155.
[91] G. E, Moore, 1939
[92] Putnam 1984.
[93] DeRose 1999. Also, DeRose
2017.
[94] Cf. Wilder Graves Penfield’s famous experiments.
[95]
Dretske, 1970, pp. 1015-16
[96] Nozick 1981,
[97] Strawson 1974.
[98] Stroud 1984.
[99] 1958, p. 57.
[100] 1953.
[101] 2002, pp. 130-135.
[102] 1984a.
[103] Note that although the statement “I am not
an adherently real brain in a vat” is devoid of sense, “I cannot know that I am
not an adherently real brain in a vat” makes sense, since one can easily verify
that the complementary sentence cannot be verified.
[104] Note that I cannot interpret (1) as “I know
that I have two adherently real hands”, since this cannot be true. I cannot
know something unverifiable.
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