The latest issue of the LYCEUM is out with articles from authors in England, Lebanon, Singapore, Canada, and the United States. This issue includes a debate on intercultural critique and recognition theory by Colin Wysman and Jordan Bartol in response to Bartol’s article in the last issue of the LYCEUM.

http://www.lyceumphilosophy.com/?q=node/107

Volume X, No. 2                                                                                     Spring 2009

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LYCEUM

Lucretius’ Venus and Mars Reconsidered

M. D. Moorman

The Ethics of Memory in Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan

Benjamin Tucker

Internal Injuries:
Some Further Concerns with Intercultural and Transhistorical Critique

Colin Wysman

Universal Injuries Need Not Wound Internal Values:
A Response to Wysman

Jordan Bartol

Enumerative Induction as a Subset of Inference to the Best Explanation

Laith Al-Shawaf

On Epistemology of the Celestial Realm

Aditya Singh

Unhappy Humans and Happy Pigs

Joshua Seigal

Change.  It is a natural phenomenon.  Leaves change color in the Fall.  Things increase in size.  A bird flies across the open sky.  Organisms come to be and perish.  People employ the word regularly and use it in political campaigns.  But what is change?

Problems associated with the reality or possibility of change have existed for millennia, beginning with Parmenides’ account of Being.  Change requires non-being.  But for Parmenides, change is impossible because it is unthinkable for what is not (non-being) to be what is (being) and vice-versa.  Something cannot come to be from nothing and something cannot come to be nothing.  Non-being, or nothing, cannot be.  The leaves, then, cannot change color.  The bird cannot fly across the sky.  Things cannot grow or diminish in size.  Things cannot come to be or perish.  Everything simply is.

As opposed to Parmenides’ Being is the Heraclitean Flux or pure becoming.  Illustrated in Plato’s Theaetetus, the Heraclitean Flux “is” pure chaos: everything is constantly changing in every aspect.  But if everything constantly changes in every aspect, then one cannot say that something “moves” from being X to being Y.  For, in a Heraclitean Flux, there is no being!  The moment something is said to be Y after being X is to say that something is.  Leaves do not really change color in a Heraclitean Flux.  Rather, one should say that leaves exist and do not exist!  If the leaves do not exist, then there is some state in a certain sense.  But if they exist, then being is in the Heraclitean Flux (but being cannot be).  Pure becoming makes knowledge of the world impossible since one cannot claim that there is anything.

Plato and Aristotle have struggled with the Heraclitean and Parmendean views concerning change.  Change, in the form humanity recognizes it, cannot occur given the Parmenidean and Heraclitean views.  What is evident in the Heraclitean and Parmendiean views is that change must occur with “one thing”, in its entirety, either coming into being or ceasing to be.  If something comes to be, no part of it must have had prior existence.  If it ceases to be, no part of it must continue to be.  This form of coming to be and ceasing to be is known as unqualified change.  Plato and Aristotle recognize this form of change to be impossible.  Change, if it occurs, must be a combination of being and non-being without complete being and complete non-being.

Qualified change is the answer to Parmenides’ Being and the Heraclitean Flux.  There are five principles of qualified change.  The first three principles are necessary for any account of change.  The last two principles are elaborations (from Aristotle) of the first three principles.  The first principle is that pure becoming is impossible; it is impossible because of the contradiction that the “same thing” is and is not.  The second principle is that, if pure becoming is impossible, all change requires something identifiable as existing that either comes to be or ceases to be: things cannot come to be if there is no entity that is.  Without something that comes to be, what could possibly come to be?  Similarly, something cannot cease to be if there is no being that actually ceases to be.  The third principle is that, if change exists and pure becoming is impossible, only certain aspects of things can change.  If nothing changes, then there is no change.  If everything constantly changes in every way, then contradictions result.  So, if change occurs, the alternative is that things change in certain aspects.

The last two principles of change are based on Aritotle’s account of qualified change from the Physics.  The fourth principle of change which Aristotle adds is that some subject must underlie the change.  Since things can change only in certain aspects, something must remain through the coming to be and perishing of things.  There are, then, two kinds of change: accidental and substantial.  Accidental changes occur whenever something non-essential to a thing changes.  Leaves changing color is an accidental change.  The leaf is the underlying subject of the change.  Substantial changes occur whenever the underlying subjects of accidental changes come to be or cease to be.  The burning of a leaf is a substantial change since the leaf no longer exists.  What remains is the matter or substratum of the leaf.  The matter or substratum remains through substantial change.  The fifth principle of change is that all change requires matter, form, and privation.  Matter, as discussed, is the underlying subject of the change and is open to being certain forms and privations.  Form and privation represent the respective being and non-being of something.  Form and privation are related opposites.  Privation is not a complete negation of being since it indicates the potentiality of something coming to be something else.  Coming to be occurs whenever a matter changes from being under a certain privation to being under a certain form.  Ceasing to be is the opposite process of coming to be.  Here is an example of form, matter, and privation in accidental change: a flower (matter) changes from being non-red (privation) to being red (form).  In order to change to being something in a particular aspect, something must not be that particular aspect first.  In the case of the flower initially being non-red, it could also be under some color other than red (i.e. yellow).  Being non-red is not necessarily being nothing.  Being red, because of the potentiality of the underlying subject to be different forms, is not pure being.  The underlying subject can cease to be a particular form.  The principles of matter, form, and privation show that change occurs whenever something moves from being under one particular aspect to being under another particular aspect.  Contra Parmenides, change is of composites and not simples.  It is not one thing which wholly ceases to be (becomes nothing) or wholly comes to be (creation) that constitutes change.  Contra Heraclitus, change requires particular aspects of a thing coming to be or ceasing to be.

Plato and Aristotle deal with the problems of unqualified and qualified change.  If one is to imagine a finite straight line (AB) which is bisected at C, a representation of the relation between unqualified change and qualified change is possible.  Imagine that either end point of AB is unqualified change: one end point is Parmenides’ notion of Being/changelessness, while the other end point is the Heraclitean Flux.  Parmenides’ notion of Being is unqualified change inasmuch as one takes his argument against motion into consideration.  The Heraclitean Flux is unqualified change in itself.  The midpoint of the line, C, represents the “middle way” position/qualified change which Plato and Aristotle support.  It is intriguing that different end points can represent the same fundamental problem.  The difference between the two endpoints is how the fundamental problem of unqualified change is applied: the Heraclitean Flux is identical to unqualified change itself, while unqualified change is found in the argument for Parmenides’ Being.  No matter in what direction one moves along the “line of change and changelessness”, the same fundamental problem of unqualified change is encountered.

(Colin Connors is a graduate student in the Doctoral Program at Boston College and an alumnus of the Saint Anselm Philosophy Department.)

Susan Gabriel
Department of Philosophy
Saint Anselm College

Colloquium Feb. 24, 2009

Thomas Reid’s Theory of Personal Identity:

Closer to DesCartes or Aquinas?

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The invention and rapid expansion of the internet and World Wide Web over the last several decades stands as a watershed moment in human history, transforming human communication and, ipso facto, leaving its impress on virtually every area of culture in the industrialized world. There can be little question, then, that human knowledge itself (or more precisely, the way we popularly understand human knowledge) will change in profound and irreversible ways—many of which will not become apparent until long after they have occurred. We need only look back upon other such watershed moments in human communication to see that this is true.

One such moment in the West occurred in ancient Greece in the 8^th century B.C., when writing was re-discovered. This event was obviously of monumental significance for Greek and Western culture. Among other things, the subsequent spread of writing throughout ancient Greece brought about a shift of prominence from one form of speech to another–from mythos to logos—thus sounding a death-knell for the oral culture in which the epic poets and their bards flourished. Gradually, knowledge became less and less a matter of what was collectively preserved and re-iterated through memory and oral recitation in a communal space. As a result, the legends, sagas, and myths that depended upon formulaic speech, poetic innovation, and public audiences for their life-blood no longer stood as living insights into the cosmic order, the nature of the gods, or the origins of society, but became artifacts of the past (preserved in textual form, to be sure). Since the writing of texts facilitated the careful pursuit of inquiry (historia), and the meticulous construction of accounts (logoi), knowledge became more and more a matter of theory, argumentation, and analysis, as well as the disciplines that developed from and depended on these forms of speech and thought. Thus, the Golden Age of Greece, an “age of reason” that saw tremendous intellectual achievements, arguably could not have taken place without the development of writing.

Another such watershed moment in human communication occurred with the invention of the movable type press by Gutenberg in the 15^th century, an invention that Mark Twain once called the “greatest event in the history of the world.” The printing press enabled high-brow texts and ideas to circulate among the masses, with the result that the language of learning eventually shifted away from Latin to the vernacular languages, the places of learning shifted away from monasteries and scriptoria to universities, libraries, and presses, and the communities of learning shifted away from the feudal aristocracies and clergy to scholars and even to ordinary folk. The Renaissance, Reformation, Scientific Revolution, and later, Enlightenment–these are but a few of the major developments in human culture and knowledge that have been traced to the printing press. In fact, the development of the scientific method itself, as well as the philosophical schools of empiricism and rationalism, could not have developed without the emergence of new criteria for truth and knowledge—all of which can be plausibly tied to the legacy of the printing press. A new “age of reason,” we might say, was brought about by this second transformation in human communication.

And so we turn to the legacy of the internet, about which it would be foolhardy to make determinate proclamations at this early date (it may take hundreds of years to gain the necessary perspective). We can, however, pose some questions. For example, how will the development and proliferation of electronic communication change the way we conceive of knowledge? There is no question that it has enabled us to transmit, store and retrieve knowledge more efficiently—but what kinds of knowledge? What kinds of knowledge flourish with the globalization of Google, Wikipedia, electronic databases, search engines, and web-logs? Is it merely “information?” If so, has the popular appreciation for reasoned argumentation and analysis been fundamentally diminished by the explosion of information and the proliferation of opinions in electronic media? Indeed, what forms of learning will be left behind, as printed monographs, books and newspapers arguably fall by the way?

In a related fashion, we might inquire: who will be the new learned? Will those with prodigious memories become even less important now that Google is but a click away? Will those capable of reasoned argument or careful empirical observation become obsolete in the face of those who can “process” information more efficiently? Though it seems hardly inconceivable, the rapid proliferation of electronic communities of learning suggest that, one day, the silicon tower will eventually supplant the ivory tower as the loci for intellectual discourse. If so, we can only wonder about the security of our knowledge as its surety is guaranteed not by human memory, or the scroll or printed page, but by computer chips and bytes.

Of course, there is no question that the developments in human communication bring great blessings to humankind. However, one wonders whether all these drastic changes in the appearance of knowledge, what it is, how we learn, who it is that knows, and where knowledge gets transmitted, change the epistemic fundamentals regarding the mind’s relation to the world and the importance of face-to-face human contact in the transmission of knowledge. As for me, though I become increasingly dependent upon electronic media and on-line communities for the development of my own thought, I find that part of me cannot help longing for what has been left behind—for the days of archaic Greece when story-telling was a meaningful community (and educational) experience, or the days of Medieval Europe when reasoned argumentation guided by faith was seen by all to be a worthy exercise of learning. And I wonder what good things we are in the process of leaving behind now.

In his Essay on the Intellectual Powers of Man, Thomas Reid (1710-1796) gives this advice: “Let us accustom ourselves to try every opinion by the touchstone of fact and experience. What can fairly be deduced from the facts duly observed or sufficiently attested, is genuine and pure; it is the voice of God, and no fiction of human imagination.” It is hard to recall a stronger endorsement of empiricism than this in the whole history of philosophy—to identify the facts duly observed, and what is inferred from them, with the voice of God. Has Reid gone too far? Or should philosophers follow him?

Reid’s assumption, when he recommends that we test every opinion “by the touchstone of fact and experience,” is that we can in fact acquire reliable experience of the world. He clearly thinks that by starting with due observation and sufficient attention to the testimony of others we can reach philosophical knowledge that is “genuine and pure.” This is something that has been doubted from time to time in the history of philosophy ever since the days of the ancient Sophists. The doubt involves a suspicion that what we consider to be facts, the purported foundation of philosophical and scientific knowledge, may in fact be relative to the observer and hence not objective or real facts at all. In Hellenistic times, Pyrrhonian Skeptics believed that one should suspend belief in all cases, because it is impossible to know whether a proposition or its contradictory is true. In essence, they reasoned as follows: because people disagree, therefore nobody knows anything. Obviously though, if the Sophists and Skeptics are right, Reid is wrong.

Another way of disagreeing with Reid would be to say that we actually do have genuine and pure knowledge, but it does not come from experience. This is a view opposite to that of the Sophists and Skeptics in the sense that rather than trading on doubt it trades on the desire for absolute certainty. Philosophers who put reason and logic before experience are inclined to hold that whatever reason discerns as being deduced from fundamental principles must be true, because it is deductively certain, like mathematics. Thus, by relying on deductive logic, Berkeley proved that there is no such thing as matter,[1] and British Idealists held, for instance, that “the Absolute enters into, but is itself incapable of, evolution and progress.”[2] The fact that these conclusions fly in the face of common sense is thought not to count against them, because they are shown strictly to follow, not from facts, but from indubitable principles. The rationalist program requires precisely that we subordinate our ordinary understanding of things to the results of logical inquiry. It is as though we were to say, these are my theories, so much the worse for the facts! Again, if Berkeley, the British Idealists, and various other rationalists are right, then Reid is wrong.

What should we think? It is perhaps helpful to remember that philosophy in the West began with the Greek confidence that the world we live in is intelligible. The kosmos, an ordered whole, and physis, nature, are accessible to nous, intelligence, and to logos, reasoned speech, physei, by nature. Thus philosophia, the love of wisdom, is not an unrequited love or doomed enterprise in our tradition. On the contrary, it is Plato’s “upward path,”[3] the path we choose when we reject abject skepticism, extreme rationalism, and other paths that deny the natural capacity of the embodied human mind to understand. As human beings, rational animals, our mode of understanding is empirical, that is to say, we learn by the use of sense perception and emotion together with intelligence. Admittedly, this involves our subjectivity, and perhaps even prejudice. However, in Gadamer’s striking phrase, “there are legitimate prejudices,”[4] namely those authoritative pre-judgments that actually aid understanding. I think this is close to what Reid meant when he recommended that we rely on the touchstone of fact and experience. He regards it as a justifiably confident reliance, like the loving trust a child places in its parents and teachers. Not that experience (and parents and teachers) can never be wrong, but rather that when we fairly consider “the facts duly observed or sufficiently attested” as well as what follows from them, we become able to judge of those experiences (and parents and teachers) and to discern when their deliverances are right and when they need to be taken with a grain of salt or even rejected altogether. This is the philosophical attitude par excellence, and Reid is not out on a limb with it at all. Rather, if we want to be philosophers, too, we should follow him and heed the voice of Truth as it speaks to us in well-considered experience. For, “through the infinity of the universe, the mind which contemplates it achieves some share in infinity.”[5] To depart from this faith is to embark on a different path altogether.

Why do we celebrate birthdays? Each year on our birthday we look for some significance. Sometimes it is a social or developmental marker — entering adolescence or middle age, reaching legal majority, reaching the legal drinking age, for example. Often we ask each other, “do you feel any different?” or “do you feel older?” We wonder if we have accomplished enough given our age, are we ahead or behind, are we still full of promise or has our time passed us by. These numbers — 16, 18, 21, 30, 40, 70, 80 — take on a life of their own, imposing their own questions and meanings upon us, enticing us or forcing us to interpret our lives according to them. As the years roll by and the numbers grow larger we start to think less of the day of our birth, of our beginning, and more of the diminishing time left to us and our end. If our birthday is meant to commemorate the event of our coming into the world, then it seems that we slowly and almost inevitably lose sight of this event as it is crowded out by other meanings, longings, or regrets. Is the only remaining significance of our birthday then to help us count the years, to help us see ourselves through the social expectations that lend legal or psychological import to certain numbers rather than others? We tend to forget that our system of measuring time, our legal system of majority and minority, our developmental theories, while all having very real consequences on our lives, are constructs and generalizations, abstractions that come to shape our self-understanding from the outside, not from the reality of our own existence as a unique person.

I would like to consider another way of thinking about the significance of birthdays. I believe that our practice of celebrating a birthday by adding and counting the years, while having some real importance for the reasons mentioned above (as well as others), tends to be misleading because it suggests a misconception about the nature of time and about the relation between contingency and meaning or value. When we are born and we begin to count our time, we are immediately inclined to think of time as a kind of allotment that we have been given. We tend to think that at birth we are given a certain amount of time — a life-span and a life-expectancy. If we go to the doctor regularly, eat well and exercise, avoid unnecessary risks and unhealthy behaviors, we should live for a long time. We tend to think that the arc of our life is pre-given with us at our birth with something approaching an inner necessity. The numbers we use to count and measure our time become the reality that defines life, that shapes our expectations, that provides hope and often leads to regret or despair, simply a fact of life. It follows from this that we can expect a certain progression and take control over it.

Let me give you an example of what I’m talking about. In his short meditation “On Old Age,” Seneca deconstructs our preconceptions about time and existence. He writes that as he had reached the point of being undeniably ‘old’ he had gotten into the habit of thinking about his life with regret and despair — regret at the loss of promise, opportunity, youth; and despair at the thought of approaching death, of the little time left, of the decay of his body. But then he reminded himself: young men ought to think of death just as much as old men. Death is no more pressing for the old then it is for the young. Each day we wake up, he writes, is a new gift, purely contingent, and should be accepted with the same kind of joy as our first. In other words, time is not a portion, span, or quantity that we can expect and expend, it is a pure gift and as such it is absolutely contingent. No matter how healthy we try to be, or how conscientious we are about doctor visits, nothing we do can guarantee that we will still be alive tomorrow, and the fact that we are alive right now cannot be attributed to anything we have done in the past.

I am not making an argument in favor of reckless disregard for our health and well-being! If we did not practice good habits and try to develop our potential as much as possible we would progressively undermine our ability to enjoy our lives and live with dignity. But at the same time we should not fall into the illusion that we are the agents who have sufficient power to sustain our own existence. Descartes comments on this in his Meditations when he argues that at every instant the existence of a finite being is dependent on something beyond it, something greater than it, without which it would perish. To believe that I alone can preserve my existence once it has been give to me is to believe that I am able to constantly re-create myself, to produce at each moment my own existence as a causa sui. But just as our birth is an event which thrusts us into the world — without our having asked for it or played any role in making it happen — each day we wake up, each moment of our life, is given to us anew as a gift which nothing we do could necessitate. I call it a gift because it is arrives gratuitously; because it comes to us not from us; because it comes to us not as a reward we have earned, like a paycheck, but as a contingent fact that we accept rather than will. As Sartre makes so clear, our being is contingent, it is de trop, ‘too much’, more than makes sense. While we may have a moral right to life and political right to life, we do not have a metaphysical right to life — in other words, I cannot legitimately demand that I deserve to come into being and I deserve to exist for another day. I can, and ought to, say to any other person that they have no right to take my life; and I must remember that I have no right to take my own life. But this is precisely because it is something handed over to us that exceeds our logic of exchange, value, reward and punishment. In fact this gratuitous gift of life is the basis upon which we are able to love and respect (or condemn and contempt as the case may be) anything else — without the gratuitous gift of life we would not be able to wish for anything, love anything, value anything, or demand anything. Far from being an object whose value and meaning we determine, it is the absolute source of our being able to appreciate anything at all.

Given this insight, what then is the significance of a birthday? I suggest the following: A birthday is an occasion on which we celebrate that original event of our birth, not in order to count the time that has passed and speculate about the time that is left, but to remind ourselves that each day is a new gift. The presentation of gifts is a symbolic reminder of this truth. But I do not want to fall into the saccharine cliché that “life is a gift.” Even more than any other gift, life is something that is hard to accept and often a burden to bear. This is a matter of the logical essence of a true gift: in its pure contingency it logically puts the receiver in the position of being un-worthy or un-deserving; we have not earned life, either when it seems too hard to bear or when it seems more joyous than we could have imagined. Life precedes and exceeds our ability to earn it or deserve it. More than any other gift, life is not given in response to our wishes; rather it is the purely contingent basis of all our wishes. Thus life is not always what we would have wished for, and it is never reducible to a ‘just desert’. Perhaps we become so concerned with measuring our time precisely in an effort to gain some control over life, to convert it into a calculable good, a controllable and expendable resource or potential. Calculating helps us hide the pure contingency of time and of existence. It makes us feel as though we make our time and we deserve our time. But we risk transforming life — and hence all values — into an exchange value, in other words, a commodity. If we think of a birthday as a symbolic reminder of the pure gift that is life — as the incalculable basis of every attempt to calculate a meaning or value — we will not escape from contingency but perhaps we can more fully respect it as an incommensurable value and protect it from the persistent effort to commodify it, an effort which leads inexorably to the relativity all values and meanings, that is, to nihilism. Even when life is not exactly the kind of gift we would have asked for or think we deserve, especially then, it appears as a source of meaning and value which can never be reduced to our standards because they are all born from it. Even our confusion and suffering, our longing for more time, are a testament to the incalculable good that it is to be.

Tags: birthdays, Descartes, Seneca

What follows are summaries of two sessions in my Philosophy of Nature and the Human Person course. The topic is whether the scientific method is the only way to know things. The first section is a summary of the affirmative arguments for this thesis and the second is the negative position.

1. If the majority agrees on something in a certain field, that does not make it true, but it does make it probable. A large majority of scientists would agree that the method they use is the best way to investigate the things they study and the only way to reach knowledge about them. “There is no short cut to truth,” writes Karl Pearson, “no way to gain a knowledge of the universe except through the gateway of scientific method” (The Grammar of Science, 1911 p.17). Antoine Lavoisier, father of modern chemistry, remarks, “We ought never to search for truth but by the natural road of experiment and observation.” Psychologist Sigmund Freud agrees. “No knowledge can be obtained from revelation, intuition, or inspiration.”

The majority of modern philosophers concur. Philosopher John Searle asserts that “Ultimate reality, to speak rather grandly, is the reality described by chemistry and physics.” ( P. 33) He adds, “As soon as we are confident that we really have knowledge and understanding in some domain, we stop calling it ‘philosophy’ and start calling it ‘science’” (Mind, Language, and Society, p. 33 and p. 158). 19^th century philosopher Auguste Comte wrote Positive Philosophy in which he maintains that only the study of natural, mental, and social phenomena by means of the experimental method deserve to be called “science” in the eulogistic sense. Philosophy is mere guess work, according to Comte, and religion is superstition. British philosopher Bertrand Russell once declared to a BBC radio audience that “What science does not tell us mankind cannot know.”

2. Another way to defend this thesis is to define scientific method so broadly that it includes all valid reasoning. James Randi argues, “Science is best defined as a careful, disciplined, logical search for knowledge about any and all aspects of the universe, obtained by examination of the best available evidence and always subject to correction and improvement upon discovery of better evidence. What’s left is magic. And it doesn’t work.” Any genuine explanation of anything must come from the experimental method. The very word science is derived from the Latin verb scire which simply means to know.

3. Since thoughts are free creations of the mind, theories can be true or false. Hence, their claims must be tested by reality. And what other way is there to do this except by making predictions based on the theory or hypothesis and then verifying by experiment whether they fit reality or not? The only alternative seems to be arguing for positions without concrete evidence, which is idle speculation and does not lead to knowledge.

4. The great success of modern experimental science is proof enough of its validity as a way of knowing things. Science has profoundly shaped the world we live in, producing technical miracles from the atomic bomb to cell phones and cures for diseases. It has given us tremendous power over nature. Astounding innovations alter the lives of each succeeding generation and all these changes are due to science. If science were not a genuine way of knowing things it could not continually produce so many things that work. The authority of science is also cross-cultural and commands respect everywhere. Whenever something is proven scientifically who today would dare to challenge it?

SCIENCE IS NOT THE ONLY WAY TO KNOW

1.  The method of experimental science is the only way to know anything.

But modern science began with Galileo in the 1600’s.     _______________________________________________

Therefore, before the 1600’s no one knew anything.

Since this conclusion is false, what led to it is also false; namely, the claim that science is the only way to know.

2.  If science were the only way to know, then surely science ought to prove this very thesis.  But no experimental science does so.    Nowhere does one find in physics, or chemistry, or biology a proof that the experimental method is the only way to know anything.  Nor do they prove the invalidity of other methods of reaching knowledge.  Chemistry does not prove that the methods of literary criticism are invalid.  Astronomy never argues that the methods used by historians cannot lead to truth.
In fact, any attempt to prove that science is the only road to truth would have to be based on a definition of the nature of experimental reasoning.  But such a proof would be a philosophic argument and thereby would assume the validity of a philosophic way of knowing things.  Philosopher Auguste Comte tried to argue philosophically that science is the only way to know.  But he did not seem to realize that in so doing he was assuming that philosophy can discover and prove important truths without using the scientific method.

3.   Man can make use of artificial things only by means of natural things.  Any tool, such as a hammer, a scalpel, a pencil, a chisel, or a knife is an artificial product.  But such tools can be used only by our hands which are naturally given to us.  Again, the five thousands or so languages now spoken in the world are man-made, artificial inventions.  But no one can use any language except by means of his natural vocal chords, mouth, tongue and lips.
In the same way, the scientific method is an artificial, man-made way of knowing.  This is seen in the artificial instruments used and the controlled set up of the experiment which is not a natural experience.  Therefore, we can use this artificial way of knowing only by means of a natural way of knowing.  If nature gives us hands to use the tools we make, and a tongue to speak the languages we invent, what natural equipment, prior to science, is provided for us to know things?  Clearly the senses and the mind.  Can a scientist dispense with these and still use his method?  Obviously not.  He must use his sense to read his meters and his mind to understand and analyze his results.  And clearly our senses and mind can be used to know other matters besides those of experimental science.  Therefore, the scientific method is not the only way to know.

4.   If the experimental method were the only way to know, then we would expect no certainty to be found in any domain that does no experiments.  Mathematics makes no experiments.  There is no need or possibility of experimenting on prime numbers or equilateral triangles.  Yet mathematics has much more certainty and precision than physics.  It does not use the experimental method at all but proceeds by definition and deduction.
A further indication: It is necessary in experimental science to repeat experiments several times under varying conditions, and it is also necessary to compare experimental results with control groups.  This is because extrinsic physical influences can often distort experimental results.  These are not strengths but weakness in this way of arguing.  This never happens in math.  Once we have proven the Pythagorean theorem, the proof does not have to be repeated by people in Australia or at high altitudes to confirm that the conclusion is really valid.  Mathematics, therefore, shows that extremely clear and certain proofs can be achieved without using the scientific method.  Thus it is not the only way to know things.

5.  POSITIVE EXAMPLES.  Many disciplines prove conclusions and reach genuine knowledge by methods other than the scientific method.  Logic does not use the experimental method to prove that a good definition must apply to all of its subject and only its subject.  This is obvious from examples.  “Flying animal” is a bad definition of bird because it includes butterflies and bats, which are not birds; and  because it eliminates penguins and ostriches, which are birds.  Math does not use the experimental method but only definition and deduction.  For example, the definition of a prime is any natural number perfectly divisible only by one.  Therefore, two is a prime number because it is composed only of two ones.   Phonetics employs minimally-contrasting pairs of words to prove that a particular sound is used and recognized in a given language.  For instance, the English ear easily distinguishes the spoken words “fine” and “vine”.  This proves that English uses both the “f” sound and the “v” sound and recognizes the differences.
Other examples could be given from many other fields such as ethics, history, literary analysis, legal research, political science, and grammar.  None of these disciplines use special instruments of observation, measurements, or perform experiments, yet they yield genuine knowledge in their areas.  In fact each field of study has its own special method.  Thus the experimental method is only one way to know certain kinds of things.  Therefore, the scientific method is not the only way to know things or to prove things.  So saying it is the only way to know is like saying looking through a microscope is the only way to see anything.

Tags: Auguste Comte, Freud, John Searle, knowledge, materialism, science

Dr. David Weissman
Professor of Philosophy at City College of New York

Thursday, November 6, 2008

Sponsored by the New Hamphsire Institute of Politics

“Cities Real and Ideal”

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