Epistemology 101, or, "I'll take Faith vs. Reason for $1000, Alex"

Great Debates
1

I offer the following definitions for your comment and criticism.

Science is deciding truth of propositions by closely and critically examining the repeatable evidence of our senses.

Faith is assuming the truth of propositions neither provable or disprovable by Science.

Foolishness is assuming the truth of propositions that contradict the evidence of our senses.

Of the three, Science offers the most confidence and the least certainty. It is always possible that when we have evaluated the truth of some proposition, that we haven’t looked carefully enough, or critically enough, and we may have to revise our evaluation. However it usually turns out that we have at least correctly evaluated the truth of a special case of a more general proposition.

Such is the case, for instance, with Newtonian gravity. It makes inaccurate preditions, and its model (invisible forces acting instantaneous over great distances) has been clearly shown to be illogical. However, in the special case of the solar system, its predictions and model are close enough to reality for all practical purposes.

Faith is benign, in many cases beneficial, but in some cases dangerous. As an atheist, I cannot say with certainty that some of my own values are not based in Faith, for instance Faith in the intrinsic value of sentient human life.

But Foolishness is just that. If we cannot believe the evidence of our own senses, we cannot believe anything. And we cannot pick and choose when we believe what we see. I really can’t say anything good about it.

Of course, we cannot personally verify every proposition. However, a follower of Science should accept as true (at least provisionally) conclusions reached by presumably honest and careful people following a properly careful and skeptical methodology.
If you wish to Scientifically dispute someone’s conclusions and assert the opposite or contradictory proposition as a rational conclusion, you most certainly have the obligation to offer equally careful and critical examination of repeatable sensory evidence.

Just in case you didn’t notice, I’m intentionally tryintg to provoke the anti-evolutionists, the young-earth creationists, and others of that ilk.

As an aside, I have some interesting and humorous links relating to Science and epistemological philosophy:

Cargo Cult Science
[url=http://www.stone-dead.asn.au/resources/articles/gary-hardcastle/main.html]Themes in Contemporary Philosophy[/url

He’s the sort to stand on a hilltop in a thunderstorm wearing wet copper armor, shouting ‘All Gods are Bastards!’

2

Well, I agree with you. The Feynman speech is great - thanks for the link!

I see only two problems with this position of reason. The first is that repeatable, proven results tend to become entrenched as a “law” and cause and effect become unclear. In the example of the cargo cult in the South Pacific, islanders build beacons and clear a landing strip or drop zone for the aircraft during the war and every three days a plane lands and drops off supplies. Now that is repeatable and provable. It happens for years and they establish this as a scientifically provable law: wooden beacon = fresh cargo. That law is, of course, nonsense. They had it all wrong. The planes were dropping the cargo for their own reasons (supply error, spreading propaganda, etc.) which had nothing to do with the islander’s beacons, wooden structures or voodoo dance. Only when the planes cease coming will the natives see the error of their law.

The other problem is my inherent mistrust of phenomenology as an epistemological construct. I guess I just don’t trust my senses as much as you do. It’s hard for me to establish a workable reality and knowledge base given the limiting nature of the brain’s neural programming and sensory processing. Often ‘unacceptable’ results are edited out before I realize the input was ever there. How do you deal with this?

Yet to be reconciled with the reality of the dark for a moment, I go on wandering from dream to dream.

3

I would word the parameters differently. (Hey, it’s Great Debates!)

Science is deciding truth of propositions by closely and critically examining the repeatable evidence of our senses, which requires conscious and analytical awareness of the process by which we have come to believe something to be true (=proposition)

Intuitition, faith, or (choose alternative terminology here) is acknowledging that you are convinced that something is true without having conscious awareness of the process by which you have been so convinced; and assigning validity to it in the sense that you proceed on the assumption that you have been convinced accurately even if you could not defend it rationally.

Mindless idiocy, on the other hand, is believing what you were told to believe simply because the person doing the telling said “You should believe this; you should not question it. It is a good thing to believe it even though you have no reason to do so”.

Fervent defenders of rationality tend to cast all items that fall into the second category into the third, often for reasons that would assign them into the third category themselves. Fervently religious people are most often of the third category.

It is the second that is of most interest, though. In real life, it is on that level that we operate. The first category describes an approach more self-conscious and more formal than we tend to use except under highly specialized conditions; and because the portion of how we know things (epistemology) that we can observe and analyze is always merely a subset of how we know things, there is always something that is valid outside of what it can describe, even though it is a very useful mode.

Or, as Robert Pirsig made apparent, the first category really depends on operations that occur on the second – the old “you don’t know that you have seen a tree until after you have seen the tree” proposition. Like Zeno racing the tortoise, the strictly rational mind looks at data, is aware of criteria that the data must meet in order to fall into a certain category, and attempts to decide whether it does or does not indeed fall into that category. But for the most part there is no rational mechanism that determines that “does”. [“Can fish breathe? If the fish die when I take them out of water, the answer is no. But fish die sooner or later no matter what, so when do my dead fish constitute ‘fish dying when I take them out of water’? And is this fish dead? It has glazed eyes and flies are lighting on it and it hasn’t moved for the last two days and it smells really dead, but how can I know that I’ve waited long enough to say ‘Isn’t moving, dead’?”]

Disable Similes in this Post

4

That’s why I added the the various provisos: “closely”, “carefuly”, “skeptically”, etc.

Yes, our senses and our brains do fool us. If you don’t believe me, go see a magic show. As Feynman pointed out, we really have to go to some great lengths to not fool ourselves.

But if we can’t trust our senses, what can we trust. Fundamentally, that’s all we have!

As regarding the error of the original cargo cults, they made the classic error of mistaking a correlation for causation. They were neither skeptical nor careful enough. Which in their case was understandable. In the case of an educated person living in the United States, such Foolishness verges on the inexcusable.

As a professional engineer (computer programmer) I frequently employ intuition in my work (especially debugging!). However, I don’t allow myself to rationally accept an intuitive premise; rather, I let it guide my skeptical inquiry into the evidence of my senses.

In my original post, where I talk about Faith, I’m talking about the big undecidable propositions, like, “Did God create the Universe?”

I can’t rationally disprove such an assertion, therefore whether I live my life assuming its true or false depends only on Faith.

Quite the contrary. I believe the theory of General Relativity because Einstein said so. The math is so tremendously far beyond my comprehension that I have no choice to believe or disbelieve it based only on my evaluation of his reputation. Even examining the supporting evidence of the senses is really beyond my means, not having access to a handy astronomical telescope.

BUT! I do trust him, both because I trust his methodology (which I do understand), and I have seen no strong evidence contradicting him. However, my belief is provisional. Should it come to pass that the truth or falsehood of General Relativity made an important difference in my life, I would seek to gain understanding of his propositions, and based on that understanding, conduct a skeptical inquiry on its truth. Admittedly, such an inquiry would be short, since he’s a pretty smart guy, and the evidence has been handily collected for my by the Scientific establishment.

What I regard as Foolishness (and I chose this term carefully, for its mild yet unambiguous deprecation), is holding to the truth of a proposition in the face of strong evidence to the contrary.

BTW, sorry, it’s Themes in Contemporary Philosophy. Perhaps one of the moderators could fix up my post so it doesn’t force a wide screen?

5

Regarding the Pirsig analogy, even issues of Quality are subject to Scientific investigation. Quality guides your perception and your investigation, but doesn’t necessarily determine it.

One of the fundamental techniques of Science is to examine the nature of a Quality judgement, design an experiment which could falsify it, and perform the experiments.

One of the great misconceptions about the Scientific Method, is that scientists (the good one’s anyway) don’t design their experiments to support their hypothesis, they design it to falsify it! What they’re saying is, “if this experiment comes out in one exact particular way, my hypothesis might be true, but if it comes out in a myriad of alternative ways, my hypothesis is most definitely false.” They’re trying to prove themselves wrong! This technique shows the fundamental nature of skepticism and “falsifiability.”

6

Oh, I agree. But what fraction of educated people (say, who’ve completed at least HS) living in the USA do you wager really understand the difference between correlation and causation? I don’t really know, but I suspect it’s rather small. Some people might grasp the idea conceptually if you explain it to them, but still are fooled when it comes up in real life.

Sometimes it seems like this is responsible for most of the irrational beliefs people hold. “I did X and Y happened, so X must have caused Y”. This gets ingrained as a belief system and you can’t really shake it loose, because in many cases people want to believe it.

–
peas on earth

7

In the OP, SingleDad wrote (emphasis mine)

I perceive a contradiction here. You seem to be of the opinion that the anti-evolutionists, young-earth creationists, and others of that ilk, are being unscientific. But in what ways are the evolutionary theories repeatable, as you require of a scientific idea? There is quite a jump from the limited observations of microevolution among bacteria and their ilk, to “repeatable sensory evidence” that dogs and cats have common ancestors, or that apes and humans do.

I do understand that macroevolution requires vast amount of time to operate, and that it is unreasonable to expect to see any macroevolution in the short time between Darwin and us. But that does not give you an exemption to the rules of the game. If your own definition of scientific evidence requires that it be repeatable, then we’re gonna be waiting an awful long time. The jury is in no rush.

Of course, I agree with everything that others have written about sensory evidence being unreliable occasionally, and about confusing correlation with causation. Some people believe that dinosaurs never lived, and that their bones have been lying there since Creation. I say that if your definition of Science includes the requirement of repeatable experiments, then you’re not allowed to discredit such anti-dinosaur beliefs.

8

The logical fallacy of “Post hoc, ergo propter hoc” is one of enduring popularity. The reason is not that people are idiots, though. We all like to think those who disagree with us are idiots. The reason the fallacy is so enduring is that the evidence which we accept as truth is, in so many common cases, true. The constant correlation between two events, temporally sequential, and close physically, often does occur because the first event causes the second. The error of assigning that relationship to all such pairs of events is a logical fallacy in all cases, but it is not always wrong.

The overwhelming majority of people have no interest in formal logic. It does not serve their needs, nor does it properly guide their choices. I cry, mom gives me food. I am hungry, I think I will cry. The logic is not valid. The observation is not scientifically verifiable, the consequence is not drawn from falsifiable hypotheses, and the data are not examined in any rigorous manner. This set of beliefs is obviously completely illogical, and easily demonstrated as superstition. A few billion babies have survived by following it. The hardest thing for most logicians, and many scientists to admit is that science is a method with limits. It is not universally applicable, or even always a good choice of methodology. Human experience includes many chaotic and unreliable sequences and elements. Human minds function well in those circumstances, and in some cases, they do so best with hunch, instinct, and illogic.

Believing in your assumptions is implicit in the act of making them. Once you have done so, you are pretty much stuck with the limits your assumptions give you. When you deal with things that can be measured, and examined in precise detail you will be well served by the tools of science. When you deal with emotions, and the experiences of people in relation to each other, or to themselves, you will find your tools less useful. You can look for other methods, or you can insist that your two value logic limits be imposed on data which does not have that type of character on its own. You will get somewhere either way. You will miss something if you are unwilling to accept that the world itself is more complex than logic and science.

Pretending that feeling, and faith, and aura are sufficient to all examination is no more defensible, by the way. I don’t think bridges and skyscrapers should be built entirely based on the position of the Earth Dragon, or the resonance of the aura of the inner spirit of the Earth. Science and engineering are tools of vast usefulness. The thing you are calling foolishness is misapplication of the methods. We are mostly fools, you know. Some of us are unwilling to face that unpalatable truth. Defending your ideas is one thing, defending your self is another. That is a very hard lesson to learn, whether in faith, or science.

Tris

Imagine my signature begins five spaces to the right of center.

9

There is no contradiction. Evidence (in the form of sensory experience) needs to be repeatable, not theory.

For example, radioisotope dating is repeatable experience. Two people measuring two different T. Rex bones, using measuring devices built by two different companies, will repeat the same experience. Regardless of your belief system, if you carefully follow the procedure specified in the experiments, you too will receive the same experience, i.e. you will make substantially the same measurement.

Hence, old-earth theories and evolutionary theories are indeed supported by repeatable experiential evidence.

In contrast, an epiphany, wherein God tells you that the earth is 5600 years old, is certainly a sensory experience, but it’s not repeatable: You can’t set up a procedure whereby if I follow it, regardless of my belief system, I will have a substantially similar experience.

Hence, a criticism or theory supported only by epiphany is not supported by repeatable experience.

Radioisotope dating is also skeptical. I make a hypothesis according to my theory: If evolution does occur, I should see a correlation between similarity of types and age. Out of the myriad possible results, only one will support my hypothesis. Lo and behold, the experiment does indeed support my hypothesis.

I add up all of this support, and the theory itself begins to look very strong. So strong that disbelieving the theory begins to approach pure Foolishness.

10

SingleDad, we have been around and around on this issue a few times before.

Faith is not intellectual adherence to an unproven doctrine, or at least should not be. (I will allow that there are many people for whom that is precisely what it is.) Rather it is an interpersonal relationship of trust between two people. I have faith in Gaudere’s inherent goodness, compassionateness, and justice. I can post my thoughts in the certainty that she will not use her awesome moderatorial powers to trash me for the heinous offense of disagreeing with her.

My faith in God is much the same. I accept a series of statements (dogmas) about His nature and attributes, His past, present, and future actions, and His will and intentions. But the core of my faith is that I believe in Him, i.e., I trust Him to be the God He purports to be, gracious, loving, judicious, patient, long-suffering in His love for His errant children.

As regards the broader issue of epistemology, I am neither a rationalist nor an empiricist. Sake has spoken eloquently about why one cannot always trust one’s senses. If that were not enough, we have had a classic proof of this happen on this board within the past couple of months. Most of the time, rationalism makes postulates that are subject to dispute. and even when it does not, “Logic is a means of going completely wrong with absolute certainty.”

11

All this proves is that the two different measuring devices have similar degrees of accuracy, and that you can trust thier measurement. But that measurement concerns the amount of isotope in the bones right now. We do not have any repeatedly observable about how much isotope was in that bone when the animal was alive, or even about whether the animal really was alive to begin with. I also think that if we observe how fast the isotope decays nowadays, and extrapolate that information to decide how fast that isotope decayed 10 million years ago, that extrapolation would disqualify it from being repeatedly observable evidence.

I’m not saying the conclusions are wrong. I’m just trying to identify which pieces of the puzzle are “science”, and which are “faith”, as defined in the OP.

12

Tris, your point is well taken. Applying the scientific method to ordinary life would be vastly inefficient. For many practical purposes it’s totally unnecessary.

Intuition, rules of thumb, approxomations for special cases, unverified correlation… All of these get us through the day with reasonable success.

But when your tail’s in a crack, and you have to know, Science is the way to go. If your question is in the realm of experience, Science will never* fail you in the end. Of course, the world being what it is, “in the end” may be outside the range of your lifetime.

My deprecation of Foolishness is not an exhortation to use Science in every circumstance, rather it is an exhortation not to ignore Science in the cases where it has given a strong answer.

I’m not sure I understand this sentence. Could I prevail upon you to explain it in more detail?

*Hyperbole for rhetorical effect.

13

Keeves: My point was that repeatability is a criterion for introducing an experience as evidence. You are correct, that repeatability does not in and of itself qualify the interpretation of the evidence.

And you are correct in your skepticism. How do we know that measuring the amount of isotope in the material right now gives us any information on its age?

Which gives me the opportunity to introduce another characteristic feature of Science.

Nature does not hand us her secrets on a silver platter. Often, scientists have to make “chains of inference” to evaluate a particular hypothesis.

Because of the nature of the falsification method, these chains of inference are fragile in the sense that an error anywhere in the process will quickly lead to wildly incorrect results: The predictions made by the theory will substantially differ from experience produced by experiment.

Taken independently, sometimes a conclusion reached by an experiment will seem to rest of weird or intuitively incorrect assumptions. However, on closer examination, these assumptions turn out to be deductions made from a series of earlier experiments, and the chain of reasoning holds up well.

An interesting example of the failure of a chain of reasoning (pulled from my recollection), is the Wright brothers’ early experiments in aviation. In the beginning, their experiments differed dramatically from those predicted by current aerodynamic theory. So they went back and re-examined the various links in the chain, and found significant errors. They ran more fundamental experiments, and made significant corrections to the theory. The point being that the existence of error was pretty quickly demonstrated when someone actually bothered to test its results.

In the case of radioisotope dating, we have all sorts of correlative evidence, for example, geologic dating, different types of isotopes, etc.

It’s not my intention here to specifically defend old-earth or evolutionary theories (although if you want to start a new thread, I would most happily contribute to the best of my ability). Rather, it is to defend Science itself and to defend the assertion that ignoring conclusions of Science constitutes nothing less than Foolishness.

14

Defending one’s ideas is essentially different than defending one’s self. The fact is that when you feel that your ideas are your identity, that becomes a very elusive difference. If I believe that all my own opinions are based on logic, and reason, and you show me some idea which contradicts my own, my ideas are challenged by yours. That is a conflict of ideas. If the investigation moves into the area of how our ideas are supported, (whether by faith, or evidence) it remains a conflict of ideas. When it moves into an examination of our respective personal abilities, motives, and competencies, it becomes a conflict of self. What I think is my idea, why I think it is my self. The former is reasonable ground for productive discussion. The latter is only of importance to those who value my self. That judgement is not amenable to logic, but a personal, and entirely subjective one. The assessment of self is also inconsequential in any logical sense. It is important to me, but only to me. An idiot with a good idea is still an idiot, but his idea is still a good idea.

I have very strong and highly valued beliefs on matters of faith. I don’t find that to be an impediment to learning, and examining matters of science. Some feel that the existence of faith alone is sufficient evidence to discredit my opinions on matters of science. That is not a difference of ideas, it is a difference of self. I choose not to defend my faith on the basis of logic, proof, or evidence. The reason is that I find the matter to be outside of the competence of science, logic, or proof. I am unwilling to accept faith as a basis for legal or scientific argument for analogous reasons. To argue that your faith, or your scientific evidence must be applied for some reason of inherent superiority is not a disagreement of ideas, however much you like your ideas, or despise mine. It is an assignment of authority you make, and insist I acknowledge. I have been on opposite sides of many discussions where logicians demand that what is illogical must be wrong. That assumption is neither true, nor particularly logical. It is the exact same failing in communication as the case where an idea is defended because the speaker’s religion insists on its truth. What has happened is that we have ceased arguing in defense of our ideas, and begun arguing in defense of our selves.

I also believe we are each and all of us idiots, although the specific expertise of our idiocy varies from one to another. That fact not withstanding, we can learn much from one another when we listen (or in this case read) and occasionally, on a good day, with some luck teach something when we speak (write).

Tris

Imagine my signature begins five spaces to the right of center.

15

Okay, somethings in life are taken on faith. For example, if I have a dental appointment next Tuesday, I’m going to dread it, and not assume that the world will catch on fire and be destroyed, thus getting me off the hook. However, I have not a shred of evidence that says that won’t happen. In fact, scientifically, there’d be no way to give me that evidence. Since science can’t help me out, would I still be as correct if I assumed that the earth is almost history? I have to use past experience to decide that. Past experience dictates that dental visits are painful and that the earth doesn’t disintegrate. Is past experience evidence? Or is it faith?

16

Logic and a naive interpretation of one’s senses do not form the core of Science. Logic is a tool for testing the internal consistency of a set of assumptions. Science demands careful and skeptical inquiry by means of the senses.

[quote]
Originally posted by Breckinshire:
**I have not a shred of evidence that says that {the world won’t end tomorrow}. In fact, scientifically, there’d be no way to give me that evidence.[\b][\quote]

Quite the contrary. In my case, I have observed without fail that in the past the events of each day proceed according to the same rules as the day before. These observations are indeed the evidence of my senses. It would be Foolish in my original sense of the world to hold as true that the world will end tomorrow.

Science does not grant absolute certainty. However, it does grant a degree of confidence which I assert to be Foolish to contradict.

Tris: It’s not my intention to deprecate Faith, or attack anyone’s self. In my original post, I defined Foolishness in terms of behavior, as the act of assuming.

I have not called anyone specifically a Fool. If someone holds a belief in contradiction to the Scientific evidence of the senses, well then, if the shoe fits… :wink:

Actually it’s a logical fallacy. As you correctly note,
“An idiot with a good idea is still an idiot, but his idea is still a good idea.”

When you remove “your faith” from the above, you have absolutely captured my original point. However I dispute your conclusion, that the argument is a disagreement of selves. How we evaluate ideas is in itself an idea.

And I don’t despise your ideas. Other than disagreeing with my right to make my original assertion, you claim to actually live your life in agreement with it:

But please do be accurate. For one, I am arguing that Science is inherently superior to anti-Science (Foolishness); I refuse to compare Science to non-Science (Faith), the jocular title of the OP notwithstanding.

Secondly, I’m not insisting anyone agree with me. I’m making an assertion, which I’m prepared to defend rhetorically and philosophically.

17

bantmof wrote:

I’m in the company of blackjack players almost everyday. Good grief, these guys are superstitious. “If I cut the deck just like I did last time, I should have a winning round again.” Or, “If I cut the deck while thinking about ice cream, and look up at the ceiling three times like I did last time, I should again have a winning round.”

Most of these blackjack players are considerably well off, financially. This would imply that they aren’t exactly idiots, because it does take a certain amount of mental prowess to make good money in this world.

In general, when people don’t understand a certain phenomena, they will start grasping at any correlations, hoping one will stick. When one of these correlations finally stick, it becomes a hypothesis.

In blackjack, the only real correlation is: the longer you play, the more money you lose. Someone coming up with this hypothesis should give probability some study and later demand the casino their money back for ripping them off.

My point is: it’s human nature to be scientific, although not everyone accepts the rigors that are called for by the scientific method today.

There’s always another beer.

18

No disagreement, SingleDad. I consider the scientific method to be the principal technique for achieving useful empirical knowledge. As such, it is subject to the limitations implicit in empiricism: the potential for misperception, misinterpretation of data, or erroneous restriction of conclusion. The dig about logic was relative to the problems implicit in rationalism. Neither had to do with my post on Faith. Like Tris, I see it not as a “less sure” means of knowing, but as an altogether different, third-dimensional means. Knowing that God is does not prove to me anything regarding the Cambrian revolution, but it does say a lot about what I must do ethically. Completely different ballparks – to continue the analogy, in my view, you’re saying, by placing faith in an intermediate category, that a home run is worth only 1/6 as much as a touchdown; I’m simply observing that we’re watching different sports, and the scores are incommensurable.

19

The main problem is that man is a pattern-seeking animal. We need to see patterns to survive. But because of this evolutionary history, people may also see patterns where none exist. This is where the whole correlation/causation and superstition thing comes in. I’ve seen it in all sorts of people – even those who should know better. As one major example that cost a company millions of dollars, we’ve seen it in the cases of breast implant claims (“I got breast implants. I later got this connective tissue disease. Therefore the implants must have caused the disease.”). Doesn’t matter that extensive studies showed no greater percentage of that disease in women with implants as compared to those without. These people don’t want to hear that. They want to talk about their own individual cases. Sorry, but that’s not the way it works.

20

Hmm… everyone is agreeing with me. I must be doing something wrong.

Let me put it this way…

At what point can we say that someone who is ignoring evidence against their assertion and offering no evidence in favor of it is just an idiot?

Having been called an idiot on these boards (unjustified, IMHO), I’m wondering if there’s a general consensus on the question.