Below is a comment I posted on a blog post written by a Facebook friend of mine, Jason (from Becoming the Archetype—a reference point for those of you who are familiar). The post was a response to a video titled “My Question For Theists,” which I haven’t watched yet—my comments were general and more in response to the blog post than the video.
I don’t know what Jason’s nor the1janitor’s knowledge background is, but I thought it was good to do a level set on some things. There was really no reason for me to comment other than I’ve been reading on the philosophy of science lately and I wanted to commit something in pixel while it was fresh in my mind. It’s purely self-interest as motivation.
A couple of things to keep in mind, not necessarily directed at either of you but it bears some weight on the discussion.
1) Science is hardly the only way we can know things about the universe. We can know via the senses, like how I know I am at a computer right now because of my sight and tactility. We can also know via experience. I know that my lawnmower’s engine is hot because I burned myself on it a few weekends ago. We also validly know things through authority (I know I was born on August 31st through the authority of my parents and my birth certificate) and memory (I remember my birth certificate saying I was born on August 31st). That religious belief is unscientific (I would call it a-scientific to strip the derogatoriness of the term) should hardly be a surprise but it’s a misapplication of the methodology.
2) Science suffers from what philosopher David Hume called the problem of induction. Generally this means that it arrives at conclusions using inductive logic, which goes from particular instances (in this case, through experimentation) into general ideas. We know that gasoline is combustible because it has been tested and concluded as such. The problem with this is that there’s no reason for us to believe that the next experiment with gasoline will produce the same results. In broader terms, we don’t know that the universe will act the same way tomorrow as it does today. It is an assumption based on prior experience, but it cannot be conclusive the way other methods of knowledge-acquisition are. There is a way to kind of jerry-rig scientific inquiry by the falsification method, but there is still an element of assumption with that.
3) Unless you’re a scientist who has conducted a experiment that arrived at a particular conclusion, every scientific fact has to be taken on authority–often by three or four degrees of separation from the scientist.
2 Comments
In essence, all knowledge is solipsistic by nature because even knowledge by authority comes through the experience of the senses. It must be read or heard. That is why *panic* it is so difficult to understand reality. My logical deductions are not always consistent with another person’s logical deductions.
That’s a good point to make, and as I understand Kant, that was the main thrust of Critique of Pure Reason. There exist things as they are (noumena) and the things as they appear to us (phenoumena) after we process things downstream from experience . The phenoumena and the noumena can never completely match, the realization of which I think helped pave the way for existentialists to jump in.
I like using the example of the blue rubber ball, B. You and I apprehend B in roughly the same way as you and I have similar epistemic abilities. There is some differential because we might have
different experiences with Bs that affect our apprehension of them…but by and large they are similar. Now take someone like us and shrink him down to a microscopic size (since birth, so he’s “used to” apprehending things as a microscopic actor). He’s going to apprehend Bs in a very different realm as, by virtue of his size compared to Bs; where we see a bouncy blue small round thing, he’s going to see a large deadly object. He may even perceive so differently at teh fundamental level: he may not even see it as blue, not bouncy as all, filled with sharp-edged canyons. He may even see it in a persistent molecular level. His phenoumena of B is at very displaced odds with ours, yet the noumena of B is constant.
Again, this is how I understand Kant. I can’t even get past the first few chapters in my translation of Critique and I’m not about to learn German just so I can read it in the original form.