Epistemology reading with Seminar Paper.

Epistemology

Mill described the system of logic as a textbook of the doctrine that derives all knowledge from experience.  He went beyond others in claiming that not only all science but also mathematics derived from experience.

The numbers two, three and four denote physical phenomena and connote a physical property of those phenomena. Two denotes all pairs of things and twelve all dozens of things connecting what makes them pairs or dozens and that what makes them so is something physical since it cannot be denied that two apples are physically distinguishable from three apples.

Critics of Mill were to observe that not everything in the world is nailed down; for if it were we should not be able to separate parts and 2+1 would not = 3. Mill claims that a principle such as ‘the sums of equals are equals’ is an inductive truth or law of nature of the highest order. Inductive truths are generalisations based on individual experiences. Assertions of such truths must always  be to some extent tentative or hypothetical. The principle is never actually true for one actual pound weight is not exactly equal to another nor one measured mile length to another. To avoid the great intellectual support of false doctrines and bad institutions that truths external to the mind may be known by intuition or consciousness independently of observation and experience was to entertain the possibility that at some point in the future in some distant galaxy it might turn out that two and two made five not four.

John Henry Newman who was considered a philosopher belonged to the same empiricist tradition as John Stuart Mill. The only direct acquaintance we have with things outside ourselves comes through our senses. Thinking that we have faculties for direct knowledge of immaterial things is mere superstition. Our senses convey us but we have to be near things to touch them; we can neither see nor hear nor touch things if they are in the past or the future.

Newman identifies two different operations of the intellect that are exercised when we reason: inference (from premises) and assent (to a conclusion). It is important to keep in mind that these two are quite distinct from one another. Assent may be given without an argument or on the basis of a bad argument. Arguments may be better or worse but either way assent exists or it doesn’t. Locke maintained that ‘whoever goes beyond this measure of assent, it is plain receives not truth in the love of it, loves not truth for truth sake but for some other by-end.’ He believed that there can be no demonstrable truth in concrete matters, and therefore a assent to a concrete proposition must be conditional and fall short of certitude. Newman disagrees with Locke as he believes there is no such thing as degree of assent although there is room for opinion without the assent that is necessary for knowledge.

Although he denies that there are degrees of assent, Newman makes a distinction between simple assent and complex assent or certitude. Simple assent may be unconscious, it may be rash, it may be no more than a fancy. Complex assent involves three elements: it must follow on proof be accompanied by a specific sense of intellectual contentment and must be irreversible.

One difference between knowledge and certitude that is commonly agreed among philosophers is this: If I know p, then p is true; but I may be certain that p and p be false. Newman is not quite consistent as he talks as if there is such a thing as false certitude but at other times suggests it can only be if the proposition in question is objectively true. For instance if I believed Ireland was to the West of England then I believe that it will remain and will resolve to maintain it. Newman maintains that anyone who loses his conviction on any point is thereby proved never to have been certain of it.

Newman correctly distinguishes certainty from infallibility. My memory is not infallible; I remember for certain what I did yesterday but that does not mean that I never misremember. I know for certain that two and two is four but I make mistakes in long additions. Certitude concerns a particular proposition, infallibility is a faculty or gift. It was possible for Newman to be certain that Victoria was queen without claiming to possess any general infallibility. We do not dispense with clocks because on any occasion they tell the wrong time.

No general rules can be set out that will prevent us from ever going wrong in a specific piece of concrete reasoning. Aristotle in his ‘Ethics’ told us that ‘no code of laws, or moral treatise, could map out in advance the path of individual virtue: we need a virtue of practical wisdom to determine what to do from time to time.’  

Newman says that the logic of language will take us only so far and we need a special intellectual virtue which he calls the ‘illative sense’ to tell us the appropriate conclusion to draw in the particular case.

Newman’s epistemology is quite independent of the theological context which bear comparison with classical texts of the empiricist tradition from Locke to Russell.

Pierce on the method of science

In order to settle our opinions and fix our beliefs, Pierce says four different methods are commonly used. The method of tenacity which is where we take a proposition and repeat it to ourselves dwelling on all that supports it and turning away from anything that may disturb it. It has the advantage of providing comfort and peace of mind. For example people may only read a certain newspaper because it supports their political beliefs.

The second method is authority which has two disadvantages one is that it is always accompanied by cruelty.  The second is that no institution can regulate opinion on every subject and there will always be some independent speakers who aren’t represented.

The third method is a priori and is more respectable than the other two methods but it has manifestly failed to produce a fixation of beliefs. From earliest times to the latest the pendulum has swung between idealist and materialist metaphysics without ever coming to rest.

We must therefore adopt the fourth method which is the method of science. The first postulate of this method is the existence of reality independent of our minds.

The task of logic is to provide us with guiding principles to enable us to find out on the basis of what we know something we do not know and approximate more closely to this ultimate reality.

It is important to be clear about the content of the beliefs that we attain in the course of this communal unceasing pursuit of truth. Belief Pierce says has three properties: first it is something that we are aware of, second it appeases the irritation of doubt and third it involves the establishment in our nature of a rule of action that is to say, a habit. Different beliefs are distinguished by the different modes of action to which they give rise.

Pierce sometimes writes as if logical truths were laws of mental behaviour. He says that the three main classes of logical inference are deduction, induction and hypothesis. He goes on to say ‘in deduction the mind is under the dominion of a habit or association by virtue of which a general idea suggests in each case a corresponding reaction.’ This could mean that reasoning whether good or bad, is a matter of habit; but it is a matter of fact not of thought, whether a particular piece of reasoning is valid or not.

Frege on Logic. Psychology and Epistemology

In working out his logical system Frege was anxious to show the difference in nature and role between logic and these two other branches of study. He adapted Kants distinction between a priori and a posteriori knowledge.  He said we need to distinguish how we first come to believe a proposition and how we would eventually justify it. There must be a justification if we are to talk of knowledge at all, for knowledge is belief that is both true and justified. It is absurd to talk of an a priori mistake because one can only know what is true.

Frege used the idea of Axiom to describe how all things identical are equal to themselves (he asserted a priori to deductive definitional truth).  He said that all pairs no matter what they are pairs of are identical to each other. Frege came up with the idea that you have to logically define zero as it opens up the road to advance in computing and in logic. The computer never relied on an actual zero as it used Frege and his idea of a ‘null class’. The analytic philosophy was previously Frege on the logical underpinning of language (sense VS reference).

He said that if the proposition is a mathematical one its justification must be mathematical; it cannot be a psychological matter of process in the mathematicians mind. Images and thoughts is not what arithmetic is about. Different mathematicians associate different images with the same number. For example the number 100 may be thought of as the number 100 by one person but by another may simply be known as ‘C’. Arithmetic is concerned with the truth of such propositions whereas psychology with their occurrence in thought. A proposition may be thought of without being true, and a proposition may be true without being thought of.

Frege gave the name ‘Sentential logic’ to explain that the meaning is located in the sentence as a whole. Sense and reference are where some sentences are on a  superficial level and make perfect sense but have no reference. ‘The King of France is bald’ makes sense to us but has no reference as there is no King of France. This is important when it comes to computer programming as it determines the way that the computer can understand certain things.

Psychology is interested in the cause of our thinking whereas mathematics is in the proof of our thoughts. Cause and proof are quite different things. If it is true that humans have evolved, no doubt there has been evolution in human consciousness; so if mathematics was a matter of sensations and ideas, we would need to warn astronomers against drawing conclusions about events in the distant past.

In his late essay ‘Thoughts’ Frege warned against the ambiguity inherent in the statement that logic deals with the laws of thought. If by ‘laws of thought’ we mean psychological laws that relate mental events to their causes then they are not laws of logic as they make no distinction between true and false thoughts. Logical laws are ‘laws of thought’ in the same sense that moral laws are laws of behaviour. Actual thinking does not always obey the laws of logic any more than actual behaviour always obeys the moral law.

Frege didn’t reject the Cartesian idea that ‘I’ is a proper name he went on to describe that there are two separate worlds. One is interior and private whereas the other is exterior and public. Perceptible things of the physical world are accessible to all of us as we can all see and touch the same trees. But he also claimed that there is a inner world of sense-impressions, images and feelings of desires and wishes which we may call ‘ideas’.

He concludes that if there is no owner of ideas there are no ideas either. There cannot be an experience without someone to experience it. A pain is necessarily felt and what is felt must have some feeling to it.

Frege says we are not owners of our thoughts as we are owners of our ideas. We do not have thoughts; thoughts are what we grasp. What is grasped is already there and all we do is take possession of it. This has no effect on the thought itself than our observing it affects the new moon. Thoughts do not change or come and go; they are not casually active or passive in the way in which objects are in the physical world where one thing acts on another and changes it.

If there is to be such thing as science, Frege maintained ‘a third realm must be recognised’ a world in addition to the world of things and the world of ideas. The ego as the owner of ideas is the first citizen of this third realm. The third realm is the realm of objective thought. Both Descartes and Frege accept a division between a public world of physical things and a private world of human consciousness and seek to rejoin them by appealing to a third world; the divine mind in the case of Descartes and the world of thoughts in the case of Frege. They were mistaken by thinking there are two worlds as there is only one to which belong not just inert physical objects but also conscious rational animals.

Knowledge by Acquaintance and Knowledge by Description

Russell for most of his life was faithful to the British empiricist tradition but like Stuart Mill, Russell could not except Mills view of mathematics as an empirical science. Therefore his empiricism was always blended with an element of the Platonism that he shared with Frege. Adapted by Whitehead and Russell- (Principia mathematica) was an attempt that failed to demonstrate logical basis for numbers. As Russell started as a Platonist in relation to numbers he said they can only observed and used in calculation but not understood as things in themselves. He concluded that zero cannot be found in nature relating to computers where it cannot be recognised and that plus one gives you a increment problem. Therefore he came up with the hypothesis that you cant observe these so numbers must be derived from logic.

In logic he gave the name ‘sense data’ to the things that are immediately known in sensation such as colours, sounds smells and so on. The name ‘sensation’ was given to the experience of being immediately aware of these things.

Sense data are the only things of which we can really be certain. Descartes brought his own doubt to an end with ‘I think therefore I am’. But Russell warns us that it says something more than what is certain, as really what is certain is not ‘I am seeing a blue colour’ but ‘a blue colour is being seen’.

Russell states that there is no actual proof that the whole of life is not just a dream. Our belief in an independent external world is instinctive rather than reflective but this does not mean that there is any good reason to reject it. In order to clarify the relationship between sense data and the objects that cause them, Russell introduces his celebrated distinction between knowledge by acquaintance (the sense data that make up the appearance of the table for instance it’s colour and shape) and the knowledge by description (which is my knowledge of the table as a physical object).

Like Plato, Russell thought that the universals belonged to a supra-sensible world- the world of being. This world is unchangeable, rigid, perfect and dead. It was the world of existence that contained thoughts, feelings and sense data. People liked both of these worlds but it was clear that ‘both are real’ and both are important in meta physician.

In his last philosophical work ‘Human Knowledge’ Russell returned to a causal theory of perception. In the meantime much had happened to call in question the whole basis and method of epistemology.

Husserl’s Epoche

Husserl was the last great philosopher in the Cartesian tradition. He saw phenomenological reduction and the programme of the epoche or judgement about the existence of extra-mental reality as a refinement of Descartes methodological doubt.

Husserl, like Descartes never doubted two things: the certainty of his own mental states and processes and the language that he uses to report these phenomena. They both believe that these certainties can survive any doubt about the external world.

Husserl came up with the idea of ‘life world’ which is shaped by our own experiences and by the culture and fundamental assumptions in which we live. The life world is not a set of judgements based on evidence but an unexamined substrate underlying all evidence and all judgement. It is affected by developments in science just as science is rooted in our life world.

Wittgenstein on Certainty

In response to sceptical doubt of the kind presented in the First Meditation, Wittgenstein makes two initial points. First, doubt needs ground and second  genuine doubt must make a difference in someone’s behaviour: someone is not doubting whether he has a pair of hands if he uses his hands as we all do. Descartes would agree with the first point that is why he invented the evil genius to provide a ground for suspicion of our intuitions. But the second point he would answer the doubt he is recommending is a theoretical, methodological doubt, not a practical one.

Epistemology moved from a concentration on the purely cognitive aspect of experience to an emphasis on its affective and practical elements.