Here is an excerpt/summary from substance and shadow
Charles M. Vest, as the president of the Massachussets Institute of Technology, compiled a tiny sampling of the many things empirical science is ignorant of. A few points from his list:
science does not know how we learn and remember, nor how we think and communicate, nor how the brain stores information, nor what the relationship between language and thought is. Science does not know how living cells interact with nonliving matter. It does not know what the origin of the universe is, nor how old the universe is, nor what the universe is made of, nor what the ultimate fate of the universe will be.
Empiricists only truthfully speak of what they believe they perceive and thus what they believe they know. They are not in any position to be judgemental about other beliefs for instance, the belief in God and the survival of the soul beyond death. Yet perplexingly, famous empiricists are wont to publicly declare, as did A.J. Ayer in an address at London's Conway Hall, that the deity does not exist and there is no world to come.
I conclude with a question to which I do not know the answer. How far should our judgment of the worth of a person's life be affected by the fact that we take it to be based upon an illusion? Let us take the example of a nun, belonging to a strict order, leading a life of austerity, but serene in the performance of her devotions, confident that she is loved by her deity, and that she is destined for a blissful future in the world to come. ... The question is whether it matters that the deity in whose love she rejoices does not exist and that there is no world to come. I am inclined to say that it does matter.
The question that matters for an empiricist does not pertain to the belief of a nun. It pertains to his own belief that sense-data is the only truth. How can that be empirically proven?
In this connection, a term that crops up in recent philosophical writings is reflexivity. It comes from the Latin reflectare, to bend back. To reflexively criticize an opponent means that the critic's argument bends back to refute his own position:
Sawing off the branch one is sitting on is not generally regarded as good practice in human life, and such damaging reflexivity must always be seen as a warning that something is going wrong with our reasoning. (Roger Trigg)
For an empiricist to argue that God and the soul exist only as subjective beliefs is reflexive, for the empiricist is sunk in his own subjective belief that sense data is knowledge. Reflexivity rears its head whenever someone who believes that sense data is all we can know won't admit his belief is not knowledge. For example, how can the sceptic who says “We can't know the truth” know that his statement is the truth? In recent times, an attempt by empiricists to deal with the problem of reflexivity has resulted in statements like this:
At no stage are we able to prove that what we now know is true, and it is always possible that it will turn out to be false. Indeed, it is an elementary fact about the intellectual history of mankind that most of what has been known at one time or another has eventually turned out to be not the case. So it is a profound mistake to try to do what scientists and philosophers have almost always tried to do, namely prove the truth of a theory, or justify our belief in a theory, since this is to attempt the logically impossible.
That sums up the view of the philosopher Karl Popper, who argued that science cannot verify anything. It is only able to falsify, to disprove claims of knowledge. A truly scientific statement is one that gives a high degree of information and is subjectable to rigorous attempts to disprove it. As long as it passes the tests, it may be called knowledge, although it can never be absolutely true. Sooner or later, as testing methods advance, the statement will be proved false.
Now, science cannot test a believer's claim that God exists. Therefore science will never prove that God is false. But neither will a believer be able to prove that God is true, for according to Popper there is no way to prove any truth. So while God may exist in some way, He does not exist scientifically, hence science need not be bothered. The strategy of ignoring God statements and other dogmas as nonscience, instead of attacking them as nonsense, spares science from reflexively becoming a dogma itself.
At least, that was Popper's hope.
There is one problem, though. If Popper's theory is checked against his definition of scientific knowledge, it must be deemed unscientific. Falsifiability fails as science because of the very paradox of self-reference it was supposed to be immune to. There is no way the theory of falsifiability can test itself!
How do we know that sense data is the truth?
To rephrase the question, how do we know that what the world seems to us to be, is what the world really is?
We won't find the answer in a report on what the world seems to us to be. And a report that tells us with complete certainty that there is no truth beyond what the world seems to us to be is a report about what is outside the range of our senses. Such a report cannot be empirically true, for it does not correspond to perception.
Charles M. Vest, as the president of the Massachussets Institute of Technology, compiled a tiny sampling of the many things empirical science is ignorant of. A few points from his list:
science does not know how we learn and remember, nor how we think and communicate, nor how the brain stores information, nor what the relationship between language and thought is. Science does not know how living cells interact with nonliving matter. It does not know what the origin of the universe is, nor how old the universe is, nor what the universe is made of, nor what the ultimate fate of the universe will be.
Empiricists only truthfully speak of what they believe they perceive and thus what they believe they know. They are not in any position to be judgemental about other beliefs for instance, the belief in God and the survival of the soul beyond death. Yet perplexingly, famous empiricists are wont to publicly declare, as did A.J. Ayer in an address at London's Conway Hall, that the deity does not exist and there is no world to come.
I conclude with a question to which I do not know the answer. How far should our judgment of the worth of a person's life be affected by the fact that we take it to be based upon an illusion? Let us take the example of a nun, belonging to a strict order, leading a life of austerity, but serene in the performance of her devotions, confident that she is loved by her deity, and that she is destined for a blissful future in the world to come. ... The question is whether it matters that the deity in whose love she rejoices does not exist and that there is no world to come. I am inclined to say that it does matter.
The question that matters for an empiricist does not pertain to the belief of a nun. It pertains to his own belief that sense-data is the only truth. How can that be empirically proven?
In this connection, a term that crops up in recent philosophical writings is reflexivity. It comes from the Latin reflectare, to bend back. To reflexively criticize an opponent means that the critic's argument bends back to refute his own position:
Sawing off the branch one is sitting on is not generally regarded as good practice in human life, and such damaging reflexivity must always be seen as a warning that something is going wrong with our reasoning. (Roger Trigg)
For an empiricist to argue that God and the soul exist only as subjective beliefs is reflexive, for the empiricist is sunk in his own subjective belief that sense data is knowledge. Reflexivity rears its head whenever someone who believes that sense data is all we can know won't admit his belief is not knowledge. For example, how can the sceptic who says “We can't know the truth” know that his statement is the truth? In recent times, an attempt by empiricists to deal with the problem of reflexivity has resulted in statements like this:
At no stage are we able to prove that what we now know is true, and it is always possible that it will turn out to be false. Indeed, it is an elementary fact about the intellectual history of mankind that most of what has been known at one time or another has eventually turned out to be not the case. So it is a profound mistake to try to do what scientists and philosophers have almost always tried to do, namely prove the truth of a theory, or justify our belief in a theory, since this is to attempt the logically impossible.
That sums up the view of the philosopher Karl Popper, who argued that science cannot verify anything. It is only able to falsify, to disprove claims of knowledge. A truly scientific statement is one that gives a high degree of information and is subjectable to rigorous attempts to disprove it. As long as it passes the tests, it may be called knowledge, although it can never be absolutely true. Sooner or later, as testing methods advance, the statement will be proved false.
Now, science cannot test a believer's claim that God exists. Therefore science will never prove that God is false. But neither will a believer be able to prove that God is true, for according to Popper there is no way to prove any truth. So while God may exist in some way, He does not exist scientifically, hence science need not be bothered. The strategy of ignoring God statements and other dogmas as nonscience, instead of attacking them as nonsense, spares science from reflexively becoming a dogma itself.
At least, that was Popper's hope.
There is one problem, though. If Popper's theory is checked against his definition of scientific knowledge, it must be deemed unscientific. Falsifiability fails as science because of the very paradox of self-reference it was supposed to be immune to. There is no way the theory of falsifiability can test itself!
How do we know that sense data is the truth?
To rephrase the question, how do we know that what the world seems to us to be, is what the world really is?
We won't find the answer in a report on what the world seems to us to be. And a report that tells us with complete certainty that there is no truth beyond what the world seems to us to be is a report about what is outside the range of our senses. Such a report cannot be empirically true, for it does not correspond to perception.
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