WESTERN PHILOSOPHY - A BENIGN FAILURE ?


March 15th 1999


The next issue, Number 34, will appear on April 15th 1999.





The main thrust of this article is that the philosophers we think of as 'Western' - that is, those in ancient Greece several centuries BC and their identifiable successors to this day - have failed, broadly, in what we have to presume has been their main intention, namely to arrive at a definitive overview of the human scene, an overview of such compelling credibility that it would command general acceptance among informed persons. In short, their aim must have been, and continues to be, to achieve the elusive TOE ..... Theory of Everything.

It is further claimed herein that to succeed in generating an intelligible and credible TOE would be disastrous. Philosophical reflection is a prime example of the precept "it is better to travel hopefully than to arrive".

(Note: 'Western' is explicit because my knowledge of, say, eastern philosophies is almost nil E.S.).


The Essence of PROJECT PHILOSOPH

'Doing philosophy' is to expose and to question tacit assumptions - particularly those of 'common sense'. To do so is not to imply that common sense is always common nonsense - far from it. There has to be a process of natural selection among common sense notions, a process of natural rejection of notions that prove, even to the meanest, most conformist, intelligence, to be false or misleading. What remains, after such natural rejection has taken its toll, is of some value some of the time. To challenge its tacit assumptions is to reveal that little of it indeed is of truly dependable value all of the time.

EPISTEMOLOGY

First let us consider epistemology - the theory of knowledge. The central question here is .... on what grounds can it be claimed fairly that xyz is indeed the case? (Where xyz is a statement that might be true or might be false but, to start with, we don't know which and we are trying to decide).

Answers to the question can take many forms:

We know xyz is indeed the case because .......

1 ...... people generally, or my parents, or my teachers, or my church, or my whatever .... say it is.

BUT this is merely shifty; "it is true because 'they' say it is" shifts the question to them and gets us nowhere with solving the basic problem - on what grounds, so help us, do 'they' know that xyz is so?

2 ...... it is self-evidently the case when you simply think about it.

BUT what may be self-evident to one intelligent and informed person can be the opposite of what is equally sincerely self-evident to another because, perhaps, "when you simply think about it" may be very different for different people because of differing experiences of life colouring their thoughts.

3 ...... 'my voices' say that xyz is the case.

BUT even supposing that your 'voices' are not entirely imaginary but inspired by, say, God then how do you actually know that they were not inspired by the devil cunningly tempting you into error? In any cases the 'voices' may be giving a rather ambivalent message which you might misinterpret. You may merely be 'hearing what you want to hear'.

4 ...... our established view of things entails the truth of this particular proposition; if xyz were not true then we would have to deny a great deal that we already know to be the case.

BUT it can be that our established view is seriously deficient and that the discovery that xyz is actually not the case could be the lever whereby that faulty view can be overturned and replaced by a better one - i.e. one that embraces both the falsity of xyz and all the things that the former faulty view did account for satisfactorily.

In passing, Conan Doyle was no great epistemologist; the words he put into the the mouth of Holmes -"when we have eliminated the impossible then we are obliged to accept the improbable" - are simplistic. There may be a variety of improbabilities to choose from so we are then left with the task of identifying a hierarchy of improbabilities.

5 ...... experience - including observation, and experiment coupled with logical reflection upon the results of these - show that it is indeed so.

BUT our experience is a small part of what might be experienced and it can be an unrepresentative part at that; our observations can be slanted by the circumstances in which they are made and by the fallibility of our senses themselves; our reflection upon all these (possibly misleading) data may be slanted by deep-seated presuppositions; our senses cannot validate our senses and logic cannot validate logic without, in each case, lapsing into circularity.

Part of received logic is the principle of induction - the notion that absolutely dependable truth can be established by the accumulation of particular instances.

It cannot.

The fact that during the fifteen years of my marriage, so far, my wife has not put poison in my tea does not prove that she will never do so; her not having done so, for so long, strictly speaking entitles me only to be surprised (to say the least) if, one day, she does so. We cannot, other than by circularity, claim that induction is absolutely dependable; it is simply invalid to argue that induction often works and therefore it must always work.

There is an old saying that "experience is the best teacher"; note that the old saying is not that experience is an infallible teacher. Indeed, there is another old saying that "there's always a first time". Folk wisdom sometimes encapsulates philosophical acumen better than many a philosophical treatise!

6 ...... by acting as though xyz were the case we can make things that actually work - we can actually exercise a degree of control over the world around us. Therefore xyz must be the case.

BUT it is perfectly possible that real achievement can be based upon flawed theory'; the achievement therefore does not prove the truth of the theory.

For example, most of the machines and structures that we have, and use successfully, were designed, and could be redesigned, on the basis of classical nineteenth century physics. The fact that such physics has been radically superseded has not resulted in those machines and structures suddenly failing - has it? The Forth Bridge may be falling down - but don't blame Max Planck and Albert Einstein!

What then is the epistemological value of knowhow in relation to underlying theory? The most you can claim, epistemologically, for any dependable knowhow is that the underlying theory must be sufficiently true to support the knowhow - not a very grand inference about the way the world is! 'Knowhow' does not, rigorously, validate 'knowthat' - it merely fails to falsify it. New data may do so and often does.

Doubtless other objections also can be made to every one of these general reasons for claiming that xyz is the case. It seems that we cannot be really absolutely sure of knowing anything in the sense of 'knowthat' although we can have a firm hold on much 'knowhow' ...... so long as we can depend upon the uniformity of nature - itself an unfalsifiable truism and hence rigorously unverifiable. Epistemology suggests that certainty is elusive indeed and that a reasonable probability 'that xyz is the case' is about the best we can usually achieve.

This is no big deal after two and half millennia of earnest head scratching by the great and the good.

SOME METAPHYSICAL PROBLEMS

Then again, there are a number of very important deeply underlying questions that seem obvious enough but which, on reflection, prove to be very difficult indeed. They are indeed deeply underlying problems and there is, to this day, remarkably little agreement about their possible solutions.

One of these is .... what precisely do we mean by causation - 'cause and effect' - and how can we tell that causation is actually happening in any given case?

Intuitively we see cause and effect all around us; indeed if we wish to achieve a given effect we, naturally, set in train what we believe to be the appropriate cause. (I wish to make my wife happy so I send her flowers on her birthday). Experience tells us what causes what but, as has been suggested, experience can be misleading but we have to take a gamble on that. (Perhaps my wife's lover has sent her a far better bunch of flowers thus leading her to be unhappy about my long-suspected inadequacies - not the effect I had intended and had indeed achieved in previous years).

More fundamentally, can we arrive at a general account of causation? David Hume, one of the greatest philosophers, tried to show that, when there is "constant conjunction" between events, such as C, and events, such as E, then we can say that C has caused E to happen.

This seems to be reasonable but there are counter-examples that undermine it as a general account of causation.

One is evident in the ordinary thunderstorm; we never hear the bang before we see the flash - the constant conjunction is, on the contrary, that the bang follows its flash. Would we be right, following Hume, to say that the flash causes the bang. Indeed not!

We have very good reason to think that the flash and the bang are joint, and simultaneous, effects of a common cause - the relevant electrical discharge between cloud and cloud or cloud and earth. We only see before we hear because light travels so much faster than sound.

Another counter example - which Hume might perhaps have relished - appeared in the letters page of The Scotsman newspaper at the time of the 'Gulf War' in the early 1990's. A correspondent wrote that he had known that the war was going to happen because there had been so many prayers for peace; the man may have had Hume's 'constant conjunction' in mind.

On this Humean basis we have to infer that our world is presided over by a perverse deity who can be relied upon to do the opposite of what is prayed for. This bizarre inference has to be unacceptable, albeit for different reasons, both to theists and to atheists alike.

Perhaps the true reason why prayers for peace are so often followed by war is the "joint effects of a common cause" mooted above in the case of the flash and the bang - a situation full of war potential will result in prayerful fear of war as surely as it results in its actuality.

Two more of these deceptively simple truly basic questions are .... do we genuinely have any freedom of choice ? Are there truly any chance events ?

We undoubtedly experience both choice and chance; I decide or not (and it is up to me) to light a fire in my living room. To do so, I not only rely upon my tacit acceptance of cause and effect. A lighted match ....... and which particular match I take is surely a matter of chance; I make no deliberate selection and each match feels just like every other as I put my fingers in the matchbox ....... will start the fire but also I assume, tacitly, the dependability of induction and the uniformity of nature in that I assume that air, paper, wood and coal will continue to behave as they have done on countless previous occasions.

All that is almost embarrassingly obvious but, nonetheless, there are people who assert, dogmatically, that every event whatever is wholly determined by its antecedents and that ipso facto both choice and chance are illusory - the alleged fact of determinism ordains that choice is merely a subjective conceit and that "chance' events are merely those whose antecedent causes we have failed to identify.

Well, OK, dogmatism is allowed - provided the dogmatist admits it honestly - but many of then do not. Many support their dogmatic determinism by the unfounded view that induction is an absolutely dependable route to truth - that determinism is true because there are so many instances of it and that once supposedly chance events are not really by chance because so many of them have, subsequently, had their causes identified.

There is also a whiff of incoherence in the determinist position; its adherents have presumably thought about it and have chosen to be determinists.

As with epistemology, there are at least some parts of the metaphysical front line where there is stalemate. This, again, is no big deal after two and half millennia of earnest head scratching by the great and the good.

MORALITY AND ETHICS

Next consider moral philosophy - ethics.

It is an undoubted fact that people generally have a moral sense. Even among thieves there is honour; if one of the gang double-crosses the others, or perhaps 'shops' them, then this often results in awesome revenge based upon moral indignation. Even among horribly violent convicts there is huge moral revulsion - and often terrible retribution - against child abusers in their midst.

The central question here is .... on what grounds can it be claimed fairly that abc is indeed the morally right thing to do or, equally .... on what grounds can it be claimed fairly that def is indeed the morally wrong thing to do? (Where abc and def are actions that it is open to us to take if we so decide).

This central question is, necessarily, meaningful ONLY on the basis that the agent (the one who contemplates the act abc or the act def) has the requisite freedom of choice in the matter. If there is no such freedom ...... either because of overwhelming coercion in the given instance or because free choice is, in any case, illusory because of determinism being the true way of the world ..... if there is no such freedom then the question is not a moral one but a causal one.

Given that we entertain moral values, where do they come from?

Some of the relevant considerations are similar to those set out in the earlier paragraphs on epistemology. People very often claim to know that action abc is right while action def is wrong ; the points already made, in paragraphs 1, 2 and 3 of the epistemology section, apply, somewhat similarly, to claimed knowledge of moral imperatives.

Aside from those echoes of epistemology there are two main ways in which people seek to find their moral bearings. They are, technically, the deontological and the consequentialist ways, respectively. The one refers to moral duties allegedly known to the agent in advance of a proposed action; the other refers to the likely consequences of the action as assessed by the agent. Both approaches are full of pitfalls.

"Duties allegedly known to the agent in advance" usually have a religious slant. To act in accord with God's Will is held to be right; to act in defiance of that Will is held to be wrong. That is all very well - until we come to consult the many (self-appointed?) experts on God's Will as to what He requires of us in respect of what are clearly moral issues.

These experts are anything but unanimous about the rights and wrongs of a huge list of questions: the rights and wrongs of capital and corporal punishment; pacifism or the possibility of Just War; the rights and wrongs of meat eating, vivisection, blood sports; the rights and wrongs of a range of 'life issues' - abortion, contraception, euthanasia; the rights and wrongs of many 'marriage issues - divorce, remarriage, extra-marital sex, of 'recreational sex; the rights and wrongs of sex education, of homosexuality.

All told, God's Will is rather like beauty - it is certainly in the eye of the beholder but it is less certainly anywhere else.

Aside from these operational difficulties, attendant upon the God's Will basis for morality, there is also the trap of simplistics. Advocates of God's Will usually draw up checklists of do this and do not do that and, to make these checklists readily usable, they have to be either grossly perfectionist or teasingly general. In either case they very often result in implausibility or hypocrisy.

Consequentialist ethics is not a great deal better. This is because the consequences - the total consequences - of a proposed action are very hard to judge and, even if they are judged correctly, you still have to decide whether they are are good consequences or bad ones.

As with epistemology and the metaphysical questions already alluded to .... we are not very far along the road to a TOE. About the best we can do (it is what most of us do anyway without much help from would-be philosophers) is something that is called rule utilitarianism. This is simply that experience shows that general but not absolutely invariable adherence to certain rough and ready rules is mostly for the best most of the time. Be truthful, be kind, respect other people's privacy, care for the planet ... are just about it and if, as often happens, these precepts can make conflicting demands upon us then - hard luck - we have to do our best to sort it all out somehow.

This 'sorting out' process is often dignified by the term ethical inquiry.

This, yet again, is no big deal after two and half millennia of earnest head scratching by the great and the good.

So, I claim that the case is made for seeing Project Western Philosophy as something of a failure .... a failure to find the 'Holy Grail' of a TOE.

But it is a benign failure, if failure it be, for two reasons.

One is that, without systematic philosophical inquiry, our untutored common sense might lead us to even more spurious certainties than we labour under as it is. That is one up for philosophy.

The other is that, if experience is anything to go by, a generally accepted Theory of Everything is likely to an instrument of tyranny. (Rampant Christendom, the "Marxism' of the USSR, the dreary nastiness of Cromwell's England, the abominable Taliban ..... spring to mind).

Any TOE can so easily become a PFA - a Pretext For Anything. Long may TOE elude us!

I suggest that the best we can do is to embrace the minimum of ideology and the maximum of forbearance. Perhaps sceptical minimalist humanism is an appropriate lingua franca that might keep us from each other's throats.

Now that would be a big deal!







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