By DOUG SHAVER
Here are some miscellaneous commentaries that are not complete enough to be self-contained essays. Many of the initial batch were sitting on my hard drive for several years. Subsequent entries are current unless otherwise noted.
January 28, 2010
During the last decade, within the space of about two years, three books defending atheism became bestsellers. Never before had the advocacy of disbelief gotten so much public attention, and there was suddenly much talk of a "new atheism."
Aside from all the attention paid to the books, there was nothing new about it. Nothing but the books' commercial success, and their coverage by mainstream journalists, was unprecedented. Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and later Christopher Hitchens had nothing new to say against God or religion in general or against Christianity in particular, or in favor of skepticism or the habits of mind leading to skepticism. It had all been said before. These four just happened to say it well enough to sell more books than atheists usually can sell. It is likely that they benefitted from a confluence of other market forces as well, but the point is, there was nothing new about the kind of atheism they were defending.
But then, they were not the ones calling it the "new atheism," either. I have no idea when or by whom that label was invented, but it's easy enough to see why the religious community liked it. There was a clear implication that the old atheism, whatever it might have been, had failed. Otherwise, there would have been no need for a new atheism, right? The unbelievers wouldn't have fixed it if it hadn't been broken. However, since there was not really anything new being said, no new counterarguments were needed. The defenders of faith just recycled all the old apologetics and declared victory like they've always done.
December 20, 2009
One reason it bothers us so to concede the fundamental uncertainty of our epistemology is the questions it raises about how we mary deal with dissenters. One thing the uncertainty ought to do is ground a commitment to some version of libertarianism. If I cannot be entirely sure about what is for my own good, then I should think more than twice about making other people -- or asking the government to make them -- do anything for their own good.
There is probably no discoverable algorithm for picking even a minimal set of epistemological axioms, certainly not more than a handful that every one would agree to. The actual reality of the world we perceive is probably one such axiom. That world includes other people, and the basic similarity of their minds to ours is another candidate axiom. Related to the first is the general reliability of our sensory impressions. Then there is memory and our sense of time. We assume the existence of something we call the past, and we assume that what we remember happening in it did actually happen, for the most part. We assume further that this thing we call time will continue to go on into something we call the future. We can't prove any of these things, but we feel compelled in some way to believe all of it, and no one has ever suggested a good reason for us to believe anything different.
We continually validate these assumptions by acting as if they were so and observing the consequences. We expect certain consequences to transpire if they are true, and we expect other consequences not to transpire if they are not true. In general, the expected consequences are what do transpire, and this reinforces our justification in assuming that the axioms are true. We also observe certain consequences happening to people who act as if these assumptions were not true. Such observations imply that those people were mistaken to act as if the axioms were false. This is the sort of thing Hume referred to as the universal experience of mankind.
None of this would make any sense if there were not something right about inductive reasoning, or at least something that has been right so far. Strict deductive logic informs us unequivocally that we can infer nothing about the future from the past, but it tells us just as unequivocally that no reason exists for doubting that some things, if they have never changed yet, are not now about to change.
The proposition "There exist some characteristics of nature that are constant" is either true or false. We may put on hold the question how we identify those particular characteristics. We are not strictly obliged to affirm either that contants exist or that they do not exist. We can say we just do not know. Logic permits us to have no opinion either way. But life compels us to act either as if there were or as if there were not some constants. There is no way to act undecided. The behavior of indecision is indistinguishable from the behavior of denial.
It seems like another axiom that we should act as if there are constants, since the alternative offers no basis for any decision at all.
October 4, 2009
According to Armstrong and just about every other progressive theist in world, science can tell us what the world is like but cannot say a word about how it ought to be. Scientific rationalism (logos) can give us facts; for values, we need to go somewhere else -- a place called mythos.
It was a failure to observe this distinction that got Christianity into trouble, says Armstrong. When the church started peddling its teachings as a set of facts that all right-thinking people were obliged to believe, then it lost its moral compass along with its credibility, she thinks.
Obviously, a religion with no credibility will have no moral authority, either. Somehow, though, no matter how many skeptics are laughing at the church, anybody who wanted to burn witches, torture heretics, own slaves, terrorize abortion providers, or anything of that sort has managed to find the church well able to give him all the moral authority he might have thought he needed.
Armstrong would have us think that it's not, as Steven Weinberg opined, religion that makes good people do bad things. Rather, she suggests, it is religion trying to be rational that makes good people do bad things. But the suggestion comes without much justification. We're told that the application of reason to religion seems to ruin whatever is good about religion. Why this is so, we never learn from this book.
But if reason and religion make a bad mix, just maybe it's because religion ruins reason. Armstrong passes on the canard about scientific rationalism guiding the likes of Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot, ostensibly proving that logos doesn't need any help from religion to run up its own body count. Leaving aside the occasional claim that communism was a turned into a religion without a god, it appears that these political movements did in fact have a mythos. They had a story that their followers told themselves. From that story, they learned what the world was like and what it should become like; they learned how to live and what to tell other people about how they too should live.
*Karen Armstrong, The Case for God (New York: Knopf, 2009).
October 2, 2009
George wins a lottery against odds of 1 in a billion. Martha wins three consecutive lotteries, each with odds of 1 in a thousand. (Assume that all the lotteries are conducted so as to guarantee a winner with every drawing, and that every contestant buys only one ticket.) Schlesinger observes that Martha's three-lottery sweep ought to surprise us, but not George's winning of one lottery, even though the odds are identical. This is because somebody had to win the single lottery, but there was no guarantee anybody would win all the little lotteries.
Just how is it relevant that in one case there was a guaranteed winner and in the other case there was not? Surely, George himself ought to be no less surprised at his good fortune than Martha should have been at hers. At the individual level, she was no luckier than he was.
Schlesinger's point is that we are justified in suspecting that the small lotteries were rigged to ensure, or at least make it very probable, that Martha would win all three, whereas we have no reason to suspect that George benefited from anything but sheer good luck. Our intuition says his point is well taken. Let's see if we can check that intuition.
In the one case we are not all surprised that somebody won. We are surprised only that it happened to be George. We knew antecedently that one person would win. We just did not know who it would be. In the other case, we knew antecedently that it was nearly certain nobody would win all three lotteries, and so we are very surprised that one person did win all three. If we apportion our surprise according to the odds, then we are equally surprised by "George won the big lottery" and "Somebody won all three little lotteries.'' Why is it that one surprise arouses our suspicion and the other does not? There is a clue in the degree of specificity in the subject of each statement. Let's equalize the specificity and see what happens to our surprise level.
Big lottery: Somebody won -- no surprise; George won -- big surprise.
Little lotteries (all three): Somebody won -- big surprise; Martha won -- big surprise.
Before going any further, we need to get clear on what we mean by "surprise." A surprise is an event contrary to expectations. And on what do we base our expectations? We base them on our assumptions about how the lottery is conducted. If we assume in either case that the lottery was fixed -- either by the winner or by someone acting in their behalf -- then we are not at all surprised by the outcome. We we surprised only because an assumption of honest conduct led us to expect a different outcome. Assuming an honest lottery leads us to expect that neither George nor Martha will win anything.
So then, what do we expect instead?
In George's case, we expect someone else to win. OK, but who else? Well, any of the other 999,999,999 players. Very well. Suppose that Tom, Dick, and Harry were among those others. Would we have been less surprised if Tom had won instead of George? No. If Dick had won? No. Harry? No.
We are surprised that George won because we assumed an honest lottery, but does our surprise justify our questioning that assumption? No, not so long as we would have been equally surprised by any other particular outcome, equally specific. It was slightly more probable that one of the three others -- Tom or Dick or Harry -- would have won, but the disjunction is not equally specific to "George won." Individually, each had the same chance George did.
In Martha's case, what we expected instead of her winning all three lotteries was not that somebody else would but that nobody would. It was certain that three persons, x, y, and z, would win, but it was practically certain that they would not all three be the same person.
Statistically, there was only one alternative to George's winning the big lottery, and that was for exactly one other person to win it. That person, no matter who it had been, had no better chance to win than George did. Thus, if George's winning is sufficient reason for us to question whether the lottery was conducted honestly, then ho would anybody else's winning. But, then we're saying we would be suspicions no matter what the outcome had been. In that case, though, we contradict our claim that we expected someone other than George to win. If we're going to be incredulous no matter who wins, then we must have expected nobody to win.
There were several possible alternatives to Martha's winning all the three lotteries. One person other than she could have won the first lottery or the second or the third. Two people other than she could have won the first and second, or first and third, or second and third. Either of those outcomes was more probable than Martha's winning all three.
We can put it another way. There were at most 2,999 other people who could win have prevented Martha's winning streak, whereas there were 999,999,999 other people who could have prevented George's single win. Whoever won the big lottery instead of George had to beat the same odds he had to beat, whereas whoever blocked Martha's streak needed to beat much lower odds -- just 1 in a thousand.
*George N. Schlesinger, New Perspectives on Old-time Religion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), pp. 124-38, 141-4, 147-8.
September 23, 2009
It is the ultimate ugly question: Why should I believe that? We don't want to hear it, and it is nearly always considered rude to ask it.
This is partly because we have conflated intellectual rights with civil rights. People say the have a right to believe whatever they believe, as if that were all the justification anyone should want. Of course it is a fact that no one can be legally compelled to change their opinion about anything, but "There is no law against it" is not always a good excuse for doing something.
With occasional and highly interesting exceptions, the law is clear as whether anyone has a right to engage in some particular behavior, and there is a broad consensus that the law has authority to decide what the citizens' rights are. With regard to epistemic rights, nothing is clear, partly because there is no consensus about who or whether anyone can or should decide what those rights are.
September 18, 2009
One of the more popular skeptical mantras is "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" (hereafter ECREE). It is commonly attributed to Carl Sagan, and he did indeed popularize it, but he did not coin it. Whatever its origin, though, it is often criticized as an epistemological sham, serving no more purpose than to provide skeptics an excuse for dismissing any evidence at all for any claim to which they are undisposed to give credence. It certainly could be so used, and we can even stipulate that it is so used on some occasions. But no principle or theory is invalidated merely by misuse or misapplication.
The problem of assessing ECREE's validity hinges on the meaning of "extraordinary." What makes any claim extraordinary, and what constitutes extraordinary evidence?
There is a trivial sense in which everyone agrees with ECREE. Would we not all agree that, whatever else "extraordinary" might mean, when it comes to evidence, testimony is about as ordinary as anything gets? If so, then we must note: For every one of us, there are some propositions that we will not believe solely on the basis of uncorroborated testimony, no matter who provides the testimony. We may differ as to which propositions we should place in that category, but the category is not empty for anybody.
For all of us then, some claims do require more or better evidence than other claims do. It simply is not the case, for anyone, that whatever constitutes sufficient evidence for some propositions must be sufficient for all propositions.
But then, how do we, or how should we, decide which claims need better evidence, and how do we decide just what makes certain kinds of evidence better than other kinds?
There is no answer to either question that satisfies all epistemologists. We lay philosophers are on our own here. Regarding ECREE in particular, any evaluation must depend on a definition of "extraordinary," and I have see no non-question-begging definition. Its defenders tend to end up saying in effect that if ordinary evidence fails to convince them that a particular claim is true, then it is an extraordinary claim.
Trying as best I can not to beg too many questions myself, I observe that any given person will call a claim extraordinary whenever he or she regards it -- for any reason at all -- as extremely unlikely to be true. Now, assuming that this person is rational, they will have some reason for having reached this judgment. Maybe we agree it is a good reason, maybe we disagree. It does not matter what we think. It's their reason, and it makes them think that the claim at issue is very unlikely to be true, and therefore they cannot believe it just because somebody says it is so. In such a case, extraordinary evidence will be simply whatever it takes to convince them that the reason they had for making that judgment is wrong.
We can get a little more specific. For some of us, a claim will look unlikely to be true if, were it true, it would contradict some set of beliefs that we antecedently consider very well justified. The claimant is thus telling us that all those beliefs, notwithstanding our justification for believing them, are wrong. And, nobody is obliged to believe such a thing just because somebody says so. Any evidence offered in support of such a claim has to be of such a nature as to provide us with good reason to think that those antecedent beliefs were mistaken, that our justification just was not as good as we thought it was.
This too, I would suggest, is an epistemic position that everybody takes. It is contrary to our human nature to suddenly decide, for no reason but somebody's say-so, that a large number of our fundamental beliefs are in error. Nor do I regard this as a defect in our cognitive nature. Most of the time, it is a good thing if we find it difficult to change our minds about matters of great import.
September 3, 2009
One reason it bothers us so to concede the fundamental uncertainty of our epistemology is the questions it raises about how we mary deal with dissenters. One thing the uncertainty ought to do is ground a commitment to some version of libertarianism. If I cannot be entirely sure about what is for my own good, then I should think more than twice about making other people -- or asking the government to make them -- do anything for their own good.
There is probably no discoverable algorithm for picking even a minimal set of epistemological axioms, certainly not more than a handful that every one would agree to. The actual reality of the world we perceive is probably one such axiom. That world includes other people, and the basic similarity of their minds to ours is another candidate axiom. Related to the first is the general reliability of our sensory impressions. Then there is memory and our sense of time. We assume the existence of something we call the past, and we assume that what we remember happening in it did actually happen, for the most part. We assume further that this thing we call time will continue to go on into something we call the future. We can't prove any of these things, but we feel compelled in some way to believe all of it, and no one has ever suggested a good reason for us to believe anything different.
We continually validate these assumptions by acting as if they were so and observing the consequences. We expect certain consequences to transpire if they are true, and we expect other consequences not to transpire if they are not true. In general, the expected consequences are what do transpire, and this reinforces our justification in assuming that the axioms are true. We also observe certain consequences happening to people who act as if these assumptions were not true. Such observations imply that those people were mistaken to act as if the axioms were false. This is the sort of thing Hume referred to as the universal experience of mankind.
None of this would make any sense if there were not something right about inductive reasoning, or at least something that has been right so far. Strict deductive logic informs us unequivocally that we can infer nothing about the future from the past, but it tells us just as unequivocally that no reason exists for doubting that some things, if they have never changed yet, are not now about to change.
The proposition "There exist some characteristics of nature that are constant" is either true or false. We may put on hold the question how we identify those particular characteristics. We are not strictly obliged to affirm either that contants exist or that they do not exist. We can say we just do not know. Logic permits us to have no opinion either way. But life compels us to act either as if there were or as if there were not some constants. There is no way to act undecided. The of indecision is indistinguishable from the behaviour of denial.
It seems like another axiom that we should act as if there are constants, since the alternative offers no basis for any decision at all.
August 27, 2009
Probably most of what we believe, skeptic and believer alike, we believe on the basis of testimony. If we learned it in school, we believe it on the testimony of our teachers. If we read it in a book or other document, we believe it on the testimony of the author. (Or not; most of us actually do not believe everything we read.)
We believe so much just because somebody says it is so. But none of us believes all testimony. One reason is that we cannot, because there is always contradictory testimony. If one person says X happened and another says X did not happen, or one says Y exists and another says Y does not exist, we know they cannot both be right.
There is much about which no contrary testimony exists. Propositions of this nature, if almost everyone is aware of them, are often called common knowledge. For much else, though, from some people we hear one thing and from others we hear the contrary. In many cases, we are inclined to believe one testimony rather than the other. This is often more or less automatic. Just knowing that some say X and others say not-X, we don't go through any analysis. We suppose either that X is the truth or that not-X is the truth, and that's the end of it. We all do this, all the time.
We have so far said nothing about the nature of any particular testimony. The only thing about any proposition P that makes it testimony is that somebody affirms P, either orally or in writing. And in most cases, if we believe it with little or not thought, then we are presupposing two things. One is that the testifier actually believes what he says. The other is that he has good reason to believe it. Without those two presuppositions, we have no rational justification for supposing that if so-and-so says P, then P must be true.
We may suppose as a generality that these assumptions are warranted, but exceptions to both are numerous, especially the assumption of good reason. Unfortunately, there is no algorithm for determining when we should reject one presupposition or the other, certainly none that is even close to foolproof. Any rule we follow will lead as inevitably to believe some false testimony and disbelieve some true testimony. The very attempt to formulate rules presupposes a prior knowledge of what kinds of testimony tend to be reliable and what kind tend to be unreliable. Thus, if anyone asks What kind, of testimony should I trust? the unavoidable answer is It depends on whom you ask.
Partly for this reason, we and our detractors seem to each other to be guilty of inconsistency. It looks to you as if I reject testimony if it supports your position when I would that testimony in any other case. Likewise, it looks to me as if you believe testimony that you would reject in any other case, provided only that it supports your position. Undeniably, we're all guilty at least once in a while of inconsistency if not outright hypocrisy. That doesn't make it right, but it should make it forgivable.
But if we're inconsistent in applying some principle, it could be because the principle the principle is wrong and we are right. When every rule seems to have an exception, that could be telling us something about human diversity. There are constants of human nature, but for a lot of X's, "Anyone in situation X always tells the truth" is not one of them.
Now some comments on the two presuppositions.
Does the testifier believe it himself? The answer is not always straightforward. Sometimes it depends on what you mean by believe. More than once I have seen a writer introduce or conclude an anecdote with the observation, ''If it isn't true, it ought to be." This seems to be a concise way of saying, "This story might be true or it might not be true, but in either case, (a) it is believable and (b) it contains a Very Important Lesson and so it must be told."
What if the writer is not so committed to literal truth? What if he thinks that, since the story is credible and not known to be false, and since it would benefit people to think it was true, then it might just as well be true. Such a person would be convinced that any disclaimer was an unnecessary and nitpicky distraction, perhaps even counterproductive to the goal of making the world a better place. T0 such a way of thinking, if a story is not provably false and should be true, then it is morally equivalent to being actually true. For these people, the distinction between possibly true and actually true is just for pedants to worry about. There are causes to be served and crusades to be won, and they believe everything they say in the sense that, in their opinion, it is true, but their construal of "true" might differ a bit from yours and mine.
As for having good reason to believe, we can assume that everyone's reasons are good enough in their own judgment. What we should want to know is whether we ourselves would judge those reasons to be good enough. The problem arises when someone asserts P without giving any reasons. We must then ask whether we are justified in supposing that the testifier would not have asserted P without having what we would agree is a good reason.
The answer has to depend on at least two considerations. Let us call the testifier Sam. First, we have to know something about Sam besides his name. An unknown source can not be known t0 be either reliable or unreliable. An unknown source is of unknown reliability. Possibly we will have other reasons to believe the testimony, but if we know nothing about Sam, then we cannot argue, ''It's probably true because Sam said it."
We must also consider how consistent Sam's assertion is with everything else that we thought we knew before we encountered his testimony. Every one of us has a worldview and an epistemic right to use it when evaluating testimony, any testimony. If what Sam tells us implies that our world view is fundamentally in error, then we are under no obligation to believe his testimony for no reason other than
his say-so. We need corroborating evidence that we can evalulate independently -- meaning that we can assess it without giving any consideration to Sam's credibility.
What if lots of other people believe Sam? Then they have a worldview that Sam's testimony is consistent with, and so they are within their epistemic rights to think that if Sam says it, then it must be true. But their rights don't impose any epistemic obligations on the rest of us. If we have a different worldview, then we have every bit as much right to apply it to Sam's testimony as they do to apply their worldview to Sam's testimony.
If it happens to be the case that Sam's testimony is true in fact, then of course we who disbelieve him are making a mistake. And if his testimony happens to be false, then those who believe him are making a mistake. So be it. We all makes mistakes of these sorts all the time. It comes with being human.
What I just said is not to excuse pure obstinacy. My point is solely that nobody has to change his worldview just on someone's say-so. That doesn't mean we're entitled to act like we're infallible. It means that when somebody tells us, "Your worldview is totally messed up," it is always appropriate for us to respond, "OK, you say so. Can you give us any other reason to think so?" And if no more reasons are forthcoming, then it is appropriate to end the debate with that. If, on the other hand, Sam or one of his supporters does produce additional reasons, then we may be obliged to undertake a serious and thorough evaluation of those reasons to see how cogent they are.
August 6, 2009
Reality is the set of all things that exist, and existence implies reality. A thing is real if and only if it has consequences, and a consequence is an observable state of the universe. That is to say, an entity E is a real entity if and only if a universe in which E exists is observably different from a universe in which E does not exist. Such a difference must be implied by any definition of E. If no such difference can be identified, then the existence of E is meaningless, considering that a universe in which it exists is indistinguishable from a universe in which it does not exist.
Clifford's dictum is probably too strong, though of course it depends on how much and what kind of evidence is required to establish sufficiency. I would also distinguish, as I don't think Clifford did, between intellectual wrongs and moral wrongs. But it may be argued that it is always wrong in some sense to be indifferent to whether one’s beliefs are true. All manner of error or fallacious thinking may be excused. Deception can be excused in some circumstances, and even self-deception in rarer circumstances. But to affirm in any general way the moral irrelevance of congruity between belief and truth is to undermine a basis for morality itself. We may argue that in some circumstances some considerations must outweigh truth, but we may not claim that the truth never matters. If a person prefers feeling good to facing reality, he or she should say so.
The rightness or wrongness of any action depends among other things on what will be or could be its consequences. Moral judgment therefore entails the ascertainment of those consequences, and the ascertainment must be true if the moral judgment is to be correct.
This cannot work if it may ever be presupposed that an action will have no morally relevant consequences. Therefore, indifference to truth can never be justified. One may be excused for not believing it, but not for not caring whether one believes it.
The Greeks were probably not the first philosophers, nor the only philosophers of their time. They were the only ones mentioned in the documents that have survived from their time. We cannot say there must have been others. Neither can we say there could not have been any others. Considering human nature, it is not likely that nobody anywhere had had such thoughts before.
Thoughts are immaterial. They do not get preserved in the historical record. Only their tangible expressions get preserved. Architecture, pottery, jewelry, sculpture, and other such cultural artifacts sometimes might convey hints of an ancient people’s mind set, but only written documents can tell us anything specific about the thinking of a community that no longer exists.
There is a notion attractive to many people that all ancient documents are either true or fraudulent (and almost never fraudulent). These people suppose, in other words, that until modern times, all writers either believed everything they wrote — and believed it with good reason — or else were attempting to perpetrate some hoax or fraud. It seems to be supposed that nobody ever knowingly wrote fiction before it became possible, with the invention of printing and the advent of mass literacy, to make money writing fiction. The crucial distinction between fiction and fraud is that the author of fiction does not hope or expect to be believed. He might hope that his readers will be enlightened by his narrative. He will surely hope that they will be entertained. But he will not intend for them to think that the events of his narrative actually occurred.
Although creative writing is nothing new, disclaimers such as “This is a work of fiction” are very new. That is not because modern people have lost an ability, previously common to all people, to distinguish fact from fiction. It is rather because modern legal systems make it prudent for a storyteller to clearly state his intentions. I don’t mean to suggest that all ancient writings should be treated as so many Morte D’Arthurs. In general, narrative works that seem intended to be perceived as factual history probably were so intended. But if ancient readers were no more skilled than we are at distinguishing fact from fiction, then neither were ancient writers. With rare exceptions if any, even the real historians of antiquity had access to little if any primary information. They might in some cases have been able to examine a few documents that recorded eyewitness accounts of significant events. For events occurring within their lifetimes, they might sometimes have been able to interview the actual witnesses. For the most part, though, Herodotus and others like him were recording stories they had heard, or in some cases had read, and some of those stories had been circulating for many generations. The transmission of history by oral tradition is not a reliable process. Many ancient historians acknowledged this fact and were explicit about their skepticism toward certain of their sources. They would say things like “I don’t believe it myself, but according to _____, this is what happened.” We should not infer, though, that wherever they failed to express such doubt, doubt is not now justified.
The reconstruction of history is not a legal proceeding. No relevant evidence is barred from consideration on grounds of having been improperly obtained. History's witnesses cannot be cross-examined. Their testimony is fixed and they get no opportunity to clarify or retract any of it. Furthermore, we rarely have the witnesses’ actual testimony, even in writing. What we have are documents that are copies of copies of copies of documents of which the originals, according to some people, were written by certain individuals. It can never be merely assumed that the extant copies accurately reproduce the originals or that the originals were in fact written by those credited with their authorship. The task of historians is among other things to reach scientifically informed judgments about such issues. The rest of us can either defer to the professionals' judgment or do enough research ourselves to make up our own minds.
A mistaken belief about what happened in the past will not ordinarily have important consequences for the present. It is unlikely to make any practical difference in my life whether or not I believe there was a real King Arthur or William Tell. Of course, I will be thought foolish if I believe something contrary to a universal consensus, but nothing worse is going to happen, and if I care nothing about the opinions of other people, that will be the end of it.
There is a tendency to suppose that particular ideas originate with whoever is first known to have written about them, absent the author’s explicitly crediting predecessors. In many cases, a contrary supposition does not necessarily violate parsimony. Ancient documents usually did not survive unless someone wanted them to. Their default fate was disappearance, which usually meant their vanishing from history. There is no way we can know about a document unless either we have a copy of it or else the document’s existence is mentioned by someone whose work we do have a copy of.
There was no mass production of any books. The cost of making copies was great enough that no copy was made without someone's being powerfully motivated. Such motivation rarely happened, and when it did, the person it happened to usually wanted only one copy. A book had to be considered extremely special -- like perhaps the word of God -- before people with lots of money thought it worthwhile to produce numerous copies of it. And naturally, almost nobody felt any motivation to copy books containing ideas they disapproved of. It did happen, although rarely, that someone would produce quotations from a book in order to argue against the author’s ideas. More often, though, a writer disputing another writer would only paraphrase the other. Considering what can be done with a paraphrase, we often have no good idea what was really written originally. But even a paraphrase, no matter how unfair, would at least let us know of the book's existence and provide some hint of its content.
A book that was considered not even worth mentioning would have vanished without a trace from the historical record. In many cases, it almost might as well have never been written. I say “almost,” because there is no telling how many of the people who did influence history might have gotten some of their key ideas from books that they never mentioned to anyone whose own recollections got recorded for posterity.
Of course, the more popular a book was, the likelier it was to be copied by many people (as well as made mention of in other books). And the more copies that were made at any given time, the likelier it was some of those copies would be copied, and that some of those copies would be copied, and so on until the printing press was invented. Nowadays, the writer of an extremely popular book becomes not only famous but rich. In ancient times, you almost had to be rich to begin with in order to have enough leisure time to write a book, and there was no way for the book to make you any richer. The most that you could hope to gain from the book was some measure of fame.
Truth is supposed to have some connection with reality — another concept for which a universally accepted definition has been elusive. Most of us assume that there is such a thing as reality, though, and that truth is a property of any statement congruent with it. This in a way is a restatement of the axiom of identity: A true statement is a true statement. If that is so, then by definition a statement is false if it has no such congruence. Most of us believe it cannot be both congruent and incongruent, which is all we’re saying when we affirm the axiom of noncontradiction. If we also believe that it must be one or the other, then we affirm the axiom of the excluded middle.
Everything else in logic follows from these axioms. All the technical terms, the Latin verbiage, the rules of inference, the validity of syllogisms, the whole works is nothing but commentary and elaboration on the three axioms. If an argument is valid, it will be impossible for the conclusion to be false if all the premises are true. So then, if the premises happen to be true, then we can be certain that the conclusion is true as well, because otherwise we would have a contradiction. An argument is invalid if it allows the possibility of a false conclusion notwithstanding all true premises. It fails to demonstrate, in other words, that a false conclusion would in fact constitute a contradiction of at least one of the premises. The formal study of logic is an investigation of what it takes to make an argument valid and exactly what is wrong with arguments that lack validity.
A fallacy is any error that renders an argument invalid. Much work has gone into the taxonomy of fallacies. Their common characteristic is that they make it possible for the conclusion to be false notwithstanding that all the premises are true. The only thing being categorized is the way in they do that. Likewise for the taxonomy of valid arguments. The several labels simply identify different ways in which it can be shown that there is no way for the conclusion to be false if all the premises are true.
Until philosophers are kings, or the kings and princes of this world have the spirit and power of philosophy, and political greatness and wisdom meet in one, and those commoner natures who pursue either to the exclusion of the other are compelled to stand aside, cities will never have rest from their evils — nor the human race, as I believe — and then only will this our State have a possibility of life and behold the light of day. (Plato, Republic, Book V)
No one yearns for philosopher-kings anymore, because no one wants kings of any kind. The western world has made up its collective mind that no unelected government can be a legitimate government. The power to govern must be derived from the consent of the governed, and that consent must be conveyed by a vote of those who would be governed.
Plato scorned democracy. His objections to it still find plenty of sympathy among intellectuals, but there is a strong consensus that if there are any solutions to democracy’s disadvantages relative to the alternatives, they must be found within a democratic system, because no alternative is acceptable. One of the most famous comments to this effect is attributed to Winston Churchill: "Democracy is the worst form of government there is, except for all the others."
We have become committed to the ideal that government must be of the people, by the people, and for the people. Rarely throughout human history has it been disputed that government ought to be for the people. The most tyrannical despots have generally made at least a pretense of thinking that nothing was more important to them than their subjects' welfare and happiness.
Government of the people and by the people has been less often considered a good idea. The ancient Greeks tried it for a while and failed, and for almost 2,000 years thereafter most western thinkers supposed that the failure was clear evidence that democracy was not really such a good idea.
The first efforts to rehabilitate it were made in late Medieval England, where a hybrid democracy-monarchy evolved over several centuries. The eventual result was that essentially all political power shifted from the hereditary ruler to the elected rulers. Before that transition was completed, England’s American colonies revolted and set up their own government without even a vestige of monarchy. After a little over two centuries, it seems to be more successful than the Greek experiment was. Most of the world’s nations are now democracies, at least superficially.
So, has Plato been proved wrong? Substituting "nation" for "city," we may ask whether we have achieved any rest from evils. I don’t know anyone who thinks so. Some think that most Americans are better off than most Athenians were. Others will dispute that. But nobody thinks that America or any other democratic nation is a utopia. Even if a few of the evils that existed in Athens have lately been exorcized from our own culture, there are too many remaining, tormenting too many people.
Most of us have had the occasional fantasy about what we would do to eradicate one or more of our society’s pathologies if we were granted absolute dictatorial power. We are not moved to such fantasies by any craving for power. Well, maybe some are, but the rest of us are moved instead by the apparent inability of democratic institutions to take any effective action against those pathologies. The conventional wisdom is that if we must choose, the present pathologies are to be preferred over those that come with any dictatorship, however benevolent, and that in any case there is no reason to suppose that we must choose. There is nothing a dictatorship can do that a democracy cannot do if the people will just decide to do it. It is up to those who see a need for government action to persuade at least half of their fellow citizens to approve the action. Such is the democratic principle, anyway, however more complicated the practice might be.
A commitment to democracy need not imply a fatalistic acceptance of democracy's shortcomings or a pretense that they either don't exist or are no cause for concern. It should instead imply a determination to minimize the consequences of those shortcomings. They cannot be eliminated. If they are the cost of our freedom, then let us gladly pay them, but let us not gladly pay more than we must.
Except in a few very small communities, democracy in real life is not self-rule, strictly speaking. It is rule by a few people who are chosen to be rulers, periodically subject to being denied their ruling authority. As Jefferson put it, they govern by the consent of the governed. The correct term for such a government is not democracy but republic. A republic may be considered a kind of democracy, but it is not a pure kind.
Republican government is often justified on grounds not of quality but expediency. The delegation of power is thought to be necessitated by the unfeasibility of having the citizens of a large state gather regularly to conduct government business. The citizens therefore delegate their governing authority to representatives whom they hold accountable by conducting regular elections. This is thought to be a compromise between the ideal of a pure democracy and the bane of any kind of unelected government.
Of course, there being no free lunch, minimizing one cost tends to entail other costs. If we won't be ruled by philosopher kings but are determined instead to rule ourselves, then perhaps it behooves us to become philosophers ourselves. It is guaranteed that we will always know what we want. It is not guaranteed that what we want will always be good for us, nor that we will always know how to tell the difference between what we want and what we ought to have.
Not everyone can be a philosopher, and not everyone who could be one needs to be one. But rulers uninformed by philosophy cannot be the best rulers, even of themselves. A little learning is indeed dangerous, but there is not any less danger in complete ignorance. Those who have learned a little should be trying to learn more, not to know less.
What shall we take to be our epistemological community? Ideally, we should be as unparochial as we can manage. That is to say we should not assume that epistemic communities coincide with geographical communities. Our neighbors or coworkers might not know what we suppose everybody knows.
This was not an issue through most of human history. Until very recently, nearly all communities were small and culturally homogeneous, and almost everyone spent their entire lives within walking distance of where they were born. Only a handful of the world's major cities were multicultural. Even in those places, the diversity was not so much celebrated as simply tolerated, and often enough not even tolerated, at least not peacefully.
An epistemic community is a set of intercommunicating people all of whom know approximately the same things. Here, "know" is being loosely defined. The shared knowledge of an epistemic community is that set of beliefs that are treated by the community as incontrovertible statements of fact. It is not relevant to this definition whether anyone outside the community thinks any of those beliefs constitute knowledge. A person who was raised in a certain religious environment and, through his formative years, had no significant interaction with people having different worldviews, is not to blame for considering his religion's worldview to be in some sense a self-evident truth.
As a generality with no instructive exceptions, the acquisition of knowledge is never a solitary activity. We get most of our knowledge from other people, and even our private thoughts, however productive of new knowledge they might be, depend for their intelligibility on concepts that we have learned from others. Newton was not the only discoverer standing on the shoulders of giants. We all have mentors, and we all ride their shoulders. Skeptics and other freethinkers are no exceptions. We all believe much because, and only because, we heard it from sources we think authoritative. We skeptics differ from the credulous mainly in whom we consider authoritative, and in our readiness to dispute our own authorities when we think we have good reason to.
Leo Strauss is credited with the observation that conservatism is the doctrine that all the important questions have already been answered. Few liberals, in my experience, exhibit any suspicion that those questions remain unanswered. The difference between conservatism and liberalism is only about what the right answers are.
There was a time, within living memory of the oldest baby boomers, when liberalism also had the distinction of being the only political philosophy that any educated person could espouse. Then along came William F. Buckley Jr., and a few of us discovered that conservatism was not just for troglodytes. But the man who made conservatism intellectually respectable did not quite make it intellectually fashionable.
The prevailing wisdom has it, more than ever before, that the lessons of the past are all cautionary. The study of history is thought to be the study of human folly at best or, more typically, human wickedness. The consensus among most educated people seems to be that our ancestors, with the possible exception of a few painters, sculptors, musicians, and writers, achieved nothing laudatory.
It is easy to get the impression that conservative territory is coterminous with religious territory, that conservatives are religious and liberals are secular. It might even be approximately so. While it may be noted that the explicit disparagement of religion in any general way is thought to be politically incorrect, it is no coincidence that the Christian Coalition was a conservative movement, or that while "Religious Right" is part of our political lexicon, "Religious Left" is not. It comes back to those important questions and their answers. Conservatives think the answers were revealed to men of rare virtue. Liberals think the same thing, but not about the same men. Both sides believe in revealed truth. They just differ about what truth was revealed and to whom it was first revealed.
They also differ in that conservatives usually admit to believing in revealed truth while liberals tend to deny it.
We see things that have happened in history and believe that they should not happen again. We should then ask: What principle, had it been followed by those who did the thing that should not happen again, would have prevented their doing it? We then ask: Have other groups, claiming to follow the same principle, done things that we think should not happen again? Must we not then reformulate the principle?
It may be objected that the basic operations of arithmetic are in fact empirically verifiable – that, for example, whenever two objects are combined with three objects, the result is invariably five objects, thus confirming 2 + 3 = 5.
Let’s make it as simple as it gets and consider 1 + 1 = 2. It is claimed that we never observe a contrary. But what would constitute a contrary observation? Well, what constitutes the observation itself? To what empirical fact, exactly, does “one plus one” correspond?
We begin with an obvious case. I stand in front of a table. Beside the table is a barrel full of apples. I remove one apple from the barrel and put it on the table. Then I remove another apple and put it on the table beside the first apple. There are now two apples on the table. Let us now disregard all the other apples in the barrel. The two on the table were two apples while they were both in the barrel. They were two apples when one was on the table and the other was still in the barrel. And they will remain two apples if one of them is removed from the table and taken anywhere else – into the next room or across the world. The sum of one apple and one apple has nothing to do with their location or movement relative to each other. One apple and another apple are two apples by definition, regardless of their spatial relationship.
Even their temporal relationship is irrelevant. Suppose I rarely eat apples. Many years ago, while living in Florida, I bought one at a grocery there and ate it. This year, now living in California, I buy one from a grocery here and eat it. Thus I have eaten two apples, but those apples never existed at the same time, let alone in the same place.
For further illustration, we can consider how we deal with an apparent falsification. Add one cup of sugar to one cup of water. The result will not be two cups of sugar water, but considerably less. Scientists do not treat this as an exception to 1 + 1 = 2. They treat it as evidence of how matter is constituted. When we observe a fact that seems to contradict mathematics, we adjust our understanding of the facts in order to accommodate the math, if we are scientifically rational.
In common usage, in contrast to academic philosophical usage, a claim of knowledge is essentially a claim of certainty. To say "I know P" is to say "I don't consider it possible for P for be false." This is reflected in the assertion sometimes made, "I don’t believe it, I know it." Such a statement is nonsense, strictly speaking, but it is widely supposed that mere belief implies at least some uncertainty about the thing believed.
This happens not to be an intellectually useful distinction between belief and knowledge, though, which is probably why Plato first tried to establish a better one in the Theaetetus. Twenty-four hundred years later, a good consensus is still elusive, but there is much to be gained from a study of the reasons why the issue has been so challenging.
We often hear that you can’t change human nature. Sometimes it is a complaint. Other times it is an excuse. For people who think certain social changes would be desirable, the intractability of human nature is a problem, because reforms would entail forcing people to act contrary to their natural inclinations. For those opposed to such changes, it means that reform efforts would be futile at best.
There are those, too, who deny the existence of anything like human nature. This is the “blank slate” model, according to which a society (or its ruling class) can manipulate people to act pretty much any way the rulers want them to. In the nature-nurture debate, these are the champions of nurture.