Try to imagine engaging in inquiry, any kind of inquiry, but
without constraints: none whatsoever.
Any term, symbol, phrase, or utterance could mean anything at any time,
and could change at any time. One might
utter ‘causation is local’, and by the time one had begun to say ‘local’, the
meaning of ‘causation’ could be different.
‘A and B’ could entail ‘A’, or ‘not-A’, and it may not be that ‘A’
represents the same thing in all three occasions. Similarly, no assumption about the nature of
reality is given: maybe the world has structure, maybe not; maybe whichever of
those is the case changes from moment to moment; maybe it both has and lacks
structure at all times; and so on.
Again, imagine that there are no constraints whatsoever on the inquiry
so that no assumption about the inquirer’s tools, linguistic or otherwise, or
the subject of inquiry can be made.
Under such conditions, any inquiry would be still-born,
unable to proceed past its starting point (it couldn’t even really have a
starting point, but let’s ignore that for the time being). Moving forward under such conditions would be
like trying to steer a car in outer space: it would be impossible to find the
traction required to move. Any attempt
to interpret evidence would stall without the ability to settle on meanings
for, say, basic logical terms such as ‘all’ or ‘the’; any attempt to draw a
conclusion would falter without some standard of argument evaluation; and so
on. Therefore, in order to advance
inquiry at all, in any direction, certain constraints have to be put in place,
if they aren’t there already.
This is, I think, the only sensible interpretation of the
claim that even science rests on untested assumptions. It is also the reason that philosophy and
science are essentially intertwined, each inextricable from the other. Here is a nice statement of the situation:
“Science
has always included a large philosophical component, whether at the level of
basic presuppositions concerning evidence, causality, theory-construction,
valid inference, hypothesis-testing, and so forth, or at the speculative stage
where scientists ignore the guidance offered by well-informed philosophers only
at risk of falling into various beguiling fallacies or fictions” (Christopher
Norris, ‘Hawking Contra Philosophy’, https://philosophynow.org/issues/82/Hawking_contra_Philosophy)
None of
this, of course, entails that the assumptions amount to superstition, mere game
playing, wish fulfillment, or anything else that is non-truth-conducive. Indeed, they may be just the presuppositions
needed to get at the truth; they may not be, of course. Whether suppositions about evidence,
causality, hypothesis-testing, and so on, are good ones is a further matter of
debate; their mere existence is a necessity either way, so that alone will not favour
one conclusion or the other.
Now, we can
draw certain conclusions from the foregoing.
1.
We
know – or, so I shall assume here – that various branches of human inquiry
exist: physics, biology, math, economics, history, etc., whatever one thinks of
them, are part of the world we inhabit.
2.
It
follows that these branches of inquiry depend upon and involve constraints –
assumptions, or presuppositions – that allow them to get off the ground.
3.
It follows that human beings are the kinds of
creature that have the ability to recognize naturally occurring constraints –
suppose, for example, that the laws of logic exist mind-independently and we
discover them – or else have the ability to create and impose constraints that
allow inquiry to proceed.
4.
It is absurd to suppose that we endow ourselves
with either or both of these abilities.
That is, we cannot suppose that human beings come into creation as
formless entities that lack all structure/constraint, and then proceed to endow
ourselves with the ability to construct theoretical presuppositions. The reason for this is that endowing
ourselves with the ability to come up with theory-enabling assumptions is itself
a kind of ability or capacity, in which case what we do, in conducting inquiry,
presupposes that we have capacities.
5.
Therefore, it follows that we have certain
capacities that exist prior to any theory construction or evidence gathering in
which we may engage.
The same goes for the species as a whole: we cannot explain
how Homo sapiens or, indeed, species
in general arose if we do not presuppose that the pre-human world contained the
structure and capacities that would give rise to the variation-selection-heredity
loop that leads from the earliest life-forms to what exists today.
Grand conclusion: it cannot be the case that all structure
is human-constructed structure. Our
ability to construct presupposes structure.
Nature is, at least in part, independent of us and not of our making.
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