Empiricism and Standpoint Epistemology

In an interesting blog post, Liam Kofi Bright argues that standpoint epistemology is implied by the basic commitments of empiricism.  In what follows, I argue that this is an error.

Kofi Bright’s characterization of standpoint epistemology involves three propositions:

(1) Knowledge is socially situated. (2) Marginalized groups are socially situated in ways that make it more possible for them to be aware of things and ask questions than it is for the non-marginalized. (3) Research, particularly that focused on power relations, should begin with the lives of the marginalized. 

He begins with a simple thought experiment: suppose that one half of a caste system works each day on the factory floor, the other half in the offices, and nobody ever switches.  An empiricist would, he points out, approach the first group, if knowledge about factory floors is sought (and the second if knowledge of the workings of office buildings is sought).  Accordingly, in such a world there is “a clear sense in which knowledge would be socially situated”.  

After adding the assumption that factory workers are worse off than the office workers, so that they constitute a marginalized group, Kofi Bright concludes:

What is more, for at least some things… the marginalised are clearly in a better position to know what's going on and ask pertinent questions, for just the same reason as above.

What is unclear is why there is “more”.  What exactly does marginalization add, epistemically?  Kofi Bright has thus far argued that factory workers know more than office workers about how factories operate simply on account of their social situation, which as an empiricist must mean because the experiences provided by their work in factories are not available to the office workers.  That’s proposition (1).  But how does adding the assumption that factory workers are worse off lead to (2), especially when the conclusion is based on “just the same reason as above”?  How does the fact that one position is better than the other at gaining knowledge of factory work, because it involves factory work, lead to the conclusion that marginalization is a further epistemic advantage?

This part of the argument is based on the premise that the marginalized caste has more to be concerned about, such as “the orders telegraphed in from the office blocks, which they have every reason to pay attention to lest the food rations cease”.  The idea is that if one must worry about orders from the office blocks, on pain of starvation, then this will keep one sharper and more focused on the relationship between the castes in comparison to those who are not subject to such pressure.  

Let me note, to begin, that the suggestion that fear causes the mind to sharpen and focus, rather than dull and blur, is not a tenet of empiricism but is in fact an empirical proposition concerning human psychology.  It may very well be true, of course, but it does not follow from empiricism (which is an a priori philosophical theory), so if the empiricist believes it, s/he ought to base that belief on the empirical evidence in its favour.  Accordingly, it is this evidence that has to be taken to favour (2), not (1) nor empiricism itself, which as a philosophical commitment must remain neutral on this question, at least so far as it offers up a priori arguments. 

In fact, this point cuts a bit more deeply.  For, in order to comply with (1), empiricist standpoint theory must insist that it is the social psychologists, not empiricist philosophers, who are best placed to know of the relationship between social conditions, such as oppression, and psychological states such as belief (I assume beliefs are necessary for knowledge).  Moreover, the typical empiricist would agree, I suppose, that these psychologists must do more than haphazardly observe factory-office interaction, and then draw whatever conclusions occur to them off the top of their heads.  Rather, they need to engage in the proper selection and collection of data followed by appropriate scientific analysis, such as statistical tests, comparison against established theories, etc.; in short, reasoning their way toward a conclusion.  So, it is not simple observation of factory-office relationships, but the proper application of scientific methodologies to properly attuned observation, that leads to knowledge of the power relations in play.  After all, psychologists can make mistakes and occasionally have to retract or modify their conclusions (which is just to say that proper reasoning is required).  Accordingly, social situatedness does not lead  straight to knowledge.  What is required is the proper gathering of evidence combined with good empirical analysis.  So, as a matter of a priori philosophical argument, the question of the relationship between a particular social situation, such as ‘factory worker’, and a particular knowledge claim remains open.  

The only way to resist this conclusion is to insist that the epistemic advantage enjoyed by the social psychologists (who properly apply the scientific tools that allow for correct inferences from properly collected data) just is their social position; so it really is social position that holds knowledge even in this case.  This, however, is simply to beg the question because it builds epistemic mastery into the definition of a social position.  In other words, what makes knowledge reside in a social position here is the fact that a particular social group has better epistemic tools than its competitors.  But even a rationalist foundationalist can agree that S is epistemically privileged if and only if S is epistemically better than its rivals: this is trivial.  So, empiricism implies standpoint theory either on the basis of synthetic a priori claims, or else by trivializing it.

A part of Kofi Bright’s argument refers to incentives:

…if you had limited time and resources to interview people and find out about race relations in some town in 1947 Alabama, which group do you think [you] should spend more time getting to know, should you want to include in the research team… I take it that an empiricist, somebody who thinks that knowledge tracks degree of experience and incentive to really think things through, is going to want to favour the marginalised group here.

What is important to note here is that this implies that it is not the mere existence of incentives that epistemically advantages a social group but, instead, the fact that the incentives lead the members of the group to reason better, to “think things through”.  However, the incentive to think better does not always lead to better thinking.  A highly motivated lover of physics, who wants desperately to prove his intellectual worth, may enter a Ph.D. program, work hard, and nevertheless graduate with less knowledge of physics than his disengaged, wealthy classmate who has no real interest in physics but wants to pass the time until her trust fund matures and who happens to be a mathematical prodigy who easily masters physics at the highest levels.  

In general, incentive is a necessary condition for achievement, not a sufficient condition.  After all, who has more incentive to redress persistent economic inequality in western societies than the marginalized?  That incentive has not led to increased equality over the past fifty years.  In fact, inequality has worsened over that time.  The fact is that marginalized people need more than incentive to fight inequality; they need the means to do so.  The powerful are happy with our current distribution of wealth, so they ensure that roadblocks to change exist.  Overcoming roadblocks requires more than incentive and, of course, the world is filled with roadblocks on the path to knowledge.

            So, it is not mere incentive that provides someone with epistemic advantage but, rather, the combination of the incentive with the skill and opportunity to both learn more than others and to succeed in doing so.  What this means is that before we can determine whether social position is epistemically relevant, and if so how, we need to know which tools best serve in gaining knowledge and how they should be applied.  In other words, we need to determine the proper standards of evidence and reasoning before we can assess the epistemic status of a social group.  But this is just to say that standpoint theory is false.  So I disagree with Kofi Bright when he asserts that empiricism’s implication of standpoint theory is obvious, “really quite a banal point”.  I think, on the contrary, that empiricism is incompatible with standpoint theory.

            Let me conclude with an example.  To this day, here are those who study and immerse themselves in astrological writing, theory, and practice and who take themselves to have a great deal of knowledge concerning the relationship between celestial bodies and human affairs as a result.  I disagree on the grounds that astrology is a false theory, based on Aristotelian teleology, which has no role in contemporary astronomy.  What the demographic category ‘astrologer’ amounts to, or what demographic groups astrologers occupy, is simply irrelevant; what I care about is whether they are applying correct physical models properly.  It is the thinking, not the social position, that matters.

Subjectivist Truth

These thoughts are inspired by Liam Kofi Bright’s blog post on subjectivism about truth (see here).  In the post he insists that we distinguish subjectivism from relativism.  The latter is the doctrine that what is true for one may not be true for another, so that each thinker offers a distinct perspective or reference frame against which truth is determined.  The problem with this view, he argues, is that it presupposes an objective conception that can survey all viewpoints at once and assert that each has its own extension for the truth predicate.  Resisting this, the subjectivist insists that truth is exhausted by his or her own viewpoint: what is true for him/her is what is true, period.  There are no other viewpoints to consider according to subjectivism.

 

Kofi Bright insists that subjectivism does not fall prey to the objection that the subjectivist cannot make sense of error because the subjectivist can accept that: (1) others believe things that he/she disagrees with, so those others can be wrong; and (2) the subjectivist him/herself has believed things in the past that he/she no longer believes, in which case the subjectivist can make sense of having been wrong.  What the subjectivist cannot make sense is simply being wrong in his/her beliefs right now but this is not a problem, according to Kofi Bright, because “that is just to say: they are self-consistent”.

 

Okay, so if this is right, then one core idea of subjectivism is:

 

            (S1)      Right now, all of my beliefs are true.

  

But how could the subjectivist combine this with something else that Kofi Bright insists they can admit, namely:

 

            (S2)      In the past, I have believed falsely?

 

Presumably, (S1) applies to any time one wishes to consider: at the time, the subjectivist has no false beliefs.  On the other hand, some past times include the subjectivist believing falsely.  So, according to (S1), the subjectivist has no false beliefs right now.  According to (S2), tomorrow it could be the case that the subjectivist had a false belief that day before, i.e. right now.  The only way this could be the case is if something that is truly believed today can properly be false tomorrow.  

 

Now, it is perfectly commonplace to revise one’s past beliefs, of course, but normally this results in the judgement that what one believed in the past was false at the time; one just didn’t realize it.  In this case, however, it seems that the subjectivist cannot rightly claim that what s/he believed in the past was false without admitting that there was a time at which she had a false belief, in which case (S1) can only be said to apply to one time, whichever time is present.  In short, the subjectivist must belief that her/his beliefs right now cannot contain falsehood, but that this same does not apply to any times other than the present.  

 

What this suggests is that subjectivism is also a kind of presentism, according to which only the present is real, so one cannot generalize or quantify over non-present times.  ‘For all times, t: P’ can only mean something like ‘From the perspective of right now, for all times, t: P’, which does seem in accordance with subjectivism.  However, this isn’t without difficulty.  First, it requires an answer to the various objections against presentism, which is no easy feat.  Secondly, it renders subjectivism hard to motivate, for consider that if it is possible for the subjectivist to be wrong at any past time, on what basis can s/he believe that the current time must be an exception?  Presumably, on the presentist basis that only the present is real at all, but then that robs the view of any substantive sense in which the subjectivist was wrong: a past mistake is not a real mistake because the past is not real.  Unreal mistakes are not mistakes, it would seem.  So it is hard to see how to combine (S1) and (S2).

 

A different kind of worry for the subjectivist is considered by Kofi Bright, and that is the idea that we can simply make things true by believing them, and this is a problem because the mind just doesn’t seem to have that kind of ontological power.  He insists that the subjectivist may very well have a number of causal beliefs that rule out this kind of power.  Nevertheless, if the sincere belief that P suffices for the truth of P, then there is some potentially troubling connection between the two here.  Kofi Bright replies that the subjectivist can distinguish between constitution and causation and 

 

insist that while they think a belief's being true is constituted by their believing it they are not saying their belief causes it to be true, nor that its being true causes the state of affairs it describes to obtain.

 

So let us consider the idea that what it is for a belief to be true is for me, the subjectivist, to believe it, without attributing causal power here.  Whatever constitution amounts to, it will entail a biconditional:

 

            (S3)      It is true that P iff I believe that P.

 

I think that (S3) causes trouble for subjectivism in that it will commit the subjectivist to some strong and dubious propositions.

 

To see this, consider that if the subjectivist is to have anything like the worldview of contemporary natural science among her/his beliefs, then s/he will believe that we are biological creatures who evolved through time under selection pressure; at the very least, that we are physical entities, at least in part, who were created by physical, chemical, and biological processes.  So, let’s call this the first premise:

 

            (P1)     We are evolved or at least created biological creatures.

 

Secondly, since truth is constituted by belief, the subjectivist must believe that she is capable of holding beliefs:

 

            (P2)     I, the subjectivist, am capable of holding beliefs.

 

Thirdly, since, within her/his subjective belief-set, we assume, with Kofi-Bright, that something close to the modern scientific worldview exists, we assume that s/he agrees that reality contains some kinds that cannot form beliefs (rocks, soil, water, stars, etc.), so:

 

            (P3)     The world contains entities that are not capable of holding beliefs

 

In other words:

 

            (P3*)   Not everything is capable of forming beliefs.

 

Fourthly, let us assume that the difference between that which is capable of belief and that which is not is accounted for buy some difference in the nature of the kid under consideration, so that  if one is capable of forming beliefs, then one has a capacity that other things lack:

 

            (P4)      Belief-forming kinds have a capacity that other kinds lack.

 

Fifthly, believing anything depends on the existence of the capacity to form beliefs.  Without this capacity, there would be no beliefs.  Put another way, that a belief exists entails that the capacity to form beliefs exists.  So:

 

            (P5)     The existence of a belief depends on the capacity to form beliefs.

 

Sixthly, therefore:

 

            (P6)     If I believe that P, then I have the capacity to form the belief that P.

 

Let us return, now, to (S3), and substitute:

 

            (B1)     It is true that (I have the capacity to believe) iff I believe that (I have the capacity to believe).

 

Let us assume that we can use the T-schema:

 

(T)        It is true that P iff P

 

on the left hand side of (B1) to obtain:

 

            (B2)     I have the capacity to believe iff I believe that (I have the capacity to believe)

 

I will follow Kofi Bright and insist that this is not to attribute some strange causal power to the mind.  It is not that my belief that I have the capacity to believe reaches out into the causal realm and creates my psychological structure but that, somehow, having that structure is constituted by having the belief that I have that structure:

 

            (S4)      That I have the capacity to believe is constituted by my belief that I have the capacity to believe.

 

Even this, however, seems wrong for it would entail that having the capacity to believe depends on the existence of a belief, but a belief cannot exist without the capacity, so the dependence runs the other way around.  The capacity has logical and explanatory (if not causal) priority.  To allow the existence of belief-forming capacity to be constituted by the existence of a belief is to conjure up something out of nothing: the belief exist which explains the existence of the capacity to believe, which makes no sense.

 

There are, of course, many places a subjectivist may try to block the argument, but none of them is particularly appealing:

 

1.     S/He can reject the idea that we are biological creatures, products of our environment

2.     S/He can insist that beliefs exist without the capacity to form beliefs

3.     S/He can insist that even if A constitutes B, B can still have logical or explanatory priority over A.

4.     S/He can reject whatever logic underlies moves such as those from (P5) to (P6)

5.     S/He can insist that, as subjectivist, the subject cannot be expected to be subject to the same explanatory standards or requirements of anything else: we are sui generis.

 

In a sense, (1) and (5) amount to the same: the subjectivist, as a believer, is unlike or outside of the rest of nature, and indeed this can be seen even more clearly by substituting the proposition that I exist in (S3):

 

            (S5)      That I exist is constituted by my belief that I exist.

 

Here is the image of a belief conjuring the existence of the believer, not causally of course, but still: the dependence here is the wrong way around.  

 

On the other hand, (2) would suggest that beliefs are not to be viewed as dependent on the believer: they are free-standing states, independent of a cognitive structure.  So, rocks, soil, and stars might form beliefs after all.  

 

With regard to (3) whatever constitution is, it must surely be a relation of some kind of priority such that the properties of the constituted kind depend on the constituting matter.  If not, then it is hard to see what constitution could amount to, but I am willing to entertain suggestions.

 

Finally, there is no easy way to sum up how to respond to (4) because there are many non-standard logical systems, many of which may have much to be said in their favour.  Still, I think it is safe to say that this shows that the subjectivist takes on some very strong commitments.  After all, moves like that from (P5) to (P6) are simply applications of rules like universal instantiation, and if we must reject those to accept subjectivism, then subjectivism must have a very compelling defence, for otherwise we must simply ask: why not just reject subjectivism instead?

 

Mind-Independence and Value

Over at The Electric Agora, Daniel Kaufman posted an interesting essay on morality and objectivity (here), which carries on a debate he has been engaged in with Spencer Case.  I left the argument below in the comments there, but thought I would repost it here as it does constitute something that I take to be an implication of views I hold elsewhere.

Here is an argument for a kind of realism about moral values (in what follows 'Real' with a capital-R means 'mind-independent').

First premise: realms of what you call the objective but non-Real have the following property: the rules, norms, and facts involved are what they are in virtue of acts of human deliberation and decision. There are publicly accessible facts concerning the rules of tennis, for example, but they are subject to revision by us: should a governing body, or sufficient numbers of people, decide that there are new rules, then there are new rules. 

Second: in order for there to be realms whose rules/norms/facts are determined, at least in part, by human deliberation and decision, then human beings must be the kind of creatures who can deliberate, and that requires that we have a certain kind of structure, for the truly structureless cannot give rise to anything, let alone deliberation. The nature of this structure cannot be determined by acts of deliberation, for the latter depend on that structure for their existence. 

Conclusion: there is structure to human beings that is Real, i.e. mind-independent. Let us assume for now that this structure is biological.

Here is a neo-Aristotelian take on all this. It is plausible to suppose that biological structure leads to objective facts about human beings, and so can determine, for many aspects of being a human, that there are some conditions or states (the virtues) that lead to flourishing and some (the vices) that diminish flourishing: some things promote health, for example, whether we like it or not (eat your vegetables). So, in reasoning about moral matters, i.e. how to live best as a human being, the realm of the Real will be a factor – not necessarily the only factor, but one nonetheless. Hence, we can conclude that moral reasoning must be at least partly Realistic.

This seems rather persuasive to me. All the same, I in fact lean toward subjectivism when it comes to most of what is contained in actually existing moral codes, which generally strike me as the attempted universalization of local, contingent, and historically conditioned preference-sets. People who argue about morality often seem to think that their own success can be attributed to the specifics of their moral or cultural or social code – which are, therefore, projected outwards – but it seems more likely that, since most systems include some people who flourish, it is something that is common to all systems that grounds well-being, and that is what contributes to flourishing given our nature. Put another way, most moral argumentation seems to be conducted without considering human nature, and so is like arguing over Einstein’s Field Equations without considering physics or math. 

So I guess I would say that I lean toward *theoretical* Realism about values but, in most cases, *practical* subjectivism. This is, admittedly, a strange position (though perhaps something not too far from Plato).

Anyway, if you have any interest in formulating a response I would be interested in it, but I found your essay interesting and though-provoking regardless.

Special Relativity, Entropy, and the Direction of Time

Assuming that, as far as perception and experience are concerned, space is a three-dimensional, and time a one-dimensional, projection of a four-dimensional space-time, the following question arises: why does the brain, a material organ, break down a four-dimensional, relativistic space-time into three spatial dimensions and one temporal dimension? There is really only one answer that suggests itself, and it is that as biological products of natural selection our survival depends on tracking entropy: we need to find pockets of low entropy in order to discover sources of work that we may employ in order to maintain our own relatively low entropy, and since the entropic gradient is aligned along the temporal dimension, it is to our benefit to evolve to single out that dimension from the other three in order to focus on it and thereby be able to track entropy. That is, it is important to our survival that we find low entropy systems in order to secure energy.

This seems straightforward enough but it does, however, raise a deeper question: why is entropy organized along the temporal dimension alone; why not along another dimension, or two or more dimensions? Why did evolution find it necessary to endow us with perceptual and cognitive faculties that see the world as a three-dimensional array of material and objects that are evolving in a fourth dimension rather than some other way?

We know that in Minkowski space-time, neither spatial distances nor temporal durations have geometric significance on their own: only their combination in terms of Einstein’s Interval Formula:

     I² = dt² – ds²

has physical significance. What this entails is that there is no preferred set of spatial axes for the universe, no sense in which one can be right or wrong in labelling one direction “east” rather than “north” or “up” rather than “sideways”, and so on. All such spatial directions are significant only in relation to an observer; the universe itself doesn’t single out a particular direction in space.

Accordingly, if entropy increase were to be correlated with a spatial axis, it would be impossible for evolution to track it because it is impossible for physically real correlations to exist in relation to one or more spatial axes. The pattern of entropic increase would simply disappear from all spatial perspectives except one, i.e. from those corresponding to the rotation of the particular choice of axes. If a pattern is deeply dependent on a directional convention in this way, then there is no way for the non-directed, probabilistic processes of evolution to latch onto it, for there is, in reality, no probabilistic pattern to be detected: the pattern would be an observer effect, just like some works of art are constructed so that only when looked at directly is an image visible; all other angles show no discernible pattern - there is no pattern inherent to the image itself in such a case. In essence, if entropy were to be aligned with one or more spatial axes, the pattern of the second law of thermodynamics would simply disappear with movement in space, rendering impossible to have both freedom of movement and the ability to track entropy.

Given the non-directionality of space, entropy increase could not be aligned along any spatial dimension, so there could be no fitness relevant pressure to track any such gradient spatially. The only remaining option is that what we evolved to detect, namely the entropy gradient, is aligned with the fourth, temporal, dimension. But how could this be the case? According to (I), temporal duration frame-dependent – how much time there is between any two events will vary, though in such a way as to preserve the interval, I, between them. Moreover, the direction of time does not make an appearance in (I) since whether we put a positive or negative sign in front of the (frame-dependent) measure of time will make no difference to the interval because the value for time is squared in (I). This is one of the senses in which it is thought that Relativity counts against the common-sense notion that time passes from past to future.

If we leave things here, however, then we are faced with a problem: we know that entropy is coordinated with the temporal dimension, but if that dimension lacks an inherent direction, then there is no reason for entropy to uniformly increase or decrease along it: any such pattern would only be apparent, like a spatially oriented second law of thermodynamics, that exists only from some points of view. So if there is a genuine entropy gradient along the temporal dimension, which would account for our having evolved to single out time from space, then we must conclude that as a matter of fact, if not mathematical necessity, the fourth, temporal of the universe is inherently directed or asymmetric.

However, precisely because the temporal duration is squared in (I), it makes no difference to the mathematics of the interval to suppose that there is an objective, physically significant direction to time. In other words, even if there is a real difference between +t and -t, the interval will wash that out by squaring the value. So, the mathematics of Special Relativity is not impacted by the assumption that time is directed in the following sense: at each four-dimensional space-time point, a unique direction is defined, from the past light cone to the future. We can think of it as an array of vectors originating at the point and directed toward each point on the interior of one half of the light cone only; alternatively, we can state that between any two time-like separated space-time points, there exists a vector that defines the past-future orientation. This way, local temporal asymmetry is relativistically invariant and from the frame of reference of the surface of the Earth, there is a genuine pattern for the non-directed mechanisms of evolution to stumble upon and register for future iterations of variation-selection-inheritance.

In other words, the very fact that the four-dimensional, invariant Interval is broken down by the brain into a three-plus-one dimensional cognitive-perceptual model provides excellent reason to believe that the direction of time is not an illusion but, rather, a relativistic invariant.

Why does this matter? Well, it matters because there is a strong current of argumentation in the philosophy of time/physics to the effect that both the passage and direction of time are illusory, mere mental projections onto a fully symmetric underlying physical reality. If the foregoing argument is correct, then this is unlikely to be true simply because it would be unable to account for the fact that evolution reached a wide-spread and relatively stable equilibrium in constructing human beings to experience and understand the world as 3+1-dimensional rather than 4+0-, 2+2, or 1+3-dimensional. More fundamentally, it cannot account for the fact that entropy is aligned with any of the dimensions in (I) at all: if there is no fact of the matter as to which direction in space-time is locally future-oriented, there would be no entropic gradient in the first place for evolution to eventually track. In other words, without an objective temporal direction, there could be no entropic gradient at all since from one temporal perspective the universe would consist of mostly improbable transitions and that perspective would have to be considered equally valid compared to the opposite perspective in which probable transitions are the rule. But any viewpoint according to which a highly probable and highly improbable set of transitions need to be considered equally valid must surely be incorrect.

So, it seems that the best way to view the implications of Relativity Theory for the debate over the nature of time is that it combines with the theory of evolution to suggest that Einstein-Minkowski space-time includes a temporally oriented vector field defined at every space-time point that determines the future light cone from that point. The vectors themselves are perhaps to be viewed as unit vectors with frame-dependent lengths determined by the time-dilation implied by Lorenz Transformations.

The upshot for the philosophy of time is that a naturalistic picture of time that combines Einstein-Minkowski space-time with Darwinian evolution is not only compatible with asymmetric, i.e. directed, time but in fact demands it. In short, the direction of time is not an illusion. Furthermore, so long as we can define temporal passage in terms of directed temporal ordering, then this view is compatible with objective temporal passage as well. Since, as I’ve argued elsewhere, there is no problem with a deflationary, relational conception of temporal passage, we can conclude that the Theory of Relativity is no threat to the idea that time genuinely passes from the past toward the future.

Understanding as an Alethic Concept

One of the ways in which I have defended the value of the humanities is by reference to understanding, as in “the humanities help to improve our understanding of ourselves and our environment, and this is important”.   This is both initially plausible and helps to lay out a kind of value that is distinct from the gathering of knowledge, which the sciences seem to do better than the humanities. 

 

One advantage of taking this route is that “understanding” is a rather wide-ranging term that has many meanings, so people can import various, positive, interpretations into the phrase “improve our understanding”.  This is, of course, also a disadvantage, for it renders the basic defence ambiguous.  So what does it mean to say that the humanities improve our understanding?

 

Among the rather familiar and straightforward meanings of “understanding” we could list:

 

·      The knowledge of linguistic meaning: e.g. “x understands English”

·      A sympathetic or gentle approach or demeanour: “x was very understanding of y’s situation”

·      An informal agreement: “x and y came to an understanding”

·      A belief state that is the result of inference or observation: “I understand that you have changed jobs”

·      An assumption, perhaps unspoken or hidden: “it is understood that everyone will speak respectfully at department meetings”

·      A cognitive ability: “it is impossible for non-human animals to understand that moral obligations exist.”

 

When it comes to the value that humanities offer, I think, however, that the best meaning is something along these lines:

 

·      To understand something, P, is to realize or learn the significance of P; e.g. “I understand that this is a very complex issue that impacts x, y, and, z and will require further investigation”

 

That seems to capture what the humanities are after: to discover and impart methods, tools, writings, interpretations, and arguments that will allow us to learn something of significance about something, which may be that that something is in fact significant.  So, understanding, will result when some argument or analysis makes clear to us: (1) that P is significant/important; or (2) what is significant/important about P.

 

This indicates that understanding is similar in certain respects to explanation.  An explanation, E, of P makes P clear to us or, as I would say, enables us to see why or that P is true, either by entailing P, rendering P probable, or fitting P coherently into our prior body of knowledge.  

In the case of explanation, however, E can explain P even if E is false.  For example, Aristotle explained why material bodies sink in water by appeal to (1) hylomorphism, which includes the claim that bodies (“substances”) include an immanent form; (2) a theory of space that is structured formally, with “earth” at the center, surrounded by, in order, “water”, “air”, and “fire”; and (3) a principle which states that anything with form F will naturally seek space that is F.  Given (1) – (3) it follows that rocks, “earth”, will sink because the “earth” form of space is below the “water” part.  So, (1) – (3) are explanatory.

 

They are not, however, true.  Accordingly, I suggest, Aristotle’s explanation cannot provide us with any understanding of the motions of bodies. In particular, it cannot offer any additional understanding than what was contained in the prior observation that rocks fall in water, fire rises in air, and so on.  Aristotle’s attempt to move from those straightforward observations to a systematic elucidation of what is going on when bodies move ultimately fails for the simple reason that it is, so we currently believe, false: we no longer accept his account of the structure of space and reject his formal account of attraction (bodies don’t naturally move, we think, but instead naturally continue in their current state).  So even though Aristotelian physics neatly explains motion in virtue of providing a set of propositions that entails a great deal of what we observe, it does not offer understanding of motion.  This is, of course, not unique: it is straightforward to construct a set of propositions that are false but entail or make probable some other proposition that is known to be true.

 

Let’s consider a made-up case in which x is afraid of the dark and posits that this was caused by x’s abduction by extraterrestrials one night years ago, which left a deep-seated fear that is brought to the surface in the dark.  This would explain the fear: the proposition that x was abducted combined with the proposition that this was traumatic and that trauma can leave a lasting fear that is associated with the time of day during which the initial event occurred, entails or renders probable a current fear.  However, x does not in fact understand why the fear exists, if the abduction never occurred.  Further, a non-occurrent event cannot increase x’s awareness of the significance or importance of the fear: the abduction proposition adds nothing on that score either (no more than supposing x’s fear is caused by unicorns or magic).

 

What this suggests is that the understanding sought by the humanities is in fact an alethic concept: whatever it is that increases understanding must be true.  The same applies for a good explanation, so understanding is something like a good or correct explanation of the significance of something.

 

If this is right, then it immediately raises a question: how can the humanities improve our understanding if they do not either: (1) discover the truth, at least in part; or (2) apply truth-preserving methods to previously discovered truths?  In the absence of truth, there can be no understanding, so the humanities must either be able to determine the truth or else take the truth and derive something from it that clarifies the importance of something.  

 

In the latter case, this process of derivation must be truth preserving or probability/coherence increasing; otherwise it will not in fact increase our understanding.  It may of course be possible to do something in addition to determining the truth or an alethic consequence from what is known.  That is, the process of increasing understanding may involve deriving something, P, from something known as well as situating this truth in some kind of context that is enlightening.  But again, if this context is not factual, situating a truth in it cannot improve our understanding, so there is a kind of alethic constraint at all stages of the process.

 

So, if all this is roughly along the right lines, then any humanities project aimed at improving understanding must, at least in part, either discover the truth or else work with the truth to derive further truths that are significant or can be contextualized with other truths in such a way as to produce an improvement in our awareness of the significance or importance of something, which must also be of genuine or true significance, for otherwise we have no understanding (if something isn’t truly significant, then we cannot really understand its significance.)  

 

In short, if we want to improve our understanding of P, then:

 

1.     P must be true

2.     The theory (story/account/proposition/…), T, that improves the understanding of P must be true

3.     T must have some truth preserving or probability raising relation to P (otherwise it cannot help us see that/why P is true)

4.     T may also do more than (3): for example it ay relate P to a context, C, or another understood proposition, Q.

5.     If (4), then C or Q must be true as well.

 

I don’t, in other words, see how the appeal to “understanding”, in the defence of the value of the anything, gets a discipline off the hook of either being truth-producing or at least truth-preserving.  So, any field that aims at understanding must employ methods that have one or both of these properties.  This, of course, includes the humanities.

 

One worry about (1) – (5) above is whether it is compatible with a robust notion of fictional truth, i.e. one in which fictional propositions can be literally and directly true, as in “that Centaurs have four legs is true” instead of “that Geek myth-makers said that Centaurs have four legs is true”.  If one takes it to be true that Centaurs have four legs, then presumably we could offer a study to increase our understanding of Centaurs themselves, which seem never to have existed, rather than our understanding of their story-tellers, which do or did exist.  This seems awkward.  I am not sure how much of a problem any of this is, but it seems to me to have a rather felicitous implication: there is reason to adopt an indirect account of fictional truth in which propositions about fictional entities are in fact about the acts and thoughts of writers and story-tellers, in which case the study of mythology can aid in our understanding insofar as it aids in our understanding of human beings who make up tales and the societies and times in which they live.  This seems perfectly respectable, so long as it is alethic in the ways mentioned above.

More on "Theory" in the Humanities

This is a follow up to the previous post that cast a skeptical eye on the ability of the humanities to produce knowledge or meaningful understanding.  I want to comment here on the possibility of constructing a humanities based “theory” to elucidate the world, ourselves, or the relation between the two.

To see deeper into the problem with the assumption that something such as a theory emanating from a humanities discipline can reliably provide information about the world – including the mind of an author – I will consider the description of one such theory, Derrida’s deconstructionism, as provided in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP).  What is deconstruction according to this article?  One of Derrida’s earliest answers is described as follows:

Simply, deconstruction is a criticism of Platonism, which is defined by the belief that existence is structured in terms of oppositions (separate substances or forms) and that the oppositions are hierarchical, with one side of the opposition being more valuable than the other. The first phase of deconstruction attacks this belief by reversing the Platonistic hierarchies.

Supposing that Plato’s alleged hierarchies are mistaken, it is unclear what value there is in reversing them.  The reversal of a false hierarchy isn’t necessarily a true one.  For example, if we reverse the false hierarchy, men are superior to women, we get the equally false, women are superior to men.  Moreover, if Plato himself is guilty of some form of complex fiction writing, i.e. failing to engage in anything other than his own abstractions that lack grounding in reality, then reversing them is to similarly play in the realm of fiction, much like analyzing Tolkien’s works for hierarchies among Orcs, and then reversing them; what could that possibly teach us?  Perhaps it could teach us something about the opinions of the author of the reversal, but without both more context and a relatively sophisticated psychological theory applicable to the author, it is not easy to say what would be learned here.

The SEP entry continues:

On the basis of the reversal… we can see that something like a decision (a perhaps impossible decision) must have been made at the beginning of the metaphysical tradition, a decision that instituted the hierarchy…

This is plausible.  Decisions – assumptions, presuppositions, etc. – as to the rules and axioms of investigation must be made prior to any inquiry.  It does not follow, however, that such decisions are arbitrary, unfounded, unjustified, or not conducive to discovering the truth.  They may be just the right decisions required to uncover the structure of reality, and the reasoning they initiate may be logically sound.  What this means is that there is no reason to believe that the mere act of reversing the result of such decisions will lead to a better account of reality. 

Now let us turn to the second phase of deconstruction:

The previously inferior term must be re-inscribed as the “origin” or “resource” of the opposition and hierarchy itself.

There are a couple of problems here.  First, as just noted, because the need to rely on “decisions” – axioms, rules, etc. – in order to get inquiry off the ground does not entail that the decisions are bad or conducive to falsehood, it follows that we cannot assume that any hierarchy that results is necessarily wrong.  Hence, to elevate what Plato saw as the less valuable of two parts of a hierarchy – say matter over form – is not necessarily to do anything important or revealing.  Nor does it follow that the inferior term must have some fundamental or central role in the creation of the hierarchy.  Perhaps Plato elevated form over matter because he was in fact obsessed with the material – maybe he feared the physical body – and felt some paradoxical need to overwhelm it – put it in its place – in his theory; but perhaps not.  The mere fact that there is a decision here tells us nothing, because similar decisions are required for any inquiry, including Derrida’s. 

In general, from the fact that a hierarchy is incorrect, it doesn’t follow that the previously inferior term is the origin of the hierarchy itself.  Consider:

            Non-human animals are more intelligent than humans.

This is, apparently at least, the wrong way around, so we must reverse the hierarchy:

            Humans are more intelligent than non-human animals.

It does not follow that re-inscribing “non-human animal” as the “origin” of this opposition and hierarchy is correct, or even makes any sense.  On the contrary, it appears that if anything it is a preference for, or bias toward, the human that is the origin here.  At any rate, it is the relation between the two that is the cause of the hierarchy, not any one on its own, so to propose a theory of reversal and inversion on a priori grounds is simply suspect.

Secondly, unless we assume that Plato himself discovered something deep and true about the essence of reality in his hierarchical oppositions, he just messed up the order, any act of inversion will tell us nothing.  So… how do we know that Plato was right here?  Suppose someone divides the world into red things and geometric objects, making the latter more important than the former.  This clearly seems to be a hierarchy that tells us nothing about reality, so inverting it so that the red things are more important will similarly tell us nothing. 

Well, perhaps I am not properly considering the nature of this re-inscription, so: 

How would this re-inscription or redefinition of appearance work? Here we would have to return to the idea that every appearance or every experience is temporal. In the experience of the present, there is always a small difference between the moment of now-ness and the past and the future… this infinitesimal difference is not only a difference that is non-dualistic, but also it is a difference that is, as Derrida would say, “undecidable.” Although the minuscule difference is virtually unnoticeable in everyday common experience, when we in fact notice it, we cannot decide if we are experiencing a memory or a present perception, if we are experiencing a present perception or an anticipation… Insofar as the difference is undecidable…[it] destabilizes the original decision that instituted the hierarchy.

There is certainly work in the experience of time that suggests that any particular experience is a structured mix that combines perception of what is occurring at that time with memory and anticipation (see, e.g., Horwich 1987) – experience has content that is temporally structured to include a past, present, and future component.  What is not clear, is whether there is no way to distinguish these at all; even fuzzy boundaries can be boundaries, and who knows what cognitive science might discover.  Moreover, it is unclear why this undecidability would invalidate Platonic arguments about, say, the form of the good, or the nature of mathematical knowledge.  There may be an argument for this, but since Platonic metaphysics is the result of a long period of contemplation and analysis, there is no obvious move from a feature of momentary perceptions to the results of long, thorough contemplation. 

When reflecting upon the nature of number or goodness, one may be doing little more than staring out of a window, pen and notebook in hand, mulling over arguments of Frege and Russell, or Kant and Aristotle.  The perception of the trees and birds beyond the pane of glass may – though may not – be an essentially entangled mix of what is seen then with memory and anticipation.  It is not at all clear, however, what impact this has on one’s reflection of Frege’s attempts to translate the Peano axioms into axioms of the predicate calculus.  Suppose, as one read The Foundations of Arithmetic, one’s perceptions were consistently temporally mixed in just this way: what is the significance of this fact for reflecting on whether the logical reduction of arithmetic is sound?  It would seem that the inability to separate the temporal components of experience would have no bearing on this.  Further, even if one cannot separate out the components of experience at the time they are happening, it doesn’t follow that one can’t look back on one’s experience with the benefit of additional information and then disentangle the strands, which might lead to a principled way to do so in general.  In short, it is not at all clear how the alleged features of temporal experience would undermine the choice of axioms and rules of inquiry that are required to get any investigation off the ground.  Conversely, if such features do destabilize all such choices, then they would undermine the principles that undergird the deconstructionist inversion.

So this is an example of a theory applied to a text that is supposed to result in something interesting and informative about reality.  However, if the text itself is simply off base, then the move proposed by this theory will not likely tell us anything interesting or informative; at least it gives us no reason to suppose so because it offers no means of correcting the text other than rearranging its parts, which is of not help if the text is fundamentally incomplete.  Moreover, we have to have some reason to believe that the inversion proposed by the theory is a good move: likely to be informative, corrective, truth-conducive, or what have you.  For this, more than a priori reflection on texts is required, because what we want to know is when texts are better or worse at getting things right.  Inverted Plato vs. Regular Plato leaves us in no position to judge.  It is like being told that A believes that P and B believes that not-P.  Without evidence from outside their belief states, we have no way of adjudicating between them.

So, until we can demonstrate that humanistic writing, that isn’t grounded in math and science, can reveal something about reality, then any attempt to reverse, pervert, subvert, or otherwise undermine previous such writing cannot be said to amount to knowledge of anything.  What, then, can it tell us?  I am not sure.  Perhaps something about the mind of Derrida, but I am not sure what that would be without more empirical evidence about him and how human minds work in general; i.e. not without some science. 

Obviously more has to be said to make the case.  In particular, I am, here, relying on a single source about a single aspect of a single author’s work, so it would be illegitimate to generalize from this single case.  It is, however, illustrative of the point I made in the previous post: that a non-scientific theory of texts applied to texts to create other texts does not seem to be the kind of thing that will generate knowledge of the world; at best it would generate knowledge of the applier of the theory, but even that would be suspect without detailed empirical investigation.  So, the question is what the theory – in this case a principled inversion – could possibly teach us about the world.

Let me end with a limited defence of Plato.  It seems to me that his “elevation” of forms had to do primarily with an observation, that Euclidean geometry, which is an a priori and formal axiomatic system, manages to correctly describe space.  He proposed, along Pythagorean lines, that the explanation of this is that reality itself is ultimately mathematical in nature, so that it shares its form with the Euclidean axioms.  If this is correct, then the basic structure of reality is timeless and unchanging, in which case the idea that the world is a place of change and flux must be some kind of mistake or illusion.  This may be wrong, but it is reflection on the basis of a mathematical-physical knowledge and observation.  So, to return to the original point, it is far from obvious why a general “inversion” of the resulting system would be true, interesting, or valuable.