This is largely what is called a 'correspondence theory of truth', which was an approach pioneered by Bertrand Russell, and also G.E. Moore, who were at Cambridge together at the start of the twentieth century. There is still a thriving trade in correspondence theories, but it must be noticed that the very existence of a thriving trade in them is a sign that these have not managed to 'win out' in any serious way over competing approaches. Indeed, I think part of the situation that distinguishes the twentieth from the twenty first century in these terms is that the very idea of one theory 'winning out' has been largely abandoned, with reasons both good and bad.
I am intrigued by your suggestion "all the entries in our minds either correspond to, or are abstracted from entities in objective reality" - consider the 'snark' in a game of 'snark hunt', in which folks are taken on a hunt for an animal that in fact does not exist in any conventional sense. Do you want to say the 'snark' is abstracted from entities in objective reality...?
Your chosen approach here softens some of the corners of correspondence theories in ways that most proponents of such approaches usually want to avoid, but I find your approach (and others like it) intriguing, and it brings to mind also remarks in David Hume 1739 book A Treatise on Human Nature:
"All our simple ideas in their first appearance are deriv’d from simple impressions, which are correspondent to them, and which they exactly represent."
I continue to ponder that claim - it is decidedly non-trivial.
However, I would caution you against using 'fact' as a synonym for 'evidence', as what is claimed as a 'fact' and what the evidence actually consists of are two radically different things. Nowhere is this clearer than when you get into the use of p-values in statistics, and a variety of related forms of mathematical sorcery that obfuscate what is the case. Evidently there is a way to make 'facts' and 'evidence' align, but the common usage of 'fact' slips wildly away from 'evidence' - and this is especially so wherever statistics are the most common toolset.
For instance, a pharmaceutical company claims has an experiment that shows that the unvaccinated suffer more deleterious effects than those that received their vaccine candidate. They claim this shows their candidate is 'safe and effective' (as a fact, and as another way of reporting this specific evidence). But the experimental design treats a person as 'unvaccinated' until two weeks after the administration of the candidate. So any adverse reactions within two weeks are attributed to 'unvaccinated' subjects, who in fact have received a dose but not yet had two weeks pass. This is not a hypothetical, this rather scurrilous methodology has indeed been used - even though it could show saline solution to be a 'safe and effective' treatment for just about anything! (This is because any time your methodology assigns different timespans to two arms, the longer time span arm has more background events e.g. heart attacks.)This is just one example of how 'fact' and 'evidence' can become blurred in ways that are not helpful.
Another issue to consider: the attempt to corral 'social reality' from 'physical reality' runs into problems when you start to recognise the overlaps between entities in social reality and the claims made about physical reality. This, I'd say, has been a recurrent theme in recent philosophy of science. A good example here is the electron - because what do we mean when we say 'electron'...? And does the electron 'exist'? Is it part of physical reality? Your correspondence theory allows for us to say that the electron is 'abstracted from' physical reality. This is weak sauce as far as such theories go, but it seems to me a fair way of approaching the issue, and it is certainly hard to do better with this kind of entity, which is as much an artefact of our experimental histories as anything else.
But this leads to another issue, a thought experiment if you will. Imagine a form of consciousness that exists encoded in a gravimetric field. What form of social reality does such a being experience...? You say "most of us accept as an absolute truth that we live on a planet that orbits a star" - I would suggest that this isn't true for this hypothetical gravity-being, for which planets and stars are indistinguishable, although they can 'feel' stars and gas giants more prominently than most planets.
This is an absurd example, but I think it is helpful to consider this case before considering whether, for instance, a tribesperson living in the Amazon accepts 'that we live on a planet that orbits a star', which is, ultimately, a construction of our social imaginary, and does not have quite the necessity that you perhaps intend here. This is a can of worms, to be sure, but it teases at the risks involved in going down these kinds of path.
Lastly, because I cannot resist, I want to say that "The earth and seven other planets revolve around the sun" is a false statement unless qualified. One must first accept the lazily evoked shortcut preferred by contemporary astronomers that 'a dwarf planet is not a planet', which is rather questionable. In no way is it necessary to accept this, and I flatly reject it. With my astrophysicist hat on I would say, rather, "The earth and three other terrestrial planets, four jovian planets, and at least eight dwarf planets orbit our sun".
There is no prima facie reason to exclude dwarf planets from being planets *except* the desire to claim that we know how many planets there are. This, I would suggest, is the only reason the International Astronomical Union chose this otherwise indefensible formulation. But the truth is: we do not know how many planets there are in our solar system. And it will be a long, long time before we do. That for me is a more wonderful, more accurate, and more humble way of approaching astronomy than the 'finger in a dyke' approach of saying dwarf planets are arbitrarily not planets, for which no experiment, no evidence, and no facts exist - nor could they exist, because ultimately it is pure hermeneutics, that is, social reality.
This is more than just game-playing on my part (although it is also this!) - it is a sign that this neat division into 'social reality' and 'physical reality' is intimately intricated and involuted in ways that do not tease apart to the degree that folks preferring correspondence theories tend to prefer. For these, and other reasons, I do not personally come at these problems in this way. But that doesn't mean you cannot. For where you are coming from, I would suggest you would be much happier with a correspondence theory. Just be aware that, as with so much in life, your epistemic mileage may vary.
Re: “the attempt to corral ‘social reality’ from ‘physical reality’ runs into problems”:
I’m not sure I follow you here. I see a problem with physical scientists claiming that the social reality models they have constructed are the complete truth about physical reality. Considering the intellectual history of our current models such a claim is chutzpah.
The rubber meets the road only in action. When our actions are compatible with what is we tend to get the desired result. Our present models of the fundamental nature of physical reality appear to be pretty good. Using them as the basis of action for the next century or so probably won’t lead to any disaster.[5]
Entities in social reality are entangled with physical reality entities in at least two ways: One way is that every social reality entity must be instantiated in some physical reality entity for us to perceive it. Another way is that we invent social reality entities to explain our observations of physical reality phenomena. This second entanglement is useful in our on-going effort to stay alive and do our thing.
Re: “A good example here is the electron - because what do we mean when we say 'electron'...? And does the electron 'exist'? Is it part of physical reality?”
According to Wikipedia the word ‘electron’ was first used in 1891 in a paper by George Storey that described this research into electrolysis. He postulated that there existed a “single definite quantity of electricity.”[6] His assertions were based on his own observations and well as prior theoretical and experimental work. Subsequent research and ultimately the technology of the Scanning Tunneling Microscope and the Single Electron Transistor[7] confirmed the utility of explaining observed phenomena not only by hypothesizing the existence of individual electrons, but also by assigning them a charge and a mass that is compatible with other observations.
“Does an electron exist? Is it part of physical reality.” Is the moon part of physical reality? It’s been a part of what humans have taken to be part of physical reality from the get go. But what is it? For many millennia we had various answers. In the last few centuries, we converged on a single model. Then we actually went to the moon and walked about. For almost everyone the moon is most certainly a real thing. The electron will probably never be as real to most of us as the moon. But it is just as real as the moon for thousands of people who do stuff assuming it is real.
Re: “imaging a form of consciousness that exists encoded in a gravimetric field”:
Thank you. Now I have an answer to a common objection to my assertion that humans, with their limited sensory channels and limited brains can never know the final, absolute truth about anything other than the imaginary worlds, like a geometry, that they create. An important conclusion that I draw from this assertion is the necessity of dialogue between different points of view, especially in the navigation of social reality.
Re: “seven planets”:
For me, a nice example of the inherent ambiguity of language. We escape this ambiguity only in our imagination where we have created numbers, logic, mathematics, and computer programs.
Notes:
[1] Since my ultimate concern is with action, in my thinking I take certain assertions as firm anchors. I don’t presume that these assertions are true in an absolute sense, just that they are close enough to truth that the actions that could flow from them will tend toward achieving the desired result. One such anchor is the assumption that from a human perspective everything that happens has a cause. That is, there is some energy or force behind anything that happens. Further, if we want to have things happen differently then we must alter the energy or force that is behind that happening.
[2] Are we headed toward some major trouble for humankind? A lot of people think so. Certainly, this is debatable, but the consensus of some people that are thinking about our future is that our worldwide civilization is currently going through a transition era that will set the state for the next stage of the First Worldwide Civilization.
[3] A brighter future? There are many visions. Right now, I’ll settle for one in which humankind has reduced the probability of committing nuclear civilization suicide to something close to zero. In my view this won’t be the case as long as large-scale state sponsored violence remains a readily available option.
[4] Simple assertions can be ganged together by logical connections to make a complex assertion.
[5] Destroying civilization with atomic weapons is not an example. In that case we are applying our understanding of what is to commit suicide.
[6] Wikipedia, ‘electron’, retrieved 5/29/24.
[7] ChatGPT-3.5 in response to “What is the evidence for the existence of discrete electrons? Can individual electrons be observed? Give references” followed by “How does this response relate to the Wikipedia ‘electron’ article that claims that George Stoney invented the word ‘electron’? Give references“, and “How does the view that the electron is a particle with a measurable charge and mass square with experimental observations that can be explained by conceiving of the electron as a wave? Give references.”, 5/29/24 responses.
Finally, the crucial question for you in my view: the electron.
"The electron will probably never be as real to most of us as the moon. But it is just as real as the moon for thousands of people who do stuff assuming it is real."
This statement commits you to a particular epistemic position that I cannot join you in, but that I do have some respect for.
In this regard, I think you will not be shaken from your stance, and do not need to be either, so I will just share some wider philosophical context:
Firstly, from Alfred North Whitehead:
"What I am essentially protesting against is the bifurcation of nature into two systems of reality, which, in so far as they are real, are real in different senses. One reality would be the entities such as electrons which are the study of speculative physics. This would be the reality which is there for knowledge; although on this theory it is never known. For what is known is the other sort of reality, which is the byplay of the mind. Thus there would be two natures, one is the conjecture and the other is the dream."
This statement has such great wisdom in it, it is worth reading again and again.
Likewise, Isabelle Stengers (greatly inspired by Whitehead):
"But if we abandon the crude dichotomy between knowing and believing, we are forced to conclude that physicists today are nothing without the electron (or molecular biologists without DNA), for the majority of devices that populate their laboratory assume its existence."
If you were a pragmatist, you would be entitled to claim the electron was true on pragmatic grounds. But as long as you hold to correspondence, you must always leave this caveat somewhere in your claims about electrons: at any moment, a new physical theory could entirely rework the electron into a completely new context. Such a new theory would have to incorporate the behaviour of what we now call the electron, in the same way Einstein's general relativity incorporates Newtonian gravity, certainly. But it would be a naïve physicist who could not allow for this possibility, given the unresolved corners of physics and the continual resistance of the 'grand theory'.
I myself am in an odd situation. I do not call the electron 'real' (a silly word, and very hard to use well), but I do claim there are facts about electrons we can make. But being able to make facts about electrons for me is not the same as claiming that electrons are 'real', which implies a capacity to make distinctions of a kind that I truly do not think are possible. Distinguishing between 'real' and 'imaginary' always runs up against the problem that 'what is real is to be imagined'. It is all imaginary. What matters are the additional claims we can make about what we are imagining. And this, to a great extent, is why epistemology interests me as a field, but also why I can never deny that metaphysics is always entailed in its function.
Thus, to conclude, I will cite you:
"An important conclusion that I draw from this assertion is the necessity of dialogue between different points of view, especially in the navigation of social reality."
Here, we entirely concur! The only difference between us is that since it all has to be imagined, it's all 'social reality' to me. An electron is part of the social reality of physicists and chemists, I might say, but only with a wry wink. Personally, I would never use 'reality' in so bullish a manner, as it doesn't fit with my philosophy. The cleave into physical and social reality is not something I need to imagine, but I have no issue whatsoever with you doing so - I clearly understand how you are mounting your distinctions, and we communicate very well I would say. This, and other examples like it, give me great hope for the future.
"Our present models of the fundamental nature of physical reality appear to be pretty good. Using them as the basis of action for the next century or so probably won’t lead to any disaster."
I must respectfully disagree. They ALREADY led to the disaster, what I call 'the Nonsense' and what others call 'the pandemic'. If you think our model of physical reality is in good order, I invite you to reconsider it in the context of recent events.
I concur that, in the context of physics and chemistry, our models appear to be in good order. I have wondered for some time if physics might actually be 'done' for now, and that we just don't know it (studying astrophysics as an undergraduate really exposed me to the extent to which metaphysics has infiltrated physics in order to 'keep the dream of progress alive'). But this is a small corner of the scientific lexicon, and even there you will find certain issues, which I'll touch upon in my next and final comment.
But it simply cannot be claimed that sticking to our current physical models 'probably won't lead to disaster', when they already did. The only way to defend such a claim is to deny the disaster (which you could do, but the evidence is stacking more and more against any alternative interpretations) or to deny that physical models were entailed in the disaster (which is a more plausible defence, but clearly the entirety of pharmaceutical and non-pharmaceutical interventions rest upon our current models, so I think you'd be arguing from a weak corner here).
I entirely realise that many people are as yet still unaware of the disaster we just lived through. In this regard, wait a short while... the lid cannot be kept on this pit of demons for much longer without entirely destroying civil society. We urgently require Truth and Reconciliation for the events of 2020-2022, but I fear we will never see it since the entirety of global governance (with the honourable exception of several African nations) is implicated, and will take whatever steps it can to defend themselves from the blame that would otherwise fall on their shoulders.
Feel free not to reply to this part of my commentary. We have other more productive lines to discuss. But I cannot but speak the truth as it appears to me, and so I must say what I have said.
Lots of good stuff here too, Frank. I'm going to split up my replies into separate sections here for clarity.
I'll start with the fear of nuclear war.
Let me start by saying how refreshing it is to find someone who still has this fear kindled in their hearts. The legacy media worked hard to draw us away from this and to substitute a nebulously-framed 'climate change' disaster as a replacement. They also replaced genuine environmental concerns (of which there are many) with this 'climate change' metaphysics.
I'm sure the people involved felt there were good reasons to worry about all this. I certainly do worry about the environmental issues being obscured by 'climate change', whereas I can no longer worry about 'climate change' itself because too many people who study the climate have spoken out with objections and were censored. I cannot worry about a crisis that claims a scientific grounding when those who present contrary views are silenced - I must instead worry about the silencing, since when this is happening there is no scientific process. But this doesn't mean I don't think there's an issue here - I do. But it is impossible to deal with it, and therefore it must be set aside until the censorship issue has been resolved, and scientific discourse restored.
I say all this as preface to the issue with nuclear armageddon, as I feel it is an important part of the context. Here, I find less evidence of overt censorship, but rather the soft censorship of 'let's just not talk about it'. What a shockingly naïve approach!
Were you aware that during the media hubub over the conviction of former President Trump for bookkeeping misdemeanours inflated to felony counts by invocation of an unspecified felony (very creative legal theory this!) that the Biden administration just slipped out a press release saying, basically, 'we're going to risk some nuclear brinkmanship' i.e. allow US weapons to strike Russian targets. The sheer insanity of this plan is literally beyond belief. I find it very difficult to understand how anyone can push forward such nonsense unless they are completely unhinged, and yet...
So I share your fear about nuclear weapons. And I also fear we are the closest we've been to seeing them used since the 1960s (although we also danced with it in the 1980s). This is a depressing situation. I am at a loss to know how to address this under the omerta on talking about nuclear weapons that seems to have settled in.
You say:
"A brighter future? There are many visions. Right now, I’ll settle for one in which humankind has reduced the probability of committing nuclear civilization suicide to something close to zero. In my view this won’t be the case as long as large-scale state sponsored violence remains a readily available option."
As my above discussion hopefully makes clear, I entirely concur with you here.
Re ”Your chosen approach here softens some of the corners of correspondence theories… and it brings to mind also remarks in David Hume 1739 book A Treatise on Human Nature”.
Thanks for the comment and the reference to Hume. Hume’s “A Treatise on Understanding” consists of three books. The first, “Of the Understanding”, appears to be the most germane to this dialogue. The URL https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/bigge-a-treatise-of-human-nature provides a text of Hume’s treatise. It contains the sentence you quote (my emphasis):
That all our simple ideas in their first appearance are deriv’d from simple impressions, which are correspondent to them, and which they exactly represent.
What is this sentence saying? I’m finding Hume’s 18th century sentences difficult to understand. I offer what follows as my interpretation of what he means. The assertion under consideration appears at the end of the eighth paragraph of Section I: Of the Origin of Our Ideas.
Prior to making this statement Hume divides “all the perceptions of the human mind” into two classes: impressions and ideas. He does not define ‘perceptions’. I take it that he means any entity that one is conscious of. He further says that impressions include any sensation, passion, or emotion as it first appears to us and that ideas are “the faint images of those in thinking and reasoning.” Hume then subdivides both impressions and ideas into those that are simple and those that are complex: Simple perceptions or impressions and ideas are such as admit of no distinction nor separation. The complex are the contrary to these, and may be distinguished into parts. As an example, he says tho’ a particular colour, taste, and smell are qualities all united together in this apple, ’tis easy to perceive they are not the same, but are at least distinguishable from each other. I take it that he is saying that color, taste, and smell are simple impressions while an impression of an apple is a complex impression.
Furthermore, he claims that while the overall relationship between impressions and ideas is complicated, the relationship between simple impressions and simple ideas is straight forward. In 21st century words Hume claims this relationship is 1-to-1: every simple idea has a simple impression, which resembles it; and every simple impression a correspondent idea. For example: the idea of red, which we form in the dark, and that impression, which strikes our eyes in sunshine, differ only in degree, not in nature. Given that the relationship between simple impressions and simple ideas is 1-to1, Hume next needs to show that all our simple ideas in their first appearance are deriv’d from simple impressions.
He presents two arguments. The first is that no one can have any idea of a particular sensation without first experiencing it: to give a child an idea of scarlet or orange, of sweet or bitter, I present the objects, or in other words, convey to him these impressions. … on the other hand we find, that any impressions either of the mind or body is constantly followed by an idea, which resembles it, and is only different in the degrees of force and liveliness. His other arguments is: that where-ever by any accident the faculties, which give rise to any impressions, are obstructed in their operations, as when one is born blind or deaf; not only the impressions are lost, but also their correspondent ideas; so that there never appear in the mind the least traces of either of them. … We cannot form to ourselves a just idea of the taste of a pine-apple, without having actually tasted it.
Having made his general point, Hume allows that exceptions are possible. For example, he maintains that after a person has experienced a progression of shades of a color, except for one missing shade, that they could form an accurate idea of the missing shade without experiencing it. But he says: the instance is so particular and singular, that ’tis scarce worth our observing, and does not merit that for it alone we should alter our general maxim.
Interesting. Citing Hume, can I claim that “all simple entities in our minds correspond to impressions of simple objective reality entities”?
Re: ‘fact’ and ‘evidence’
Thank you, Chris. I was lazy. I should have looked deeper.
SEP has a whole article on ‘evidence’. Without committing to a single definition this SEP piece focuses on ‘evidence’ as that which justifies belief. Fine, but is ‘belief’ any clearer than ‘evidence’?
The SEP piece on ‘belief’ suggests that belief is an attitude we have when we take something to be the case or regard it as true. OK. What’s an ‘attitude’?
Each of us can only be aware of what’s in our own mind. My take is that everything I’m aware of can be taken to be either a sensation, a perception, a thought, an emotion, or a dream. It seems to me that ‘evidence’ is strongly (exclusively?) linked to thought, so I would adjust the SEP definitions to hold that evidence is that which supports a thought that such and such is the case, i.e., an assertion.
Every assertion makes a claim either about entities in physical reality or social reality. The evidence for a claim about physical reality are observations. The most logically solid observations are measurements since numbers, at least when taken individually, are unambiguous.
Given the above, my definition of ‘fact’ follows immediately: a fact is an assertion that is backed by evidence. There does not appear to always be a clear dividing line between evidence and fact since a simple evidentiary claim can be considered to be an elementary fact. However, more often than not people confuse evidence for fact. Usually, at least a few bits of evidence are needed to support a fact.
I'm going to gloss over the Hume material for now. I love Hume, but I think you have to appreciate him as a historical move within philosophy, inspired by yet breaking with Descartes, and inspiring Kant who breaks with Hume. I think it very difficult to apply Hume directly to our current circumstances without being able to put him into context.
However, I'll respond to this as it is a question:
"Citing Hume, can I claim that 'all simple entities in our minds correspond to impressions of simple objective reality entities'?"
I would say 'yes', but you have to add 'or recombinations thereof'. Even if the unicorn was never an animal, Hume would say that it was an idea created from combining entities that came from real animals (the horse and the narwhal in this case).
Your definition of 'fact' is:
"a fact is an assertion that is backed by evidence."
This is fine if you are comfortable with the idea of contradictory facts. It is perfectly possible for there to be assertions backed by evidence that contradict. Indeed, a simple (but misleading example) is 'Trump is the greatest threat to democracy' and 'the Biden administration is the greatest threat to democracy'. Both are backed by strong evidence. Are both facts...?
I would not want to use 'fact' in such a context myself. I want to restrict facts to those statements that have a non-metaphysical grounding, which requires that their framing can be teased apart from their metaphysics - which is non-trivial (the trouble with contemporary pseudo-politics is that it all becomes metaphysical rather too fast). I dealt with this briefly in my last philosophy book, The Virtuous Cyborg, but it would be inefficient to go to this book to explore it. To some extent, all my books touch upon this issue somewhere.
The glossary for Wikipedia Knows Nothing, for instance, offers this definition:
Fact: an assertion that can be made reliably (and that can be verified), which emerges from the refinement of a knowledge-practice (q.v.). See also seduction of facts (q.v.).
The cross-references:
Knowledge-practice: any practice that can be performed with a degree of reliability and that allows for the assertion of facts (q.q.v.) as a side effect of its execution.
Seduction of facts: the political temptation to substitute the assertion of facts for the space of discourse that is authentic politics (q.v.) .
I hope this is helpful - or at least interesting! 😄
Hi Chris. Thanks much for your comments. Just knowing that some of my ideas have in the past been addressed under Correspondence Theory is really helpful, as are all of your other remarks, especially the critical ones. I’ll reply in order after a preliminary remark:
With many asides, in this blog I’m attempting to instigate thoughtful dialogue about how reality works[1], about how humans might avoid the worst of the troubles we’re headed towards,[2] and how we might begin to go down a path toward a brighter future.[3]
Re: Correspondence Theory:
You say: “There is still a thriving trade in correspondence theories, but it must be noticed that the very existence of a thriving trade in them is a sign that these have not managed to 'win out' in any serious way over competing approaches” and add “the very idea of one theory 'winning out' has been largely abandoned, with reasons both good and bad.” I’m intrigued. What are some competing approaches?
Philosophy is an art form, not a science. Under Correspondence Theory the SEP says:
“Narrowly speaking, the correspondence theory of truth is the view that truth is correspondence to, or with, a fact—a view that was advocated by Russell and Moore early in the 20th century. But the label is usually applied much more broadly to any view explicitly embracing the idea that truth consists in a relation to reality, i.e., that truth is a relational property involving a characteristic relation (to be specified) to some portion of reality (to be specified). This basic idea has been expressed in many ways, giving rise to an extended family of theories and, more often, theory sketches. Members of the family employ various concepts for the relevant relation (correspondence, conformity, congruence, agreement, accordance, copying, picturing, signification, representation, reference, satisfaction) and/or various concepts for the relevant portion of reality (facts, states of affairs, conditions, situations, events, objects, sequences of objects, sets, properties, tropes). The resulting multiplicity of versions and reformulations of the theory is due to a blend of substantive and terminological differences.”
So, according to the SEP:
truth is a relational property involving a characteristic relation (to be specified) to some portion of reality (to be specified)
Being only a citizen, not a professional philosopher, this statement is puzzling. In my mind the most basic things are entities. An entity is anything to which attributes can be subscribed. Using language, any noun denotes an entity. Entities can have relationships with other entities.
In my mind “truth” is an attribute of an assertion about an entity or group of entities.[4] In common language it is possible to form meaningless assertions, for example: “The concept of five is green.” So, the first consideration in assessing the truth of an assertion is to determine that the assertion is meaningful. Meaningful assertions are statements that such and such is arguably the case or not. Every meaningful assertion has a validity attribute. Classically this attribute is either “true” or “false”. Post classical it may also be “mostly true”, “mostly false”, or “indeterminate”. Acceptable techniques for assigning this attribute to a meaningful assertion depend on the reality in which the assertion is meaningful, and on the socially acceptable ways of determining that “such and such” is the case in that reality. I’m not sure how this interpretation of truth relates to the above characterization of Correspondence Theory.
So, the first snark was created in Carrol’s mind. How does a human do such a thing? A new human comes into being first as a single zygote cell composed of millions of molecules. This cell divides, then the divided cells divide, and the process repeats until there is an organism of roughly 37 trillion cells. Along the way the cells specialize in morphology and function. Some cells specialize in coordinating and controlling the life functions of the whole organism. At birth some of these cells work together to direct the newborn human to respond to hunger signals and the presence of a nipple by instinctively starting to suck. Some of these cells are structured and organized to make sense of the barrage of signals the newborn starts to receive from the external environment. Somewhere along the way, certainly by early childhood, a child, using its specialized signal processing and memory cells, begins to not only just make sense of signals from objective reality, but starts to create imaginary entities. This creative activity continues in different ways as a human moves through different life stages. Some humans, like Lewis Carroll, continue to create imaginary entities throughout their lives, hence the snark comes into existence first in Carroll’s subjective reality and then in social reality where children find out about it and invent their own versions of snark hunts.
Although the initial data for everything in our minds comes from entities in objective reality, it’s not accurate to claim that all of our subjective entities are abstractions. Clearly the patterns in a kaleidoscope should not be considered abstractions of the underlying bits of colored glass, although these bits of physical reality are the source of the kaleidoscope’s images.
Thanks for continuing our discussion. I'll focus in this part on your request for a brief tour of the landscape of epistemology.
Firstly, pragmatism, as per Charles Pierce, William James, and John Dewey (this is a decidedly US tradition, actually!). The view here is that correspondence with reality is a factor, but the pragmatic consequences of beliefs also matter. When beliefs lead to successful outcomes, they possess truth irrespective of their relationship with an 'external reality'. I have never got on with Dewey, but I like William James' approach in so much that he recognises the necessity of acknowledging a variety of belief systems that can hold some degree of truth despite seeming contradictory to each other.
Secondly, 'coherentism', espoused by Bonjour, Kvanvig, Lehrer etc. come at the problem from the question of the coherence of sets of beliefs. I have sympathy for this approach, since it is most open to paradigm shift (transferring one set of beliefs for another in the face of contravening evidence) and is more resistant to excessive certainty than most correspondence theories. I think this is a more subtle path, but I am not well-read in it personally.
Likewise, there are a variety of confirmation theories, but I haven't studied these very closely. These are a spin-off from coherence theories that suggest that internal coherence is insufficient, there must be some external verification.
Personally, I am drawn to contact theories of the kind discussed briefly in this Stranger Worlds:
However, I have my own epistemology which is espoused in my short-form philosophy book, Wikipedia Knows Nothing. Nobody has yet given it a name, but I suppose I would call it 'knowledge as a practice'. It moves in an entirely different direction from pretty much every theory of knowledge I've seen offered, although it has some significant crossover with Bruno Latour and Jacques Rancéire.
07/08/24 – It’s taking me awhile to get to this. For one, I’ve been putting more energy into trying to alleviate my substantial social isolation; for another I’ve been working on a couple of new Citizen Philosophers pieces that I’m aiming to post under a new tab on the landing page similar to your Stranger Voices tab. Also, you have given me a lot to chew on here, so it will be a while before I post a reply.
07/25/24 – Still working on replying to your comment but finding that understanding William James’ prose is real work for me. So, I’m posting what I have so far and wondering if you might provide a bit of guidance.
Re: “pragmatic consequences of beliefs also matter. When beliefs lead to successful outcomes, they possess truth irrespective of their relationship with an 'external reality'”.[my emphasis]
I’ll start with what I think I know and maybe you will point me to where I can better my understanding. In “Whose Reality” I claimed that it can be useful to categorize the contents of my consciousness into:
sensations,
perceptions,
thoughts, and
feelings.
Thoughts are clearly different from the other three phenomena. The other three phenomena arise spontaneously, but so can thoughts. Still, unless a spontaneous thought is immediately captured, it tends to disappear,[1] so a distinguishing feature of thoughts is that they are willed, either de novo or retrieved from memory. Perceptions are tied intractably to their corresponding objective reality entity. It seems to me that I experience only a limited number of distinct sensations and feelings. There is no such constraint on my thoughts. So, a thought is a willed mental entity that is distinct from a sensation, perception or feeling, and there is no limit to what it can be about, or what form it can take.[2]
It seems to me that a belief is a kind of thought. In common language we use this word sometimes casually as a synonym for a thought. For me an assertion embodies a thought that such and such is the case. Assuming that an assertion can be modified by probability bounds where such bounds are warranted, I try to restrict ‘belief’ to assertions for which I think there is insufficient generally accepted evidence to accept it wholeheartedly as true. Re the quote above, it seems to me that claiming that a belief has some truth if it suggests an action that is successful is not at all helpful. At least at first blush I have to disagree with your pragmatists; additional considerations would be necessary to rule out the role of chance.
It seems to me that your statement: “I like William James' approach in so much that he recognises the necessity of acknowledging a variety of belief systems that can hold some degree of truth despite seeming contradictory to each other” is a different consideration. Any intellectually earnest construction of a belief system almost certainly contains at least oblique references to objective truth.
I take this last quote as a nudge to attempt to be a bit more educated. Conveniently many classics can now be accessed for free on the web. ChatGPT-3.5 tells me that one place to look to get a better idea of what you are referring to is James’ “Will to Believe” essay. I have begun to try to understand this essay but am finding that parsing 18th century English is a challenge. I often have to read some sentences a few times before I understand them. If there are other pieces I might work on to get educated on James’ views of truth perhaps you can direct me.
Notes:
[1] Speaking strictly personally.
[2] Since some physical process that might be limited to Earth life-forms underlie any thought, there might be limitations that humans inherently cannot be aware of.
Thanks for these thoughts, Frank! The time to reply simply does not matter to me at all. I am glad that you are working to cut down on your isolation - this is a problem that many of my friends have struggled with, and to be fair I have too at times. Very important to avoid this hole!
Regarding your division into sensations, perceptions, thoughts, and feelings - I'm far from convinced that you can carve up the mental world so neatly. Thoughts and perceptions intertwine (do you know Brunner and Postman's 'Red Spade' experiment...?), and feelings are equally rolled in here too. The response of the amygdala to a threatening situation is fear (flight) or anger (fight), but prior thoughts and feelings affect how this otherwise subconscious brain element processes perceptions. Fear can even be fun, as it is frequently in certain videogames and also rollercoasters.
There's a complexity to mental phenomena, and I'm not sure it can be reliably cleaved apart like this. I should like to think more about this one... I am wondering if I can mount a different schema here that would serve your purpose but not be prone to collecting an awful lot of mental activity into 'thoughts'. What this exchange has achieved, however, is making me doubt the unitary nature of 'thought' entirely - and I appreciate that! I will think about this further... It may take some time to put this together in a form I'm happy with.
Your comment actually links up very well with last week's Stranger Worlds, "The Truth of Ourselves":
You probably haven't got to this yet, and there truly is no rush for you to do so. Take your time, please! I appreciate the cadence of our conversations very much, and do not desire the unfortunate urgency that some discourse is cursed with. But I mention it, as the topics overlap considerable.
I think to some extent the piece linked above is an answer to your challenge about "When beliefs lead to successful outcomes, they possess truth irrespective of their relationship with an 'external reality'", since this is expressly a question of practical truth. In this regard, I am playing catch up myself as I have only really dug into this side of Anscombe's work recently, and I still feel I have much more reading to do on it. It could be another year or two before I feel I have something decisive here.
And yes, William James is terrible to read. But he is not as bad as Kant! 😂
Many thanks for a stimulating exchange - I will think further on this question of thoughts/beliefs/perceptions. I think it an interesting rabbit hole.
This is largely what is called a 'correspondence theory of truth', which was an approach pioneered by Bertrand Russell, and also G.E. Moore, who were at Cambridge together at the start of the twentieth century. There is still a thriving trade in correspondence theories, but it must be noticed that the very existence of a thriving trade in them is a sign that these have not managed to 'win out' in any serious way over competing approaches. Indeed, I think part of the situation that distinguishes the twentieth from the twenty first century in these terms is that the very idea of one theory 'winning out' has been largely abandoned, with reasons both good and bad.
I am intrigued by your suggestion "all the entries in our minds either correspond to, or are abstracted from entities in objective reality" - consider the 'snark' in a game of 'snark hunt', in which folks are taken on a hunt for an animal that in fact does not exist in any conventional sense. Do you want to say the 'snark' is abstracted from entities in objective reality...?
Your chosen approach here softens some of the corners of correspondence theories in ways that most proponents of such approaches usually want to avoid, but I find your approach (and others like it) intriguing, and it brings to mind also remarks in David Hume 1739 book A Treatise on Human Nature:
"All our simple ideas in their first appearance are deriv’d from simple impressions, which are correspondent to them, and which they exactly represent."
I continue to ponder that claim - it is decidedly non-trivial.
However, I would caution you against using 'fact' as a synonym for 'evidence', as what is claimed as a 'fact' and what the evidence actually consists of are two radically different things. Nowhere is this clearer than when you get into the use of p-values in statistics, and a variety of related forms of mathematical sorcery that obfuscate what is the case. Evidently there is a way to make 'facts' and 'evidence' align, but the common usage of 'fact' slips wildly away from 'evidence' - and this is especially so wherever statistics are the most common toolset.
For instance, a pharmaceutical company claims has an experiment that shows that the unvaccinated suffer more deleterious effects than those that received their vaccine candidate. They claim this shows their candidate is 'safe and effective' (as a fact, and as another way of reporting this specific evidence). But the experimental design treats a person as 'unvaccinated' until two weeks after the administration of the candidate. So any adverse reactions within two weeks are attributed to 'unvaccinated' subjects, who in fact have received a dose but not yet had two weeks pass. This is not a hypothetical, this rather scurrilous methodology has indeed been used - even though it could show saline solution to be a 'safe and effective' treatment for just about anything! (This is because any time your methodology assigns different timespans to two arms, the longer time span arm has more background events e.g. heart attacks.)This is just one example of how 'fact' and 'evidence' can become blurred in ways that are not helpful.
Another issue to consider: the attempt to corral 'social reality' from 'physical reality' runs into problems when you start to recognise the overlaps between entities in social reality and the claims made about physical reality. This, I'd say, has been a recurrent theme in recent philosophy of science. A good example here is the electron - because what do we mean when we say 'electron'...? And does the electron 'exist'? Is it part of physical reality? Your correspondence theory allows for us to say that the electron is 'abstracted from' physical reality. This is weak sauce as far as such theories go, but it seems to me a fair way of approaching the issue, and it is certainly hard to do better with this kind of entity, which is as much an artefact of our experimental histories as anything else.
But this leads to another issue, a thought experiment if you will. Imagine a form of consciousness that exists encoded in a gravimetric field. What form of social reality does such a being experience...? You say "most of us accept as an absolute truth that we live on a planet that orbits a star" - I would suggest that this isn't true for this hypothetical gravity-being, for which planets and stars are indistinguishable, although they can 'feel' stars and gas giants more prominently than most planets.
This is an absurd example, but I think it is helpful to consider this case before considering whether, for instance, a tribesperson living in the Amazon accepts 'that we live on a planet that orbits a star', which is, ultimately, a construction of our social imaginary, and does not have quite the necessity that you perhaps intend here. This is a can of worms, to be sure, but it teases at the risks involved in going down these kinds of path.
Lastly, because I cannot resist, I want to say that "The earth and seven other planets revolve around the sun" is a false statement unless qualified. One must first accept the lazily evoked shortcut preferred by contemporary astronomers that 'a dwarf planet is not a planet', which is rather questionable. In no way is it necessary to accept this, and I flatly reject it. With my astrophysicist hat on I would say, rather, "The earth and three other terrestrial planets, four jovian planets, and at least eight dwarf planets orbit our sun".
There is no prima facie reason to exclude dwarf planets from being planets *except* the desire to claim that we know how many planets there are. This, I would suggest, is the only reason the International Astronomical Union chose this otherwise indefensible formulation. But the truth is: we do not know how many planets there are in our solar system. And it will be a long, long time before we do. That for me is a more wonderful, more accurate, and more humble way of approaching astronomy than the 'finger in a dyke' approach of saying dwarf planets are arbitrarily not planets, for which no experiment, no evidence, and no facts exist - nor could they exist, because ultimately it is pure hermeneutics, that is, social reality.
This is more than just game-playing on my part (although it is also this!) - it is a sign that this neat division into 'social reality' and 'physical reality' is intimately intricated and involuted in ways that do not tease apart to the degree that folks preferring correspondence theories tend to prefer. For these, and other reasons, I do not personally come at these problems in this way. But that doesn't mean you cannot. For where you are coming from, I would suggest you would be much happier with a correspondence theory. Just be aware that, as with so much in life, your epistemic mileage may vary.
All the very best,
Chris.
Part 3 of 3
Re: “the attempt to corral ‘social reality’ from ‘physical reality’ runs into problems”:
I’m not sure I follow you here. I see a problem with physical scientists claiming that the social reality models they have constructed are the complete truth about physical reality. Considering the intellectual history of our current models such a claim is chutzpah.
The rubber meets the road only in action. When our actions are compatible with what is we tend to get the desired result. Our present models of the fundamental nature of physical reality appear to be pretty good. Using them as the basis of action for the next century or so probably won’t lead to any disaster.[5]
Entities in social reality are entangled with physical reality entities in at least two ways: One way is that every social reality entity must be instantiated in some physical reality entity for us to perceive it. Another way is that we invent social reality entities to explain our observations of physical reality phenomena. This second entanglement is useful in our on-going effort to stay alive and do our thing.
Re: “A good example here is the electron - because what do we mean when we say 'electron'...? And does the electron 'exist'? Is it part of physical reality?”
According to Wikipedia the word ‘electron’ was first used in 1891 in a paper by George Storey that described this research into electrolysis. He postulated that there existed a “single definite quantity of electricity.”[6] His assertions were based on his own observations and well as prior theoretical and experimental work. Subsequent research and ultimately the technology of the Scanning Tunneling Microscope and the Single Electron Transistor[7] confirmed the utility of explaining observed phenomena not only by hypothesizing the existence of individual electrons, but also by assigning them a charge and a mass that is compatible with other observations.
“Does an electron exist? Is it part of physical reality.” Is the moon part of physical reality? It’s been a part of what humans have taken to be part of physical reality from the get go. But what is it? For many millennia we had various answers. In the last few centuries, we converged on a single model. Then we actually went to the moon and walked about. For almost everyone the moon is most certainly a real thing. The electron will probably never be as real to most of us as the moon. But it is just as real as the moon for thousands of people who do stuff assuming it is real.
Re: “imaging a form of consciousness that exists encoded in a gravimetric field”:
Thank you. Now I have an answer to a common objection to my assertion that humans, with their limited sensory channels and limited brains can never know the final, absolute truth about anything other than the imaginary worlds, like a geometry, that they create. An important conclusion that I draw from this assertion is the necessity of dialogue between different points of view, especially in the navigation of social reality.
Re: “seven planets”:
For me, a nice example of the inherent ambiguity of language. We escape this ambiguity only in our imagination where we have created numbers, logic, mathematics, and computer programs.
Notes:
[1] Since my ultimate concern is with action, in my thinking I take certain assertions as firm anchors. I don’t presume that these assertions are true in an absolute sense, just that they are close enough to truth that the actions that could flow from them will tend toward achieving the desired result. One such anchor is the assumption that from a human perspective everything that happens has a cause. That is, there is some energy or force behind anything that happens. Further, if we want to have things happen differently then we must alter the energy or force that is behind that happening.
[2] Are we headed toward some major trouble for humankind? A lot of people think so. Certainly, this is debatable, but the consensus of some people that are thinking about our future is that our worldwide civilization is currently going through a transition era that will set the state for the next stage of the First Worldwide Civilization.
[3] A brighter future? There are many visions. Right now, I’ll settle for one in which humankind has reduced the probability of committing nuclear civilization suicide to something close to zero. In my view this won’t be the case as long as large-scale state sponsored violence remains a readily available option.
[4] Simple assertions can be ganged together by logical connections to make a complex assertion.
[5] Destroying civilization with atomic weapons is not an example. In that case we are applying our understanding of what is to commit suicide.
[6] Wikipedia, ‘electron’, retrieved 5/29/24.
[7] ChatGPT-3.5 in response to “What is the evidence for the existence of discrete electrons? Can individual electrons be observed? Give references” followed by “How does this response relate to the Wikipedia ‘electron’ article that claims that George Stoney invented the word ‘electron’? Give references“, and “How does the view that the electron is a particle with a measurable charge and mass square with experimental observations that can be explained by conceiving of the electron as a wave? Give references.”, 5/29/24 responses.
Finally, the crucial question for you in my view: the electron.
"The electron will probably never be as real to most of us as the moon. But it is just as real as the moon for thousands of people who do stuff assuming it is real."
This statement commits you to a particular epistemic position that I cannot join you in, but that I do have some respect for.
In this regard, I think you will not be shaken from your stance, and do not need to be either, so I will just share some wider philosophical context:
Firstly, from Alfred North Whitehead:
"What I am essentially protesting against is the bifurcation of nature into two systems of reality, which, in so far as they are real, are real in different senses. One reality would be the entities such as electrons which are the study of speculative physics. This would be the reality which is there for knowledge; although on this theory it is never known. For what is known is the other sort of reality, which is the byplay of the mind. Thus there would be two natures, one is the conjecture and the other is the dream."
This statement has such great wisdom in it, it is worth reading again and again.
Likewise, Isabelle Stengers (greatly inspired by Whitehead):
"But if we abandon the crude dichotomy between knowing and believing, we are forced to conclude that physicists today are nothing without the electron (or molecular biologists without DNA), for the majority of devices that populate their laboratory assume its existence."
If you were a pragmatist, you would be entitled to claim the electron was true on pragmatic grounds. But as long as you hold to correspondence, you must always leave this caveat somewhere in your claims about electrons: at any moment, a new physical theory could entirely rework the electron into a completely new context. Such a new theory would have to incorporate the behaviour of what we now call the electron, in the same way Einstein's general relativity incorporates Newtonian gravity, certainly. But it would be a naïve physicist who could not allow for this possibility, given the unresolved corners of physics and the continual resistance of the 'grand theory'.
I myself am in an odd situation. I do not call the electron 'real' (a silly word, and very hard to use well), but I do claim there are facts about electrons we can make. But being able to make facts about electrons for me is not the same as claiming that electrons are 'real', which implies a capacity to make distinctions of a kind that I truly do not think are possible. Distinguishing between 'real' and 'imaginary' always runs up against the problem that 'what is real is to be imagined'. It is all imaginary. What matters are the additional claims we can make about what we are imagining. And this, to a great extent, is why epistemology interests me as a field, but also why I can never deny that metaphysics is always entailed in its function.
Thus, to conclude, I will cite you:
"An important conclusion that I draw from this assertion is the necessity of dialogue between different points of view, especially in the navigation of social reality."
Here, we entirely concur! The only difference between us is that since it all has to be imagined, it's all 'social reality' to me. An electron is part of the social reality of physicists and chemists, I might say, but only with a wry wink. Personally, I would never use 'reality' in so bullish a manner, as it doesn't fit with my philosophy. The cleave into physical and social reality is not something I need to imagine, but I have no issue whatsoever with you doing so - I clearly understand how you are mounting your distinctions, and we communicate very well I would say. This, and other examples like it, give me great hope for the future.
With unlimited love,
Chris.
You say:
"Our present models of the fundamental nature of physical reality appear to be pretty good. Using them as the basis of action for the next century or so probably won’t lead to any disaster."
I must respectfully disagree. They ALREADY led to the disaster, what I call 'the Nonsense' and what others call 'the pandemic'. If you think our model of physical reality is in good order, I invite you to reconsider it in the context of recent events.
I concur that, in the context of physics and chemistry, our models appear to be in good order. I have wondered for some time if physics might actually be 'done' for now, and that we just don't know it (studying astrophysics as an undergraduate really exposed me to the extent to which metaphysics has infiltrated physics in order to 'keep the dream of progress alive'). But this is a small corner of the scientific lexicon, and even there you will find certain issues, which I'll touch upon in my next and final comment.
But it simply cannot be claimed that sticking to our current physical models 'probably won't lead to disaster', when they already did. The only way to defend such a claim is to deny the disaster (which you could do, but the evidence is stacking more and more against any alternative interpretations) or to deny that physical models were entailed in the disaster (which is a more plausible defence, but clearly the entirety of pharmaceutical and non-pharmaceutical interventions rest upon our current models, so I think you'd be arguing from a weak corner here).
I entirely realise that many people are as yet still unaware of the disaster we just lived through. In this regard, wait a short while... the lid cannot be kept on this pit of demons for much longer without entirely destroying civil society. We urgently require Truth and Reconciliation for the events of 2020-2022, but I fear we will never see it since the entirety of global governance (with the honourable exception of several African nations) is implicated, and will take whatever steps it can to defend themselves from the blame that would otherwise fall on their shoulders.
Feel free not to reply to this part of my commentary. We have other more productive lines to discuss. But I cannot but speak the truth as it appears to me, and so I must say what I have said.
Thank you for listening. One more!
Lots of good stuff here too, Frank. I'm going to split up my replies into separate sections here for clarity.
I'll start with the fear of nuclear war.
Let me start by saying how refreshing it is to find someone who still has this fear kindled in their hearts. The legacy media worked hard to draw us away from this and to substitute a nebulously-framed 'climate change' disaster as a replacement. They also replaced genuine environmental concerns (of which there are many) with this 'climate change' metaphysics.
I'm sure the people involved felt there were good reasons to worry about all this. I certainly do worry about the environmental issues being obscured by 'climate change', whereas I can no longer worry about 'climate change' itself because too many people who study the climate have spoken out with objections and were censored. I cannot worry about a crisis that claims a scientific grounding when those who present contrary views are silenced - I must instead worry about the silencing, since when this is happening there is no scientific process. But this doesn't mean I don't think there's an issue here - I do. But it is impossible to deal with it, and therefore it must be set aside until the censorship issue has been resolved, and scientific discourse restored.
I say all this as preface to the issue with nuclear armageddon, as I feel it is an important part of the context. Here, I find less evidence of overt censorship, but rather the soft censorship of 'let's just not talk about it'. What a shockingly naïve approach!
Were you aware that during the media hubub over the conviction of former President Trump for bookkeeping misdemeanours inflated to felony counts by invocation of an unspecified felony (very creative legal theory this!) that the Biden administration just slipped out a press release saying, basically, 'we're going to risk some nuclear brinkmanship' i.e. allow US weapons to strike Russian targets. The sheer insanity of this plan is literally beyond belief. I find it very difficult to understand how anyone can push forward such nonsense unless they are completely unhinged, and yet...
So I share your fear about nuclear weapons. And I also fear we are the closest we've been to seeing them used since the 1960s (although we also danced with it in the 1980s). This is a depressing situation. I am at a loss to know how to address this under the omerta on talking about nuclear weapons that seems to have settled in.
You say:
"A brighter future? There are many visions. Right now, I’ll settle for one in which humankind has reduced the probability of committing nuclear civilization suicide to something close to zero. In my view this won’t be the case as long as large-scale state sponsored violence remains a readily available option."
As my above discussion hopefully makes clear, I entirely concur with you here.
More to come...
Chris.
Part 2 of 3
Re ”Your chosen approach here softens some of the corners of correspondence theories… and it brings to mind also remarks in David Hume 1739 book A Treatise on Human Nature”.
Thanks for the comment and the reference to Hume. Hume’s “A Treatise on Understanding” consists of three books. The first, “Of the Understanding”, appears to be the most germane to this dialogue. The URL https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/bigge-a-treatise-of-human-nature provides a text of Hume’s treatise. It contains the sentence you quote (my emphasis):
That all our simple ideas in their first appearance are deriv’d from simple impressions, which are correspondent to them, and which they exactly represent.
What is this sentence saying? I’m finding Hume’s 18th century sentences difficult to understand. I offer what follows as my interpretation of what he means. The assertion under consideration appears at the end of the eighth paragraph of Section I: Of the Origin of Our Ideas.
Prior to making this statement Hume divides “all the perceptions of the human mind” into two classes: impressions and ideas. He does not define ‘perceptions’. I take it that he means any entity that one is conscious of. He further says that impressions include any sensation, passion, or emotion as it first appears to us and that ideas are “the faint images of those in thinking and reasoning.” Hume then subdivides both impressions and ideas into those that are simple and those that are complex: Simple perceptions or impressions and ideas are such as admit of no distinction nor separation. The complex are the contrary to these, and may be distinguished into parts. As an example, he says tho’ a particular colour, taste, and smell are qualities all united together in this apple, ’tis easy to perceive they are not the same, but are at least distinguishable from each other. I take it that he is saying that color, taste, and smell are simple impressions while an impression of an apple is a complex impression.
Furthermore, he claims that while the overall relationship between impressions and ideas is complicated, the relationship between simple impressions and simple ideas is straight forward. In 21st century words Hume claims this relationship is 1-to-1: every simple idea has a simple impression, which resembles it; and every simple impression a correspondent idea. For example: the idea of red, which we form in the dark, and that impression, which strikes our eyes in sunshine, differ only in degree, not in nature. Given that the relationship between simple impressions and simple ideas is 1-to1, Hume next needs to show that all our simple ideas in their first appearance are deriv’d from simple impressions.
He presents two arguments. The first is that no one can have any idea of a particular sensation without first experiencing it: to give a child an idea of scarlet or orange, of sweet or bitter, I present the objects, or in other words, convey to him these impressions. … on the other hand we find, that any impressions either of the mind or body is constantly followed by an idea, which resembles it, and is only different in the degrees of force and liveliness. His other arguments is: that where-ever by any accident the faculties, which give rise to any impressions, are obstructed in their operations, as when one is born blind or deaf; not only the impressions are lost, but also their correspondent ideas; so that there never appear in the mind the least traces of either of them. … We cannot form to ourselves a just idea of the taste of a pine-apple, without having actually tasted it.
Having made his general point, Hume allows that exceptions are possible. For example, he maintains that after a person has experienced a progression of shades of a color, except for one missing shade, that they could form an accurate idea of the missing shade without experiencing it. But he says: the instance is so particular and singular, that ’tis scarce worth our observing, and does not merit that for it alone we should alter our general maxim.
Interesting. Citing Hume, can I claim that “all simple entities in our minds correspond to impressions of simple objective reality entities”?
Re: ‘fact’ and ‘evidence’
Thank you, Chris. I was lazy. I should have looked deeper.
SEP has a whole article on ‘evidence’. Without committing to a single definition this SEP piece focuses on ‘evidence’ as that which justifies belief. Fine, but is ‘belief’ any clearer than ‘evidence’?
The SEP piece on ‘belief’ suggests that belief is an attitude we have when we take something to be the case or regard it as true. OK. What’s an ‘attitude’?
Each of us can only be aware of what’s in our own mind. My take is that everything I’m aware of can be taken to be either a sensation, a perception, a thought, an emotion, or a dream. It seems to me that ‘evidence’ is strongly (exclusively?) linked to thought, so I would adjust the SEP definitions to hold that evidence is that which supports a thought that such and such is the case, i.e., an assertion.
Every assertion makes a claim either about entities in physical reality or social reality. The evidence for a claim about physical reality are observations. The most logically solid observations are measurements since numbers, at least when taken individually, are unambiguous.
Given the above, my definition of ‘fact’ follows immediately: a fact is an assertion that is backed by evidence. There does not appear to always be a clear dividing line between evidence and fact since a simple evidentiary claim can be considered to be an elementary fact. However, more often than not people confuse evidence for fact. Usually, at least a few bits of evidence are needed to support a fact.
Hi Frank,
I'm going to gloss over the Hume material for now. I love Hume, but I think you have to appreciate him as a historical move within philosophy, inspired by yet breaking with Descartes, and inspiring Kant who breaks with Hume. I think it very difficult to apply Hume directly to our current circumstances without being able to put him into context.
However, I'll respond to this as it is a question:
"Citing Hume, can I claim that 'all simple entities in our minds correspond to impressions of simple objective reality entities'?"
I would say 'yes', but you have to add 'or recombinations thereof'. Even if the unicorn was never an animal, Hume would say that it was an idea created from combining entities that came from real animals (the horse and the narwhal in this case).
Your definition of 'fact' is:
"a fact is an assertion that is backed by evidence."
This is fine if you are comfortable with the idea of contradictory facts. It is perfectly possible for there to be assertions backed by evidence that contradict. Indeed, a simple (but misleading example) is 'Trump is the greatest threat to democracy' and 'the Biden administration is the greatest threat to democracy'. Both are backed by strong evidence. Are both facts...?
I would not want to use 'fact' in such a context myself. I want to restrict facts to those statements that have a non-metaphysical grounding, which requires that their framing can be teased apart from their metaphysics - which is non-trivial (the trouble with contemporary pseudo-politics is that it all becomes metaphysical rather too fast). I dealt with this briefly in my last philosophy book, The Virtuous Cyborg, but it would be inefficient to go to this book to explore it. To some extent, all my books touch upon this issue somewhere.
The glossary for Wikipedia Knows Nothing, for instance, offers this definition:
Fact: an assertion that can be made reliably (and that can be verified), which emerges from the refinement of a knowledge-practice (q.v.). See also seduction of facts (q.v.).
The cross-references:
Knowledge-practice: any practice that can be performed with a degree of reliability and that allows for the assertion of facts (q.q.v.) as a side effect of its execution.
Seduction of facts: the political temptation to substitute the assertion of facts for the space of discourse that is authentic politics (q.v.) .
I hope this is helpful - or at least interesting! 😄
Chris.
Part 1 of 3
Hi Chris. Thanks much for your comments. Just knowing that some of my ideas have in the past been addressed under Correspondence Theory is really helpful, as are all of your other remarks, especially the critical ones. I’ll reply in order after a preliminary remark:
With many asides, in this blog I’m attempting to instigate thoughtful dialogue about how reality works[1], about how humans might avoid the worst of the troubles we’re headed towards,[2] and how we might begin to go down a path toward a brighter future.[3]
Re: Correspondence Theory:
You say: “There is still a thriving trade in correspondence theories, but it must be noticed that the very existence of a thriving trade in them is a sign that these have not managed to 'win out' in any serious way over competing approaches” and add “the very idea of one theory 'winning out' has been largely abandoned, with reasons both good and bad.” I’m intrigued. What are some competing approaches?
Philosophy is an art form, not a science. Under Correspondence Theory the SEP says:
“Narrowly speaking, the correspondence theory of truth is the view that truth is correspondence to, or with, a fact—a view that was advocated by Russell and Moore early in the 20th century. But the label is usually applied much more broadly to any view explicitly embracing the idea that truth consists in a relation to reality, i.e., that truth is a relational property involving a characteristic relation (to be specified) to some portion of reality (to be specified). This basic idea has been expressed in many ways, giving rise to an extended family of theories and, more often, theory sketches. Members of the family employ various concepts for the relevant relation (correspondence, conformity, congruence, agreement, accordance, copying, picturing, signification, representation, reference, satisfaction) and/or various concepts for the relevant portion of reality (facts, states of affairs, conditions, situations, events, objects, sequences of objects, sets, properties, tropes). The resulting multiplicity of versions and reformulations of the theory is due to a blend of substantive and terminological differences.”
So, according to the SEP:
truth is a relational property involving a characteristic relation (to be specified) to some portion of reality (to be specified)
Being only a citizen, not a professional philosopher, this statement is puzzling. In my mind the most basic things are entities. An entity is anything to which attributes can be subscribed. Using language, any noun denotes an entity. Entities can have relationships with other entities.
In my mind “truth” is an attribute of an assertion about an entity or group of entities.[4] In common language it is possible to form meaningless assertions, for example: “The concept of five is green.” So, the first consideration in assessing the truth of an assertion is to determine that the assertion is meaningful. Meaningful assertions are statements that such and such is arguably the case or not. Every meaningful assertion has a validity attribute. Classically this attribute is either “true” or “false”. Post classical it may also be “mostly true”, “mostly false”, or “indeterminate”. Acceptable techniques for assigning this attribute to a meaningful assertion depend on the reality in which the assertion is meaningful, and on the socially acceptable ways of determining that “such and such” is the case in that reality. I’m not sure how this interpretation of truth relates to the above characterization of Correspondence Theory.
Re: Snark hunt
ChatGPT3.5 responded that “snark” entered our vocabulary via the Lewis Carrol poem “The Hunting of the Snark”. The kids game of a snark hunt was very likely motivated by this poem: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43909/the-hunting-of-the-snark
So, the first snark was created in Carrol’s mind. How does a human do such a thing? A new human comes into being first as a single zygote cell composed of millions of molecules. This cell divides, then the divided cells divide, and the process repeats until there is an organism of roughly 37 trillion cells. Along the way the cells specialize in morphology and function. Some cells specialize in coordinating and controlling the life functions of the whole organism. At birth some of these cells work together to direct the newborn human to respond to hunger signals and the presence of a nipple by instinctively starting to suck. Some of these cells are structured and organized to make sense of the barrage of signals the newborn starts to receive from the external environment. Somewhere along the way, certainly by early childhood, a child, using its specialized signal processing and memory cells, begins to not only just make sense of signals from objective reality, but starts to create imaginary entities. This creative activity continues in different ways as a human moves through different life stages. Some humans, like Lewis Carroll, continue to create imaginary entities throughout their lives, hence the snark comes into existence first in Carroll’s subjective reality and then in social reality where children find out about it and invent their own versions of snark hunts.
Although the initial data for everything in our minds comes from entities in objective reality, it’s not accurate to claim that all of our subjective entities are abstractions. Clearly the patterns in a kaleidoscope should not be considered abstractions of the underlying bits of colored glass, although these bits of physical reality are the source of the kaleidoscope’s images.
Hi Frank,
Thanks for continuing our discussion. I'll focus in this part on your request for a brief tour of the landscape of epistemology.
Firstly, pragmatism, as per Charles Pierce, William James, and John Dewey (this is a decidedly US tradition, actually!). The view here is that correspondence with reality is a factor, but the pragmatic consequences of beliefs also matter. When beliefs lead to successful outcomes, they possess truth irrespective of their relationship with an 'external reality'. I have never got on with Dewey, but I like William James' approach in so much that he recognises the necessity of acknowledging a variety of belief systems that can hold some degree of truth despite seeming contradictory to each other.
Secondly, 'coherentism', espoused by Bonjour, Kvanvig, Lehrer etc. come at the problem from the question of the coherence of sets of beliefs. I have sympathy for this approach, since it is most open to paradigm shift (transferring one set of beliefs for another in the face of contravening evidence) and is more resistant to excessive certainty than most correspondence theories. I think this is a more subtle path, but I am not well-read in it personally.
Likewise, there are a variety of confirmation theories, but I haven't studied these very closely. These are a spin-off from coherence theories that suggest that internal coherence is insufficient, there must be some external verification.
Personally, I am drawn to contact theories of the kind discussed briefly in this Stranger Worlds:
https://strangerworlds.substack.com/p/our-different-worlds
However, I have my own epistemology which is espoused in my short-form philosophy book, Wikipedia Knows Nothing. Nobody has yet given it a name, but I suppose I would call it 'knowledge as a practice'. It moves in an entirely different direction from pretty much every theory of knowledge I've seen offered, although it has some significant crossover with Bruno Latour and Jacques Rancéire.
Hope these remarks are helpful!
Hi Chris,
07/08/24 – It’s taking me awhile to get to this. For one, I’ve been putting more energy into trying to alleviate my substantial social isolation; for another I’ve been working on a couple of new Citizen Philosophers pieces that I’m aiming to post under a new tab on the landing page similar to your Stranger Voices tab. Also, you have given me a lot to chew on here, so it will be a while before I post a reply.
07/25/24 – Still working on replying to your comment but finding that understanding William James’ prose is real work for me. So, I’m posting what I have so far and wondering if you might provide a bit of guidance.
Re: “pragmatic consequences of beliefs also matter. When beliefs lead to successful outcomes, they possess truth irrespective of their relationship with an 'external reality'”.[my emphasis]
I’ll start with what I think I know and maybe you will point me to where I can better my understanding. In “Whose Reality” I claimed that it can be useful to categorize the contents of my consciousness into:
sensations,
perceptions,
thoughts, and
feelings.
Thoughts are clearly different from the other three phenomena. The other three phenomena arise spontaneously, but so can thoughts. Still, unless a spontaneous thought is immediately captured, it tends to disappear,[1] so a distinguishing feature of thoughts is that they are willed, either de novo or retrieved from memory. Perceptions are tied intractably to their corresponding objective reality entity. It seems to me that I experience only a limited number of distinct sensations and feelings. There is no such constraint on my thoughts. So, a thought is a willed mental entity that is distinct from a sensation, perception or feeling, and there is no limit to what it can be about, or what form it can take.[2]
It seems to me that a belief is a kind of thought. In common language we use this word sometimes casually as a synonym for a thought. For me an assertion embodies a thought that such and such is the case. Assuming that an assertion can be modified by probability bounds where such bounds are warranted, I try to restrict ‘belief’ to assertions for which I think there is insufficient generally accepted evidence to accept it wholeheartedly as true. Re the quote above, it seems to me that claiming that a belief has some truth if it suggests an action that is successful is not at all helpful. At least at first blush I have to disagree with your pragmatists; additional considerations would be necessary to rule out the role of chance.
It seems to me that your statement: “I like William James' approach in so much that he recognises the necessity of acknowledging a variety of belief systems that can hold some degree of truth despite seeming contradictory to each other” is a different consideration. Any intellectually earnest construction of a belief system almost certainly contains at least oblique references to objective truth.
I take this last quote as a nudge to attempt to be a bit more educated. Conveniently many classics can now be accessed for free on the web. ChatGPT-3.5 tells me that one place to look to get a better idea of what you are referring to is James’ “Will to Believe” essay. I have begun to try to understand this essay but am finding that parsing 18th century English is a challenge. I often have to read some sentences a few times before I understand them. If there are other pieces I might work on to get educated on James’ views of truth perhaps you can direct me.
Notes:
[1] Speaking strictly personally.
[2] Since some physical process that might be limited to Earth life-forms underlie any thought, there might be limitations that humans inherently cannot be aware of.
Thanks for these thoughts, Frank! The time to reply simply does not matter to me at all. I am glad that you are working to cut down on your isolation - this is a problem that many of my friends have struggled with, and to be fair I have too at times. Very important to avoid this hole!
Regarding your division into sensations, perceptions, thoughts, and feelings - I'm far from convinced that you can carve up the mental world so neatly. Thoughts and perceptions intertwine (do you know Brunner and Postman's 'Red Spade' experiment...?), and feelings are equally rolled in here too. The response of the amygdala to a threatening situation is fear (flight) or anger (fight), but prior thoughts and feelings affect how this otherwise subconscious brain element processes perceptions. Fear can even be fun, as it is frequently in certain videogames and also rollercoasters.
There's a complexity to mental phenomena, and I'm not sure it can be reliably cleaved apart like this. I should like to think more about this one... I am wondering if I can mount a different schema here that would serve your purpose but not be prone to collecting an awful lot of mental activity into 'thoughts'. What this exchange has achieved, however, is making me doubt the unitary nature of 'thought' entirely - and I appreciate that! I will think about this further... It may take some time to put this together in a form I'm happy with.
Your comment actually links up very well with last week's Stranger Worlds, "The Truth of Ourselves":
https://strangerworlds.substack.com/p/the-truth-of-ourselves
You probably haven't got to this yet, and there truly is no rush for you to do so. Take your time, please! I appreciate the cadence of our conversations very much, and do not desire the unfortunate urgency that some discourse is cursed with. But I mention it, as the topics overlap considerable.
I think to some extent the piece linked above is an answer to your challenge about "When beliefs lead to successful outcomes, they possess truth irrespective of their relationship with an 'external reality'", since this is expressly a question of practical truth. In this regard, I am playing catch up myself as I have only really dug into this side of Anscombe's work recently, and I still feel I have much more reading to do on it. It could be another year or two before I feel I have something decisive here.
And yes, William James is terrible to read. But he is not as bad as Kant! 😂
Many thanks for a stimulating exchange - I will think further on this question of thoughts/beliefs/perceptions. I think it an interesting rabbit hole.
With unlimited love,
Chris.
Going to wade in on this topic for October's Stranger Worlds, Frank. Thanks for opening this path for me! I have enjoyed pondering 'thought' again.