A thread at UD that was just beginning to get interesting was unfortunately cut short when Elizabeth departed.
As is oh so typical over at UD, those silly IDiots were appealing to obvious truths and the primacy of logical reasoning. Elizabeth, in contrast, was championing her empirical methodology.
During the exchange, Elizabeth made the following statements:
My method is the standard empirical method.
If you can’t establish the truth of the premises how can you know your conclusion is correct, however impeccable the logic?
My question to Elizabeth was simple. How did you arrive at the truth of that statement [assuming it’s a rhetorical question] using the standard empirical method?
I’d really like to give Elizabeth an opportunity to answer.
For reference:
A deductive argument is said to be valid if and only if it takes a form that makes it impossible for the premises to be true and the conclusion nevertheless to be false. Otherwise, a deductive argument is said to be invalid.
A deductive argument is sound if and only if it is both valid, and all of its premises are actually true. Otherwise, a deductive argument is unsound.
http://www.iep.utm.edu/val-snd/
Given the above explication of valid and invalid arguments and sound and unsound arguments, does Elizabeth’s question even make sense? IOW, logic does not and cannot tell us whether the conclusion is “correct.” Logic can only tell us whether an argument is valid. Logic cannot and does not tell us whether an argument is sound.
How do we discover these facts/truths of logic using Elizabeth’s standard empirical method? If they cannot be established as facts/truths using the standard empirical method, should logic be abandoned? If so, why?
More recently, here at TSZ, Elizabeth says:
No skeptic at TSZ even blinks. Elizabeth seems utterly unaware that’s she’s said anything of substance. Sad, really.
Keep going Mung, there’s a DI fellowship at the end of the rainbow!
I have noticed in my life people do say their conclusions are from logic and the other side is illogical.
\Yet indeed logic is only a mechanism for thinking. Its neutral about truth/accuracy
As you said the premises must first be true. Then a conclusion based on them is logical or not depending on obedience to the premises.
Evolution, for example, is not a logical conclusion based on investigation on data. Its only logical based on premises that are not actually proven.
Thats why I stress fossils are not biological scientific for evolution. Because they are only telling the tale as evolutionists say IF the geology is accurate.
If the geology/deposition of the fossils is wrong then the biology evidence from the fossils ceases to exist. THEREFORE fossils never are bio sci evidence. EVEN if they accurately related the evolution progression of some creature.
This has been a important investigative flaw when evolutionists say evolution has bio sci evidence and name this as top dog.
Its illogical to say fossils are bio sci evidence but logical to say they are evidence for evolution if the geo sci is right . even then the morphing is speculative however.
They can’t win.
.
Rich:
I think Byers will get one before Mung does.
Mung:
Yes.
Which was exactly her point:
And it was indeed a question, addressed to those who claimed the primacy of logic.
Actually, checking back, it was addressed specifically to William – I’d been trying to get him to explain how he ascertained “objective truth”. He’d used the metaphor of a “tape measure” and I’d asked him what the analogy of a tape measure was. He said :”Primarily, logic”. So I ask how he ascertained the truth of the premises on which the logic operated. Later in the thread he refined his answer to: “A combination of logic and sensory input.”
To my mind William’s argument is extremely muddled, and those who were supporting him (or at least trying to poke holes in what I was saying) seemed to imply I was disputing the utility of logic. I do not. I think logic is very useful. My point is that it needs premises to operate on, which I think is where William’s “sensory input” comes in.
Barry, however, missed the point entirely:
“Pointing out that an obvious thing is obvious” does indeed leave anyone open to a counter argument, although “arrogant bastard” is the least of it. If your premises boil down to “it’s obvious innit” you don’t have much of an argument. And believing that what is “obvious” is “objective truth” has led to unnumerable false premises down the years:
The earth is obviously flat
The sun obviously goes round the earth
Space and time are obviously the same for all observers
Women are obviously intellectually inferior to men
Another favorite expression is “self-evident”, which some people at least use synonymously with “obvious”. If they mean something else, it’s not clear what they mean.
If I’ve learned anything in the best part of a century, it’s that what seems “self-evident” ain’t necessarily so. Which is why we have moved to evidence-based practice in all kinds of fields, including medicine, which is why we now live so much longer, and why so many killer diseases are now history.
Empiricism works.
Mung,
And that must be why ID is doing so well!
However it seems they are satisfied with simply pointing out the obvious (‘life is designed’) and calling it a day.
[ Seinfeld ]
What is it with advocates of ID becoming hypnotized by this sort of self-referential word play?
Along with their conviction that “error exists” style arguments establish TRUTH?
[ /Seinfeld ]
Self-evident truths. Sigh. There are no 4 sided triangles and baby torture is objectively wrong. Head, keyboard, clatter.
The “truth” of any premise cannot be established without the use of logic – a, or not-a, true, or not-true. Empiricism is a non-starter without the assumption of the capacity for true/valid rational arbitration of sensory input. While sensory input can “lie”, so to speak, we hold reason/logic as being able to discern where sensory input is “erroneous”, so to speak.
Some things can appear obvious but end up being incorrect; some things are obvious once understood and cannot be incorrect on pain of absurdity. That’s the difference between merely being “obvious” and something being self-evident. The primacy of mind/logic over empiricism – indeed, over any other way of establishing knowledge beyond solipsism – is self-evident. To deny primacy of mind/logic is to deny the self-evident and fall into the absurd.
Which leads many philosophers to ask “why does science work so well?”. Could it be that it is telling us something true about the world? And then much discussion ensues.
I suspect that many scientists are realists in their hearts, even though they may say out loud that science is only about predicting, not about what is true in the world.
For why do (eg) neuroscience unless you believe it is telling you something about real brains and how they work. Is it really motivating just to do science in order to publish papers and make predictions about future experiments?
But it is the case that what, if anything, science says about reality is a philosophical question, not a scientific one.
In any event, one cannot have much of an argument with those that cannot see empiricism’s dependence on logic. It’s as if they think that unless they are formally applying logic consciously, they are not applying it at all. Every time one thing is discerned from another, every time a test is conducted or research is analyzed, every time protocols are used to protect the integrity of resulting data, every time information is interpreted in terms of theory and hypothesis, logic is guiding every step and then used to criticize all work. There is no such thing as “empiricism” without an assumed valid arbiter of thought and incoming sensory data.
William J. Murray,
Self-evident truths are self-evident. Which ones are, of course, being another matter entirely. There are other potential constructs besides ‘bottom-up’ and ‘top-down’.
William J. Murray,
Arbitration on the correct application of the scientific method is the task of other people. They apply logic and reason. But their logic and reason is applied to empirical data, and the gathering thereof. Without such data, logical arguments are suspended mid-air.
Elizabeth’s statement has enormous substance and is (to me at least) utterly unsurprising. Anti-science advocates seem to be the only people who have any trouble with this basic concept. Why, precisely, do you think we should be blinking?
There is no meaningful “data” wrt empirical science without a logically coherent means of acquiring it, validating it, interpreting it, sorting it, and applying it to models and theories. What other people say or do is still acquired by you via your sensory capacity and evaluated/sorted by your mental faculties. Even their arbitration process is assumed by you to be done in by them in a manner their minds can verify as logically/scientifically valid.
Which is why primacy of mind is a necessary assumption – even if you deny it, every word you post in an argument assumes it.
If you do not assume mind is primary – independent, with access to some form of objective evaluation capacity – then all you or anyone else can possibly be is a functioning, material solipsist, with concepts of “logic” and “evidence” and “proof” and “empiricism” physically, necessarily biased and determined by your particular brain-state arrangement. As such, you cannot be objective; you cannot be independent; what you perceive and think and interpret and believe is a function of your particular, biased material processes. Agents you hold as being “independent” arbiters you trust are nothing of the sort because all information coming in from them is necessarily processed through your pre-existing, materially-biased system which has no independent, objective capacity whatsoever.
You can have nothing but hens guarding the hen house; the only thing you can have to evaluate beliefs is the exact same physical process that produces them.
WRT DNA_Jock’s post above:
William J Murray, June 4, 2015 at The Skeptical Zone:
What’s the point of attaching an metaphysical “ism” to science, if not to skew it in favor of some metphysical ideology?
Once again: The “truth” of any scientific premise cannot be established without the use of logic: a or not-a, true or not-true.
The validity of empiricism as a model depends entirely upon logic. Indeed, coming up with empiricism as a justifiable means of modeling what we experience was an exercise in logic being applied to incoming sensory data.
Science depends on logic to establish/verify any scientific premise or theory; logic doesn’t depend on science. Logic can be applied to utterly non-scientific concepts. Why do we apply logic to scientific endeavors? Because we hold that logic can arbit between true statements and false; or between sound conclusions and unsound ones. Logic validates how scientific data is acquired, interpreted, sorted and used to build models; science does not and can not dictate the principles of sound logical reasoning.
They shouldn’t have to ask. It should be obvious. But it isn’t, because philosophers are looking at things the wrong way.
Mostly, they are pragmatists. If a scientist says that he is a realist, he probably means that he is a pragmatist. He likely hasn’t bought into the meaning of “realism” that philosophers use.
Allan Miller said:
Unless the can produce a causally independent mind with access to some objective means of arbiting true statements from false and implementing them, it doesn’t matter what you call them or how they operate because all you can be is the biased system itself with no means of correction available.
No, it cannot.
William, I honestly think some of the trouble here is that you aren’t properly unpacking your concepts.
Tell me how “logic” can “arbit” between these two statements:
The universe is 6,000 years old.
The universe is 13.62 billion years old.
Obviously logic alone cannot. Nor can observation alone. Together however, we can figure out which is most likely to be true. Or rather, as I’d rather put it, which of the two makes better predictions.
Can you tell me precisely what you mean by “incoming sensory data”?
Or give me an example?
To me, this post is simply full of holes.
I note (and approve) your scare quotes. No, we can’t. Nobody is suggesting otherwise. Nor can we establish the truth of a premise without observation. Neither has “primacy”. Perception itself is an iterative process (and almostly certainly uses fuzzy, rather than classical, logic).
I have very little idea what you mean by this sentence.
I’d love to know what you mean by “sensory input” here. And, for that matter “erroneous”. I don’t know whether by “sensory input” you mean, for instance, the firing of neurons in response to a signal, e.g. light, pressure, molecule, or some more integrated perceptual input, e.g. “I see an apple”. Or something else entirely.
And I think that if you were clearer about what you meant, you might see where your argument lacks coherence (as I think it does).
I think this is bullshit, to be honest. Sure some things appear to be so, but turn out not to be e.g. the moon illusion. But how things “end up being” is the result of empirical hypothesis testing, and remains provisional, always. One researchers “end” conclusion may be another researcher’s beginning. Relativity is the classic example. Newton’s space-time model “ended up” being “absurd” only in the sense that it could not be reconciled with new data. Einstein’s does a better job – but can’t be reconciled with quantum mechanics. And all these are empirical findings. They weren’t decided by someone in an armchair using pure logic to “arbit” between Newton, Einstein and Quantum mechanics. They require iterative hypothesis formulation and test against data.
What’s that forward slash doing between “mind” and “logic”? Where did anyone agree that logic and mind were identical? And in any case, logic is not an alterantive to empiricism – it’s part of it. You need the math (the logic) and you need the data. Neither is sufficient and both are necessary. Together they form empirical methodology, which does not tell us what is true, but what makes the best predictions, and the fact that predictions appear to work, mostly, tells us that probably there is a “reality” out there that our models converge to.
But we have no direct access to that reality – we are stuck with testable models, formed by the use of both logic and data (where “logic” is not restricted to classical logic).
The statement below is false.
The statement above is true.
Those who forget the history of philosophy tend to repeat it, so here goes:
Descartes observed it would be circular (hence fallacious) to determine the reliability of the senses by means of the senses. That is why he attempted to determine the reliability of the senses by means of reason. In order do, however, he recognized that he needed to determine the reliability of reason itself. Unfortunately, his attempt to determine the reliability of reason by means of reason has been widely recognized as just as circular as any attempt to determine the reliability of the senses by means of the senses. That’s what Hume showed in the Treatise, and that’s what motivates Hume’s skepticism, to which everyone else responds in one way or another.
The Big Lesson we should draw here — according to my version of pragmatism — is that we should abandon the Quest for Certainty as a fool’s errand, and accept Peirce’s maxim (since echoed by Dewey and Wittgenstein), “let us not doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts”. In other words, doubt stands in just as much need of justification as anything else. We need reasons to think that our senses are not reliable in some specific circumstances. Doubting the senses isn’t something we just start off with, for free, as Descartes seems to have thought. (Actually Descartes’ real position is much more subtle than that, but we can gloss over the details for now.)
The real heart of the problem here lies in Descartes’ attempt to do metaphysics with the same methods of mathematics. In mathematics — Descartes thought — one starts off with self-evident, intuitively obvious axioms and then proceeds, stepwise, to deduce the theorem. The entire Cartesian project is to do metaphysics along those lines: start off with an intuitive or self-evident premise and then show how to get substantive metaphysical results. That’s how Descartes aims to get from his “I think, therefore I am” to his claims about the existence of God and the immortality of the soul. But as they say in Maine, “you can’t get there from here!”
The pragmatist alternative (independently discovered by Hegel and by Peirce) is to attend to the structure of justification in non-formal domains, beyond logic and mathematics. In everyday life, when reasoning about empirical content, justifications have a fallible-but-corrigible structure by virtue of being embedded within a broader framework of embodied social practices shared by a community of inquirers. As a community of inquirers, there are both inherited assumptions and background conditions, implicit understandings and pre-understandings, and also forward-facing, future-oriented problems-to-be-solved. So justification is essentially temporal, oriented towards both past and future. That’s not the case for justifications in purely formal domains, i.e. proofs or demonstrations.
—————————————————————
What WJM gets precisely right is that a great deal of cognitive processing is involved in the coordination of sensory inputs and motor outputs, but I worry that it is a mistake to call that “logic”. (I was called out the other day because someone thought I’d claimed that brains are logical devices, which is not my view!)
Think of logic, following Brandom, as “the structure of semantic self-consciousness”. In other words: in everyday practical dealings with the world, we infer from perceptual judgments (“it looks like it’s about to rain”) to courses of action (“I shall take my umbrella, just in case”). And inference is something that we do. It is part of the structure of the game of giving and asking for reasons (“why are you taking your umbrella?” “because it looks like it’s about to rain.”). Logic is this underlying inferential structure made explicit — and, in symbolic logic, we abstract away from meaning in order to examine the structure itself.
Clearly going to be some deep and interesting relation between what’s happening at the personal level of description (the game of giving and asking for reasons, inference, meaning, personhood, etc.) and the subpersonal level of description (pulses or flows of activity across populations of neurons). What that relation is, we don’t yet know. The neuroscience of reasoning is still in its infancy, so far as I know. But I think it would be a clear instance of the homunculus fallacy to say that we rational animals can reason, or use logic, because our brains are reasoning, or using logic. (Though substance dualism commits one to the homunculus fallacy in an even more egregious fashion — we are persons because there’s a person inside of us!)
Yes, I agree. But I think he goes astray from that point onwards by failing to unpack what he means by “sensory inputs” (and ignoring motor outputs), and if what happens at the perceptual level is “logic”, it’s not classical logic, and it can’t happen without the input.
All the evidence suggests that a kind of Bayesian fuzzy logic is involved. Here is a commentary piece I wrote about a study that had (I thought) suggested just that.
I worry that Murray has a classical empiricist conception of what perceptual experience is like. On this conception, we get bare sensations — white! square! round! — and the mind has to somehow organize these sensations into awareness of objects.
Alternatively, and just as problematic, is the version of experience that tempted many neo-Kantians: the world is presented to us in sensory consciousness as one big whoosh, a “bloomin’, buzzin’ confuson” (as James described the subjective awareness of an infant), and then we come along, apply categories to this confusion, and introduce order into it.
I think it is far better to begin with an enactive conception of experience, according to which experience has order, structure, and stability to the extent that perceptual awareness of affordances is correlated with motor responses. For us rational animals, sensorimotor abilities are expanded to include a wide variety of social practices (built on the I-You-We model of intentionality), including discursive practices (the space of reasons).
In other words, we should reject both a disembodied conception of “experience” in favor of enactivism and an overly intellectualistic, mathematical conception of “logic” or “reason” in favor of a pragmatist, inferentialist account.
One might worry that this is cheating, because I am using empirical science to explain our ability to experience, and hence explain our ability to do empirical science. But this kind of relaxed anti-foundationalism is the only alternative to the misguided Quest for Certainty that terminates in Humean skepticism. I’ll let Sellars have the last word on this point:
EL said:
Are those assertions of objective truth? Well, they can’t be, since you don’t hold the premise of objective truth. So what is it that you’re actually saying here? That most people don’t believe in primacy of mind? That most people believe that perception is an iterative process? That there is evidence that neither is primary? That it is a logical conclusion that neither is primary?
This makes sense to me.
This is where neuroimaging really has been useful I think – it is now very clear that perception is not a one-way system, and that “top down” (or, as I prefer, “endogenous”) processes are applied to the gain even at very early perceptual stages. So if we are looking for something we will “see” it more easily, not because of a late filter, but because the early sensory system is selectively activated for relevant input.
We’ve been doing a lot of work recently using a visual task in which the visual stimuli are identical in every respect in two conditions, but in one they are relevant, and in the other, irrelevant, and looking at the electrophysiological patterns associated with both primary visual areas and “late” or “executive” frontal areas (using MEG). It is really striking how different the signatures are, even in primary visual cortex, and even early in the process – in fact, before the stimulus arrives (participants know whether it’s going to be relevant or not beforehand).
I hold to the premise (or I assume the truth of the premise if you prefer) that there is a reality “out there” to which our models converge. I do not think there are statements that can be definitively said to be true or false – merely “good predictors” or “bad predictors” (I’m not talking btw of statements about morality here, but of statements about the world we live in).
Of course I’m not. You’d need a poll to answer that question, and it wouldn’t tell whether “mind has primacy” is true, even then, only whether it was likely to be true that most people thought so.
I have no idea, but the evidence suggests that that model is the closest we’ve got to reality so far.
William, I don’t even buy your problem statement! I don’t think that the statement “mind is primary” is either true OR not true! I don’t even know what it means! Especially as you seem to think that mind is synonymous with “logic” (I’m assuming that as you keep writing mind/logic as though they mean the same thing).
I’m saying that perception appears to be an interative process, from the evidence so far.
So if anything is “primary” it’s the existence of an organism with the architecture capable of perception. And we call that perceiving process, sometimes, “mind” (unless we want to reserve that word for the processes of organisms that have some higher order of thinking than simple perception-action circuits).
Sellars said:
Self-correcting in terms of what means of being able to recognize error, and what means of being able to correct it? Hens cannot guard the henhouse, KN. It is precisely because they are hens and are subject to predation by that which the have no defense that they need something superior to themselves, and their predator, to guard the henhouse.
Which is why every argument here begins and ends with logic – forming deductions and inferences, identifying words, explaining conclusions, proposing true/not true comparisons – in expectation of others having access to the same, objective logic and an independent mind capable of true understanding, which they can alter in a top-down manner. There is no valid argument about evidence that doesn’t begin with a logical interpretation of the data.
What foundationalism offers is the means for error to exist (in relation to truth) and a means by which error can be corrected. Without foundationalism or primacy of mind/logic, all one is doing is changing their statements, not “correcting” them. Foundationalism begins with premises, like the principle of identity, without which no argument is possible, and no coherent view of reality is possible.
When you have an argument that doesn’t require foundationalism to make, then I’ll listen to anti-foundationalist perspectives. Unfortunately, without foundationalism to guide you, I have no idea how you will expect me to understand anything your say, much less process it towards any conclusion you have any right to expect me to come to.
EL:
If you don’t know what it means, how can you argue against it, or insist that neither has primacy? It seems to me that you’re just arguing against me for the sake of arguing against me, without even knowing what I mean when I say something.
EL said:
The concept that you are an organism capable of perception is one that lies within your mind; without your mind, you would have no way of conceptualizing yourself as such. Without mind organizing data, you have no means of recognizing incoming sensory data as incoming sensory data, or to define it as such, or think of it as such. There would be no concept of “organism” or “non-organism”.
You are making the essential error of mistaking a construct held in the mind as true for an objective truth of the actual world. How your mind has constructed your picture of your experience (organism, senses, external world, etc.) is in fact just that – a mentally-constructed picture that, as you say, may or may not have much to do with the actual reality.
In terms of what you have to work with and from, EL: mind must be held as primary and must be held to have some kind of capacity to objectively arbit incoming information. Otherwise you have no argument to make, and no one to make it to that can understand it.
KN said:
Why “should” we?
Sure, but that doesn’t mean that mind came first. And that is the key point: things can bootstrap. Once you have perception you can potentially perceive perception.
Because it has greater predictive power as a model.
Well, I often don’t know, William, because you use words in ways that seem to me unclear. It could well be, I guess, that you are saying something I agree with, but I’m doing my best, and the best I can make from your words seems not to make a lot of sense.
That could be stupidity on my part; it could also be unclear expression on yours; it could also be unclear thinking on yours. And my hunch is that it’s that last thing.
EL said:
I didn’t say it came first. Are you still arguing against something even though you don’t know what it means?
Thanks, Captain Obvious, for telling us that you have to have the capacity to perceive before you can perceive. The point was that the idea that your model of what perception is and where it comes from and how it originates is all a mental model constructed by mind and built upon mental interpretations of data.
Mind – whatever it is, in reality – is the primary tool/capacity upon which all other ideas, concepts and explanations depend and can be logical held to originate from, because anything “preceding” mind or “building” mind or “creating” mind is itself a mentally-constructed model and interpretation that depends entirely upon mind.
Mind must be held as primary, independent, and as having access to some objective arbiter of true statements.
Without perception, you would not have a mind.
EL said:
Really? I’m supposed to somehow interpret that out of what KN actually said:
(BTW … you have the nerve to label the word “arbit” as “fancy”, and then pass on terms like “perceptual awareness of affordances …”??)
EL, do you know of any large group of scientists that have abandoned “classical empiricism” for an “enactivist” perspective, and can you provide the enactivism-based research that compares the scientific success between the two groups in creating models that have better predictions?
Or, are you once again arguing about something even when you don’t understand what it means? I’ll be the first to admit, I have no idea what KN is talking about here or what it is supposed to mean. Which is why I asked him why we “should”, or what he means by “better”, because outside of objectively true statements that refer to foundationalist, necessary assumptions that guide proper deductions and sound inferences, I don’t even know
WTF he’s talking abouthow to contextualize anything he says without referring to that which he appears to be arguing against.Then when did it come?
Neil Rickert,
I agree. But, that doesn’t mean “perception” is derived from physical senses, nor that it is derived from any physical commodity at all. After all, we perceive while asleep in dreams.
Do rocks dream them? If no physical commodity is needed, why precisely cannot rocks dream?
Then, without looking it up, do blind people see in their dreams?
I don’t know if rocks dream or not.
I don’t know if blind people can see in their dreams.
What do you think, William. What are the entailment of your world view?
Based on the logic of disembodied minds, should people blind from birth be able to see in their dreams or in near death experiences?
William J. Murray,
What makes you think that ‘immaterial’ minds can be causally independent of their substrate? They get their inputs from the same place as the rest of us – eyeballs, ears & skin mainly. How does the immaterial mind correct for invalid sensory input, in a manner unavailable to the ‘material mind’?
Yes, it strikes me that the whole function of organisms means that it is imperative that minds should be causally dependent on their substrate. The mind “serves” the substrate, as much as vice versa.
And in fact, minds are “shaped” by sensory inputs and the death of many connections. The “substrate” substantially produces the brain/mind.
Glen Davidson
William J. Murray,
This just strikes me as silly. Of course other people’s opinions are processed through my sensory input and evaluated by my mind. Do you have a shortcut?
If I think I have observed a phenomenon, but can’t be sure, it gives my supposition one heck of a boost if someone else can verify it. Of course both my original perception and the confirmation could be distorted and ‘wrong’, but there is an element of independence between those two observations. I’m not just looking at something and then looking again. Someone is telling me that they saw it too. There is nothing particularly ‘logical’ about the act of observation per se. But intersubjective confirmation starts to add weight.