Hume and Popper

Heather said that I should subtitle this blog "Miner Little Women and Rebekah's Crazy Thoughts." I feel safe with this labeling because my thoughts do feel a little crazy.
One of my old professors is giving a talk this week, and since I have been in abstentia from philosophy for nearly NINE years I decided to jump back in. Don Garrett (my old prof.) is an expert on the philosopher David Hume. He will be giving a talk on Hume's idea of probability. Hume argued that since our experiences with the world are finite, and since our faculties are always given to faults and deficiencies we can never know something based on experience to be absolutly true. Our beliefs are only probably true, and the degree of probability they have is based on our perceived accuracy of our faculties, and corroborating past experiences. Hume had developed what we call the "problem of induction." Most of our knowledge about the world is inductive, meaning that it is based on evidence which is another word for experience. Inductive reasoning is not as strong as deductive because deductive reasoning does not depend on experience. Deductive knowledge is generally considered to be necessarily true given the rules of logic - the conclusion necessarily follows from the premises. Since our experiences can never be exhaustive, we can never "necessarily" know if a theory, claim,or hypothesis is true. Since science concerns itself with observation, then scientific knowledge has a very hard time qualifying itself as necessarily true. Karl Popper, a philosopher of science who came on the scene from Vienna after WWII, acknowledged that Hume was correct to alert us to the problem of induction. But Popper argued that Hume's solution to the problem was not good enough. What was Hume's solution? "that all our reasoning concerning causes and effects are deriv'd from nothing but custom; and that belief is more properly an act of the sensitive, than of the cogitative part of our nature" (Part IV, Sect. I). What is the "sensitive" part of our nature? Well, the part that feels, has impulses, gut reactions, AND all those experiences based on the senses. Hume reasons that since our inductive beliefs cannot be based on reason/logic, then we must believe based on something other than logic, i.e. our sensitive nature or psychology. Popper was not satisfied and neither are most scientists and philosophers of science because this means that we believe only because we feel like believing, and not because there is some law of the universe which we have "discovered" by all our astute observations and superior reasoning.
Popper proposes that to reclaim rationality in science we have to accept his theory of falsification. Falsification means that we develop hypotheses based on an aim to try to falsify them with experiments and observations. When we subject our hypotheses to falsification and they fail to be falsified, then we can accept for now their high probability of being true, until some falsification does arise. I however, do not think that Popper is being intellectually honest. By saying that we will subject our hypotheses to falsification does not mean that we are able to infuse this thinking with deductive reasoning. Our scientific beliefs are no more deductive than before we introduced "falsification" into the practice. Hume was on to something when he claimed that we believe because our past experiences and habits incline us to believe - belief based on experience cannot be rational because it is experiential, period.

What we can say however, is that beliefs that are not based on recurrent experiences or reliable sensations are most likely CRAZY.

How to pick the right man...

Today Camille and I were in the backyard. I was raking pine cones and she was telling me very creative stories. I couldn't always understand what she was saying with the noise of the rake, but I remember at one point she told me about how she would invent a new cell phone. She is oftening thinking about ways to improve the world, our home, our lifestyle, etc...Out of the blue she pronounced,"Mom, when I'm in college and I'm picking the man to marry, I'm not going to choose one of those guys that fool around." Me - "Oh, so you'll pick someone who works hard?" Her - "Yeah." I don't believe she knows the alternative connotation of "fool around," but I found her decision to be spot on either way.

Dinner Conversation

Tonight at dinner I asked Gwyneth, Elise, and Jeff to explain something about the play Oedipus Rex that we saw last week-end. This was at Phillips, and Scotty, the student we drive to church every Sunday, was Oedipus. I hadn't read this particular Sophoclean play in college, but I had read Antigone too many times to count. I couldn't figure out how the Sphinx was involved in Oedipus' fate. Gwyneth explained it to me; that Thebes had been plagued and the Sphinx challenged Oedipus to solve a riddle to save the people of Thebes from the plague. He did (it's the riddle, "what walks on four legs in the morning, two at noon, and three in the evening?), the people were cured, and crowned him king, married him unbeknownst to his mother, etc... How did I miss this?? Elise reminded me that the character who explained this bit in the play had dots painted all over her face!! Elise and I were at the 9 o'clock showing, and I had assumed that she was just being well-behaved in front of all the teenagers, not that she was actually following and understanding the play! I realized once again that I'm not too bright.

Celeste

Celeste has been doing a few cute things lately that I thought I should write down as she is sure to outgrow them someday. She loves to put little items in her clothes. If she is wearing a onesie she puts little dolls, dice, lipstick, markers or playing cards down the collar so that the shirt acts as a pocket. She also tries to convert her pant legs into pockets, but hasn't realized that they only make good pockets when you stay sitting. Lately she has also started to say "Jesus" and at fairly random times. Tonight "Jesus" means that I should sing "Jesus Wants Me For a Sunbeam." At bedtime I often sing her a simple lullaby, but tonight she insisted "Jesus!" Elise thinks I should add pictures because writing is just boring - maybe we'll try to video her making pockets...