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.
7 comments:
comment # 1: I bet Hume never thought someone would be writing about him in pink, with polka-dots in the background, that said, now I will read what you wrote.
Here I go with a more serious comment. What was Hume's problem with induction anyway? Even if science doesn't use deduction, the benefits we have from modern science far outweigh the problems that have arisen from false hypothesis. And couldn't you say that it is impossible for us to use deduction to further science. Although I can relate to the frustration with induction used in the scientific method. When Ariel was being treated for Leukemia, I was frustrated to find out that not everyone reacts to the same treatment because each person's disease is very individualized. Not only is the initial event that caused chromosomes to change unknown, different chromosomes are affected in different individuals, resulting in Leukemia, and each person's body may react differently to the commonly used drugs. I wanted the doctors to be able to say, "Your daughter has such and such kind of Leukemia based on the chromosomes that were initially changed, and is allergic to such and such drugs, so we will go with treatment plan such and such." But as it was, we found out along the way which drugs she reacted well to, which ones almost killed her, and some we will never know if they had any affect at all. So, I am grateful to modern science and all the cancer patients and doctors who had gone before us to at least figure out how much they know now, which was enough to save her life, despite all the ill affects. How could that all have come about using deduction only?
No, it's not a problem of science failing to use deduction, it's just that deduction isn't a tool available to them, SO we can't really know in a necessary, logical sense that what we purport to know is actually TRUE. The key here is that we "purport" to know things - they work for us, so we continue to use them. Hume argues that this is as good as it gets, others are dissatisfied with this because if we are pursuing knowledge shoudln't we be pursuing TRUE belief, not just useful beliefs?
Here are some more random comments. I wonder if babies only use deduction, because they don't have the experience to only use induction. Like I am hungry, period, no reason why. It is what it is. And my next thought that if taken to the extreme, Hume could never use the word "is" becasue he would always have to wonder if the conclusion he came to was based on past experience, thus not true. He would be hard to live with. Like on December 31st if I ask Nikolay to take out the garbage he says he will next year, meaning tomorrow. Just imagine Mrs. Hume asking David if he was hungry, and he couldn't rely on his senses he would say, "It may be probable." So she would have to wonder how many potatoes to peel.
Ok,I guess that is what I meant by that I relate to the frustration of induction in the scientific method. But I guess he doesn't want scientists saying that they KNOW something based on experience, because nothing we perceive can be absolutely true.
If we were to pursue TRUE beliefs in everything, life would be too much to handle. How much progress would we really make? There is much more learned through experience that you didn't even know was there to learn.
This is all very intellectually stimulating. Thank you!
I think Hume is right. It is as good as it gets, and we should all start using the word probably a lot more. Like the world is probably round.
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