How to be an empiricist

what's up dogs so i am an empiricist but what is it to be an empiricist well in this video we're going to examine that question focusing in particular on the work of baz van fressen his book the empirical stance contains a useful discussion of empiricism that frames the debate about empiricism in what i think is a fairly novel and insightful way so empiricism is of course a philosophical position and so perhaps we should start with a more general question well what is a philosophical position philosophical positions are often stated in terms of beliefs so according to van frassen most philosophers are committed to what he calls principle zero which says that for each philosophical position x there exists a statement x plus such that to have position x is to believe or decide to believe that x plus so x plus is is the doctrine of x now if we if if we're construing philosophical positions as beliefs then that principle is surely true all it says is that in order to count as holding a certain uh position you must believe a certain statement that is defining of that position a simple example of this would be uh to be a cartesian dualist is to believe that mind and matter are distinct substances the distinctness of mind and matter is a belief about the world and it is a it is the doctrine of cartesian dualism uh note that we might take x plus not to be a single belief but to be a cluster of beliefs i mean maybe no particular belief in that cluster is necessary to count as an idea of the position um maybe it's more like you need a sufficient but vague number of the beliefs you know whatever it doesn't matter whether we think of x plus as a as a single belief or as a kind of vague cluster anyway applying this to empiricism uh we end up we have it that there exists a statement called an e plus such that to be an empiricist is to believe e plus um so that's our assumption or n e for naive empiricism to to be an empiricist is to believe e plus that seems reasonable there are many different empiricists what makes them all empiricists is that they all believe e plus the question then is what is e plus what is the belief that is the doctrine of empiricism well we can begin thinking about this by turning to what we might call textbook empiricism empiricism as it is commonly understood in in recent philosophy empiricism as it is commonly presented to people learning philosophy for the first time if you open a philosophy textbook you will probably find a couple of common definitions of empiricism so first of all there is empiricism in terms of concept concept empiricism on this view to be an empiricist is to believe that all concepts are derived from sense experience that is there are no innate concepts this is the classic debate between loch and leibniz in locke's famous metaphor the mind is a tabula rasa a blank slate upon which sensory experience writes all of our ideas are either directly copied from impressions or are constructed from ideas copied from impressions by some mental operation so i have say the ideas of horse horn and white just on the basis of sensory experience right like i open my eyes right now i'm looking at a white wall so i've got the like whiteness the idea of white that sensory experience if i look at my window maybe i can see a horse i mean i can't because i don't live on a farm but you know maybe i see a horse sometimes so i get the idea of horse and i see another animal with a horn so i get the idea of horn and then i i can combine them right into the idea of unicorn so even though i've never directly seen a unicorn that's constructed out of um simpler ideas that were derived directly from sensory experience so you know i mean this is this is perfectly familiar right empiricism about concepts and then by contrast the rationalists like leibniz they held there are certain ideas whose content exceeds that which can be provided by sensory experience leibniz compared the mind to a veined block of marble if you take a veined block of marble and hit it with a chisel it breaks apart more readily along certain lines the veins mark out a particular shape and so although labour is required to reveal the shape in a sense the shape is already there it's already in the marble waiting to be revealed so it is according to leibniz with respect to the mind and at least some of its concepts the mind has certain innate dispositions inclinations habits that we so we are predisposed to develop particular ideas as a result of experience or maybe another way to look at it is that the mind gives form to the materials provided by experience anyway that's concept empiricism and this idea of concept empiricism was a powerful tool for the british empiricists and it had particularly radical consequences in barclay and hume concept empiricism was able to frame a particular philosophical program it was now the task of philosophers to show how to derive various concepts from sense experience complex ideas must be broken down into simple ideas and then these ideas related to sensory impressions and if this derivation could not be done if a purported concept could not be uh could not be shown to be derived from the materials of experience then the purported concept was held to be meaningless that was that was the basis of things like hume's critique of the self hume's view of causation barclays uh critiques of matter and things like that so you know this this was as i say a powerful tool um so i mean obviously this way of thinking about empiricism captures uh something important about an influential stage in the history of philosophy but there's an obvious problem with defining empiricism in this way uh with with treating this claim about concepts as what it is to be an empiricist um the claim that there i know that there are no innate concepts is assuming it's meaningful at all it's a purely psychological thesis it's a claim about the operation of the human mind it's also obviously questionable um there's there's not any particular reason why we should think it's true um i mean you know your your body is not an undifferentiated mass you're born with certain bodily features why wouldn't the mind come into the world with a certain structure um i mean and actually no even worse right there's there are positive reasons to think that this thesis is false indeed some of these problems were known at the time to the british empiricists themselves hume's missing shade of blue is a classic example so hume imagines a person who has seen lots of shades of blue except one call it shade zed now if you line up all the shades of blue in front of this person leaving a gap where shade zed would go would this person be able to imagine shade zed well intuitively yes um but if that's the case this person certainly yeah they haven't uh they haven't derived that from like copying a sensory impression right this person seems to have an idea that is not copied from a sensory impression um so just a few other uh similar points that might be raised here what about what about abstraction right like i have the concept red um i've developed this concept by abstracting from various particular shades of color um i never experience red in general i only experience specific shades so if you if you take two different shades of red what do they have in common well they're both part of a range of colors that i've designated red but but that classification scheme is not forced on me by experience um and in fact that's well demonstrated by the fact that other cultures have used different color classifications i mean indeed with this point in mind it's it's not actually clear how to even state what the deliverances of experience in its in themselves are like so in order to describe our experience at all it seems like we need to assume some prior conceptual scheme some sort of you know way of classifying and that way of classifying will not itself be given an experience more recently you have things like chomsky's poverty of the stimulus argument which attempts to show that children are not exposed to enough linguistic information to develop an understanding of the grammar of their language from that information alone which suggests that certain structural rules of grammar are innate finally there are problems with the very idea of innateness which arguably renders this whole debate meaningless so what is it what is it for any trait to be innate all traits are a product of the interaction between genes and environment and genes do not specify particular traits in anything like the way that you know an architect's blueprint specifies the characteristics of a building there's always this interaction whether you're talking about bodily traits or mental traits i have a video series on innateness i'm not going to go into the into it here but you can check out my series on innateness if you are interested in learning more about um about this but anyway look uh so there's a bunch of problems with with concept empiricism no doubt there are answers to all of these points because you know there's never going to be a knockdown argument against any substantive position the key point is this if we if we view empiricism as a claim about how we develop concepts this turns empiricism into a psychological thesis and this thesis had obvious problems even in the past and it appears to have been refuted in modern psychology um in fact from the point of view of modern psychology it's hard to even state what this thesis amounts to now it would seem a little bit odd for a general philosophical position a general world view to end up just amounting to psychology and to being refuted by psychology um indeed if empiricism is defined defined as the view that there are no innate concepts it seems a little hard to account for the continuing influence of empiricists of the major empiricists like hume and barkley right like their basic views would be fairly trivially false um okay so let's grant that concept empiricism doesn't work an alternative way of thinking about empiricism an alternative uh textbook definition as it were we might frame empiricism in terms of justification to be an empiricist is to believe that all knowledge is justified on the basis of sense experience experience is the source and foundation for knowledge so on this view we may well have innate ideas we may well have ideas that cannot be derived from sense experience but these are not going to provide any justification for our beliefs right if you want justification comes from experience um a classic statement of this approach to empiricism which is actually slightly weaker than this is is to say that there is no synthetic a priori knowledge that is there is no a priori knowledge of the world the only propositions that we can know april awry the only propositions that we can know independently of experience are analytic truths truths concerning the relations of our concepts so i can know april or i that all bachelors are unmarried because the term bachelor is just defined to mean unmarried man but that tells me nothing about the way the world is all knowledge of matters of fact is built on experience if i want to know whether there actually are any bachelors i have to do some empirical investigation um and it's you know it's not something i can just figure out by like intellectual intuition by pure reason or anything like that i have to actually go out and observe things and that's the case for all synthetic propositions whenever we you know and if for any proposition that is not just true or false in virtue of meaning we have to go out and investigate the world now this kind of view cannot be refuted by psychology because it's not a claim about how we develop concepts or about the causal operations of our minds it's a claim about justification now um so again there are there are problems with this way of thinking about empiricism um van frassen certainly thinks that this way of of approaching empiricism ended in failure um and in fact the failure was clear even by around the time of hume how could all knowledge derive from sense experience we know various things beyond what we immediately experience we know various general claims such as all metals expand when heated we know claims about the future such as tomorrow the sun will rise the trouble is that there simply is no means on the basis of experience itself of deriving any information beyond what is immediately experienced there's no way of deriving any general information or information about the future to put it another way experience provides no means for ampliative inference um you know from from going beyond what we what we are currently experiencing this is the problem of induction and i i mean i'm assuming that you're familiar with this if not i have some videos on hume's problem of induction should you need to remind yourself of what that is but anyway experience in itself logically implies nothing beyond beyond whatever it is you're experiencing at the time um so you know the empiricist seems to face a fairly uncomfortable dilemma here first option is to just renounce induction renounce ampliative inference and that seems to compel us to renounce knowledge of any general claims it compels us to renounce knowledge of the future um like you know we can we can only know our what we're currently experiencing and anything that logically follows from that but pretty much nothing logically follows from that um so this is a skeptical disaster it would render us unable to perform even the simplest actions right why take the stairs rather than jump out the window if i have no better reason to believe that jumping out the window will result in my death so the second option then is to admit some sort of non-analytic principle which is not derived from experience which will allow you to infer various claims from experience um so this might be something like the you know uniformity of nature assumption right like that will allow you to uh well you know hume suggests at least that you know if we can assume that nature is uniform then we can use that to justify inductive inferences but of course if you're admitting these sorts of principles then you're just abandoning empiricism a further problem here is that there's actually an internal problem with taking experience as the foundation of knowledge so okay so let's consider this claim right that experience provides the foundation of knowledge why should we accept this why should we think that the experience can work in this way can work as a foundation i mean clearly this claim needs to be argued for right we can't just assume that this is true there are plenty of philosophers who reject it both rationalists and skeptics so there are two alternatives right the first option is to attempt to argue for this claim within experience as it were we can try to argue for this claim by building on nothing but experience um so we can try to like use experience itself to show that experience is the only foundation for knowledge now i mean so in the first place it's it's far from clear what this argument could possibly be experience is not like self-verifying as it were um at least not in any you know it's not not in any obvious way it's just not at all clear how you can kind of get from experience alone to the claim that experience is the only foundation for knowledge um but more importantly even if you did give an argument it looks like this argument would be plainly circular because we would be justifying experience as a source of knowledge by by appealing to experience um how could that possibly be convincing to somebody who is skeptical that experience can play this role i mean this is analogous to hume's point about induction it's circular to say that induction is justified because induction has worked in the past because you're justifying induction by appealing to induction so the second option is we can provide an argument from outside the empiricist framework that is we can give an argument that appeals to something outside of experience for this claim that all knowledge is based on experience or that experience is the only foundation for knowledge well this is obviously self-defeating right we'd be justifying empiricism on a non-empiricist basis um we'd be giving up on the idea that all knowledge is based on experience by hypothesis whatever materials we're drawing on to justify the claim that all knowledge is based on experience are themselves justified by something other than experience so that's not going to work either um so that looks like a bit a pretty big problem okay so look we've we've moved fairly rapidly through some of the difficulties with textbook empiricism um and you know these sorts of arguments are not going to be absolutely conclusive but there are some fairly deep problems with these kinds of empiricism there are problems of you know empirical reputation problems of internal coherence um i mean we can also add that if we're proposing these as definitions of empiricism we're also going to run into the problem that very few of the people that we would all identify as major empiricists actually held these views right so if you if you think that empiricism just is the claim um you know that there are no innate concepts um or something like that then again like it's going to turn out that actually many people that are traditionally identified as empiricists aren't actually empiricists because they don't hold that view so can we do better than this well perhaps the difficulty here lies in principle zero in the claim that holding a philosophical position must consist in believing some statement remember that in the case of empiricism we had n e to be an empiricist is to believe that e plus on this approach empiricism is a doctrine a uh belief or at least a set of beliefs now van frassen points out a very general problem with any attempt to frame empiricism as a doctrine and maybe the the issues that we've seen um you know with concept empiricism and justification empiricism um i kind of i like a product of this type of of problem in in a way but there's a very general problem no matter how we define what the belief is um we're going to face this issue so our question is what is e plus well okay there are a couple of general things we can say about what e plus would need to would need to be right e plus would need to have certain features so e plus would need to ground the empiricist critique of metaphysics for one thing um and it would itself obviously need to be invulnerable to that critique if e plus is to do any work if e plus is to be significant then it can't be a tautology it can't be something trivial like all bachelors are unmarried okay you know a statement like that doesn't tell us anything about anything except how we've defined our terms e plus must be a factual thesis and it must involve some claim about the human epistemic position um you know and that's got to imply either the falsehood or the untenability or the meaninglessness or whatever of uh metaphysics in order for the empiricist critique of metaphysics to work now obviously e plus itself can't be a piece of metaphysics so it must be a factual claim of a you know scientifically respectable sort or at least empiricists must treat e-plus as being open to debate indeed this is one of the key characteristics of empiricism no factual claim can be ruled out april or i disagreement with any factual hypothesis is admissible in the sense that every factual hypothesis uh is is is put to the test every factual hypothesis is held to be at least potentially true of course that doesn't mean that we will in practice take every hypothesis seriously we now know that the earth is a globe and this has been well established for thousands of years and scientists don't need to worry about arguing with flat earthers anymore they don't need to take the flat earth as a serious possibility but at an earlier stage flat earth theory would have been admitted into the conceptual arena and it was put to the test for all the early greeks knew it might have been true how did they show that it wasn't true by conducting experiments and ultimately in the end science didn't accept the spherical earth because you know spherical earth was the word of god or because spherical earth was supported by tradition or because the spherical earth was the deliverance of intellectual intuition or whatever no instead we put a variety of positions against the tribunal of experience and the spherical earth won out so the empiricist attitude is um as van frassen puts it as in science so in philosophy disagreement with any factual hypothesis is admissible in the sense that disagreement is is in principle acceptable we don't rule out hypotheses a priori but now we face an obvious problem because we've said um by n e to be an empiricist is to believe that e plus and a corollary of n e is that the empiricist critique of some metaphysical claim m will involve showing that m is incompatible with e plus um so you know think of those empiricists who criticize a metaphysical hypothesis by showing that it can't be supported by experience or by showing that the concepts involved in its statement can't be derived from experience or whatever what we're saying here in other words is that hypotheses that are incompatible with the empiricist doctrine e plus are not admissible but but for the empiricist disagreement with any factual hypothesis is admissible disagreement over claims about what the world is like is permitted we don't rule out um alternative hypotheses apriori i mean we can put this in the form of a dilemma suppose the e plus is taken by the empiricist to be not open to debate so contraries to e plus are inadmissible well then we are ruling out factual hypotheses a priori and this violates the empiricists anti-dogmatic attitude we have made e plus into exactly the kind of metaphysics shielded from criticism that empiricism claims to reject on the other hand suppose e plus is open to debate so that contraries to e plus are admissible well in that case the empiricist has has lost any radical critique of metaphysics metaphysics is not problematic in principle even by the empiricists likes um now of course the empiricist may still be able to critique some specific metaphysical claims in the same way we can criticize specific claims in all fields right like a scientist might reject a specific version of the big bang model for example the point is that once the empiricist admits that contraries to e plus are admissible are open to you know debate she no longer has any general critique of metaphysical theorizing the most the empiricist can say to the metaphysician is well okay you know let's let's each explore the factual hypotheses that we both favor i favor e plus you favor uh this hypothesis that contradicts e plus let's let's both go on our way there's no critique of the metaphysical project in itself um so i mean maybe one way to see this is is to like apply this to an example consider three philosophers frank vincent and don frank and vincent are both empiricists don is a metaphysician suppose that frank and vincent have some disagreement about a factual matter and this can be anything you like i mean maybe frank believes that eating red meat is associated with a higher risk of cancer whereas don does not what's frank going to say about this well something like okay i disagree with vincent but the mistaken beliefs he holds are admissible because they're compatible with e with e plus right you know we take we're both you know taking these beliefs putting them against the tribunal of experience whatever they're both admissible they're both you know within this realm of like reasonable debate now what will he say to don with respect to don's belief in some speculative metaphysical hypothesis well in this case if frank is to be an empiricist he's going to want to mount some kind of substantive critique he will want to say it's not just it's not just that don is mistaken but that the very project that don is engaging in is misguided but frank has no way to do this on the basis of e plus if contraries to e plus are admissible uh it's just it's just going to become a standard factual disagreement like his disagreement with vincent um so i mean this is you know this argument is maybe a little bit abstract um so it might be worth uh framing it in a in a different way um so i'm i'm i'm gonna present what is essentially the same argument again but again in in in different terms um so the central claim of empiricism is something like this there is no a priori knowledge or experience is our only source of information or whatever okay you know whatever e plus is it's um it's it's going to be something like that every factual hypothesis must be subjected to testing against observation before it's accepted or rejected whatever e plus is it had better entail that no hypotheses can be ruled out a priori here's the problem consider some non-empiricist metaphysical hypothesis m m denies or entails the denial of the claim that there is no a priori knowledge so the metaphysician disagrees with e plus now if we accept empiricism we must accept that the dispute between e plus and m cannot be decided a priori i mean you know this is just the central claim of empiricism right the problem here is that e plus tells us that m must be wrong right like given that we accept e plus we can immediately derive that m is false uh m entails that there is a priori a priori knowledge but we accept e plus according to which there is no a priori knowledge so we must reject m but now we're rejecting m a r i so empiricism is incoherent um e plus entails that we cannot rule out m a priori and that we can rule out m a ri so if this is right if this argument is is right then we shouldn't think of empiricism as being a doctrine we shouldn't think of it as a belief contrary to principle zero a philosophical position can consist in something other than a belief but if empiricism is not a belief what is it van frassen suggests that empiricism should instead be thought of as a stance whereas stance involves a cluster of attitudes commitments and goals and which may at some given time involve or presuppose certain beliefs but it cannot be equated with any set of beliefs stances can survive through uh changes of belief even fairly radical changes of belief and this is why when we examine the history of philosophy we find the empiricist attitude recurring there are various philosophers through various areas that we can speak of as embodying the empiricist stance despite fairly radical differences in world view so as van frassen puts it the story of empiricism is a story of recurrent rebellion against a certain systematizing and theorizing tendency in philosophy the story of empiricism is the story of rebellion against metaphysics think of aristotle against plato with aristotle emphasizing empirical inquiry disdain towards high theory and plato's postulation of ideal forms or the 14th century nominalists who rebelled against an aristotelian tradition that had uh drifted somewhat from aristotle's more empirical focus or the british empiricists who rebelled against the sort of systematizing continental philosophers so you know there are lots of other cases in each of these cases we can speak of an empiricist attitude an empiricist stance in philosophy of course to modernize we see in all of these cases beliefs that might strike us as rather strange for an empiricist look at how barkley one of the great british empiricists appeals to god to ensure the coherence of his philosophical system um you know that's an example of a move that may not be particularly empiricist but you know barclays attacks on representationalism his attack on the explanatory value of materialism on the primary secondary quality distinction that's that's all a great expression of an empiricist stance so we can certainly speak of an empiricist attitude there obviously people can embody the empiricist stance to more or less of an of a degree so let's try to state this a little bit more precisely what we see recurring across the ages is a philosophical stance with two general parts there's a positive part and a negative part bear in mind that my description here is not intended to be complete because working out the empiricist stance is going to be an ongoing project um but anyway having said that the the first the positive part the positive part emphasizes anti-dogmatism fallablism it involves a general admiration for the norms of the natural sciences um including the idea that no hypothesis should be ruled out apriori which as we saw is the source of the dilemma that arises when treating empiricism as a doctrine um so let's yeah so a couple of characteristics then first characteristic the empiricist will say something like that the the process of science is a paradigm of rational inquiry they will they will treat empirical science as um as as the kind of ideal uh form of rational inquiry this is the empiricist's strongly positive attitude towards science now note that what matters for the empiricist is not really the content of science it's not how its theories and models describe the world but rather its its practices its norms its methods what empiricists find admirable is how scientists go about testing their hypotheses this is an important point because there are many different ways of admiring science um physicalists or materialists also have a strongly positive attitude towards science but for them it's more the content of science that is the object of their admiration they are impressed by how our best theories and models describe the world and um you know part of their attitude part of their kind of approach to philosophy is they structure their you know beliefs and their attitudes um like around the assumption that science provides reasonably complete and reasonably accurate descriptions of the way the world is um you know science is approximately true um so you know one way to put this is in terms of the distinction between process and product empiricists emphasize the process of science physicalists tend to emphasize the product of science um for the empiricist as van van frassen puts it it's not so much that science teaches us what to believe rather science teaches us how to give up our beliefs so it's it's an emphasis on the the practices and the norms and methods now of course e1 is what embodies the empiricist emphasis on experience as an arbiter of theory choice the claim is not that all concepts are drawn from experience or even the all knowledge derives from experience or anything like that rather the point is we must do what we can to bring any factual hypothesis to empirical tests and when people propose factual hypotheses and then work to shield them from empirical testing we can rightly be suspicious of what those people are up to and i'll notice actually the empirical test doesn't simply mean you know experience in the traditional sense science doesn't simply test claims against experience experience is highly uh experience in science becomes highly regimented right we work out quantitative predictions from our theories which specify very particular observations as relevant and then we run controlled experiments in what might be highly artificial conditions in francis bacon's famous phrase we torture nature for her secrets so i mean certainly the you know a lot of uh empiricists in the past tended to kind of think of like experience as this thing that's just kind of given to us and we construct knowledge on that basis but actually if you're taking empirical science as a paradigm of rational inquiry you can see that that's sort of a silly way of thinking um anyway the next characteristic disagreement with any factual hypothesis is admissible admissible in the sense that any factual hypothesis should be put to the test put in the the the arena of debate no factual hypothesis can be ruled out april or i um the empiricist then has a general tolerance of disagreement on factual questions um and again you know this is part of what embodies the empiricist's emphasis on experience in theory choice perhaps the word of god is that the universe is geocentric or that humans do not share a common ancestor with other species or perhaps that is what pure reason tells us or um or whatever or what tradition tells us but that kind of thing is just irrelevant to the empiricist these these hypotheses like all other claims about the world must face the tribunal of experience um and of course another point here is that experience can't refute any hypothesis conclusively so we might always be able to rehabilitate an apparently refuted theory and that has happened in in the past you know theories that um were thought to be refuted ended up uh being resurrected again um so you know so that's that's part of this uh tolerance of disagreement with respect to factual questions um they are all in principle um well none of them can be ruled out a priori and maybe with you know changes in our experience we might see that apparently refuted theories get rehabilitated so that's the positive part of empiricism and second there is the negative part and this is the resistance to metaphysics in particular empiricists target the kind of metaphysics that to quote van frassen gives primacy to demands for explanation and proceeds by explanation by postulate that is giving explanations that postulate the reality of entities or aspects of the world not already evident in experience and so we get a couple more characteristics of empiricism three the rejection of demands for explanation at certain points in metaphysics there's a drive to provide explanations for anything and you know the metaphysician is not satisfied with the claim that there might be certain brute facts the metaphysician is not satisfied with just leaving things unexplained here's an example consider empirical regularities like all copper conducts electricity now metaphysician will look at this and ask okay why does all copper conduct electricity give me an ex explain this explain this regularity now we can investigate this scientifically we might appeal to a theory about the behavior of electrons the underlying molecular structure of a piece of copper and so on to explain the electrical properties of copper in comparison to the electrical properties of other materials but that's not what the metaphysician is getting at this just this you know giving a scientific model just pushes the question one step back take our fundamental scientific theory and let's suppose there are two types of fundamental particle a and b which both repel each other again the metaphysician will ask why does a repel b and the way that she will explain this is by saying well because it's a law of nature that a repels b the presence of a necessitates that b will be repelled uh there is a physical necessity right so we have these regularities in the world and what underlies these regularities is physical necessity so what the empiricist resists here is the notion that regularities require this kind of explanation in the first place right an empiricist well some many empiricists at least would be happy to say a and b repel each other that's just the way the world is right like that's where explanation ends um so for for more on this point uh you should check out my video my videos on laws of nature um but you know this is this is a good example i think of where an empiricist will just say like it's you know it's it's just bizarre to think that you would need to give that you would even need to you know give an explanation um of of this kind at least right like um a and b are you know our repulsive a and b repel each other that's that's just it right the idea that there needs to be kind of something behind that or something grounding that is is not is not legitimate um of course the you know look the request for explanation that's a natural expression of our curiosity of our desire to push knowledge as far as it will go but the metaphysician will count failure to explain these things as a mark against a theory and she will construct theories merely for the purpose of explaining things that are not dealt with by the sciences and it's here that the empiricist will um you know will demur the not every demand for explanation is legitimate for the empiricist now what is perhaps even more problematic uh is not the request for explanation but the kind of explanations that metaphysics provides so the fourth characteristic of empiricism is a strong dissatisfaction with explanations that proceed by postulation so that is by with explanations that proceed by postulating entities beyond what is given or what could be given in experience for example in metaphysic in meta ethics rather some philosophers attempt to explain ethics by treating it as providing true descriptions about a realm of non-natural moral values there are certain features of our ethical discourse or certain intuitions we have about ethics or whatever that for which the postulation of non-natural moral values is supposed to provide an explanation or consider philosophers who explain mathematics by postulating a platonic realm of numbers and other mathematical objects of which mathematics provides true descriptions or philosophers who explain morality by postulating alternative possible worlds either as abstract objects or as concrete entities that somehow exist without any spatiotemporal location to us all philosophers who explain scientific theories as providing true descriptions of structures in nature again like certain uh features of accepted scientific theories such as how scientists have used them to derive successful novel predictions are said to require an explanation and the explanation is well the theory is successful in that way because it provides a true description of the unobservable world and so on and so on um like yeah obviously we can multiply these kinds of examples endlessly that gives you a sense of uh explanation by postulate that the empiricist uh resists so so that is the the empiricist stance um and that's what the you know that's that's where the empiricist resistance to metaphysics is going to come come from so how then is the empiricist to to critique metaphysics well at a minimum it looks like the empiricist needs to do two things first of all the empiricist will say something about what in general is wrong with attempting to explain our practices by postulating aspects of the world beyond experience of which these practices provide true descriptions and secondly the empiricist will give an alternative account of these practices so let's take the first point what's wrong with explanation by postulation with explaining some area of discourse by postulating a realm of you know non-empirical facts about which that discourse provides true descriptions well the empiricist can make several objections here first of all as we've seen she might well say that the demand for explanation is just not legitimate in the first place or at least the demand for the kind of explanation that the metaphysician is giving is not legitimate um you know so we might argue that ethics mathematics modality and so on simply don't need this kind of explanation but second even if you accept the demand for the explanation the empiricist will say well the explanation is often of no value even on its own terms one reason for this is that the metaphysician's explanation appeals to features that are less comprehensible than the the the things that we wanted to explain in the first place so let's take modality all people who can competently use the english language have a grasp of modal concepts concepts of necessity possibility contingency counterfactuals and they know how to judge claims made using such concepts like you know when i say well i you know could have put on a blue shirt this morning i think yeah okay that makes sense because i've got a blue shirt in my cupboard i you know there's nothing preventing me from getting in my cupboard like i know that because i went into the cupboard this morning etc etc right like i can reason in these kinds of ways so yeah we we all know how to use these concepts we want how to judge these concepts now the metaphysician explains this discourse by the introduction of a realm of possible worlds but like well first of all what on earth is a possible world what is their nature how do we know about them how do they relate to one another how do they ground the truth of modal claims right we've just postulated an entity here which like doesn't do any other work it's not like we're um it's not like we're say drawing on something that uh has a uh a use in a bunch of other theories you know like in the way that so you know in the way that in science you know electrons are applied in lots of different theoretical concepts context no we're just you know postulating this realm of entities um which itself raises all sorts of questions it's it just opens up a whole load more problems than the one we started with um i mean i should note here that the empiricist wouldn't object to analyzing modal language in terms of possible worlds in the context of developing a formal logical theory right like we can the problem is with treating possible worlds as real entities that our modal language describes rather than as potentially useful logical tools um so yeah so this is this is one problem right like metaphysical explanations tend to just introduce things that make the subject less comprehensible than it was when we began another reason why these explanations are often of no value in even in their own terms is that the metaphysical explanation uh interprets the discourse as delivering knowledge but then it presents a picture of the world in which we are cut off from actually having it cuts us off from the relevant facts so again you see that in the in the case of modal discord in the case of um possible worlds right like the there's we don't have any access to possible worlds they're either abstract so they're not spatial temporal so you know we don't relate to them or they they're concrete but they don't again they don't have a spatiotemporal connection to us so there's no access we could have to them similarly if you take mathematical platinism the postulation of abstract mathematical entities well you know they don't have spatiotemporal properties they can't enter into causal relations so there's this problem of epistemological access right how how do they imp like how do we get to them to learn about them um so compare this to the case of something like scientific models uh here in this case we can understand how if they are true we could come to know that they're true because these models will postulate causal relations between ourselves and the entities we are studying these models are therefore successful by their own lights that's often not the case for metaphysics right if there are abstract mathematical entities in some platonic realm um like there's again there's no connection to us um so again this is this is a way in which even by its own lights uh these explanations have problems indeed there's a more general difficulty lurking i guess in the background here metaphysics from an empiricist point of view is in a sense self-sabotaging i mean i guess this this point um about these explanations being less comprehensible or these explanations postulating things that cut us off from the relevant facts that's self-sabotaging but there's a there's a broader way in which metaphysics is self-sabotaging metaphysical theories aim towards the truth that's the goal of metaphysics to provide a true theory of the world applied in the service of explaining particular things but how are metaphysical theories evaluated well the the from an empiricist point of view metaphysics is forced to employ criteria of success that do not have any clear connection to the truth so obviously no metaphysical theory is ever put to empirical tests there are no um there are no ontological experimentalists in uh philosophy departments right but what the metaphysician will do is to say well you know look there's many different ways in which we judge theories there's many different values and standards by which we judge theories empirical testing is just one of them and these other values actually we can employ in metaphysics so in particular metaphysics uses inference to the best explanation um and yeah we find inference the best explanation in the sciences and so on as well so this is a perfectly legitimate kind of inference um but in metaphysics the criteria for judging the best explanation includes things like agreement with the metaphysician's intuitions agreement with common sense simplicity the ability of the theory to render true as much of the discourse as possible right so um you know so so what we what we want to do in uh postulating possible worlds is to make sure that what we our intuitions about which modal statements are true are correct um so here the empiricist is going to say there's just no reason to think that these features are actually indicative of the truth of the metaphysical theory there's there's no reason to suppose that you know our intuitions are correct with respect to metaphysical matters um simplicity uh as well can be interpreted in all kinds of ways um and so on furthermore even if these features were correlated with the truth inference the best explanation can only get you to the best explanation that you have actually come up with it may be the best of a bad lot so again so metaphysics aims towards the truth but uh the criteria of success are not going to are not reliably going to lead you to the truth and this is this is a big problem because truth and the construction of true explanations is essentially the only benefit of metaphysical theorizing in metaphysics there is you know success consists in the selection of true theories failure consists in the selection of false theories or in making no selection at all so you know failing to find what you consider to be an adequate theory that's all there are no collateral gains and losses now compare this with science in science as in metaphysics truth is a success and falsity is a failure at least if we're interested in you know constructing true scientific theories but there are countless collateral gains and losses also there is um you know that there are the gains of of increased safety increased peace better technology better security um potential dangers um greater capacity for war alienation from traditional ways of life and so on right like silent science has all of these practical applications and so there are practical gains and practical risks in metaphysics there really is no practical value the most we can ask is is this theory true or false van frassen asks us to compare newtonian mechanics with cartesian dualism newtonian mechanics prevailed for over two centuries many people incorrectly took it to be an accurate picture of the underlying structure of the world but over that time it provided enormous benefits indeed it continues to provide enormous benefits to this day because we continue to apply newtonian mechanics to make predictions there are a few people who would say that it would have been better had newtonian mechanics never been developed on the other hand cartesian dualism well imagine if cartesian dualism had uh had had not been considered fairly conclusively refuted but had reigned for over 200 years as the dominant model of the mind um it's we probably wouldn't have gained much right though what would the benefits of that have been um well i i guess maybe we would have had an intuitively appealing explanation of some part of human life right there's there's certain features of consciousness of which cartesian dualism gives us an intuitively appealing account and that's basically it uh that's that's as much as you're gonna get um so look i i should note i've been speaking in very general terms here because i'm talking about a general philosophical stance of course there are many specific targets of metaphysical theorizing you know ethics mathematics science modality universals mind and so on a person might favor an empiricist account of some of these but not all while still embodying an empiricist stance we might think for instance that ethics does not call for explanation in terms of postulation whereas maybe the success of science does call for such an explanation so yeah i mean as i mentioned earlier you can you can embody the empiricist stance to more or less of a degree so that is the critique of the metaphysical explanation then there's the second element the alternative account of the practice in question what will the empiricist say here well i mean there are lots of different lines you can take on this i will present just a few options so one option is to just reject the uh discourse entirely uh this is going to be the line taken by abolitionist error theorists with respect to moral discourse or most atheists with respect to religious discourse the view here will be that the practice is just it's defective it's based on mistaken or inadequately supported presuppositions it doesn't actually um bring anything useful into our lives it's not actually successful and so we should just eliminate it we should just do away with it second we might hold that the discourse although it fails to track metaphysical facts it's justified for pragmatic reasons uh for example error theorists who think of moral discourse as involving useful fictions similarly fictionalists about mathematics uh instrumentalists about scientific theories um you know i mean so so it's like okay we can think of a scientific theory as uh as as descriptive right like the theory describes the world as being a certain way it's false but it's really useful i mean that's that's just how we treat newtonian mechanics these days we know that its description of the underlying structure of the of the universe is false but uh it's very very useful in in various contexts um a third option is to say that the discourse is not properly interpreted as even attempting to state facts in the first place this is the view of non-cognitivists about morality they will say that moral judgments are not beliefs but expressions of emotions or preferences or plans or whatever or take um what's well take hume's uh classic analysis of causality on some interpretations obviously it is open to interpretation exactly how how to take this but um okay when we judge that a causes b partly we're simply asserting that there's a constant conjunction between a and b so whenever a happens b happens but then there's this idea that there is a necessary connection between a and b um and a human line on this will be well that arises from the mind forming the habit of expecting b on seeing a and then projecting this expectation onto the objects themselves and at least one way of interpreting that would be that causal claims therefore aren't really fact stating um these are just examples uh other alternatives to metaphysical theorizing are available also um but you know you can see that these these are the sort of lines that empiricists can take in terms of providing an alternative account there is an important thing to note here though in many cases it's not really possible to avoid making metaphysical claims entirely suppose i adopt a non-cognitivist account of moral discourse well in that case i'm committed to the position that there are no objective moral facts just because on a non-cognitivist view moral statements are not fact stating in the first place but that claim there are no objective moral facts is that not a metaphysical claim i mean in saying this i am saying something about the underlying ontology of the world about what the world contains um i mean there's a difference after all between between saying there are no objective moral facts and saying i don't know whether there are objective moral facts right like if you're saying there are no objective moral facts that looks like a metaphysical claim a claim about the nature of the world um so you might think well surely that's metaphysics that should be unacceptable to the empiricist but remember that on the view i've articulated here empiricism is a stance not a belief and you know if if i'm a non-cognitivist about morality what i'm certainly not doing i'm certainly not saying that moral discourse is grounded in metaphysical facts or explained by metaphysical facts i'm not explaining morality by postulating a realm of entities beyond experience of which moral discourse can provide true or false descriptions it's this kind of metaphysics explanation by postulation against which the empiricist rebels um so so so yes uh we we may well be committed to all kinds of you know beliefs right which which seem to in some sense go beyond experience right so like yeah to say that there are no objective moral facts that maybe there's a sense there in which that goes beyond experience um but uh it's if it's it's it's specifically about uh how these beliefs are applied in the service of explanations um that empiricists are going to uh take a stance against um so anyway that's that's empiricism or at least that is empiricism as people like van frassen see it um well i hope you found that interesting that is all i have to say today so thanks for watching

Channel: Kane B

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Id: TSYKP6UKpwk

Length: 58min 49sec (3529 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 12 2020