How We Know - Harry Binswanger's New Book

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

I'm still trying to figure out the following:

The church imprisoned, tortured and killed all kinds of people throughout history and this proves Aristotle was a major obstacle for science.

It makes sense to some people, I guess.

Michael

[George H. Smith]

I'm still trying to figure out the following:

The church imprisoned, tortured and killed all kinds of people throughout history and this proves Aristotle was a major obstacle for science.

It makes sense to some people, I guess.

Michael

Aristotle was not an obstacle to science. The ossification of some of his ideas into a rigid orthodoxy was the problem. And that had nothing inherently to do with his metaphysics. The same thing happened to some of his scientific ideas.

It is true that for centuries metaphysics trespassed into the legitimate domain of science, but in the Middle Ages there wasn't much territory to invade. The radical shift came with the development of 17th century empiricism, especially in the writings of John Locke, who clearly understood the problem. Epistemology then replaced metaphysics as the principal focus of philosophy, and with some exceptions (such as absolute idealism), epistemology has retained its supremacy ever since. Although there are some legitimate metaphysical issues that cannot be settled by science, most notably the nature of causation (which is presupposed in every experimental procedure), most legitimate philosophical issues are epistemological (or moral, or esthetic, etc.). Rand understood this, which is why she had a minimalist metaphysics. Philosophers frequently become foolish when they trench on the legitimate domain of science, as scientists frequently become foolish when they trench on the legitimate domain of philosophy--as when they believe that they can engage in science without any philosophical presuppositions. Without a philosophy of science, if only an implicit one, any experimental results of science could be interpreted according to the personal whims of every scientist, and no consensus would be possible.

Ghs

[George H. Smith]

I deleted an earlier version of this post, above. I don't post nearly as often as I used to, and I got a little rusty with the HTML tags.

But he did present the Copernican thesis as a hypothesis (as all scientific explanations are). He mocked the Aristotelian Simplicio who was also a surrogate for the Pope himself. That is what got Galileo in hot water.

The Church management changed their minds on Aristotle after Aquinas' brilliant defense of the Faith using the Aristotelian mode of argument. That was over 300 years before the Galileo affair. Galileo was a smart smart ass and Pope Urban did not appreciate his wit.

Galileo's mocking of the character Simplicio, who represented the pope's position, is what made it clear that Galileo was not merely presenting Copernicanism as mere hypothesis. He presented it as the truth. In a recent L.org essay I discussed how unorthodox beliefs were sometimes shielded in the dialogue form, though I discussed the case of Vanini, not Galileo. But the principle was the same. Vanini paid with his life, however, whereas Galileo was only put under house arrest. See:

Freethought and Freedom: How Freethinkers Attempted to Avoid Persecution .

Long before Shaftesbury wrote this passage, freethinkers had attempted to avoid legal penalties by using literary devices that might conceal their true opinions. One such tactic was to write dialogues with two or more fictional characters. A dialogue permitted the villain of the piece to express unorthodox beliefs, which the orthodox character (the ostensible stand-in for the writer) would then refute. But when freethinkers used this tactic, their unorthodox arguments were typically stronger than their orthodox refutations, and this could cause some readers to become suspicious.

If you read my article, you will see that Vanini got into trouble largely because of his Aristotelian views. Pure Aristotelianism was a seedbed of heresy, both during the High Middle Ages and the Renaissance.

Ghs

[Brant Gaede]

The basic problem with Aristotle is that he wasn't a true scientist much less a mathematician. The only modern man of genius back then that way was Archimedes, who actually even invented a basic form of Calculus. He and his influence, would be and otherwise, pretty much went by the way when he died (was killed). Aristotle was reborn, so to say, not to say it was his work that led to proper scientific methodology but the workers of and off his work in the hundreds of years following. This is not geological time, but for people it might as well be. Destruction is quicker, so SOBs figure high in common history. Stalin, Mao and Hitler seem more significant than the likes of Rand. Quickly the Twin Towers, which took years to build, got knocked down by people of a culture flying airplanes they didn't even know how to land whose brothers could hardly produce anything much less airplanes. But a new building has gone up surrounded by hundreds of still standing buildings. Even if Russia and the United States destroy each other, there will be 6 billion undestroyed human beings to carry on and in a few hundred years it will all be smoothed out. The Black Plague was more destructive than that would be, but today, for us, it's of slight interest. It's just like it never happened. The Great Fire of London--WTF was that?

--Brant

but that asteroid heading right for us . . . --that's a different story (bend over and kiss your ass goodbye)

regardless, it's not yesterday: it's today, for This Is Your Life!

[George H. Smith]

The basic problem with Aristotle is that he wasn't a true scientist much less a mathematician. The only modern man of genius back then that way was Archimedes, who actually even invented a basic form of Calculus. He and his influence, would be and otherwise, pretty much went by the way when he died (was killed). Aristotle was reborn, so to say, not to say it was his work that led to proper scientific methodology but the workers of and off his work in the hundreds of years following. This is not geological time, but for people it might as well be. Destruction is quicker, so SOBs figure high in common history. Stalin, Mao and Hitler seem more significant than the likes of Rand. Quickly the Twin Towers, which took years to build, got knocked down by people of a culture flying airplanes they didn't even know how to land whose brothers could hardly produce anything much less airplanes. But a new building has gone up surrounded by hundreds of still standing buildings. Even if Russia and the United States destroy each other, there will be 6 billion undestroyed human beings to carry on and in a few hundred years it will all be smoothed out. The Black Plague was more destructive than that would be, but today, for us, it's of slight interest. It's just like it never happened. The Great Fire of London--WTF was that?

--Brant

but that asteroid heading right for us . . . --that's a different story (bend over and kiss your ass goodbye)

regardless, it's not yesterday: it's today, for This Is Your Life!

It is incorrect to say that Aristotle was not a true scientist. He wasn't a true physicist in the modern sense, but he did remarkable work in botany and biology. Indeed, some of his observations in botany were not replicated until the 19th century.

Ghs

[Brant Gaede]

Didn't know that.

[George H. Smith]

Didn't know that.

Alexander, who had been tutored by Aristotle, sent Aristotle many botanical specimens during his conquests. Aristotle's work at the Lyceum was continued for many years by Theophrastus, who is often called the father of botany. Aristotle's teleological view of nature was much better suited to the biological sciences than to physics. And the work in botany and biology at the Lyceum was grounded in careful empirical observations, which makes us wonder how some egregious blunders could have happened, as when Aristotle declared that women have fewer teeth than men. 8-)

Ghs

[BaalChatzaf]

dless, it's not yesterday: it's today, for This Is Your Life!

It is incorrect to say that Aristotle was not a true scientist. He wasn't a true physicist in the modern sense, but he did remarkable work in botany and biology. Indeed, some of his observations in botany were not replicated until the 19th century.

Ghs

None other than Charles Darwin praised Aristotle as the best naturalist who worked within the limits of the naked eye there ever was up to modern times. Coming from Charles Darwin who completely altered our outlook on how the realm of living things worked, such praise is very great praise.

What Aristotle missed on was in two areas:

1. motion. He did not grasp acceleration or inertia so he could not give a good account of forces.

2. checking out his hypotheses. Aristotle used data to formulate hypothesis but he never worked out a systematic way of testing the hypothesis by experiment and further observation.

Aristotle was a brilliant worker who was the master of many fields from drama and psychology on the one hand to ethics and logic on the other and just about everything in between. His students and followers made the mistake of accepting his claims uncritically and this blunder slowed down the development of real fact based and fact tested science by over a thousand years.

Ba'al Chatzaf

Ba'al Chatzaf

[George H. Smith]

dless, it's not yesterday: it's today, for This Is Your Life!

It is incorrect to say that Aristotle was not a true scientist. He wasn't a true physicist in the modern sense, but he did remarkable work in botany and biology. Indeed, some of his observations in botany were not replicated until the 19th century.

Ghs

None other than Charles Darwin praised Aristotle as the best naturalist who worked within the limits of the naked eye there ever was up to modern times. Coming from Charles Darwin who completely altered our outlook on how the realm of living things worked, such praise is very great praise.

What Aristotle missed on was in two areas:

1. motion. He did not grasp acceleration or inertia so he could not give a good account of forces.

2. checking out his hypotheses. Aristotle used data to formulate hypothesis but he never worked out a systematic way of testing the hypothesis by experiment and further observation.

Aristotle was a brilliant worker who was the master of many fields from drama and psychology on the one hand to ethics and logic on the other and just about everything in between. His students and followers made the mistake of accepting his claims uncritically and this blunder slowed down the development of real fact based and fact tested science by over a thousand years.

Ba'al Chatzaf

Ba'al Chatzaf

We agree, for once, so this may a good time to visit hell for some serious ice-skating.

Ghs

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Although there are some legitimate metaphysical issues that cannot be settled by science, most notably the nature of causation (which is presupposed in every experimental procedure), most legitimate philosophical issues are epistemological (or moral, or esthetic, etc.). Rand understood this, which is why she had a minimalist metaphysics.

George,

You may be interested in some of the following quotes by Rand. I'm sure you already know them, but the reader might like them.

The first is from The Journals of Ayn Rand (pp. 698-700 -- kinda pushing the envelope on fair use ):

June 19, 1958

"Cosmology" has to be thrown out of philosophy. When this is done, the conflict between "rationalism" and "empiricism" will be wiped out—or, rather, the error that permitted the nonsense of such a conflict will be wiped out.

What, apparently, has never been challenged and what I took as a self-evident challenge (which it isn't) is Thales' approach to philosophy, namely: the idea that philosophy has to discover the nature of the universe in cosmological terms. If Thales thought that everything is water, and the other pre-Socratics fought over whether it's water and earth and fire, etc., then the empiricists were right in declaring that they would go by the evidence of observation, not by "rational" deduction—only then, of course, the whole issue and all its terms are [thoroughly confused]. The crux of the error here is in the word "nature." I took Thales' attempt to mean only the first attempt at, or groping toward, a unified view of knowledge and reality, i.e., an epistemological, not a metaphysical, attempt to establish the fact that things have natures.

Now I think that he meant, and all subsequent philosophers took it to mean, a metaphysical attempt to establish the literal nature of reality and to prove by philosophical means that everything is literally and physically made of water or that water is a kind of universal "stuff." If so, then philosophy is worse than a useless science, because it usurps the domain of physics and proposes to solve the problems of physics by some nonscientific, and therefore mystical, means. On this kind of view of philosophy, it is logical that philosophy has dangled on the strings of physics ever since the Renaissance and that every new discovery of physics has blasted philosophy sky-high, such as, for instance, the discovery of the nature of color giving a traumatic shock to philosophers, from which they have not yet recovered. [AR is referring to the discovery that our perception of color depends on the nature of the light and the human visual system as well as on nature of the object, which led many philosophers to conclude that perception is subjective.]

In fact, this kind of view merely means: rationalizing from an arrested state of knowledge. Thus, if in Thales' time the whole extent of physical knowledge consisted of distinguishing water from air and fire, he took this knowledge to be a final omniscience and decided on its basis that water was the primary metaphysical element. On this premise, every new step in physics has to mean a new metaphysics. The subsequent nonsense was not that empiricists rejected Thales' approach, but that they took him (and Plato) to be "rationalists," i.e., men who derived knowledge by deduction from some sort of "innate ideas," and therefore the empiricists declared themselves to be anti-rationalists. They did not realize that the Thales-Plato school was merely a case of "arrested empiricists," that is, men who "rationalized" on the ground of taking partial knowledge as omniscience.

Aristotle established the right metaphysics by establishing the law of identity—which was all that was necessary (plus the identification of the fact that only concretes exist). But he destroyed his metaphysics by his cosmology—by the whole nonsense of the "moving spheres," "the immovable mover," teleology, etc.

The real crux of this issue is that philosophy is primarily epistemology—the science of the means, the rules, and the methods of human knowledge. Epistemology is the base of all other sciences and one necessary for man because man is a being of volitional consciousness—a being who has to discover, not only the content of his knowledge, but also the means by which he is to acquire knowledge. Observe that all philosophers (except Aristotle) have been projecting their epistemologies into their metaphysics (or that their metaphysics were merely epistemological and psychological confessions). All the fantastic irrationalities of philosophical metaphysics have been the result of epistemological errors, fallacies or corruptions. "Existence exists" (or identity plus causality) is all there is to metaphysics. All the rest is epistemology.

Paraphrasing myself: Philosophy tell us only that things have natures, but what these natures are is the job of specific sciences. The rest of philosophy's task is to tell us the rules by which to discover the specific natures.

June 20, 1958

The philosophy which I now will have to present is, in essence, the "rules of thinking" which children should be taught in the proper society (which the Wet Nurse needed). It is fundamental epistemology—plus psychological "epistemology." All the evils of philosophy have always been achieved via epistemology—by means of the "How do you know that you know?" Consider the fact that the first and greatest destroyer, Plato, did it by means of the issue of "universals vs. particulars." Mankind as a whole seems to be caught in the trap of the nature of its own epistemology: men cannot think until they have acquired the power of abstractions and language, but having done so, they do not know how they got there and are vulnerable to any attack on their means of knowledge. Like the discovery of "A is A," their epistemology is implicit in their thinking, but unidentified. This will be the main part of my job: my theory of universals—the hierarchical nature of concepts—the "stolen concept" fallacy—the "context-dropping' and the "blank-out" (the refusal to identify)—the "Rand's razor" ("state your irreducible primaries")—the rules of induction (and definitions)—the "integration into the total sum of your knowledge"—the proof that "that which is empirically impossible is also logically impossible (or false)"—etc.

This will be the issue of "teaching the world my particular kind of epistemology'' (which I took to be self-evident and known). This is also why I always thought of philosophy as a static, "finite" base, like logic, i.e., as a closed discipline which has to be learned in order then to proceed to live, with "life" beginning above this base. This, probably, is the root of what Leonard [Peikoff] had in mind when he called the present state of the world "the age of pre-reason." It will help me to think of my job as "Philosophy for Hank Rearden. "

The second is from Ayn Rand Answers (pp. 162-163):

[Q:] I thought you and Emerson were both champions of individualism, so I was surprised by your remark [in “Philosophy: Who Needs It”] about Emerson’s “very small mind.” Could you comment?

. . .

If you want to compare me to anyone, there's only one philosopher whose influence I admit—and proudly—and that is Aristotle. I disagree with some of his philosophy, especially his cosmology (but then cosmology is not a proper part of philosophy). I disagree with certain Platonic influences in some of his works. But I agree with all of his essential points. So, if you want to pigeonhole me. it will be an honor to belong to the same class as Aristotle. [PWNI 74]

So there we have it, some classic Rand quotes in the raw (meaning not polished by her for publication):

"Cosmology" has to be thrown out of philosophy. When this is done, the conflict between "rationalism" and "empiricism" will be wiped out—or, rather, the error that permitted the nonsense of such a conflict will be wiped out.

The real crux of this issue is that philosophy is primarily epistemology—the science of the means, the rules, and the methods of human knowledge.

"Existence exists" (or identity plus causality) is all there is to metaphysics. All the rest is epistemology.

... cosmology is not a proper part of philosophy...

With the exception of a few axioms, she not only didn't speculate on metaphysics, she didn't seem to like those who did--especially those who pushed their metaphysical speculations to include cosmology.

Rand was concerned with understanding humans in existence from the perspective of human size, both physically and metaphorically.

Michael

[BaalChatzaf]

Shall we ignore the fact that the cosmos is expanding? Not only expanding, but expanding at an accelerated pace.

[Brant Gaede]

Shall we ignore the fact that the cosmos is expanding? Not only expanding, but expanding at an accelerated pace.

1) I'm sure you're sure of this but are all others with brains and knowledge of this subject too?

2) What is it expanding into? More cosmos? (Trick question.)

3) Since you are the anti-metaphysicsian can we assume you have none? What would that mean?

4) You keep complaining about the depredations of metaphysics in the history of science, but seem to have no understanding of the subject as explicated on by Ayn Rand. And it's so short and simple, why not?

--Brant

[George H. Smith]

Although there are some legitimate metaphysical issues that cannot be settled by science, most notably the nature of causation (which is presupposed in every experimental procedure), most legitimate philosophical issues are epistemological (or moral, or esthetic, etc.). Rand understood this, which is why she had a minimalist metaphysics.

George,

You may be interested in some of the following quotes by Rand. I'm sure you already know them, but the reader might like them.

The first is from The Journals of Ayn Rand (pp. 698-700 -- kinda pushing the envelope on fair use ):

June 19, 1958

"Cosmology" has to be thrown out of philosophy. When this is done, the conflict between "rationalism" and "empiricism" will be wiped out—or, rather, the error that permitted the nonsense of such a conflict will be wiped out.

What, apparently, has never been challenged and what I took as a self-evident challenge (which it isn't) is Thales' approach to philosophy, namely: the idea that philosophy has to discover the nature of the universe in cosmological terms. If Thales thought that everything is water, and the other pre-Socratics fought over whether it's water and earth and fire, etc., then the empiricists were right in declaring that they would go by the evidence of observation, not by "rational" deduction—only then, of course, the whole issue and all its terms are [thoroughly confused]. The crux of the error here is in the word "nature." I took Thales' attempt to mean only the first attempt at, or groping toward, a unified view of knowledge and reality, i.e., an epistemological, not a metaphysical, attempt to establish the fact that things have natures.

Now I think that he meant, and all subsequent philosophers took it to mean, a metaphysical attempt to establish the literal nature of reality and to prove by philosophical means that everything is literally and physically made of water or that water is a kind of universal "stuff." If so, then philosophy is worse than a useless science, because it usurps the domain of physics and proposes to solve the problems of physics by some nonscientific, and therefore mystical, means. On this kind of view of philosophy, it is logical that philosophy has dangled on the strings of physics ever since the Renaissance and that every new discovery of physics has blasted philosophy sky-high, such as, for instance, the discovery of the nature of color giving a traumatic shock to philosophers, from which they have not yet recovered. [AR is referring to the discovery that our perception of color depends on the nature of the light and the human visual system as well as on nature of the object, which led many philosophers to conclude that perception is subjective.]

In fact, this kind of view merely means: rationalizing from an arrested state of knowledge. Thus, if in Thales' time the whole extent of physical knowledge consisted of distinguishing water from air and fire, he took this knowledge to be a final omniscience and decided on its basis that water was the primary metaphysical element. On this premise, every new step in physics has to mean a new metaphysics. The subsequent nonsense was not that empiricists rejected Thales' approach, but that they took him (and Plato) to be "rationalists," i.e., men who derived knowledge by deduction from some sort of "innate ideas," and therefore the empiricists declared themselves to be anti-rationalists. They did not realize that the Thales-Plato school was merely a case of "arrested empiricists," that is, men who "rationalized" on the ground of taking partial knowledge as omniscience.

Aristotle established the right metaphysics by establishing the law of identity—which was all that was necessary (plus the identification of the fact that only concretes exist). But he destroyed his metaphysics by his cosmology—by the whole nonsense of the "moving spheres," "the immovable mover," teleology, etc.

The real crux of this issue is that philosophy is primarily epistemology—the science of the means, the rules, and the methods of human knowledge. Epistemology is the base of all other sciences and one necessary for man because man is a being of volitional consciousness—a being who has to discover, not only the content of his knowledge, but also the means by which he is to acquire knowledge. Observe that all philosophers (except Aristotle) have been projecting their epistemologies into their metaphysics (or that their metaphysics were merely epistemological and psychological confessions). All the fantastic irrationalities of philosophical metaphysics have been the result of epistemological errors, fallacies or corruptions. "Existence exists" (or identity plus causality) is all there is to metaphysics. All the rest is epistemology.

Paraphrasing myself: Philosophy tell us only that things have natures, but what these natures are is the job of specific sciences. The rest of philosophy's task is to tell us the rules by which to discover the specific natures.

June 20, 1958

The philosophy which I now will have to present is, in essence, the "rules of thinking" which children should be taught in the proper society (which the Wet Nurse needed). It is fundamental epistemology—plus psychological "epistemology." All the evils of philosophy have always been achieved via epistemology—by means of the "How do you know that you know?" Consider the fact that the first and greatest destroyer, Plato, did it by means of the issue of "universals vs. particulars." Mankind as a whole seems to be caught in the trap of the nature of its own epistemology: men cannot think until they have acquired the power of abstractions and language, but having done so, they do not know how they got there and are vulnerable to any attack on their means of knowledge. Like the discovery of "A is A," their epistemology is implicit in their thinking, but unidentified. This will be the main part of my job: my theory of universals—the hierarchical nature of concepts—the "stolen concept" fallacy—the "context-dropping' and the "blank-out" (the refusal to identify)—the "Rand's razor" ("state your irreducible primaries")—the rules of induction (and definitions)—the "integration into the total sum of your knowledge"—the proof that "that which is empirically impossible is also logically impossible (or false)"—etc.

This will be the issue of "teaching the world my particular kind of epistemology'' (which I took to be self-evident and known). This is also why I always thought of philosophy as a static, "finite" base, like logic, i.e., as a closed discipline which has to be learned in order then to proceed to live, with "life" beginning above this base. This, probably, is the root of what Leonard [Peikoff] had in mind when he called the present state of the world "the age of pre-reason." It will help me to think of my job as "Philosophy for Hank Rearden. "

Michael

Thanks for posting these passages. I have Rand's Journal, so I probably read them at some point, but I didn't remember them.

Ghs

[George H. Smith]

Here is a brief passage about metaphysics from my book Why Atheism? (Prometheus, 2001).

The term “metaphysics” was coined in the first century B.C. by librarians in Alexandria who, while cataloguing the writings of Aristotle, had to come up with a name for his untitled work on first principles. Their solution, to call it Metaphysics, was at once logical and unimaginative: it simply referred to the fact that this book was listed immediately after the book on Physics.

The label metaphysics emerged from this humble beginning to become the most influential and controversial branch of Western philosophy. Hailed for centuries by medieval philosophers as the Queen of the Sciences, a discipline which yielded fundamental knowledge of the universe, metaphysics became a target of sustained criticism during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as John Locke, David Hume and other empiricists undermined its traditional foundations.

No trend in modern philosophy is more significant than the shift of emphasis from the metaphysical theory of being to the epistemological theory of knowledge. Alexander Pope’s dictum that the proper study of mankind is man was echoed by David Hume’s contention that a “science of man” is the foundation of all other sciences, because all knowledge, including our knowledge of nature, is a product of the human mind. Thus, as John Locke had previously argued, philosophers should investigate the origin and limitations of human knowledge before venturing into the murky world of metaphysical systems.

Locke’s empiricism and high regard for Newtonian physics made him contemptuous of traditional metaphysics. “You and I have had enough of this kind of fiddling,” he wrote to a friend; we are unlikely to learn anything in metaphysical works on God and spirits. And, in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke declares that the “master-builders” of his era were not metaphysicians but scientists, such as “the incomparable Mr. Newton,” whose work had been hindered by the “uncouth, affected, or unintelligible terms” of metaphysics. Metaphysicians attempted to pass off “vague and insignificant forms of speech” as profound insights and deep learning, when in fact they were nothing more than “the covers of ignorance, and hindrance of true knowledge.”

This is fairly complex issue, as we see in the fact that Locke himself would later be hailed by Enlightenment thinkers as the father of modern metaphysics. Modern and traditional metaphysics had something in common, in that both viewed metaphysics as what Aristotle had called the science of first principles. But modernists looked for these first principles in the human mind, not in “being” external to the mind, because there can be no knowledge without a cognitive process that produces this knowledge. Moreover, this modernist metaphysics included more than we now understand by the term “epistemology” (which was coined in the nineteenth century). Modernist metaphysics included both epistemology and psychology, insofar as the latter was concerned with the origin and formation of ideas.

In a famous passage, Locke described his philosophic role as a modest one -- “as an underlaborer in clearing the ground a little, and removing some of the rubbish that lies in the way to knowledge.” (This refers, of course, to metaphysical rubbish.) This profession of modesty, however, is a bit disingenuous. Locke was calling for a revolution in philosophy, and he knew it.

Ghs

[9thdoctor]

Shall we ignore the fact that the cosmos is expanding? Not only expanding, but expanding at an accelerated pace.

Listen carefully to Dr. Flicker:

[Guyau]

.

My remarks thus far on How We Know are collected here.