Given recent posts here at TSZ challenging the validity of presuppositions and self-evident truths I thought the following list might be worthy of debate.
Presuppositions of Science
1. The existence of a theory-independent, external world
2. The orderly nature of the external world
3. The knowability of the external world
4. The existence of truth
5. The laws of logic
6. The reliability of our cognitive and sensory faculties to serve as truth gatherers and as a source of justified true beliefs in our intellectual environment
7. The adequacy of language to describe the world
8. The existence of values used in science
9. The uniformity of nature and induction
10. The existence of numbers
When critics object to the Logos as a presupposition and offer instead 10 other presuppositions, Ockham’s Razor flies out the window.
Why not? Is the Given not a Myth, or are these presuppositions not Givens?
They’re not Givens.
Ok, then what’s the difference in the epistemic and semantic status of these presuppositions and Givens, such that they don’t count as Givens?
I already proposed one such account: that the presuppositions are metalinguistic expressions of the norms implicit in the corresponding epistemic practices.
If you don’t like that approach, then what’s your alternative?
As I mentioned on another thread, I think being a Sellarsian Given requires some sort of certainty or incorrigibility about something. There’s nothing like that going on here. It’s possible to be mistaken about any of these presuppositions, so they can’t be Givens.
quick question to you all (except walto who acknowledges that his assumptions could be true and he still not know anything)
1) how do you know stuff in your world view?
If you say something like “what ever works” what were the starting premises that you used when you determined that personal pragmatism was a good solid foundation to build upon?
peace
Fair enough William, I will accept that correction.
It’s not possible to be mistaken if we are talking about revelation.
But you knew that
peace
Don’t remember acknowledging that, but…I could be wrong about that too!
What I hope I said was that in any case where I believed something that was true and I had sufficient justification for doing so, I knew it.
If it’s not possible to be mistaken when a revelation has occurred, then I think it must be possible to be mistaken THAT a revelation has occured. Sadly, one or the other.
Except you don’t know whether God has revealed truth to you, that’s something you must presuppose.
But you knew that, because I have explained this to you before and asked several probing questions you had no idea how to answer that exposed this flaw.
This could be get deep but some theisms believe that what we call the “external world” is simply the actualized imagination of the divine “self”.
peace
But your belief that there are revelations could be mistaken. Stating that it was revealed to you that there are revelations doesn’t help. Because your belief that there are revelations could be mistaken.
Do you think that God if he existed and if he choose to could reveal something to you in such a way that you could know it for certain?
If not why not? and are you certain about that?
peace
Also, could not the veracity of the revelation be tested? Or is all revelation of the non-disprovable sort?
I don’t know, I’m open to being convinced. You have to argue for it, I can’t just assume it.
Explain how that would be possible.
So if one presupposes a particular God exists and one presupposes that He wished to reveal something and one presupposes He actually did reveal something to someone and one presupposes that someone is you, could God reveal something that your limited intellect could understand correctly?
Maybe,beyond your presupposes is there other evidence ?
Some thoughts:
Yes, I’d say this is a working assumption.
Not quite sure what this means. I’d say this is a hypothesis rather than an assumption. It could be falsified.
I’d say this was a property of us, not the world. We can know things. I guess it’s sort of an assumption that we can know things. Not sure it’s not a koan.
I’m not sure that truth “exists” in the same way that, say, you exist. Isn’t it a property of a claim?
These are conventions, I’d have said. Not truths about the world.
I don’t think these are assumed. Indeed a lot of scientific methodology is designed to test whether the proposition is valid. In my field, for instance, one of the things we actually study is the non-veridical nature of some perceptions.
Again, not an assumption.
Not sure what this means.
Not sure what this means either
I don’t think numbers exist
Both of those claims seem right to me!
Philosophers will complain that all testing is holistic: that there are always multiple assumptions involved in any experiment any one of which could be questioned by considering the results.
We can look at the null hypothesis under the chosen distribution. But Is the statistical distribution appropriate? Why do you think the equipment is measuring what you say it is measuring? Are there unaccounted-for sources of bias or other experimental error? Is the mathematical structure of the model correct? Are any approximations used the appropriate ones?
I’m not saying that scientists don’t resolve these issues in practice. Only that one should not assume there are fixed rules which can be applied mindlessly to get scientifically acceptable results.
I completely agree.
Why do you insist on starting premises?
This is an oddity of religious conservatives. They insist on a rigidly intellectualist account (which presumably would require starting premises). Yet they despise intellectuals.
I suppose it is because religions are themselves merely intellectual constructs.
It seems perfectly possibly for an idealist to use science but claim it is just a great tool for predicting future experience.
In fact, there is another forum I frequent full of philosophers who claim exactly that!
fifthmonarchyman:
This time around, will you stop pretending that your question hasn’t already been answered?
For the umpteenth time:
fifth:
You’re not getting it. The idea that ‘personal pragmatism’ is ‘solid’ is not a foundational view, based on some set of starting premises. It’s a (provisional) conclusion based on thousands of experiences.
fifth,
No, and I also don’t think that God himself could attain absolute certainty.
See my follow-on comment.
Quite confident, but absolutely certain? No, of course not.
Since others have chimed in, why not me too?
Presuppositions of Science
1. The existence of a theory-independent, external world
Unlike other philosophers here, I think that the existence of a theory-independent reality can be in fact be demonstrated by a transcendental argument against the conceivability of a rational cognitive agent that cannot distinguish between its own inner states and external reality. Better put, there is no grasp on the concept of subjectivity without also having a grasp on the concept of objectivity. The raw materials of this argument can be culled from Kant, C. I. Lewis, Davidson, Strawson, and Frederick Wills; the argument was made explicit by Ken Westphal.
2. The orderly nature of the external world
This is not a presupposition, but a fact of given experience that the world as we experience is has both regularities and irregularities; no mind that can have the kinds of experiences that we manifestly have could fail to detect both regularities and irregularities in its experience.
3. The knowability of the external world
I don’t see the difference between (2) and (3).
4. The existence of truth.
I don’t know what it means for “truth” to “exist”; I know what it means to say that there can be no meaningful communication without an implicit grasp on the concept of truth, and I also know what it means to say that the goal of inquiry is to bring our models and expectations into closer alignment with the underlying structure of reality.
5. The laws of logic.
I see the laws of logic (both classical and non-classical) as ways of expressing in language the norms that must be in place for there to be successful communication aimed at cooperation in a shared world.
6. The reliability of our cognitive and sensory faculties to serve as truth gatherers and as a source of justified true beliefs in our intellectual environment.
The reliability of our cognitive (conceptual and perceptual) faculties isn’t presupposed; we find out through the process of inquiry to what extent our faculties are and are not reliable, and revise our expectations of them accordingly.
7. The adequacy of language to describe the world.
I don’t know what this means, but I think that descriptives are a transcendental requirement on a shared language, not a presupposition of science per se.
8. The existence of values used in science.
Again, I don’t know what it means to say that values do or don’t exist, except in the context of some theory of what values are. But the epistemic values of both good theories and good inquiry are discovered along with the process of inquiry itself — the epistemic virtues we praise today are not those of Aristotle, for example.
9. The uniformity of nature and induction.
This isn’t presupposed by science, since we manifestly experience nature as uniform in some respects and not uniform in other respects.
The reliability of induction
This isn’t presupposed but rather we discover in the process of inquiry that induction is sometimes reliable and sometimes not.
10. The existence of numbers
I don’t know what this means, but our epistemic practices rely on the fact that we can count — not that there are Platonic entities, “numbers”, somehow waiting out there for us to discover them.
fifth,
From comments I made at UD, an argument that absolute certainty is impossible, and an argument that God, if he exists, is similarly limited:
One:
Two:
I posted this link before, but for those joining our broadcast late, there is an interesting discussion of the Myth of the Given involving many philosophic sophisticates which is ongoing here.
A recent comment by the OP to whet your appetite, should it be whettable by such things:
In order to better understand why, it might be helpful to think of Sellars as embarking on a naturalization of Kant’s theory of experience. For Kant, experience results from the synthesis of the pure forms of intuition provided by “the sensibility” on the one hand, and the conceptual categories provided by “the understanding” on the other (he thinks that this follows from the failure of both empiricism and rationalism to account for knowledge). However, the synthesis itself is not something that occurs within experience, but is something that must be hypoethesized to occur given our knowledge of the nature of experience. For Kant this (arguably) ends in a metaphysics of transcendental subjectivity, something that Sellars wants to try to avoid
[ … continues for several more paragraphs]
KN:
Does that not render the existence of a theory-independent reality something other than a presupposition? Why presuppose something that can be demonstrated?
I think it is because they are dimly, somehow, aware that Christianity is an orthodox religion, one focused on correct belief, rather than an orthopraxic religion focused on correct conduct (as Judaism and Islam are). This is a tendency in Christianity that has been massively extrapolated by contemporary American Protestantism (which is in fact a very unusual, sociologically and historically weird kind of Christianity).
The demand for orthodoxy — for correctness of belief — conjoined with a certain (I think highly misleading) picture of rationality and justification (foundationalism, the demand for certainty, and taking a pre-19th century picture of mathematics as the paradigm for justification) then produces the idea that one can start off with some “foundation” and build one’s “worldview” on that “foundation”.
And since that’s how they think, they imagine that that’s how everyone else thinks as well. But they end up despising intellectuals because intellectuals wander off the reservation, so to speak — we don’t care about remaining within the narrow confines of orthodoxy. That’s what makes us dangerous.
Because my starting premises have been constantly attacked here. It’s been a constant drone
I want to know what the basis for that attack is. It’s about consistency and fairness.
If the attackers want to acknowledge that they have no basis for attacking other folks presuppositions I would be cool with that. If fact is It’s my suspicion that that is the case.
peace
BruceS,
Thanks for the link — it looks good!
That’s right — I don’t think it is a presupposition, precisely because there is a valid and sound transcendental argument demonstrating that no cognitive agent could be self-conscious if it were not also conscious of a world different from itself.
(This is also why mystical experience and certain drug-induced experiences that lead to the loss of object-oriented consciousness also involve the loss of self-consciousness. The “boundary” disappears from cognitive experience, hence the feeling that “all is one”.)
Reciprocating Bill, to fifth:
Alan:
The fact that a purported revelation turns out to be true doesn’t demonstrate that it was a revelation. It might just be something that the “revelee” (or someone else) figured out on his own, consciously or unconsciously.
A convincing revelation would need to be something that no human could plausibly have come up with. The stuff that fifth considers to be revelation doesn’t fit the bill.
So you two agree revelation is possible even tough you don’t “know” how it happens or are in keiths case are “pretty confident” that it doesn’t happen? Am I correct in making that inference?
It’s seems to me that since revelation is possible in your worldview the burden of proof is on you to prove it does not happen before you rule out that it might happen .
On the other hand in my worldview it is impossible for at least some revelation not to happen so I am under no such obligation to prove my claim that it does happen.
peace
And one suspects if it proved to be false we would encounter the no true revelation fallacy.
You have yet to explain how any human can come up with anything that is true at all.
IOW
How do you know stuff in your worldview?
Yes, I see it would. That’s why I called it a “working assumption” rather than a hypothesis. It doesn’t actually matter whether it’s true or not, but assuming it is true is a motivation to continue.
fifth,
No, fifth. You’re not paying attention.
I was responding to this question of yours:
Revelation is possible, though I see no evidence that it happens. What revelation can’t do is yield absolute certainty.
And no, I am not absolutely certain of that.
ETA: Not least because God himself can’t be absolutely certain of whatever he’s revealing to us!
Sure, I’m just saying that it is not presupposition if that word means an assumption which is mandatory to even do science.
I do think that most scientists must be scientific realists to be motivated to do science. But it is not logically necessary to be a scientific realist to do science.
fifth:
How many times must I repeat this?
what count’s as support in your worldview?
In your worldview what counts as evidence and why does it count?
Is it actual knowledge or just something you treat as knowledge?
peace
fifthmonarchyman,
My basis for disagreeing with your position is that it’s bumper sticker theology and you vote based on it. If you’re going to take actions that impact other people’s lives, they deserve a better explanation than “I assume my scriptures are true.”
I also consider it intellectually lacking to believe things without evidence.
Yes, an omnipotent being could manage that I think.
So in your worldview God is incapable of revealing something to you in such a way as that it is impossible for you to doubt? Why so?
peace
Can you give it here? Or provide a link?
Right. He gave an answer to “When do you think you have knowledge?”
So your disagreement is based only on the fact that you think I will vote to spoil your fun. OK
What is your basis for determining that it is wrong to vote according to beliefs that are contrary to yours?
Kantian Naturalist,
(Bolding mine.)
This is one aspect of the fundamentalist mindset that I find interesting and difficult to empathize with. The idea that knowledge is provisional and subject to change seems to be anathema to them. I wonder if this powerful desire for certainty is a consequence of their religious beliefs or one of the reasons for them.