"Skepticism (is) the virtuous mean between two vices: absolute knowledge and absolute ignorance." -- Odo Marquard, "Skeptics: A Speech of Thanks," in In Defense of the Accidental
I think
Aristotle's reputation is strong enough even these days that I don't need to defend it. He was a smart guy, and we have to use his terminology to criticize his failings anyway. The problems came when people began to use Aristotle's rationalism as a sort of natural Bible -- a set of principles capable of describing the true regulation of an orderly universe from first causes. "Ipse dixit" became a fallacy because of the strength and the
allure of his reasoning, sure, but the real problem there was not Mr. Aristotle. The problem was the natural tendency of
porridge to unceasingly migrate into the nearest human cranium, until the headpiece is completely full, or
fulsome, if you will, and the noggin is infinitely dense.
Once people get just a little bit of porridge up in their brain pans, they begin to exhibit symptoms of Mythical Childhood. They feel comfortable, certain, and at home in any environment. However, as the porridge begins to agglutinate (or acquiesce, if you will), it slowly occludes the retinas from the inside, muffles the ear drum from above, and causes periodic eructation of the olfactory nerve. Late stage victims of porridge see through their porridge, hear through their porridge, and walk about wearing the expression of one worried by a stink of unknown origin.
Porridge thinking is not liberal or conservative, capitalist or socialist. Porridge comes in many flavors, from apple pie to schnapps. Porridge is really just sure, certain, in complete mastery of the unknown, and comfortable with its methods.
It's porridge, for example, that says that medieval man was oafish and superstitious. The porridge says, "Everyone back then took everything on faith and ignored sense data, but then the Great Ensmartening came, when Science was developed by brave martyrs who taught us to rely upon experimentation."
No one should have to refute this gruel. Like all just-so stories, and especially the ones that make "us" the heroes, it's obvious foolishness with a political agenda. After all, the real history of the change toward today's science is a tale of learning to prefer inductive reasoning over deductive reasoning when dealing with unknowns, but the lesson was slow, Europe was a difficult student, and its enemies were those who liked their porridge. The enlightenment was about accepting uncertainty in a way that most of us today cannot.
Below, I'll take a look at Christiaan Huygens and David Hume and show why the enemy of progress is neither knowledge nor ignorance, but certainty. I'll also have a personal application.
Deductive reasoning, if it has been a while since you dealt with the names of tools, is often illustrated with a three part syllogism: "All men are mortal. Socrates is a man. :: Socrates will die." In essence, it applies a rule that is believed to be true to an observation that is believed to be accurate. If the rule is true and properly limited, and if the observation is accurate and apt, then the conclusion which follows must be true.
There is no point trying to avoid deductive reasoning (or praising it, a la Sherlock Holmes), because each of us uses it every day. Most of us employ it in a form called an enthymeme, where we offer only two of the three steps in the syllogism ("LBJ was the greatest president. He not only engineered the Voting Rights Act but also every major form of poverty assistance America had after World War 2" is "Conclusion: LBJ was the greatest. Observation: LBJ brought greatest care for the greatest number of citizens. [Missing: Rule: Good presidents provide for the welfare of the greatest number])." If you say, "My car is too faster than your bike! I can go 130 mph in my car," you're being deductive; the missing "rule" is "bicycles cannot go faster than 60 mph."
What's more, we use deduction in science. We have to. It's necessary and good and wonderful and even preferred, so long as we're careful. We just use it when postulating known behaviors with observed phenomena.
Inductive isn't the opposite of deductive, either. Inductive reasoning is acquiring data, data, data, and more data, and then predicting, from that data, a rule. (I dropped the ball, and it bounced three times. I repeated that, and it always bounced three times. I did this ten times. Now I predict that, the next time I drop the ball, it will bounce three times.) The problem with inductive reasoning is that it merely predicts a behavior. The "why" has to come from deduction and analogy and synthesis.
Take a look at this fairly cool page on Christiaan Huygens. Huygens is where we go when we want to find out who "invented" science. More importantly, he was the man who made everyone else face up to the uncertainty of science.
It is not true that, before the Royal Academy, every scientist worked from the Bible and changed results to please a bishop. That was not the issue -- wasn't even an issue -- for English and Dutch scientists. Instead, the question is why a person would attempt to prove something on the absurd basis of inductive reasoning. Huygens pointed out that it is possible to prove a solution absolutely in mathematics, but physics only gives tentative predictions, not explanations. The explanations can never be proven; they are constructions of surmises based on repeated observations and dependent upon homologies.
In other words, given the fact that the senses lie and that induction only indicates a very likely future, the use of experimentation followed by deduction meant acknowledging from the start that one was . . . merely hoping for the best, really.
It advertises a "Bible" diet of pulse and water. For some reason, the business failed.
Huygens's answer, and it is "science"'s answer, is to take any unknown and unobtainable answer and divide it up into lesser unknowns. Imagine an extremely large and impossible question, like "What caused this disease?" One divides that enigma into smaller ones: what was the first sign of disease, were there the same signs in other persons, was this person showing these signs only in one place, or all places, what was the diet of the person, what was the blood of the person, etc. Each of these questions is an unknown, but each gets divided again. Then the investigator relies on
analogy and on experiment to derive repetition, and all of the segments may be reassembled. However, and this is critical, the physicist and doctor had to be comfortable knowing that their work was, at its very, very best, promising only a good bet.
Early science's enemies were the people who knew how to figure out things in nature: one worked deductively. Most of them reasoned this way: "What would a rational, loving, involved, and omnipotent God do? What does the Bible say? Simply work logically downward, and you have your answer." Most of them did, but not all. Others worked deductively by asking, "What do the ancients say? What does tradition say? Apply observation to tradition, and you get your answer."
They had their porridge, in other words. Worse, reaching for experimentation was uncomfortable because it had to confess from the start that it was not going to offer up a sure answer. (I don't mean "science is always being revised," either. I mean that the truth value of anything derived from inductive reasoning is weak, and they felt that weakness in a way that we simply do not.)
We all know what happened between the time of Huygens and David Hume. There were inventions and discoveries galore. While we don't celebrate them, there were embarrassing absurdities, too. Nevertheless, the English and Dutch, and the French to a lesser degree, were feeling pretty glorified about progress. These people had a new type of porridge. Inductive reasoning, from being frightening, had become triumphant, and "virtuosos" and experimentalists could do anything.
If you have not read David Hume's critique on inductive reasoning, then you have robbed yourself of a challenge akin to climbing Kilimanjaro. I found a really well written and interesting article on the savagery and fearfulness of Hume's attack by Marc Lange in The History of Logic. You can read it here. Basically, David Hume made every subsequent thinker uncomfortable by showing that inductive reasoning does not attain even justifiable belief. In other words, one can divide a question mark a thousand times, but the mystery never vanishes.
Hume also attacked the other part of "science": its habit of employing analogy and treating surmise as law. (Just as an example, we have data going through the roof about orbits. The math works out for angular momentum in elliptical orbits. Things fall in a predictable way with simple equations. This data leads to a postulate attractive force, but no one directly measures it, and it resists empirical qualification except in effect. However, people start to treat the abstraction as a physical presence.) Hume wasn't anti-science, and he wasn't trying to stop the industrial revolution. He was pro-thought, and it seems as if he was eager to make comfortable "men of reason" just as uncomfortable with their certainty as he had already made religious thinkers. (He was widely regarded as an atheist, although he refused to be drawn on the question.)
I'm sorry about all that turgid stuff. It's just that the early scientists had something much more frightening to deal with than any Hollywood version of "the church": they had to acknowledge uncertainty. After they had begun to feel certain again, David Hume helped them feel unsure once more. They were the better for it.
The reason we have barbaric instances where scientists were censored or imprisoned by ecclesiastical courts in Italy or France is that the Roman Catholic Church was comfortably certain, and it was filled with porridge in the brain. It wasn't the only one, either. You see, they were reasoning deductively, and they had gotten very good at deduction (imagine today's hedge fund managers writing papal bulls, and you'll get the idea). Plenty of scientists were reasoning the same way, but they're the scientists whose names we don't remember, because they were the ones who mocked Galileo and opposed inoculation. (The story of inoculations for small pox is best-seller novel interesting, because it wasn't exactly what you'd think it was. You don't get a pure scientist vs. ignorant savages. You get a trial and error clinician against the pure scientists.)
I alluded to ipse dixit, which is the fallacy of authority, but the real problem for the Renaissance conservative was the problem of deductive reasoning's allure. If you use deduction too often, you can mistake the logically attractive for the real, just as, if you use induction too often, you can mistake concluding abstractions for real agents. These are the magnetic poles of porridge.
Aristotle said the earth was a sphere. Its shadow on the moon is always a half circle, and only a sphere makes such a shadow, and thus the earth is a sphere. He did not bother to check, of course, or seek an experiment. It was logical, so it must be true. Similarly, he said that women had fewer teeth than men, because that was logical to him. Deduction, when done properly, delivers a result that
must be true, but people never know when their "rule" is flawed or their "observation" is biased. When early 20th century scientists said that women have smaller brains than men, therefore cannot learn as much as men, and therefore should not go to college, their generalization was true. It's just that they never stopped to wonder why elephants and blue whales, with brains as big as houses, don't hunt us. Nor did they have any solid evidence that brain size was related to intelligence.
The churchmen who forbade experiments on a vaccuum pump did so because, a priori, there can never be a complete absence ("according" to Aristotle, who never actually said it). There cannot be a "nothing," so a vaccuum cannot exist (due to the principle of plenitude, which was part of their cosmology (it's not from the Bible; it's another deduction)), so anyone working on such a device is logically working for Satan on destroying the world. Once the major premise was granted, the rest followed.
Similarly, though, the experimental scientists of the 18th century who had proved the "vegetable spirits" of plants by induction (observation of many specimens) "knew" that they could extract those spirits to do physical work. It had to be the case. Now, we realize today that there are no animal or vegetable spirits, but the problem was that the sum of experimentation was being treated as a physical fact. The conclusion or the actual explanation for the observed phenomena, which Huygens onward had warned would be coming from analogy and synthesis and deduction, was being treated as a physical fact.
Neither "faith" nor "science" was to blame. Porridge -- the tendency to be certain of one's methods, to have a key that unlocks every window -- was the problem. Heck, anyone want to talk about "The Seven Races of Man?" (I mean anyone at DailyKos. Unfortunately, there are people on other websites who do.) That was scientific: a conclusion based on lots of observation was then used as the basis of deduction. If not that, how about the "criminal" brow ridge that no doubt one or two persons here has? Again: scientists looked at the heads of executed criminals and came to scientific conclusions about what they had in common and devised phrenology.
Another challenge to certainty came, or should have come, from the Logical Positivists. Bertrand Russell, of whom I am no fan, had run into an insurmountable paradox in the form of "the set of all sets." This may seem like no big deal, but deduction should allow for an absolute proof. At around the same time, Wittgenstein had demonstrated the illegality of a great deal of philosophical enquiry, due to its lack of clarity. At nearly the same time, many were showing how language was corrupting all questions and limiting the answers. Niels Bohr probably seemed like just one more darned thing, given all the hammering certainty had taken by then.
Porridge thinking comes from one error, the belief in a universal solvent, a sure fire method for figuring out everything. Either a person begins demanding that the universe adhere to one's deductions or one silently and unconsciously accepts the theorized constructs that explain repeated observations as if they already are the universe. Each mistake gives its victim comfort and makes its victim a tyrant or a bigot, if only of herself or himself.
Now for a personal revelation, and why I'm protesting the human condition this way.
I am still teaching at a microscopically small Christian college. I've been teaching at it for a decade now, even though I never expected to be teaching at any college, much less a fundamentalist one, and least of all one a hundred miles from the nearest book store. (The school had a very good academic reputation in the 1990's.) The college has gone through three presidents in this time. The most recent one is moderately famous or infamous (People for the American Way have a page on him, and not in the good portion of their website). The amount the faculty have suffered in the decade is pretty bad, but here is the thing: each time a president has left, the word from the church that supports the school is, "We're going to bring the college back to Christ."
You see, their syllogism works like this: God wishes schools that honor Him to prosper in the world; the school is having a hard time; the faculty and staff must not be proper Christians. This must be true. Any other explanation -- the "convention" of churches keeping the college starved, insufficient administrative numbers, having no job searches for administrators, lack of promotions -- would involve hard work. They have their porridge.
The same easy comfort comes to people who reason the other way: small Christian college, so everyone there is a bigot and a prude, an incompetent fool. It has to be. For them, prudes and bigots they've seen on TV have been religious, and these people are religious, so they have to be like Donald Wildmon or Ted Hagee or David Barton. Never mind that human beings in one's daily life are variegated, surprising, failed but aspiring, hopeful and sad, their universal key to the world has a quick answer. They have their porridge.
Let us resolve, each of us, to be uncertain. Let us each take a vow of doubt when it comes to "them." Whoever "they" are, let us resolve to be unsure why they acted, who they are, what they want, where they live, and what they really mean. Doubt makes us think, and certainty fills our heads with porridge.