Our examination of Logical Positivism is by no means thorough or complete, but it reveals some useful insights. Recall the tentative "query list" formed at the beginning of this thread. It contained some of the questions one might meaningfully and appropriately ask about a given theory of knowledge, questions which would or should suggest how useful, reliable and productive such a theory of knowledge would be for the task at hand. In the present case, we are looking for a theory of knowledge that is suitable for answering questions about ethics. This does not assume that ethics is in fact what we think it is -- it does not assume that ethics is cognitive (can be known about by us), it does not assume that ethics exists at all. Ethics may turn out to be entirely different from what we intuitively suppose it to be. Ethics may even turn out to be a chimera -- an utterly fictitious entity. We would not expect any adequate theory of knowledge to tell us that unicorns exist, or that horses do not. Knowledge entails truth, in whatever way it may do so; if ethics is no more than a hypothetical concept, a good theory of knowledge ought to reveal that fact.

In evaluating the family of Positivist theories of knowledge, let us begin by applying our original list of questions to what has been said so far in our discussion of Positivism (including Logical Positivism, Logical Behaviorism and similar methods of inquiry). Our interview may have answered some questions well, and some poorly, and some not at all. It may (probably) turn out that we are asking the wrong questions, or not asking all of the right questions, and will have to revise our criteria.

* * * * * * * * *

(1) ACCORDING TO YOUR EPISTEMIC THEORY (THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE), WHAT IS KNOWLEDGE? WHAT COUNTS AS KNOWLEDGE (ACCORDING TO YOUR THEORY) AND WHAT DOES NOT? ARE THERE SHADES AND DEGREES OF KNOWLEDGE (LIKE HIGH CONFIDENCE, STRONG BELIEF, EDUCATIONAL GUESSWORK, MERE HUNCH AND THE LIKE) OR IS IT ALL OR NONE (COMPLETE CERTAINTY, OR ABSOLUTE IGNORANCE), OR WHAT?

Logical Positivism and its descendents takes a very precise, hard-line approach to knowledge claims -- perhaps too hard for our purposes. This position follows naturally from the major concerns of late 19th and early 20th century knowledge. During this time, there was a major and organized effort to expunge "pseudo-science" and other spurious claims from the general body of knowledge. The body of knowledge accumulated by society (in this case, the sphere of "Western Civilization", going all the way back to the Ancient Greeks and Egyptians) had many sources and contributors, many of them merely a matter of tradition and lore, or second or third or fourth hand testimony, others mere rumor or persistence of belief, others a matter of religious or political doctrine or other "authority". Still other beliefs were adopted as "knowledge" without sufficient justification for "true belief", and remained "knowledge" through inertia rather than for any stronger reason.

The Logical Positivist "inventory of human knowledge" project included a massive (re)organization of the various branches of more than two millennia of compiled knowledge. By the turn of the 20th century, this knowledge resembled a disorganized heap more than anything else, in desperate need of consolidation and reorganization. Now "soundness" (or correctness and consistency) and "completeness" made sense. While any body of knowledge that is fed by ongoing contributions to it is bound to contain errors, questions and gaps in virtue of being a work in progress, as a *theory* (a body of knowledge) it ought to be correct insofar as it has been completed so far, and, the truth claims of this body of knowledge ought to be mutually consistent at the very least. To be bona fide knowledge, all claims about an external, public objective world ought to be correct (or at least reasonable, and consistent with our observations), public (accessible to everyone), and objective (the same for everyone -- as some have put it "the view from nowhere", or, from everywhere).

These considerations have shaped Logical Positivism, determining its general structure and purpose. Positivist knowledge then, is not merely belief, or what is perceived from the viewpoint of an individual observer, nor is it ultimately, a matter of degree, or kind. It is -- to put it bluntly -- absolute. It claims to have (or to be able to get) all the knowledge that can be attained. Any "knowledge" that cannot pass the LP gauntlet is simply not knowledge. Any criteria for knowledge other than the verificationist test (later softened to the "disconfirmation" or "falsifiability" test is not knowledge. Any knowledge that contradictions other knowledge is not knowledge. Any theory that conflicts with another theory is not knowledge. Any knowledge not backed by empirical observation is not knowledge. Any knowledge relying merely upon sincere belief, conjecture or faith is not knowledge. . . .

[An historical observation concerning "verification" is in order. Originally the criteria for "knowledge" included "verification", that is, a "proof" of some sort that the claim was indeed true. This of course is not always feasible; the cost, or length of time for such a proof might exceed human capability. An interesting example is Aristotle's -- or was it Archimedes? -- "Sand Reckoner". The idea is this. No one has the time to count all the grains of sand on all the beaches of the world. And yet, the number of grains of sand on Earth must be finite, and a specific number. The argument goes like this. There are a finite number of grains of sand -- a thousand, say, in a tablespoon. One does have the time to count this many grains of sand. And furthermore, there are a finite number of teaspoons of sand (again, some specific number) in a bucket of sand. Thus, there must be a finite number of grains of sand in a bucket of sand, even if there are millions and millions of grains -- too many to count. And by similar reasoning, there must be a finite number of grains of sand (again, a specific number) in larger finite units of sand, say, a crate or other large container containing a thousand buckets of sand. A beach, however big, is finite in size -- it contains a finite (if enormous) volume of sand -- containing some finite number of crates of sand. And the number of beaches on earth is finite, as the size of the Earth itself is finite (the Greeks knew approximately -- to a 1% error! -- how voluminous the Earth was). Therefore, the number of grains of sand on all the beaches of the world is finite (if huge), even though we do not know the exact number of grains of sand there are (and there must be some specific number of grains of sand, as all finite numbers are specific -- there is no such number as "about fifty").

Now even the Positivists had to agree that in *practice* a lot of our knowledge is not exact, but an estimate -- the population of Europe, for example, or the number of atoms in a quart of water, or the height of Mount Everest or the time (year, day, minute and second) the last dinosaur died. Being true, and knowing the truth, they realized, meant two different things. One could know *that* there were a finite, specific number of grains of sand in the world (and not infinitely many -- as our intuitions tell us as we gaze out at the vast stretches of beachfront property extending from horizon to horizon), and not know what that actual number was.

Thus Positivists had to hedge a bit on their claims. No, you could not (in practice) *verify* (by calculation) the exact number of grains of sand on Earth, but *in principle* you could, because it was true that that the exact number of grains of sand -- however many there were -- *had* to be finite, and anyone can count up to a finite number, given enough time. So "proof" -- a critical element of Positivist knowledge -- had been modified to "possibility of proof". "Possibility", too, had been modified as "possible in principle" had replaced "possible in practice". One could actually count a million grains of sand (it would take months), or even a billion grains (years), but a googol of grains (ten to the one-hundredth power), although a finite, would take longer than the life-span of the universe and more people than there was material in the universe to make up people. "Proof" of a googol of grains of sand was *only* a proof in principle; it could not be carried out. more compromises were made, ending with "falsifiability" (rather than proof of truth). A claim (true or false) had to be *falsifiable* "in principle" in order to be even eligible for counting as knowledge. That is, the claim that there are no unicorns (or that there are unicorns) must pass the test that there is, or could, be some means of proving there are no unicorns. Presumably, one could determine whether such and such creature is (or is not) a unicorn (it must have a horse's head, a lion's tail, and deer's hooves -- and a single twisted horn in its forehead -- for starters). But "being immortal", on the other hand, is more difficult and problematic. Someone who lives to be a billion years old might not be immortal, merely very long-lived. In principle, no matter how long an "immortal" person lived, that person could still be mortal (if it were to die at some time in the future, a trillion or quintillion or a googol years from now). There is *no* point in time at which one can say, "well, he's made it this far; he must be immortal". And, there seems to be no other means (an "immortality meter"?) by which one could prove that such a person is immortal. So the claim of "immortality" cannot be proven by any means (known means at least), nor can it be disproved. This does not bode well for Positivist knowledge, as, despite its great inclusiveness, it leaves a great many questions unanswered, and unanswerable.

(2) ACCORDING TO YOUR THEORY, WHAT CAN WE HAVE KNOWLEDGE OF? WHAT KINDS OF "THINGS" ARE THERE? IN WHAT WAYS, AND TO WHAT DEGREE AND TO WHAT EXTENT CAN WE "KNOW" ABOUT THESE THINGS? ARE THERE (POSSIBLY -- WE MAY NOT BE ABLE TO KNOW) THINGS THAT ARE NOT COVERED BY YOUR THEORY? WHY NOT? MORE GENERALLY, ARE ALL TRUTHS KNOWABLE, ONLY SOME OF THEM, OR NONE OF THEM?

In light of (1), we can see that there are knowledge claims that Positivism cannot resolve. And, in light of the previous dialog, we can see that the "reductionist" strategy of the Positivists (explaining "everything" in terms of things we can know a great deal (but not everything) about -- physical matter and energy states, for example -- tends to fail when one comes across things that do not "reduce" well -- non-physical entities, like mind and beauty and infinitely large sets of numbers (or other objects). And even if -- as in the case of mental processes -- a reduction of sorts *is* made, and even if it were the case that the reduction was successful (how we would know this is beyond me, or anyone else at present) -- that *everything* essential to mind *were* accountable in terms of physical objects and phenomena, it does not mean that this information would in and of itself yield "knowledge". One may successfully reduce a color photo to a string of ones and zeros, but this string of bits does not reveal color, form, objects depicted in the original photo or the relationships between them.

This point is not moot. We may gather and store color images in computers as collections of bits, but we do not understand what is stored in these collections of bits simply by looking at them. We need to read (interpret) this information, and it is possible that this *interpretation* may lie *outside* our theory of knowledge, even if both the string of bits and the objects of the photo fall neatly within our theory.

(3) WHAT METHODS, PROCEDURES, DEVICES, TOOLS, PROCESSES, SENSES AND/OR ANYTHING ELSE YOU CAN COME UP WITH IS REQUIRED TO OBTAIN THE KNOWLEDGE YOUR THEORY OFFERS? (TELESCOPES? NAKED-EYE WITNESSS? NAKED EARS? COMPUTERS? HISTORIES? VIDEO/AUDIO TAPE? ESP? PURELY RATIONAL THOUGHT. GOOD HUNCHES? SACRED TEXTS? BROWN BAGS AND TWEEZERS? ? ? INTERVIEWERS? RUMORS AND MYTHS? BONES (EITHER AS FOSSILS, OR AS MYSTICAL PREDICTORS.)

Positivism has amassed a gigantic arsenal of tools, methods, procedures, instruments, senses, and the like, from microscopes to telescopes, from rules of thumb to laws of nature, from mathematics to statistics, from the naked eye to radio detectors. These tools fall into two main sorts. One sort are physical tools which aid us in ascertaining what is going on in the physical world, from inside the nucleus of an atom to the ring of quasars that mark the edge of the detectable universe. These tools extend our sense, making visible to our perception much more of the universe that our bare senses could. The other sort are conceptual tools, which can be thought of as mental aids that augment our ability to analyze, interpret, organize and apply the data we accumulate via our physical tools. These methods and procedures aid us in the mental "processing" the data we acquire.

Positivism -- as a glance back at 20th century science will show -- has accumulated and made vast use of both kinds of tools. The briefest survey of the physical instruments used in collecting information about stars, chemicals, biological and geological specimens, weather, energies (natural and artificial) and many, many other phenomena would take far too long to give even the most general "representative" sampling. Conceptual tools: formulas, theories, methods -- from the "scientific method" to "the periodical table of the elements" to "Occam's Razor" to the "Pythagorean Theorem", to the laws -- "Ohm's Law", "Boyle's Law", "Newton's Law", "Grimm's Law" -- to the various standards of weights and measures, to -- the list is simply too long to survey.

One sweeping (but fairly illustrative) generalization can be made, given Positivism's theory of knowledge: Some of these tools (either physical or conceptual) serve to establish the truth of individual claims and empirical observations, while other tools (or perhaps the same tools, applied in different ways) serve in conceptual analysis, especially in sorting by "kinds" to form generalities, or in make distinctions, or in some way "ideating" -- making inferences about the specific data collected in order to draw conclusions via logical argument.

This process has proven so fruitful, so vastly comprehensive and encompassing, that it has affected nearly every field we deem to be "knowledge". In fact, we of recent generations tend to equate knowledge *with* the Positivist paradigm. A tortilla baker on Olvera Street (in Los Angeles) may pat out several hundred tortillas a day, but it is the scientist: the nutritionist expert in vegetable diets, the maize botanist, the chemist studied in lime compounds, the thermodynamicist with his or her formulas on heat radiating from flat surfaces, and plastic components theoreticians (topologists) who can describe the evolution of the three-dimensional manifold that best describes the tortilla -- that are said to have "knowledge" about tortillas. Merely knowing how to *make* a tortilla -- which none of these experts know how to do, much less can do -- is not knowledge.

One needs to ask, in the face of the mass of information on so many subjects of study that we have amassed in the last few hundred years alone -- and this is a *very* hard thing to do (to even *imagine* doing) -- whether we are getting "all" of the information there is. By that I do not mean filling the tables of existing data out to the last decimal place. As a very familiar example, Pi (the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter, approximately 3.14159 . . .) is an infinitely long transcendental decimal number that has, of late, been calculated exactly to over one billion decimal places. In point of fact it is difficult if not impossible to come up with a practical application (outside the realm of pure number theory) that requires more than the first twenty decimal places. The approximation: Pi = 22/7, is good enough for any carpenter making a round table. The approximation of Pi carried out to about twenty or thirty decimal places falls within the range of error of the physical universe, made "fuzzy" beyond that level of accuracy by the Heisenberg Principle.

More generally, filling out the details of Positivist knowledge -- apart from specific practical applications, and the placation of obsessive-compulsive-disorder types -- does not yield "more" knowledge, only more detail, and sometimes *more* confirmation of what is already known. There is a principle in court proceedings -- the "Cumulation of Evidence" -- which states more or less that if one witness, or piece of evidence, or expert, proves the factual claim, then a dozen witnesses (or pieces of evidence, or experts) making the same point (with nothing new to add) are redundant. Of course sometimes a dozen witnesses, or a hundred pieces of evidence or a brace of experts are need to testify to different and not entirely overlapping matters, and so the overlap is tolerated (to a point). Often more scrutiny simply will not yield more insight.

But this saturation of knowledge may be accomplished on one level, or in one area of study, and yet other areas -- even related areas -- of knowledge poorly explored or even completely unexplored. For example, by 1700, European geography was completely mapped out, but almost the entire Pacific Ocean region (to say nothing of the interior of, say, Africa) was a blank on European globes. (Pacific Islanders, on the other hand, knew where *they* -- and their neighbors -- were (at this time), but knew next to nothing about Europe. Before the mid-1960's, the side of the moon facing us had been mapped in excruciating detail, but it was only after the first moon probes circled the moon that *anything* about the far side was known -- to anyone.

The deceptive nature of wealth -- including wealth of knowledge -- is that plenitude conceals poverty. There is the classic college anecdote about a botany professor who gave one of his students an apple and asked the student to write a *thorough* report on this fruit sample. The student returned after a grueling two-week break, during which time (s)he had examined the apple intensely, and had made copious notes on the item, and submitted a one-hundred and fifty page report along with the apple. "Finished!" the student said, exhausted. The professor took the apple, withdrew a penknife, and cut the apple in half, exposing the flesh inside, along with the core and seed structure. "No you're not", he replied, returning the dissected apple (and the report) to the aggrieved student. This incident illustrates that one kind of scrutiny -- one point of view of a subject -- may be drastically over-emphasized, to the exclusion not only of *more* information abut a subject, but of significant information not previously revealed by intensive, but narrow, study. Cutting the apple reveals something essential about the apple that surface scrutiny -- however dedicated -- never would: the apple is a botanical "ovary" -- it contains the seeds and other reproductive organs of the apple tree.

The question then is not how do we support scientific claims in astronomy, or evolutionary development theory (as if we were merely piling evidence onto a balance scale), but -- as I said -- what* kind* of evidence is needed to support (or merely to raise) an important point. Only *one* Tyrannosaurus Rex skeleton or Trilobite fossil -- or the conspicuous absence of any mermaid or unicorn skeletons -- is sufficient for raising very serious questions about life during the early history of the Earth. And, the discovery of a thousand -- rather than two, or two thousand, or ten billion -- T-Rex skeletons -- is a matter of "accumulation" rather than existence. Have we found no unicorn skeletons because there are none to be found, or because we haven't been looking in the right places? This is not an idle point. Up until the early 20th century, it was presumed there was one "galaxy" containing all of the known stars, planets, comets and other space debris known to the ancient Greeks. But in the early 20th century, another "galaxy" -- outside our own "Milky Way" -- discovered to be just that, and not a star, planet, nebulae or other familiar item. This galaxy was not hidden -- a Greek with good eyesight could -- and did -- see it. It merely was not *looked at*.

The point then is to review Positivism not as "Wrong" or "inaccurate", but as "complete" (or not). The commitment to the principle of reduction has its immensely practical uses -- biographers should not list Mark Twain and Samuel Clemens as "two American writers", nor should "the Morning Star" and "the Evening Star" be listed as two separate stars, but as only one planet (Venus). Still, there is the serious question, raised almost at the very inception of Positivism as to whether this theory of knowledge was focusing on *some* aspects of Reality (those that lent themselves to the sort of scrutiny and analytical tools (physical and conceptual) that Positivism has to offer), or, whether Positivism -- as some eventually (and to this day) consider to it -- to be the science of "all that there is", or even "all that we can know".

This is a very strong claim, and the basis of support for this claim is not nearly as strong -- seen from the perspective of a century later -- as it must have seemed to be at the time. ("Nothing exceeds like success!").

For our own purposes, in our present investigation of Ethics, it would seem that either there is no ethical knowledge to be *had* (simply because there is nothing *to* know). Or -- given the incredible thoroughness in areas where we would expect Positivism to be most successful (if at all) -- it may possibly -- *possibly* -- be that Positivism is not as comprehensive as one might have thought. It may be that the very advantages of Positivism (its particular array of tools and approaches) and the *sort* of knowledge it was established to investigate and acquire and process, is *not* in fact ALL the knowledge that there is to be had. Furthermore, its specialization in detecting and analyzing a *certain* kind (albeit a very broad and extremely important kind) of data about the world may in fact result in its *not* shedding light on other aspects of reality which may or may not be important, but which will *not* be discovered or revealed by Positivist methods, just as an electron microscope -- as marvelous a tool as it is -- will not reveal the galaxies to us.

One can investigate the probative philosophical question, as to *why* -- given the principles and practices of the Positivist program and its particular conception of knowledge -- ethical (and other) matters disappear from view and hence are not pursued. It is enough at this point for the reader to see (in light of the discussion presented in this last set of mini-essays and ruminations on Logical Positivism) that the LPs are*not* going to fid what they are *not* looking for (and to a degree, intentionally avoiding). It is not the fault of LP that such issues as ethics, phenomenology, aesthetics and other "subjective" area of human experience, particularly "mental" (or at least non-physical) experiences and objects. To have done so would have undoubtedly clouded the issue, just as in the case of ethics -- I will later argue -- issues of religion, spiritualism, mysticism and other "isms" need to be kept apart from "basic" ethical considerations, if only to be accounted for later, after a solid knowledge of ethical theory is established. Without analysis -- the breaking up of complex entities into their component parts in an effort to understand their functions and their relations to one another -- there is no understanding, no knowledge, only bare experience, which people can have from year to year, and generation to generation, with *no* enlightenment whatsoever.

(4) HOW DOES ONE EVALUATE / VERIFY (CONFIRM, JUSTIFY, REVIEW, CORRECT, REVISE) / ORGANIZE (STORE, COLLATE, ORGANIZE, GENERALIZE, COMPARE AND CONTRAST, OTHERWISE RELATE) / ACCESS (DISTRIBUTE, TEACH, EXPAND / APPLY THIS KNOWLEDGE? IS GETTING SUCH KNOWLEDGE PRACTICAL, OR ONLY THEORETICAL?

(5) HOW STABLE IS THE SET OF KNOWLEDGE CLAIMS YOUR THEORY OFFERS? ARE YOUR SYSTEM'S KNOWLEDGE CLAIMS TESTABLE. ARE THEY COMPATABLE WITH ONE ANOTHER (INTERNAL CONSISTENCY), AND WITH OTHER SYSTEMS? HOIW OFTEN ARE SUCH CLAIMS FOUND TO BE INCOMPLETE, AND WHY? HOW DIFFICULT ARE THEY TO "COMPLETE", OR EXPAND? HOW OFTEN ARE THEY FOUND TO CONTAIN MISTAKES, AND WHY? HOW OFTEN DOES ONE NEED TO REVISE ONE'S BODY OF KNOWLEDGE, AND UNDER WHAT CIRCUMSTANCES? WHAT IS THE SCOPE OF THIS KNOWLEDGE (HOW GENERALIZABLE IS IT?)

Questions (4) and (5) I have addressed above and suggested answers to, if only vaguely, or in part. I believe the reader can look through these considerations and (a) see their importance in evaluating *any* theory of knowledge, and (b) get at least a sense of how a Positivist would answer these questions, and how Positivism would measure up against these criteria.

Regarding the issue of "vetting" and "processing" positivist knowledge (4), we can see that the standards are very harsh -- at least in principle. (How well they are applied in practice, even in the "sciences", is a separate, but very valid question. Any reader with experience in the practice of religion knows that those who eschew sin in principle are not therefore immune to it in practice.) At the same time, there is a noticeable gap between the principles of Positivism and the actual practice (which we have witnessed in this century, after getting a foretaste of it in the 19th century under the Industrial Revolution)). I am still waiting for completely safe nuclear power "too cheap to meter" (and only paid for by a flat hook-up fee").

The issue of "stability" of knowledge (that is of knowledge claims) is equally important, and I leave that issue to the reader (and to future discussion as it arises). Most of us are not only familiar with, but heartily sick of, reading the statements of "experts in the media" who say that scientific claim A is true (not *merely* true, but *freshly proven* true, as if proof were a pudding to be eaten while still piping hot). This image is not far off. Such reports of knowledge do grow "stale", that is, they have a sort shelf-life, thanks in part to scientists eager for attention, but more often to "media pundits" -- quasi-experts who function as oracles who (mis)read preliminary reports and trends rather than tea leaves or chicken entrails (with as little accuracy or reliability). The medical field is rife with such reports of "knowledge", to the chagrin and frustration of serious doctors who have to face their media-informed patients, filled with promises, distortions and lies, inferences and innuendos, and labor to correct faulty claims, or completely disabuse them of their baseless beliefs. The dissemination and vetting of such "objective and absolute knowledge" -- including claims that are not merely true, but *proven* true -- that have to be later retracted with a regularity matched only by the seasons and the orbits of the major planets, are legion. Thus Positivist knowledge -- obtained by Positivist methods -- end up being distributed and utilized by methods more closely approximated by superstition, rumor, myth and religious dogma. This easy and ready contamination of "sure-fire" knowledge does not reflect well on Positivism. That there is (I and others would claim), an "ethic" of knowledge acquisition, on the part of our Institutions of knowledge, the purveyors of knowledge, and the receivers -- us -- of knowledge does not make things easier. However, as we will see with the next theory of knowledge, not "fixing" the problems -- nor accepting them either -- naturally leads to rebellion (the crazy, ill-thought out sort depicted in Woody Allen's parody of political revolutions: "Bananas"). The meta-theory is that if it is broken, curse it, throw it out and do the opposite -- or appeal to superstition. This is understandable as a gut reaction to failure and inadequacy in our institutions (of knowledge, of politics, or any other social "utility"). As a principle of theory adaptation, or correction, or simply "improvement", as we will see it is the worst thing one can do.


In the next part of this series, I will present the nominally "unpresentable", even incomprehensible "theory of knowledge" -- if it can be called that -- of post-Modernism. As with my presentation on Positivism, it will be a cobbled-together "police-sketch" ID of the subject, and not a faithful photo rich with detail. I am looking at Positivism and post-Modernism as the two present leading "candidates" for a theory of knowledge that will aid us in tackling the project of asking whether ethics exists, what it is (if it does exist), and how it works and how to use it, as well as actually finding useful *answers* to these questions. As it turns out, there are elements of both Positivism and post-Modernism that have value for our project, but that as they presently exist, are wholly inadequate for our purposes.

I: Last time we established -- according to Logical Positivism -- or Logical Behaviorism -- some basic features of mind, which I will attempt to summarize. First, all of the components of mind -- of everything in fact -- are physical. Second, that mind-talk entities, like impressions, thoughts, ideas, judgments, feelings, speculations -- "meanings" -- and the like are nothing more than physical brain states --
LP: That is correct.
I: -- and thus that any talk of such would, on the Positivist account, have to consist, ultimately, of purely physical phenomena. "I have a stomach ache", "You don't like me", "That's stupid", "I am afraid of spiders -- or unicorns, or ghosts", "That appears to be a man lying there", "The arrow sign indicates we should turn left" -- all of these impressions, thoughts, ideas, judgments, feelings, speculations and meanings would have to be posited *entirely* in terms of brain anatomy and physical functions --
LP: That sounds stringent, but if you *don't* make that reduction, then you are left with at least some phenomena that are *non*-physical, which leaves us with the problem -- going back to Descartes -- of what that "other" matter is, and how it could possibly interact with physical matter. With -- well, lets start with physical matter, and energy and states of affairs. These interact easily and naturally and intimately with one another -- it is coherent to say that a bulb filament emits light waves, which are absorbed, or bounce off of, a physical object, then reach the physical eye, enter the lens, strike the retina, which generates nerve impulses, which are conducted along the optic nerve to the visual cortex, and then are further processed to generate a physical brain state -- a collection of neurons and axons and other "brain state" material reconfigured by the act of their reaction to the nerve impulse --
I: -- and these "states" -- purely physical -- become new objects in the interactive process of internal brain function. They are newly formed links in causal chains in the "thinking" process -- brain processes -- and take part in further physical interactions within the brain, or between the brain and the body, or other objects of the physical universe.
LP: That is correct.
I: No "ghosts", ectoplasm, spirits, disembodied entities, or the like.
LP: Yes, exactly.
I: Earlier I said that Aristotle and others long ago defined "physics" as "all that there *is*", not merely the basic matter of modern physics courses, apart from chemistry, astronomy, biology, geology, computer science, psychological, sociology, statistics and other subdivisions of modern science. Now it seems to me that "physical" and "existing" are two distinct concepts. The car you intend to purchase, which you may have already paid for in fact, but which hasn't rolled off the assembly line yet -- does not physically exist. On the other hand, the *meaning* of a yellow traffic light for an individual person: get ready to stop, or, speed up, perhaps -- what is that? Specifically, how does the dutiful Positivist or Behavioralist "reduce" the act of a driver perceiving a yellow light and slowing down -- or speeding up -- to the terms of purely physical states -- the light, the car, the foot on the brake or gas pedal, the restraining line at the intersection -- all of that -- to purely physical states.
LP: Colors again! you seem to be obsessed with color perception.
I: Well any sense will do. You could imagine the case in which while driving you hear a siren, or smell burning fuel, or feel a bee crawl up your sleeve, or taste something bad in the coffee you're drinking, or sense an imbalance in the seat cushion.
LP: In any event, this doesn't sound very much different from your "seeing red" case.
I: It isn't, really. In both cases we clearly have physical phenomena: light waves, biological bodies, physical reactions -- although in the case of the "red", we are talking about "experience" and "consciousness", which just might *not* be reducible on the Behavioralist account --
LP: You would have to --
I: Let me finish my point -- excuse me -- in both cases we have processes occurring. At least part of each case is purely and unproblematically physical in any ordinary sense of the term. At the very least, these parts of each case are reducible *to* purely physical phenomena, even if we may not *experience* them as purely physical phenomena -- or even experience them at all. We certainly don't feel, or observe, our rods and cones squirting out electrochemical impulses in reaction to being struck with photons. These processes are invisible to our bare senses.
L: Nor do you sense quarks regrouping in your nostrils when you sniff the kitchen air for signs of smoke --
I: -- and yet such phenomena -- on the physical level -- are part of the actual cause-and-effect chain. For brain states to emerge, or configure, or reconfigure in reaction to 7000 angstrom light waves striking the organ of the eye, all that is needed to give this account are the bare physical phenomena. None of it has to be "observed" by a conscious mind.
LP: Many people don't see this, because they are enveloped in the process of sensation and perception. One may receive a physical cut -- on one's finger, perhaps -- without being conscious of the cut occurring. The same is the case for brain state formation. Physical interactions occur along the entire route, from light bulb to brain state location, without the need to invoke *any* non-physical processes at all.
I: True, but to get back to the point I was leading up to, in presenting your Behaviorist reduction of "seeing red" to purely physical phenomena, you gave an account of the process of a brain state formation as the result -- the effect -- of sense perception of a particular beam of light.
LP: Which is what Logical Behaviorism offers.
I: Yes, but the question at hand is whether the reduction is complete, that is, whether the Behaviorist account of an act of perception covers all of the elements involved in that act.
As I see it, there are two potential sources of error. First, it is possible, as the mind-dualists -- who believe in mind and brain as separate and distinct entities, one physical, the other not -- maintain, that at least some parts of the perception process are non-physical, namely, consciousness of -- experience of -- the world, and one's own brain states -- and the meaning of and interpretation attached to brain states. If so, then Positivist "reduction" to physical phenomena *fails*, because not all components of an act of perception are reducible to physical phenomena, because some components of an act of perception simply are not physical.
LP: Positivism rejects that claim, and the entire "ghost in the machine" model.
I: It does, which does not entail that Positivism is correct. However it is not an unreasonable position, especially if we are broadminded enough to take the Aristotelian view, the view we find in many ancient Greek and Roman views, that "physics" is "all that there is", not in the reductionist sense that only physical entities "count as real", but in the inclusive sense that if a thing exists, it is by definition or default *physical*.
LP: Either way, the Positivist position stands: everything is reducible to the physical.
I: Well, that may be true, but I have no firm commitment to dualism *or* to monism -- the view that mind consists solely of physical brain states or whatever else the physical brain is constructed of, or that perception is a solely physical process whatever the perception process ultimately involves. As I see it, existence takes precedent over physicality, which I see as a 7000-angstrom light-wave herring. We could conflate "existence" into the notion of physicality, or vice versa. In any case, the spirit of Positivism seem to urge us to posit what is, or could be found on examination to be real, or existing, which is what Positivists and others seem to want from their appeal to "physics" --
LP: In other words, Occam's razor, closely applied --
I: For a clean shave -- I understand. But I am making a distinction between the monism/dualism issue, and what I feel is the more substantive issue, the issue as to whether the reductionist process is, or can be, carried out completely. If there are gaps or omissions or other faults in the mind-body reduction, then reduction fails, and consequently the Positivist schema for producing a physical model of the mind fails.
LP: Well if there is only physical being, then Positivist reduction of "mental" phenomena to physical phenomena automatically goes through.
I: It most certainly does not! Mind-body reduction is not a metaphysical fact of the matter about the way things are. To say that it is, is equivalent to saying that because there are prime numbers we can therefore determine which of all of the infinitely many number *are* prime, which is a patently false claim. For Positivism to claim successful mind-body, or mind-brain, reduction in a specific case, it must demonstrate that reduction by giving a physical account of all -- *all* -- so-called "mental" phenomena.
Now such a reduction may be possible for each and every purported mental phenomenon, just as it ought to be possible -- in theory at least -- to show that every rock and stone is comprised solely of atoms, but to allege that one can do this, and to actually *do* it are very different things. We have seen this problem -- the problem of proof -- in mathematics, namely the Incompleteness theorems of Kurt Gödel which demonstrate that not all true mathematical propositions are *provable*. The important thing to remember here is that we are -- I am at least -- concerned with *knowledge*. It may be the case that all mental activity may be fully and thoroughly explainable in terms of, say, superstring theory, but to say that this is possible is not to have done it.
And this sums up my second point: ultimately, everything that is, *is*, so that the question as to whether everything is "physical" or not drops out, replaced by the question as to whether everything falls into some more specific category of existence, such as atoms, or quarks, or putatively non-physical entities such as "numbers" or "verbs", or "relations" or "types" or "generalities". And in giving an account of mind -- that is, in establishing *knowledge* about general or specific mental processes -- the question is whether the explanation -- reduction or not -- is complete and correct.
Now Positivist "verification theory" seems to me to be something of a kludge -- an unartful device for attempting to ensure Positivist truth claims. the reasoning seems to be:
(1) We can give a full and verified (or verifiable) account of all physical phenomena.
(2) If mental phenomena can be fully reduced to physical phenomena, then we can give a full and verified (or verifiable) account of mental phenomena.
(3) Mental phenomena *can* be fully reducible to physical phenomena.
(4) (Therefore) we can give a full and verified account of all mental phenomena.

I take issue with (3), not out of a general prejudice against Positivism, or even from a rejection of (3)'s claim that mental phenomena *is* fully reducible to physical phenomena. Personally, I see no inherent difficulty with such a reduction, given a sufficiently broad, liberal and non-arbitrary view of "physics". What I do take issue with is what I and others feel is a hack-reduction that simply throws out what it cannot explain. It is like a jigsaw puzzle enthusiast tossing out the puzzle pieces that "do not appear to fit".
LP: You feel that Positivism is too Procrustean?
I: It should not be Procrustean at all. Whether Procrustes removes my entire legs, or merely my toes, I am still being mutilated in the process of being arbitrarily fit to my bed.
LP: Well, Positivism is a reaction to dualists who employ ad hoc entities out of thin air -- if even that! -- to explain -- if we can even dignify the process with that word -- mind. They come up with "seat of the mind', "soul", "consciousness", "self", "intuition", "ideas", "feelings", "attitudes", "guilt", "pride", "honesty", "moral turpitude", "evil", "sanctity" and the like ad infinitum and ad nauseum as if they were populating a new region of Middle Earth or Never-Never Land --
I: Well, one can certainly do a bad job of accounting for mental states, and it is anyone's judgment as to whether dualists or monist are -- well, we cannot call them "evil", can we? -- well, let's say, mistaken.
LP: Verification theory at least serves the purpose of screening out the uncertain and the doubtful --
I: It does, though what virtue is there in presenting an incomplete picture as the whole picture? It is simply a different form and source of error. And if we must leave certain areas of our map blank, that seems to be more illuminating than to make the bold claim that what is unknown does not exist.
LP: I understand your point, but the aim of Positivism was -- is -- to cut out the sort of empty speculation that hobbles theories about new and intractable phenomena. Democritus posited atoms: round and slippery water atoms, heavy and blocklike earth atoms, light and feathery air atoms, sharp and prickly fire atoms, not because there was a shred of evidence to show that the shape of atoms belied their properties, or even that there were exactly four kinds of atoms, but because it "sounded neat". So did crystalline spheres holding the planets in their orbits --
I: -- or ad hoc "ether" conducting waves of light from the Sun to the planets. Yes, yes. But this only means that we must be scrupulous in our investigation into the unknown, not to mindlessly -- no pun intended -- apply an epistemic principle whose justification is that it meets the expectations of its subscribers. In the case of the observation of mental activities -- the "verification" of mental claims -- in order to discern their existence, the presuppositions about what constitutes "evidence" of mind, of consciousness, intent, awareness, feeling and so forth actually serve to winnow out the very sorts of observational data that would support -- more than support -- reveal -- mental phenomena, whether that phenomena is ultimately physical or not.
LP: But if mental activity *is* ultimately physical, then why bother about the "mental speak"? Astronomers do not have to learn about the ancient legends behind the constellations in order to map out the star charts.
I: But -- at least in the beginning -- "constellations", whatever their ultimate nature, were how people *experienced* the canopy of stars. They experienced the stars as constellations, noticed that they held together in these albeit arbitrary groupings, and that the various constellations were "fixed" in reference to each other even as they revolved in the sky, how planets ("wanderers") and comets and meteoroids behaved very differently, wandering about willy-nilly, even falling to earth, and they began to derived inferences from them --
LP: Such as astrological forecasts.
I: Which proved, on further scrutiny, to be false. Astronomers also proved that the stars in so-called "constellations" -- "star clusters" -- were not truly associated with one another, only seeming to be "together" until the principle of "parallax" revealed that these compact images were actually many light-years apart, but their distances collapsed due to perspective foreshortening.
Look at original Behaviorism and its ineffective modifications. According to simple Behaviorism -- Identity theory -- the mind *is* the brain, and the brain is made up of -- among other things -- networks of brain states: cells, or groups of cells that possess a "state" -- whatever that means -- in virtue of their electrical charge or physical configuration or some other physical distinction resulting from neuron activity traceable back to the eye, or the nose or the ear, or central nervous system feedback, or input from adjacent cells. This explanation sounds very enriching until one stops to realize that the fact that a cell or cell group has a certain configuration -- like the configuration of a constellation, I might add! -- in no way entails any semantic content. What is there to say that a brain state *means* anything at all, much less this thing or that thing? And to what does the state mean what it does? The fact that three neurons are in a physical "state" does not entail that this group of cells contains a certain specific "meaning" that references the state of the eye, or the ear, say. Nor does the fact that there is a causal relationship between the state of the eye and some brain state entail that there is *any* meaning to be "read" into, or out of, that brain state -- however such "reading" is supposed to work -- nor who -- or what -- "does the reading". Nothing in Identity Theory overcomes the homunculus problem: the need for a little man inside the brain who reads the brain states form by the bigger man who has the perceptual experience.
LP: Well, if one looks at computer states as an analogy --
I: Just a second -- the infamous "computer analogy" model of the brain is over used, much abused, and actually serves more faithfully as a *contrast* to actual brain activity than a model of it. It also applies more readily to the somewhat more sophisticated "functionalist" model of the brain than to Behaviorism simple.
LP: Well -- I would disagree. A computer functions as "an electronic brain" that takes in sense data of various kinds, processes that data and produces output, just as a human brain does --
I: But it doesn't. A computer may be linked to a sensor that detects 7000 angstrom light waves -- even "patterns" of such light waves so as to form a space-time configuration of such light wave patterns, but it does not have the experience of "seeing red", "being rough and shaggy" or "appearing esthetically tacky".
LP: [laughing] How can you be sure?
I: Are you claiming that a computer *does* have these experiences, having emphatically and categorically denied that a person has them?
LP: I'm joking, of course. What I am serious about is the claim that what humans do in perceiving sensations is any *more* than what a computer does.
I: Well a very simple system consisting of a sensor linking to a CPU that merely changes a computer bit from a zero to a one when 7000 angstrom light strikes the sensor is such a system. This would be the equivalent of an amoeba flinching at a beam of light, but you would not argue on the basis of the existence such a system that an amoeba -- scarcely more complex or sophisticated than a single neuron -- had the capacity to "experience red" in the sense that humans do.
LP: If it is a matter of degree --
I: Well, psychologists speak of "thresholds" of complexity, or abundance of sense-data, minimality of cognitive workspace and such. I would appeal to the image of a driver pressing an on-off switch that results in his car starting up, driving safely to the market and back home again. It is too simple a structure to accomplish what it does. Furthermore, while a pocket calculator and a human being can both input "2", "2", and the "plus" operation and produce an output of "4", I believe it would be a mistake to assume that the same functions -- even the same methodologies -- are employed in both case. Computers, even the most sophisticated AI computers, merely "mimic" human actions. They simply lack -- for whatever reasons -- a phenomenological "self" that motivates and attaches meaning to the process.
LP: "The self in the machine"? Isn't it cheating a bit to assert the existence of your ghost without at least some sensational photos of the "geist" in action?
I: Only if it is subject to Occam's Razor, which was designed to eliminate superfluous entities -- ghosts that drive and operate the machine, but fail to serve as explanations for how and why the machine works as it does. Even a cat has a "self" that the most sophisticated computer today completely lacks. It is this self -- and I am by no means committed to a non-physical self phoning in messages to the pituitary gland from Out There -- that is *required* in *any of the Positivist models of the mind simply to "read" the brain states produced by external physical phenomena. And "reading" requires a *reader*, whatever such an entity specifically entails in its form and function.
LP: But a "reader is, as you suggest, a homunculus in disguise --
I: Positivists and Cartesian Dualists alike seem to think so. Monists claim that any such "reader", or "conscious self" must be non-physical, and hence cannot exist, while dualists argue from the same premise to the opposite conclusion: that the "self" -- the "observing subject" of all of the physical objects of the brain and the world -- *must* exist, since there is no "reading", or "observation", or "interpretation" of these physical entities without some sort of reader, observer or interpreter. Yes, you can raise the homunculus objection, and the "infinite regression" objection as well. But that line of argument -- even if it ultimately pans out -- does not explain the most important aspects of "mind": observance, meaning, intention and the like.
Just look at the sequence of Behaviorist theories -- bad as they are -- that freshmen philosophy majors are subjected to by rote: Basic Identity Theory, Type Theory, Token theory and their sterile permutations, and the ultimate dead end: Functionalism, which we are stuck with because phenomenology is not widely taught to college -- freshman for some inexplicable reason, at least here in the West.
LP: Shall we go through these theories, or simply dismiss them outright?
I: By all means, let us put each on trial. The result of this exercise is conspicuous in what it leaves out.
LP: Well, first, there is Identity Theory simpler. Your "mind" *is* your brain, just as your carry-around wealth *is* the cash and credit cards you carry in your wallet or handbag. The parts of your mind -- your memories, your judgments, your feelings -- all that is simply this or that part of your brain. The thought "I am feeling queasy" is simply some configuration of whatever brain states are involved in that "thought", just as a case of beer is the twelve cans or bottle of beer (plus the carton that holds them), and nothing more than that.
I: And the objection -- one of them -- to that model of mind is that when you, I, my cat -- everyone in China who drank from a certain bad lot of tea -- is that each of these beings who entertains the thought -- or the feeling -- "I am queasy" has precisely the same brain state -- even my cat. Suppose -- we don't actually know how such thoughts or feelings (if we may call them that) are expressed in the brain -- that in fact, the "mental thought": "I feel queasy" (or, "This carpet is red", or "This carpet is tastelessly garish") is -- *is* -- just some brain state. Let us suppose that a cluster of three neurons linked in a triangle with positive charges all around -- and a certain specific blend of serotonin, dopamine and other chemicals -- and any other specific conditions you like -- *are* what we describe to ourselves and others as the thought: "I feel queasy". We then look into my brain -- lord knows where -- and see or otherwise detect this triangle of neurons, accompanied by a well-choreographed flow of psycho-chemicals moving about between the axons -- all decked out like the cast of a Busby Berkeley musical number. The whole "object" -- or "event" over time if temporal changes are required -- *is* that thought.
Given this identity between mind-object and physical-object, the presence of this material configuration of neurons, chemicals and processes is a sure-fire guarantee that the possessor of this brain containing this brain state within it *has* the thought: "I feel queasy", no matter whether this -- literally -- piece of a brain is present in me you, my cat or everyone in China who had the tainted "budget blend" lot #3340192.
LP: Exactly! Nor is this at all unusual. Only the spurious introduction of "mind" concepts makes it mysterious. If you were looking for incidence of malaria infection rather than "queasiness", you would not look for intangible or vague or disembodied entities. You would look for the presence of a purely physical virus -- that would be your infection, not some "effluviance of 'bad air' ".
I: If only it were that straightforward for mental phenomena. We have been discussing type-type identity theory --
LP: Where a *type* -- or kind -- of mental state corresponds to a *type* of physical state. In your hypothetical example, "having a queasy sensation" corresponds to a neuron triangle in the brain. To have one is to have the other. And both the mental state and the physical "types" are kinds, so that "queasiness" may cover a commonly related family of sensations, from perhaps "a slightly icky sensation" to "intense nausea", and "neuron triangles" may consist of exactly three neurons, but a variety of proportions of neurochemicals associated with the triangle. Hence, type-type: a specific *kind* of "mental" state is really a specific *kind* of "physical" state.
I: But there are other possibilities, aren't there?
LP: Well, there could be type-token, token-token, and I suppose, token-type models, although you don't hear much discussion about that last model.
I: Is it weaker than the others?
LP: No . . . it's just that there are problems -- pretty much the same problem -- with all four models, and since the other three came up first and failed, there seemed to e little reason to suppose the fourth would be any more fruitful.
LP: For the sake of thoroughness, could you run through them for me?
LP: Sure. First, type-type, which we just discussed, draws a link -- or really an *equivalence* between an alleged mind state and an actual brain state. It is important to remember that there *is no* mental state, only our belief, our perception, that there is one. In actuality, there is only the physical state -- a neuronal triangle parked in some corner of the brain that *is* the sensation of queasiness. There may be an actual varied assortment of physical states all of which together comprise "queasiness" just as -- we know this -- there are some fifty to a couple of hundred distinct cold viruses, all of which produce the same -- or pretty much the same -- symptoms. So if you have any of the hundred-odd cold viruses, then you will have any of the varieties of colds going around, maybe a runny-nose cold, or a feverish cold, or a runny-nose and not feverish but very achy cold, and so forth. We group together related mental or experiential phenomena and link it - find an equivalence to a related group of physical states.
I: And token-token theory?
LP: Well it is important -- as I constantly remind my students --
I: --and I, mine.
LP: -- that "type" means "kind", that is, a "kind" of thing, like a *kind* of brain state or a *kind* of mental state or experience often consists of more than one specific state, but a collection of distinct states all of which have enough in common to justify defining a "kind". It's just like having green frogs and bullfrogs and red-legged frogs and spring frogs -- they clearly differ from each other -- but they are all definitely frogs, if you see what I mean?
I: Yes. So unlike type-type identity theory, in which one *kind* of mental state is in fact one *kind* of physical state -- all mental states of "queasiness" are actually physical groups of neuron triangles, that may vary in some specific details.
LP: And in token-token theory, well -- you can think of that as a more particularized form of type-type in which the "kind" of mental or physical state has only one member. Any difference from that particular state entails a different *kind* --
I: So whereas type-type theory is more broad and accommodating in lumping together distinct but closely similar states, token-token is more particular -- each distinct mental state is linked to a corresponding specific state. In the case of "queasiness", there would be -- I don't know -- perhaps 76 distinct possible mental forms of "queasiness", each of which has its own specific characteristics which it shares with all other like state of queasiness, and correspondingly 76 physical brain states, each corresponding to a different mental state of queasiness.
I should stress again - as people always tend to overlook this key point -- in Identity Theory, as opposed to Functionalism and other theories of mind -- the relation between the mental state and the physical state is *equivalence*. That is the strongest relation there is: A is equivalent to B if and only if A *is* B, if they are one and the same, just as Mark Twain is one and the same person as Samuel Clemens, no more and no less.
But to get back to token-token theory and the "queasiness" example, if there are 76 distinct types of queasiness, then they differ as to distinct and unambiguous characteristics, just as distinct varieties of frogs differ in their physical make up, down to their DNA --
I: When you say "different", do you mean different forms of queasiness regarded as mental states, or as physical brain states?
LP: Oh, both, of course. As the mental state is *equivalent* to the brain state, then any difference in the mental state entails a difference in the brain state, and vice versa. As mental phenomena, the range of "queasinesses" may range from very vague and mild unease down to acute and highly intense distress. As physical entities, the 76 possible "queasy" brain states may reveal their differences in their structure. Very mild queasiness (Q-1), may consist of a triangle of three neurons, while slightly more intense queasiness may also be a triangle of neurons, but in this case, two neurons on each side of the triangle for a total of six neurons. On the other hand, Q-76 queasiness -- hurricane-level nausea, reeling vertigo and the dry heaves -- may consist of a line of 76 interconnected neurons on each side of the triangle. Or maybe the physical configuration is something different and or interesting. Perhaps Q-1 is a simple triangle of three neurons, while Q-2 consists of six neurons arranged in a three-sided pyramid -- a tetrahedron --, while Q-60 is some kind of cellular "Bucky-ball" --
I: "Bucky-ball"?
LP: After the architect R. Buckminster Fuller, who came up with the geodesic dome home -- a shape composed of some sixty triangles in a rigid and sturdy and approximately spherical shape. I am speculating wildly -- but you can see the principle behind all this. The "mental" characteristics of a mind-state are related by a one-to-one function of the physical characteristics of a brain state.
I: And one-to-one relationships are --?
LP: A simple but important mathematical / set-theoretical relationship. Take the "Little Orphan Annie" secret code: A = 1, B = 2 and so on to Z = 26. This pairing up of individual letters with the first twenty-six integers is a classic example of one-to-one relationships. For each and every letter there is one and only one corresponding integer. And, for each and every number (from one to twenty six), there is one and only one letter of the alphabet. Actually, when the one-to-one relation goes the other way, it is called an "onto" relation, but no matter -- this is a feature of what are known as "equivalence" relations. Both type-type and token-token theories of mind are essentially equivalence relations between mental states and physical states. To be one is to be the other. Now the other two possible Identity Theories of Mind turn out to be somewhat weaker theories, that is, they fail to have a one-to-one relation in one of the two directions, and so the relation is no longer an equivalence relation, but something weaker.
I: Weaker how?
LP: Well, you know the logic examples: all poodles are dogs, but not all dogs are poodles. More specifically, my Fifi is a poodle, but not all poodles are my Fifi, even though Fifi *is* a poodle. How does this apply Identity Theory of Mind? Well, when it come to mental phenomena, "identity" is really very tricky and often quite problematic.
I: How so?
LP: Well, once you introduce something "mental", above and beyond the physical brain state, you can no longer verify the claim that two persons have the same "thought", or conversely, that the "same" thought in two cases is produced by, or is "of" the same phenomenon. Type-token and token-type theory reflect this difficulty.
I: Explain.
LP: Take type-token theory. In this theory, any instance of a "type" of stimulus generates the same "token" brain state. For example, suppose that any of the many possible shades of "red" is represented in the brain as merely "red", signified by the same individual brain state whether one perceives maroon, crimson, brick, pink, or any other shade of red.
I: Well surely any sense-perception apparatus has its limitations. A yardstick can distinguish between the heights of two persons, one, say, five feet and three-quarters of an inch, and the other five feet one inch, but not between two persons, say, a sixteenth of an inch apart --
LP: Of course not. But that is not the difficulty. The difficulty lies in the introduction of mind and "mental" stuff into the process. According to dualists, there is a "mental" component to seeing "red" above and beyond having the "Red" brain state. The consequence is that one person may glance at a scarlet carpet and another at a burgundy carpet, and their brain states be the same. The reason for this is that both brain states are physical configurations generated by similar but *not* identical stimuli. This is unfortunate, but unavoidable.
I: That would mean that they "see" the same color -- "red" -- without any further distinction whereas if their brain states were different, it would suggest that they actually *perceive* different shades of red.
LP: Their having different brain states in response to seeing different shades of red wouldn't *suggest* that they perceive different shades of red -- it would *prove* it.
I: That's a rather strong claim.
LP: But unless you wish to introduce spurious "ghost-like" properties to color and to eyes and to brains, it has to be that way. Look -- if two people have the *same* brain state with respect to seeing two different shades of a color -- or two colors, for example, then they are in effect "blind" to any differences in the two shades. Yes, different colors generate the same brain state, but that is a misfortune of the limitations upon our sense-apparatus.
I: It *would* weaken the object-brain state relation, would it not?
LP: It certainly would. And that is the problem with type-tokenism. But token-type theory -- or Functionalism as it is formally called -- is even worse, though that has lately been the generally preferred option for sense-perception theory.
I: How would that work?
LP: Personally, I don't think it does, but the idea is this. Many theorists -- and rightly so -- raised an objection about basic token-token identity theory, in which a particular, specific stimulus generates in the brain a particular, specific brain state. The claim is that the same stimulus of -- take the case of our red carpet -- 7000 angstrom light waves will generate the *same* brain state, just as the same molecules -- hydrogen and oxygen -- produce water -- H2O. Simple and predictable and reliable cause and effect. The problem is that given the difference in the brains of individual people, to say nothing of the brains of cats, fish and Martians, it seems unlikely that the particular brain state in all of these different creatures is *identical*. After all, why should a guppy have the same brain structure as a human being. Such a fish *can* distinguish red -- back to behaviorism! -- just as some birds and insects and other creatures seem to be able to distinguish colors for practical purposes. But we *know* that the brain structures of these highly varied creatures are quite different, so it would be unlikely -- perhaps impossible in some cases -- for very different creatures to have precisely the same "red" brain states, despite all of them being able to "see" red.
Functionalism was inspired by the evolutionary nature of computers. All computers can, say, add 2 and 3 to get 5. But an abacus is made up of a frame, and rods and moveable beads, so the input (2, 3), the operation of addition, and the output (5) exists in the form of various quantities of beads in different positions on any of a number of rods. The addition process would consist of a specific temporal sequence of changes in abacus "states" -- still configurations of beads on rods.
But there are also "Babbage"-type calculators -- wheels and gears and cogs mounted on axles. Notches on the wheels indicate numbers, and the "addition" process consists of a specific series of turns of the interlocking wheels. Then there are computers with vacuum tubes, or transistors, or integrated circuits on silicon chips -- and a multitude of other media and algorithms -- all of which "function" as simple adding devices capable of receiving and outputting the exact same I/O, even while using different algorithms for addition. *Nothing* is the same in these various cases, except for I/O. Behaviorism would claim that identical I/O implies identical "mental" content -- at the very least, identical physical states, but the "functional" model permits wildly different internal states and processes. Computers consist of a broad range of "black boxes", each with its own internal mechanisms and algorithms, all producing *exactly* the same "cause and effect" relation. But the machine itself -- in Behaviorist terms -- is a mystery, hence the black box" moniker. It is the mysterious widget that is essential to the computational process that makes the cause and effect relation work. In the case of computers, thank goodness, we can open them up and examine the internal mechanism in order to verify the causal chain of computer I/O. But in brains -- well -- we cannot do that.
I: Is that because we have not completely fathomed the human brain's operations, or because there is more to a mind that one's brain?
LP: You have just restated the monist/dualist debate, very succinctly, I might add.
I: Yes, but -- well, what I'm getting at is that this monist/dualist debate, for all the heat and rancor and furor it has generated during the 20th century -- is it *really the source of the problem of minds? Or is it only a red herring?
LP: What do you mean?
I: Well, the monist/dualist debate -- it seems to be about what kind of substances comprise mind -- whatever the mind turns out to be. Now it is clearly important for monists that the "mind" be made up only of "physical" matter. This is because "mind" and "body" need to interact somehow, otherwise our minds would have no effect upon our bodies; our minds would literally be intangible, ineffectual ghosts in the machine of our bodies. Our, bodies would then be made solely of purely physical matter, driven solely by physical energy, possess only physical states, and -- well -- be purely determined by external physical objects and forces. The mind would play *no* part in our physical existence, save as a completely passive witness to our bodies' mechanizations, as if we were passengers inside.
LP: We certainly don't endorse *that* view.
I: Of course not. Therefore the mind must be *purely* physical. But what does this mean? What constitutes "the physical"? If you restrict the physical to the highly limited "modern physics 101" model, you over-reduce the "mind", you deny the existence of complex physical relationships that yield unconventional -- by the overly narrow standards of elementary physics -- objects and events that we encounter in our ordinary lives. If, on the other hand, you were willing to accommodate many of the most inescapable features of "mind": memory, images, judgments, reasoning, feelings, consciousness, selfhood and the like, I would expect you would have to broaden your notion of "physical" considerably -- and yet -- you would *not* have to, as you clearly fear would happen, invent non-existent entities ad hoc or ad libitum to patch up the holes in Behaviorism.
LP: But you could never verify the existence of even the simplest of these "mental" objects, states or properties. If I am thinking of a pink elephant, unless I *act* as if I am thinking of one, how could you ever prove it?
I: You could *tell* me you are thinking of one.
LP: That is hogwash. You could be lying, or mistaken.
I: Only if there were a matter of fact as to whether I was thinking of a pink elephant. Either I am or I am not thinking of a pink elephant. Verifiability is an epistemic matter, not a metaphysical one. Consider all of the bakers who do not -- actually -- know what yeast is, yet produce bread just the same.
LP: But you initial assumption here is that you are seeking a theory of knowledge on which to base your investigations into ethics.
I: Yes, and of what use is a theory of knowledge that rules that if the existence or nature of a certain entity of process is not "verifiable" by Positivistic standards, it therefore not only does *not* exist, it is also *meaningless*? That is a very severe, and not at all useful test for knowledge, is it? It errs too far on the side of skepticism.
LP: Isn't it better than going too far the other way? What good is belief in hypotheticals? You end up endorsing belief in improbables, impossibles -- even contradictories --
I: I know, I know. I'll be speaking with such people shortly, and I will have many bones to pick with *them*. Still, "two plus two is less than four" is hardly more correct than "two plus two is greater than four". Besides, by far the most critical and intractable "mental" stuff is not unobservable to *everyone* --
LP: Can you see *my* thoughts?
I: No, but I seem to be able to see mine -- some of them at least -- although there certainly is room in Positivism / Behaviorism for a generously large subconscious, or even an unconscious -- in fact -- and this is another fault with all of the type, token, type-token and all theories, and that is there is no account at all of a consciousness. No need for it, certainly no use for it, or even a mechanism that could possibly account for it, That is why you hem and haw at a account for "seeing red". Under Behaviorism, a human being is no more "conscious" than a vending machine. There is simply no need for it at all.
LP: There is no need for "awareness" or "feeling" in perception, or in human action.
I: Do you believe so? Do you really think so? Are you aware that you are exhibiting *and* professing and appealing to mental state in your debate with me? That is "bad faith", as Sartre would say.
LP: We are raised to behave as if we have "minds" as you describe --
I: In our "Skinner Boxes" as children, being fed data as if we were hard disks? Do you think that "consciousness" is *merely* an ad hoc concept, like "crystalline spheres" that are supposed to hold the planets in place, or "ether" that provides a medium for a beam of light to wave in?
LP: Those *are* ad hoc concepts --
I: Or "gravity", which is even less tangible that a crystalline sphere? Or "neutrinos", which were postulated to balance quantum theory equations -- "cook the books" so to speak. Most features of our "minds" -- as opposed to our "brains" -- are quite clearly and unambiguously presented to us. I cannot imagine *where* in my brain the next thought I express will be located, or what physical form it will be manifested in. Still -- and this is the thought -- *I* will be the witness to that thought every bit as much as you will be the witness to the color of this carpet.
LP: But does your behavior -- your assertion -- your [dryly] *promise* that you have this thought entail your having it?
I: If there is only one person in the forest, and a tree falls, does it make a verifiable sound? This is what concerns me. Two Positivists who claim that the red light went on when the oscilloscope line flattens out are taken at their word, despite the fact that "seeing red" is not a verified -- even a theoretically verifia*ble* -- even a defined --phenomenon under Positivism. There is this inherent dependence of Positivist practice upon the very "consciousness of phenomena" that it sweepingly rejects --
LP: Well --
I: There is, on the Behaviorist account, a complete severance between the purely physical "human eye receiving 7000 angstrom light waves and transduction of this energy impulse to biochemical electrical impulse reaching the visual cortex" description and "Oops! -- the red light went on!" There is no connection between the two. None. Consciousness may be a ghost in the machine, but it is "we" who turn out to be the "ghosts" --
LP: Well --
I: This seems to be the source of the apparent failure of Positivist reduction. The *objects* of Positivist investigation are unproblematic, but the *subject* of Positivist investigation -- the "observer" is completely absent. Everything is an object or process in an extended, fully determinist "cause-and-effect" chain. But there is no account given of the observers to this set of objects and processes of events. In short, there is no *knowledge*, because there is no *knower*.
LP: Well, of course there are knowers --
I: -- about which we apparently can know nothing. The subject of investigation is merely "assumed", taken for granted, as if there were nothing more to be said on the subject. As I said at the beginning of this discussion, half of modern epistemologists focus exclusively on the object of knowledge, ignoring the subject of knowledge -- these are the Positivists / Behavioralist -- while the other half focus exclusively on the subject of knowledge, ignoring the object of knowledge. Worse, each side seems to take its position in reaction to and to defiance of the other side.
LP: Well, maybe the "other side" can address your concerns more fully --
I: I doubt it. but we shall see. The question is why -- *why* -- does modern epistemology wage civil war between object and subject, when "knowledge, it seems to me, is a relation between subject and object. I can't think of any coherent view of knowledge that does not acknowledge and describe this relation, and take it to be central to the issue at hand.
LP: The issue of ethics? --
I: Of ethics, which -- and our discussion has helped me to isolate and frame this idea -- appears to be about people *as* subjects, not objects.
LP: I don't follow you --
I: Positivism, Behaviorism, Functionalism -- all of these treat people as objects of investigation. But "persons" -- entities that observe, think, and act -- are *not* objects of perceptioon, at least not solely objects, but *subjects* of perception, and action and will and awareness and experience -- all things even a Positivist must be to acquire knowledge.
LP: Good luck in your endeavors.
I: Thanks -- I'll need it.

I: The surety that Positivism offers seems to come at harrowing cost. Last time we spoke I had the impression that the Positivists not only did not subscribe to such familiar phenomena as *color*, but to -- well -- to *people*.
LP: Of course Positivists subscribe to people. Positivists *are* people.
I: That's not what I -- oh, well -- what I mean is, for example, when you were giving an account of the color "red", you dwelt on light rays and lenses and optic nerves -- and did your best to wriggle out of any description at all of the one *seeing* the color red, experiencing it, perceiving it. How can you have sense perceptions -- and knowledge -- without perceivers, and knowers?
LP: Remember "verification" -- which is not only an important element of Logical Positivism as it arose in the early 1950's, but of previous forms of Positivism going back to the 17th century. Knowledge claims are confined to either necessary truths -- like mathematical theorems, which are not dependent upon any particular state of affairs; they are simply and always true -- and to empirical observations -- non-necessary but actual, confirmed truths. We can observe people insofar as they are physical bodies subject to empirical observation. We can examine brain states as well as digestive contents -- and overt behavior - but that is it. I cannot tell if what you *see* is "red', only that you respond to an object as if it were "red" -- whatever that means -- and that owing to linguistic conventions, you use the word "red" to describe this phenomenon. By probing into your brain with a PET scan or some such device, I can tell if your brain has changed physical states upon "seeing red".
I: That sounds like the old analytical philosophical canard about "pain" being nothing more than C-fibers firing off impulses.
LP: That *is* what pain is.
I: Where is the *hurt*? Where is the suffering, the aversion to more C-fibers firing? Where is the association between my swinging a hammer, my C-fibers firing, my thumb reflecting light waves in the 7000 angstrom range, and my swearing up a blue streak at hitting my thumb with a hammer?
LP: In order: visual observation of physical phenomena, brain state activity, optic nerve impulses, overt behavior.
I: But that is *not* "all there is to the matter. As the "Peanuts" character Linus van Pelt exclaims to Charlie Brown, "Pain *hurts*!" We *experience* "red", we experience "pain", we experience all sorts of things that Positivism seems to simply *ignore*.
LP: Positivism does not *ignore* anything. It gives a full account of all that there *is*. There is light, there is electrical energy, there is bodily movement, and there is this or that brain state or process.
I: How can you *possibly* dismiss subjective experience?
LP: For the very reason that it *is* subjective. Remember my comments last time about "secondary properties" -- or qualities -- I forget which. Anyway, what there *is* is different, and to be distinguished from what we perceive -- or "experience", as you put it. We dream, we daydream, we see love in the eyes of our betrothed, we see a *beautiful sunset, "God's Grandeur" -- I think that's from Gerard Manly Hopkins -- a sad day for the losing basketball, cricket or soccer team or Labor party campaign, we see anger in a thunderstorm, "rosy fingered dawn" (Homer), joy in lambs bleating, design in a cavern, or in a winning lottery ticket, an award in a blue ribbon, and honor in a medal. None of these things -- viewed as truth claims -- are verifiable through a priori fact, deductive reasoning, or actual observation.
I: So is the experience of "red" a figment of my imagination?
LP: Literally, yes. "Figment" means made up, like a figure made out of children's play dough. A photograph is a figment of something, a dream is a figment of -- well -- nothing in particular -- it depends upon what causes the particular dream. The important thing to realize is that a picture or a piece of writing denoting something does *not* entail the existence or nature of the thing portrayed. Reports of "Bigfoot" or "Nessie", photos purporting to be of UFOs, and eye-witness testimony of Elvis's reappearance at The Ed Sullivan Theater do not constitute proof of the existence of the things alleged. These allegations may occur without the objects of their allegations existing. Even -- sad to say -- your claim that you see "red" when light bounces off of a carpet or an apple.
I: What do *you* see when you look at this red carpet?
LP: What I *see* and what is *there* are two very distinct things. Given a sufficient number of scotches, I am liable to see things you could not imagine, and that neither of us could demonstrate exist -- and for good reason. And before you protest that you and I both *see* red -- as opposed to *perceive* light waves in the 7000 angstrom range, I would ask you to demonstrate -- verify, according to Positivist methodology -- that the color I see -- experience -- is the *same* color as the color *you* experience. Personally I do not see -- no pun intended -- how you can do that.
I: But aren't you arguing that whatever we do not perceive does not exist?
LP: No, in matter of fact, I -- we -- are arguing that what we do not perceive we cannot say we know. The core issue here, as you say, is knowledge.
I: But Positivists -- the various schools of Positivism -- seem to agree on a very limited notion of "perceiving", don't you think?
LP: Well, there must be some limits on what constitutes knowledge. Hearsay, rumor, legend, mystic oracles -- these shouldn't count as sources of knowledge.
I: What troubles me is that human beings are central -- indispensable -- to any perception, gathering, evaluation of knowledge, and yet the Positivist account of persons is very poor indeed. Not only is there no account given of persons and their perceptions of the world, there is no acknowledgement of their mere existence. It is as if person, as subjects of observation -- our most basic and ubiquitous instruments of perception -- did not even exist. The Positivist notion of persons as gatherers of data, as formers of models of reality, is completely impoverished.
LP: That is because there are so many facts of persons -- as instruments of knowledge gathering and vetting -- that are so inherently unreliable. With the Individual Self, we have an imperceptible, hidden, unfathomable, unreliable "witness" to events. In the chain of data acquisition and evaluation and theory formation, the individual is by far the weakest link. Imagine forming a logical inference that includes a step like "I saw that --", or "It seems to me ...", or "I believe --", or "It looks to me like...". You cannot build up a structure of reliable knowledge -- on that sort of contribution. Doing so multiplies error beyond belief. More than that, it introduces new objects and phenomena without warrant. Look at the "constellations of the sky", or "eras in history", or "spirituality", or aesthetic theory, or religious or cultural practices, or political institutions. Metaphysical "phantoms" arise out of public opinion, like ghosts from the graveyard. People become embroiled in questions scarcely more substantial than the medieval question of how many angels can stand on the head of a pin. They raise questions that are essentially unanswerable, if not outright meaningless, as who won a war -- and who was on the right side of it, which artist was greater than the other artists, where political boundaries "really" lie", what a given culture ought to allow or to insist upon, how people ought to behave in their public and personal lives, what mankind's "destiny" is, what a person's character or mood or duties or entitlements are, whether a person's "reputation", or "soul", or "social influence" is in peril, to say nothing of "personal autonomy", "public image", "principles", "vices", "habits", states of mind, moods, "opinions", "points of view", "goodness", "badness" and all that rot --
I: Is the claim that people are good or bad, or, let us say, acting in accordance with social or ethical or procedural rules, or not -- er -- meaningful, as you would say?
LP: What rules are we talking about?
I: The rule that people should not cut ahead of others in line, lie, or harm one another --
LP: You can easily observe people acting in certain ways, lying, or telling the truth, cutting in line, or taking turns. Behaviorism is descriptive, and one can certainly describe the behavior of people. It would be messy -- human behavior is complex and hardly in conformity with any simple and coherent set of laws --
I: What about "rules"?
LP: Not laws, which are descriptions of nature's workings -- like Newton's three laws of motion -- but arbitrary and contrived rules, like "do unto others", and "don't cross against the light"?
I: Yes, rules that have -- as we say, a certain "normativity" to them. It is possible for a person to violate such a rule, while the rule still has an "oughtness" to it -- it still ought to be followed --
LP: I think you can see the contradictions right there. A law that need not -- well it is hard even to put it into words, much less find a reference to it in the world. It is like that bumper sticker: "Gravity: It's not just a good idea -- it's the LAW!" Laws are not subject to exception; they would not be laws then, would they?
I: But I am not talking about laws; I'm talking about *rules*.
LP: And what *are* they? To what in the actual world do they *refer*? The very notion of a "rule" is ridiculous. It has no being as such. Under the canopy of a "rule', is it actually possible for that rule never to be observed, and yet still be a rule. You may have a sign on a park lawn that says "Do not walk on the grass", surrounded by people walking all over the grass in flagrant violation of the sign's "rule". What does that even *mean*?
I: It seems to me that you would approve of any kind of behavior then, like setting fire to the Logical Positivist Institute, for example, or murder in the streets.
LP: Of course not. These are undesirable things --
I: By "undesirable" you mean --
LP: Actions that, according to Behaviorism, are observed to be objected to, and action taken against, like locking up arsonists, or posting police to prevent the slaughter of human beings.
I: What is an "arsonist", giving the behaviorist theory of mind?
LP: Well, I was not prepared to discuss human action theory -- although I could. I was prepared to discuss Positivistic knowledge. I would say that an "arsonist" is someone who sets fires in circumstances that others tend to react to by stopping the fires and taking certain actions against the arsonist, like locking him up, fining him or even executing him.
I: No consideration as to "intent" --
LP: What *is* intent, other than the manifestation of action? If a man sets fire to a building, he *is* burning it down.
I: Or trying to keep himself warm on a cold night --
LP: Well isn't "intention" like "rules". There is the plainly observed fact o the matter -- human action -- and this ad hoc "back story" appealing to mental states involving intention and obligation and "morality" and the like, none of which exists except as a delusional figment of the mind, divorced from any physical fact of the matter.
I: So there is no de facto case in which a man may be said to be obligated by some set of affairs not to burn down buildings, or pick my pocket --
LP: How would such a case manifest itself in the actual world? If a man burns down a building, picks your pocket -- and spits in your eye -- to what do you point to say "this is a violation of a rule", or even "this is evidence of intent". There is the physical act performed by the man, and his ongoing pattern of brains states --
I: Brain states are physical manifestations, are they not?
LP: Certainly. We have brains, and by inspection, we can correlate brain states with other states of affairs, such as lighting fires. This is all art of cause-and-effect, with humans, rather than other sorts of machinery, so to speak. Brain states have their causes, and in turn cause human actions, just as the states of other objects in the universe -- rocks balancing on top of mountain peaks, or accumulated underground pockets of flammable gases, take part in cause-and-effect events.
I: I seem to recall from somewhere that Positivists *completely* reduce mental activity to physical brain states --
LP: Well, in your sweeping view of Positivism, you tend to conflate certain views, and over generalize and oversimplify. I seem to recall earlier that you said something to the effect that Positivism -- including Scientific , or Empirical Positivism, was a purely axiomatic theory, a claim which many Positivists -- but not all -- would disagree with. For most of us it is sufficient that a fact of the world is true, even if contingent -- although I myself do not see any substantial distinction to be made between the actual and the necessary -- what is, is. But, yes, basically the view hews to the Identity Theory of Mind: the "Mind" *is* the brain, and nothing more.
I: Could you elaborate a bit -- I have always found this somewhat confusing.
LP: Probably because, like most people, you came into the Identity theory already thinking of "mind" as existing as a separate and distinct entity, and you found it difficult 'reconciling' your mental view of mind with the Positivist all-physical view of mind. To understand what we are claiming, it is very helpful to first drop all notions you may have of the "mental" -- and start "clean".
I: All right. I'll try --
LP: Good. The goal is to try to drop -- to eliminate -- or "reduce" if you like -- the so-called mental activity of "perceiving", or "experiencing" of perceiving the carpet to a purely physical, purely objective, totally non-subjective fact-of-the-matter process, like that of an icicle melting, or a rock falling. Now consider -- oh -- the red carpet we were discussing earlier.
I: Okay.
LP: We wish to do away with "mind-talk" -- talk about the Self as a separate, non-physical entity that is the "subject" of experience -- of the carpet in this case. We also wish to do away likewise with "ideas" as separate "things", apart from brain states. The reason for this elimination, or "reduction" if you will, to purely physical entities is that it is just these mental "entities" that are in question. If we can give a purely physical account of "seeing a red carpet", there is no need to conjecture the existence of very dubious purely mental objects. Why introduce a whole new metaphysics?
I: Like supposing "crystalline spheres" that hold up the planets?
LP: Exactly. Occam's razor at work.
I: Assuming it *does* work --
LP: Let's take the carpet, and reduction, and Identity theory all together, without "ideas" or individual "persons". With these out of the way, we are left with three components of a perception of an object -- our red carpet, say:
(1) First, we have the carpet itself -- the object of perception.
(2) Second, we have, as I outlined with the example of the sense-perception of "red", the causal chain of sense-data from object -- carpet -- to brain via the senses.
I: Which you already gave an account of in the example of the carpet --
LP: Yes. and finally:
(3) Third, and lastly, the resulting brain state produced by the causal chain of sense-data. From this point on, it is all neural activity -- brain states, and interaction between regions of the brain, and output in the form of motor response -- actions, speech, judgments (good or bad). and that's it. What people call "thinking", or mental activity is merely neural activity in the organ of the brain. "Ideas" and "feelings" and such are merely brain states resulting from neural activity. That and nothing more.
I: Are you *sure*?
LP: That is all that we can verify exists. The "mental" states are -- mirages. We may think we see them -- but like the mirage, the object seen does not exist.
I: How does a mirage work?
LP: Well, in the most common case, waves of hot air radiating from the ground surface reflect light, creating the illusion that there is a shimmering, waving layer of water in front of you.
I: And because there is no water, you say that there is no experience *of* water.
LP: Exactly.
I: But we *do* experience water when we see a mirage. We may be mistaken, but there is, in us -- in you -- the experience "this is a pool of water".
LP: But there *is* no water --
I: If there *were* a pool of water there, we would have the *same* experience. What does that say for your reliance upon "sense-data" for knowledge?
LP: Just that sometimes we need more sense data -- like dipping one's finger in the water, and not relying merely upon a look-see --
I: And if your finger is wet due to perspiration on a hot day, do we conclude that the evidence of *two* sense-data prevails? It seems to me that in defending the absence of mental experience you have undermined trust in all sense-data, which is not surprising. Sit through a magic act, and you will find all of your senses to be unreliable.
LP: I think I can help out here. In saying that there are no "ideas" or "feelings", I am not saying that such experiences do not exist at all -- I am -- we are -- saying that there is no mental substance above and beyond the purely material, physical brain, as I am sure you would agree --
I: I haven't taken a position on mind-dualism. I appreciate the fact that philosophers like Descartes -- and Plato -- hold that there is a separate but equal "mental substance" that comprises our thoughts -- made of what I cannot imagine. I am not arguing that, nor do I feel I have to. Whatever ideas, and feelings, and concepts are made of, I am maintaining that the Positivist view is flatly ignoring certain key -- properties, or features, or elements -- associated with physical states as they pertain to perception. As I have said before, you may provide an account of light waves ricocheting off of light reflectors, and carpet fibers and through lenses made of water and gelatin and undergoing all sort of transformations -- via neural network activity in the brain, resulting in brain states -- charged axons, or cell structures, or whatever. And all that is included in that account may be demonstrably true -- and completely satisfy Positivistic standards for knowledge. But -- when all is said and done, you end up with a brain *state* -- or a collection of states, or a temporal sequence of states -- that you claim is not merely a configuration produced by light emissions, but the sense of the "color red". And as I have said, look at that brain state, or process, or whatever this information is purportedly stored, -- and you will *not* find any *red* -- or room temperature -- what is it, seventy degrees in here? -- or extension of twenty by thirty feet, or shagginess, or dinginess, or ownership or estimated cost per square foot, or any of the other features of the carpet you would not dispute exists here beneath our feet. This model leaves out all that, and still claims to be a full and complete account of the carpet --
LP: I would take issue with ownership, and cost -- these are not properties of the carpet --
I: Then what are they properties of?
LP: They are properties of our judgment, perhaps --
I: Other brain states?
LP: Only in the sense that one would have brain states corresponding to propositions such as "this carpet is expensive", or "this carpet belongs to the building owners". But these propositions themselves are arbitrary judgments. They are not real -- they don't corresponding to anything in reality.
I: When you say that a brain state is of this carpet, and produced by patterns of light transformed -- the patterns that is -- into other media, you are referring to a kind of coding, are you not -- like written speech, or Morse code or DNA code?
LP: That would be a good way of putting it.
I: It is apt in the sense that the statement "Her love sets my heart on fire" is neither hot, nor contains a heart, or me, or her. It is a code to be "read", is it not?
LP: Of course.
I: By whom?
LP: By the holder o the thought, one would presume, or to whomever has access to that brain state.
I: So if my MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) operator scans my brain, and comes across the brain state that contains the proposition: "Her love sets my heart on fire" in axon complex 3478950376-A, along with brain states identifying her, and myself and any other interpretable components -- well, what does *she* experience? If she comes across my brain state of this carpet, she will not find "red" there, although she might find some brain state that is supposed to denote or signify "red" -- perhaps a row of six axons, two of which re in the "9" state -- whatever that may mean -- and the remaining four in the "0" state -- signifying "magenta" -- assuming my brain is configured in ASCII computer format. Assuming all of this -- all she can do -- on your account, is use her eyes -- or whatever senses available to her in probing my brain states -- and copying that information into her visual cortex -- either as "990000" or the flesh and blood brain matter equivalent of it. She does not experience "red" any more than I would, for that is all that there is, in my brain, and in hers.
LP: Well the issue is whether one needs anything *more* than that to produce the experience of "red" --
I: But you have not produced the experience of "red" *at* *all*. Your interpretation of sense experience is like that joke about the inmates at a prison who have heard all of the jokes so often that they number them and call out the numbers to save time -- "789" being the one about the traveling salesman and the farmer's daughter. One inmate calls out a number which causes the rest of the inmates to laugh especially loud, and a new inmate asks why. "Oh, that's because we had never heard that one before." -- which is ridiculous. There is an alternate punch line that also plays on the absurdity of this "encoding" of jokes, and other things. One inmate calls out a number and no one laughs. Why? Because that joke requires a really good German accent to get a laugh. Your razor, like the prison joke practice, is far too sharp -- it cuts out too much, either in physical reality, or in the "reading" of the symbolization of that reality, however the symbolization is constructed. You cannot understand prison humor, or carpet swatches, or professions of love without a *de-coding* phase. A meal may be translated into a recipe, but a recipe is not a meal. You have the steak, but where is the sizzle?
LP: Well, there are two ways out of this -- and as I do not pretend to be a Positivist extremist I would forgo the first way out. That is to assert that there is truly nothing more than the particular brain state produced by the sighting of a red carpet. That is, on seeing a red carpet, a particular portion of the brain, like a particular portion of computer memory, is configured -- or reconfigured. Literally, the biological analogy of a group of cells or other structures changing from "000000" -- black --or "999900" -- yellow -- to "99000" -- magenta -- as a string of molecules, perhaps. *That* would be what 'magenta" *is*, as the object of human experience, or perception, as it were.
I: Does that seem an adequate explanation -- to you? When the "999900" brain state forms in your brain, do you see yellow -- or laugh -- or both -- or neither?
LP: That would really depend upon your brain state -- how you are programmed to respond to the given stimulus --
I: If you mean a *behavioral* response, that would make sense. Hear a ringing bell and start salivating. And of course, associate salivating with hunger, and the desire to eat. But watch me glance at the rug. What response do I produce that will justify your claim that I *see* red?
LP: Well -- we can verify an appropriate change in your brain state -- theoretically at least.
I: But brain states are not *red*. Nor does the presence or absence of a brain state help us with the subject of this sighting -- *who* sees "red", or has the appropriate brain state? And, what is it that this person -- this being -- experiences? Look. Sometimes you see red --
LP [smiling]: How do you *know* that?
I: Are you being facetious?
LP: I'm being a Positivist. You may or may not make a distinction. In any case, one cannot *verify* that a given individual sees red or not. And since our discussion is about what we can and cannot know, that should be significant. And given your aim of trying to obtain "ethical" knowledge, which seems far more daunting a task, I think you are beginning to see that phenomena that require knowledge of "mental states", especially those purportedly "about" personal experience, or meaning, or interpretation, are very -- elusive. Perhaps they are, as some suggest, inherently "private". You are familiar with Ludwig Wittgenstein's analogy of the beetle in the box?
I: No.
LP: What you have to keep in mind is that the basic question is whether "mind' -- and mental stuff we allegedly "experience": thoughts, ideas, emotions -- is anything *more* that physical stuff: brain states, behavioral acts and so forth. Dualists -- like Descartes -- maintain that there is a separate "substance" -- mind stuff, apart and distinct from body stuff. Positivists -- like Wittgenstein -- maintain that this view is simply a mistake. It is much like early biologists that maintained that there is something "*more*" to physical life -- bacteria, badgers, Bolivians -- than atoms and molecules and body parts. They believe in "souls" and "anima" -- animating *forces* -- analogous to that observed by Volta when he made a detached frog's leg jump with an electrical current -- a sort of biological energy akin to but not reducible to physical energy: motion, sound, light, heat and so forth. Wittgenstein -- like most of the early- to mid-twentieth century Positivists -- took this problem -- this confused and arbitrary distinction between mind and body -- to be in part a matter of language --
I: *Language*? --
LP: Well, yes. We commit all sorts of abuses when we put words to things, and Positivism -- among other modern schools of thought -- attempts to expose and eliminate problems in language.
I: I don't follow you --
LP: Well, to take a very elementary example, we reify -- attribute actual existence to -- things that are often mere language entities and nothing more. For example, we speak of the "equator" as this line circumnavigating the Earth along a certain path, as if here were a thick black cord lying along the 0th latitude, as if it were a physical object with its own material and location and extension. But in this respect there is no such thing. If you travel to -- oh, Quito, Ecuador -- and walk a few miles north of town, you will not *find* the equator there. Likewise, there is no north or south "pole" jutting up out of the Arctic or Antarctic ice masses.
I: And Positivism refutes the notion of "mind" as a physical "line" or "pole".
LP: Well, here you are getting confused -- as people usually do. It is just the reverse. There *is* a physical entity which is *confused with* the "equator as a cord lying on the ground". The Earth -- a slightly squashed sphere -- rotates. The two points on the surface of the earth that do *not* change position during rotation are what we refer to when we use the curious phrases "North Pole and "South Pole". There is no "rod" -- physical or metaphysical -- poked through the Earth like a pine stick through a candied apple. Likewise, there is no "line" along the Earth's surface constituting the "equator". Instead -- if we are considered for a moment only the surface of the physical earth, two spots -- two points, or locations -- where the Earth's surface does not change position relative to the Earth surface at previous and future moments -- the "poles" -- note the scare quotes. Likewise, there is no physical "line" on the ground where the equator purportedly lies. There is only the -- uh -- maximal line, or path, along which the surface of the Earth is extended the greatest, and which moves faster than any other portion of the surface during rotation --
I: Now I m confused --
LP: Bear with me. The point is that when we talk -- using language of course -- of "the pole" or "the equator", we often, in our usage of these terms, confuse our linguistic imagery with what is actually, physically *there*. Look at the "Big Dipper" -- Ursa Major -- if you can. There are a group of stars at various positions which from our standpoint we take to be an "object" -- 'the big dipper' or the 'great bear'. But there are *no* such objects out there. All that *are* there are stars at various locations in three-dimensional space, and nothing more. In the case of the poles, or the equator, all that is *there* is a locus of points on a physical spinning spheroid. The analogy I am attempting to make is that "all that is there" -- mentally -- is the physical stuff that comprises the brain, the eye, the optic nerve and whatever other physical matter is involved in perceived a red carpet. There is "nothing more" than that in fact, even though we tend to interpret, make sense of -- experience -- this in terms of non-existent entities. We may speak of a "carpet" when in fact there *is* only the bundles of atoms, or quarks or strings or what have you that comprise the "carpet". And, there *is* only the sequential pulse of light waves of a certain frequency that generates nerve pulses in our brain, not "red". The mantra to keep in mind is "this and nothing more".
I: Our -- interpretations -- our experiences of things as this or that -- the "phenomena we experience as such", even if it misleads us -- there is no account of these in Positivism, or Behaviorism -- I'm not sure in which school of thought we are now in --
LP: I assume from the tenor of our discussion that you don't wish to parse out doctrinal differences between The Vienna School, the Positivists, the Logical Positivists, the Logical Behaviorists and all of their sects --
I: Lord, no! I am only trying to get at the basic principles of all of these schools, which have in a general way so dramatically influenced our society's general "knowledge" of the world.
LP: Good -- well -- we -- all of these groups, really, are trying to make the distinction between private experience *of* reality -- which may go off in all directions -- there are no practical limits to our imagination -- and What Is Really Out There. Are there really unicorns? If so, trot them out. Is there a "life force" -- a la Frankenstein -- apart from underlying physical energies and processes? Pump it into a "life-battery", or apply it to the animation of a tin can. Verify its existence, rather than merely assert it. Ursa Major has no fur, and does not belong to any species of bear. Now, *is* there "mental" *substance* -- a la Descartes -- as opposed to physical substance, perhaps in some as yet undiscovered or not understood form? Demonstrate this substance's existence. Isolate it, demonstrate its workings, verify its existence -- and -- nod to Descartes -- come up with a better explanation for the interaction between mental and physical "substance" than simply declaring that the two are joined at the hip -- or rather at the pineal gland in the center of the brain.
I: Tell me about Wittgenstein's "beetle".
LP: Well, the basic idea is this. Everyone has a small box. In each of these boxes is a beetle --
I: An actual beetle?
LP: Well, that is the question: what IS this *thing* in the box that each person possesses. We can see that everyone has a box -- that box is visible and uncontroversial. What is at issue is what is it that is inside the box -- if anything at all. Now the catch is while everyone can look at everyone else's box, no one -- except the owner of the box -- can see what is *in* that box. I can open up my little matchbook-sized box and take a peek inside and see that my "beetle" is in there, and what it is like, and what it is doing, and what not. But you cannot look *inside* my box -- you can only see that I have a box. Try as you might, you cannot see what is inside. Likewise, I cannot see what is inside your box, and make direct comparisons between your beetle and mine. Are they the same species of insect? Are they identical twins? Completely different insects? Complete different objects? Is there anything in the box at all?
Now people can talk about what is in their own boxes, and others can hear them and make judgments about these reports and compare and contrast them with what they see in their own box. And the word "beetle" comes to mean "that which is inside each of these boxes, whatever that may be". It is a peculiar analogy, but a clear one. The box is the brain. you can think of it as the "container" for the mind, or --
I: Henry Charlton Bastain put it this way in his 1883 book on the human mind: "The Brain as Organ of the Mind".
LP: An interesting image. I suppose it would be the analog of "The Heart as an Organ of the Circulatory System", or, "The Lungs as Organs of the Respiratory System".
I: The latter might be: "The Lungs as Organs of the Breath -- or Breathing". The former could be -- oh -- "The Heart as an Organ of Blood Flow".
L{: Yes, yes. You see the aptness of the metaphor. The individual mind is much like the contents of our beetle box --
I: The box itself being the brain --
LP: Which we *can* jointly perceive and examine and render informed judgments upon. The mind, on the other hand, has "privileged access" constraints --
I: A serious obstacle for your "verifiability principle" --
LP: Yes, it sets fundamental limits upon what we can confirm to be real. We can see the brain, and measure its activity. "Mind" is what is in the brain --
I: In other words, physical brain states -- biological switches opening and closing, receiving input and generating output --
LP: Exactly. The mind is not a separate, elusive, intangible, unreal, ad hoc "substance" --
I: I can see the spirit of Occam's Razor at work here. You don't wish to "invent" or imagine anything that is not real --
LP: Precisely --
I: But I object -- not to your goal of "physical reduction" -- you may be right. If you define "physical" as Aristotle and other Greek philosophers tended to -- as "all that there is", then your goal is trivial. If mind exists at all, it is "physical" by definition. It is only a question of how inclusive the Positivist / Behaviorist model of "physical" is.
LP: Well, to return to the beetle in the box analogy, we ARE limited to what is actually in the box --
I: No intangible, non-extended ghost-beetles?
LP: No.
I: Well, I can accommodate the Positivist insistence upon a "physical" beetle -- or "mind" -- in the sense that the mind (whatever it may be) actually exists, and can "interact" with our physical brains, and bodies. That seems to be essential to any coherent theory of mind. But I am not at all impressed, much less convinced, by the various permutations on "Behaviorism" as an adequate model of the mind.
LP: I think I know what you are getting at: type-token and type-type theory, functionalism, and so forth.
I: Yes, but it goes further than that. Remember, I am not looking only at mind as the mechanism -- the medium or vehicle -- for human response to external stimuli. I am also interested in human being itself -- what people are -- which leads us directly to the issues of ethics and morals, which as I see it, constitute the way in which people "cause" themselves to be what they are, as individuals and as members of social groups - more complex "group minds" if you will.
What concerns me most is that the model of the mind we end up with should give an account for what the spectrum of Behaviorists have traditionally discarded: private thoughts, intentionality, introspection, meaning, and so forth. We are about out of time for now, so I would like to come back to the various behavioralist attempts at describing "mind", and then to look at their deficiencies regarding the subject of my own inquiry -- ethical knowledge.

I: I having been interviewing you about Logical Positivism now, with the hope of finding a theory of knowledge that will serve my investigation into ethics and ethical matters.
LP: You are assuming of course, that there is something to be *known* about ethics. Would you admit the possibility that you might be undertaking a task similar to knowing witchcraft and how to cast spells, or knowing the anatomy of the unicorn?
I: I admit the possibility that there is no such thing as ethics, or at least, that ethics is not what we think it is, which may or may not be the same thing. However, when we concluded last time, I pointed out that the Positivist faces a problem I suppose any theory of knowledge faces, and that is, when do we stop looking, and decide that the object of our inquiry does not exist, that is, we are looking for truths concerning things about which there are no truths. That sounds awkward, but --
LP: I understand. That is a difficult problem. Physicists searched for "ether" -- the substance in which light "waved" -- and found it did not exist. Alchemists studied the evolutionary process of substances, and finally discovered, through the more sophsicated system of chemistry, that elements did *not* evolve. Some time you have to call it quits and admit your search is futile, that what you are looking for does not exist, or merely that what you are looking for is not what you thought it was.
I: Yes, that has to be, unless we think that everything -- every claim anyone makes -- is true, and that evidence exists for its truthfulness --
LP: That would be absolute nonsense --
I: Which would not preclude followers of an entire theory of knowledge from adopting such a principle.
LP: That's -- ridiculous!
I: That happens to be the position of my next interviewees, the post-Modernists. You can appreciate my concerns. But an all-inclusive theory of knowledge", the principle that "every claim is true in its own way -- from some point of view", presents problems.
LP: It certainly does. It shreds the very notion of "truth".
I: Well its interpretation of "truth" certainly is different from the Positivist interpretation. But I want to get back to a problem I have with Positivism, which to me seems to err too much the other way. Reductionism, as I have said, is a useful methodology for conflating -- merging and reconciling -- theories about two or more different sorts of things --
LP: You should say "apparently different". If the reduction can be made, then there is in fact only one kind of thing, explicable under one theory.
I: I appreciate that. The apparent difference, I would argue, comes from scientists "tunneling" from different sides of the mountain, and meeting in the middle.
LP: Not a bad metaphor, but I would prefer to think of it in terms of the detective metaphor: two detectives seeking two men, each with a different name, discover that one name is an alias and that they are really looking for the same man. There never are 'two suspects', merely two different descriptions of the same object of their search.
I: My concern, as I have said, is that Positivism is too limiting in its search, and hence fails to acknowledge the existence of certain entities -- commonly experienced entities, I might add. In other words, the search is terminated prematurely, or never even initiatited. I believe this has to do with too heavy a reliance on "reductionism", and, I suppose as well, what Positivism ultimately attempts to reduce things *to*.
LP: ?
I: Well, let's go back to the original Positivist schema. Mathematics -- or I suppose we ought to take another step back -- formal logic, is the grounding for positivist knowledge. In formal logic we simply have rules, and a priori statements -- statements whose truth is not dependent on any specific state of affairs; they are *always* true, like "A = A", "A & B = B & A", and so forth.
LP: Correct. I would also add that formal logic is sound and complete, that is, no true statements are left out, and no false statements (or mere nonsense, like "A & = B") are included. The "cut" between truth and falsehood is clean.
I: As we would hope for in any theory of knowledge. The problem is that once you move from formal logic, which consists of symbols that don't * mean* anything -- they are simple objects manipulated according to formal rules -- to bona fide mathematics, where "1" and "+" and "=' and other objects actually *mean* something, we encounter difficulties, namely Godel's claim that any such interpreted system of mathematics must necessarily be incomplete. All of the provable statements of mathematics are *true*, but not all of the true statements of mathematics are *provable* (namely, those proofs that go on forever and never terminate).
LP: We can repair any mathematical theory, however, simply by adding more axioms. The "seed" of arithmetic is the set of five Peano axioms. With those five simple axioms, we can prove a great deal of the theorems of mathematics.
I: Actually, with *four* Peano axioms. The fifth axiom -- the mathematical induction axiom, requires the concept of infinity, which is hardly a trivial assumption to toss in as "obviously true", which axioms are supposed to be. Then there is the Axiom of Choice -- axiom six if you will --
LP: Yes, yes. W end up trying to "fill out" mathematical theory by adding an infinite number of axioms --
I: Which I guess you can do if you accept the Axiom of Infinity earlier on enough. The problem is not only that to flesh out mathematics -- which is the model for Positivist knowledge -- you have to go on adding axioms ad infinitum. An even more serious problem is that -- as in the case of Euclid's fifth postulate, you have mutually exclusive choices -- three in the case of Euclid's postulate -- which serve as "forks in the road". You make one choice regarding the fifth postulate, and you go down one road to form a particular theory of mathematics. Pick another alternative, and you go down another, different, road to form a different, but also sound and complete, theory of mathematics --
LP: Ah, but in that particular case you can pick all three by dropping the fifth postulate: you get "projective geometry".
I: And in doing so, give up the fairly intuitive notion that parallel lines meet. By "giving up" fairly ordinary and commonplace truths for the sake of preserving the integrity of a theory, we seem to be losing something fair more valuable --
LP: Well, the fact that parallel lines meet in Euclidian geometry should not imply that they must meet under all interpretations of the theory of mathematics --
I: Well, I suppose you could defend that unsettling comment by arguing that it is not true that parallel lines always meet, only that under specified conditions, parallel lines will meet -- which raises a question I have about Positivism, and that is the standard of truth. It seems to me that Positivism almost harkens back to Leibnizian Rationalism -- another logic and math-based theory of knowledge. This severe theory of knowledge demands an insanely high degree of truth. In Leibniz's view, a statement is true if and only if it *must* be true. "A = A" is true because it cannot ever be false, which sounds okay, but "The Moon revolves around the Earth in 28 days" must also, to be true, be *necessarily* true -- which implies that the Moon and the Earth must necessarily exist also, and that they necessarily revolve around each other. That is insane.
LP: Well, Positivists are not Rationalists. Unlike Leibniz, we allow for "initial conditions to vary, which means, for the Moon, that given its initial position and momentum and the laws of motion -- and the existence of the Moon -- it *has* to revolve around the earth in 28 days. However, the initial conditions *could* have been different, and the Moon could have revolved around the Earth in 14 days, or two years, or fallen down onto the Earth, had things been different -- which they could have.
I: My point, to get back to it, is that the structure that Positivism imposes on the *physical* world is a mathematical one. Everything in the physical universe gets reduced to numbers -- initial conditions and laws of nature as you put it -- and presumably, those numbers get reduced to the initial axioms, which in turn, I suppose, are reduced to formal logical symbols, which have no meaning per se, but are moved around, like hollowed-out walnut shells under the procedures of logical inference, no matter where the pea may be. The question I have -- and it is a very serious question -- is this: how do you justify the claim that no truth claims are overlooked -- or worse -- thrown out -- in this process of obtaining knowledge? To expand upon this a bit, Positivism -- as a theory of knowledge -- may, in the process of applying its rules and procedures, and drawing upon previously accumulated knowledge, generate a structure of truth claims -- it does, in fact -- *but* how are we to be assured that this set of truth claims is sound and complete? Even if we grant soundness -- which is a bit of a stretch -- since the mathematics that Positivism is modelled on is itself an *in*complete theory of knowledge, what about completeness? Aren't we in danger of leaving out knowledge. Not only that, but, given the way in which Positivism was established, shouldn't we even *expect* Positivism to omit whole categories of potential knowledge, using Occam's Razor to slash away knowledge with abandon?
LP: Oh, no. In our tour of knowledge, we may miss some things the first time around. But eventually, by applying Positivism, we ought to be able to eventually cover the ground --
I: Even infinite ground? It is possible to iterate a process indefinitely and not exhaust all of the possibilities --
LP: We cannot cover ever instance, but if we discover the underlying laws --
I: Your natural world "axioms" --
LP: Nature's axioms -- the kernel of the laws that govern existence. Understand them and you understand everything.
I: The mythical "theory of everything". The question is whether such a theory exists, whether it is attainable, *and* given that we had such a kernel of knowledge -- one which entails *all* knowledge -- we are still not assured that we could derive any particular truth from them. By that I mean that given some assertion, say, that the highest possible atomic number of an element is 153, or that there are exactly 121,938,995,004 stars in the Milky Way Galaxy, or that there is intelligent life that evolved somewhere other than on the Earth, we cannot be assured that we can deduce the truth or falsehood of any of these from our axioms and our accumulated knowledge. We may have to accumulate further evidence, in which case our present knowledge is *not* complete. Or, the evidence we need may be unobservable. Or, we may not be able to generate the proof that the statement in question is true (or false). In which case, we would have questions about the universe for which we do not, and perhaps cannot, have answers. Thus our Positivistic knowledge may be limited.
LP: Still, if this is the only way to assure knowledge, then we have at least maximized the amount of knowledge we *may* have --
I: But Positivism does not do that. It actual shuts out certain questions, certain subjects and avenues of investigation. For a more than a century, there have been whole areas of knowledge simply cut off from us because of the Positivist program's methodological blinders -- knowledge that is not public, reproducible, general and -- to date -- reducible to Positivist fundamentals --
LP: Such as?
I: The color red. What is it?
LP: Red is the lowest band of visible light energy, having a wavelength of about 7000 angstroms.
I: So when I fry my index finger on a hot stove burner, my finger begins emitting -- or reflecting, I guess -- wavelengths of light in the 7000 angstrom range. . .
LP: It does.
I: And someone looks at my finger and says, "You finger is bright *red*! Did you burn it?" How does she know this? The issue here is knowledge: epistemology, not metaphysics. How does she *know* my finger is red?
LP: From repeated observation that burned flesh appears red.
I: "Appears"? Elaborate.
LP: We obtain data through our senses -- that is the key source of information about the empirical world, as I believe we covered earlier. From our observations, we infer commonalities and generalities about the world.
I: Go on.
LP: Your observer learns at an early age that a certain color is "red", and visually matches the color of your finger to other observed cases of red -- apples, sunsets, blood, certain roses and the like.
I: What about color-blind people?
LP: Or people with their eyes shut, or standing in the dark? Positivism presumes "standard conditions", as objects and events may "appear" differently to us under different conditions. We need access to the appropriate sense-data to make a correct judgment as to the true color of the -- finger in this case.
I: So a color-blind person -- a normal-sighted person in a dark room -- is not in "the standard conditions" for perceiving red --
LP: No, just as someone not equipped with an electron microscope or a radio receiver is in standards conditions for detection molecules, or X-ray stars -- or radio signals.
I: And similarly, I am not in the standard conditions required for "reading" your thoughts, or for sensing whether your wife is in love with you, or detecting the presence of ghosts or hearing God speak --
LP: That is hardly the same thing.
I: Why not? If, according to Positivism, perception is a matter of finding the appropriate "standard conditions", then it stands to reason that if one does not perceive something, then the standard conditions are not in effect, and that one needs to establish the standard conditions for sensing, say, kryptonite, or unicorns --
LP: Now you are being facetious --
I: Not at all, if you wish to argue that everything exists, but that only some things are detected by our senses owing to a lack of standard conditions for viewing. What methodology does Positivism have for distinguishing between the unperceived and the nonexistent?
LP: Well now you've put your finger upon the essence of Positivist knowledge: the "verifiability theory of meaning" --
I: Which is --
LP: Knowledge consists of that which is verifiable.
I: Verifiable by Positivist methodology, which as I pointed out earlier, may have serious gaps in its purview --
LP: Look. One may speculate ad infinitum as to what sorts of things there are, and as long as one does *not* know what is the case, there are many genuine, legitimate *possibilities* to be entertained. Positivism gleans out what is the case. Even if there are practical limitations on what we may discover, we at least do not come to believe what is false.
I: "Soundness", if not "completeness"?
LP: I'm sure you would agree that if we cannot know everything, we should at least be sure of what we do claim to know. Positivism seeks to attain knowledge, not to reinforce mere belief. That is why Positivist knowledge consists of analytic truths --
I: Truths that are necessarily true, or that necessarily follow from contingent truths --
LP: -- and empirical data.
I: This is where I have a problem with your concept of "red". Certainly if we observe some fact of the matter in nature, we can deduce other, perhaps non-observable facts of the matter --
LP: That is often the case. Consider what we know about atoms, radiation, energy waves, micro-organisms -- our knowledge of these comes from logically derivable relations between sense-data -- visible observations. I should point out that by "visible" I do not just mean detectable by sight, but detectable by *any* of our senses.
I: So when I claim that -- this carpet -- is red, the truth of my claim is supported by my perception of its hue, and the logical chain of cause and effect from . . .
LP: The entire process that we understand to be involved in seeing "red": a light source, an object that reflects red light, the eye that perceives this sense-data --
I: And if no such logical link from object to perception can be established --
LP: Then the claim being made is not only not true, it is meaningless.
I: *Meaningless*?
LP: Yes. That is an essential part of the verifiability theory of meaning. Knowledge -- in any theory of knowledge -- deals in propositions -- truth claims, which of course are either true, or false, provided they have meaning --
I: What do you mean? Are you saying that some truth-claims are meaningless?
LP: Of course. "This carpet is a certain shade of red" is meaningful, because "red" is the color produced by a certain wavelength of reflected light -- say, 6950 angstroms of wavelength. But to say "This carpet is pretty" is to utter nonsense. "Prettiness" is not a property of objects. Likewise, "There is a unicorn standing on this carpet" is meaningless as there are no unicorns. --
I: Are we deceiving ourselves, then, when we make aesthetic or ethical value judgments?
LP: Certainly, if in saying that "this carpet is pretty", or "your action is polite", you mean that the carpet, or the action itself possesses the property of "prettiness" or "politeness". Such claims are meaningless, because they are neither analytical, nor verifiable through empirical study. You can't examine the carpet for prettiness, nor, say, my act of offering you a chair for politeness. It is not to be found in the object or action under study. You cannot infer it from the nature of the carpet, or gesture. Unlike "bachelor", which entails the notion of never-married but eligible to be married male, "carpet", or even specifically "this carpet here underneath our feet", does not entail prettiness. Nor can you empirically detect "prettiness" through the most intense and thorough study of the carpet.
I: What is "prettiness", then? Or, is it anything at all?
LP: This leads us to the set of things that do not exist, rather than things that we are unaware of, that you were concerned about earlier. We are capable not only of discerning actual properties of actual objects, we are also capable of imagining fictitious properties of actual objects -- "holy water" for example -- and even fictitious properties of fictitious objects. Such attributions -- such spurious truth claims -- are meaningless. To make such claims meaningful, we need to ground them in analytic truths and actual empirical observations.
I: Let's get down to "red". Describe for me -- in Positivist discourse -- what is actually happening when I perceive -- unmistakenly, I believe -- that this carpet is red.
LP: Very well. The ceiling fixture emits white light -- the full complement of visible light -- ranging from dark red at 7800 angstroms to violet light at 3900 angstroms. This light shines down on the carpet which absorbs the spectrum of light from about 6200 angstroms to 3900 angstroms, and reflecting the remainder -- 7800 to 6200 angstroms -- which is the band of red light. This light reflects off of the carpet, and travels to our eye. The lens focuses this band of light wavelengths onto the retina at the back of the eye, where it strikes the "rods and cones" that convert these electromagnetic wavelengths into chemically generated electrical impulses that travel along the optic nerve to the brain.
I: And --
LP: And then this information is processed by the brain for inspection, or stored in memory, or synthesized with other sense-data to form judgments: "this is red, this is shaggy, this lies flat on the floor -- this is a red carpet."
I: At the beginning of your description of "seeing red" you used the term "7800 angstrom-length electromagnetic wavelength", then at some point between "conversion to chemically generated electronic impulses" and "judgment formation" you drop the expression "7800 angstrom-length electromagnetic wavelength" and substitute "red" for it from then on. Explain -- and justify -- this semantic shift. Are they equivalent? Or, did an undisclosed transformation occur during the process?
LP: Well in natural processes you may have all sorts of transformations of objects, of properties, of energy states, of forms, of information --
I: Yes, but in keeping with the spirit of Positivism - of "verifiability" -- all of your truth claims -- your knowledge -- must be logically connected -- hence the "logical" in "Logical Positivism". You start with sense-impressions, or sense-data, empirical observations -- whatever you wish to call them -- and with analytical knowledge -- logic and inference, and combine them to form legitimate general (or particular) propositions about the world. *But*, you need to do two things, it seems to me, for that strategy to work. First, you must be able to try all of the "links" in the chain, test them for strength --
LP: Otherwise, what is the point? True premises will yield false conclusions if the reasoning is not good.
I: Exactly -- and the other point is that, in addition to good reasoning, you need good premises -- good data to work with.
LP: Otherwise, it's "garbage in -- garbage out", as they say.
I: I agree. But, second, you need a good working phenomenology --
LP: Phenomenology?
I: Literally, the "study of appearances", as described by Franz Brentano, Alexius Meinong, Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre and others. You need to make the logical connection between what is perceived *by an observer*, and what there is that is being observed. The color red, for example.
LP: How so?
I: Well, in your description of the process of "seeing red", you miss a link -- the link between the brain receiving an electrical impulse carrying vital information about 7800 angstrom-length waves of life bouncing off this garish rug and into your eyes and mine, AND, the color red -- the bright, intense wash of warm color extended along the floor of this room that we both experience. As a Positivist, can you complete the chain by forging this missing link?
LP: I don't see any missing link at all. All of the steps from light bulb to mental impression are included in my description.
I: But that is not the case at all. If I may break the process down step-by-step: first, the heated filament in the ceiling fixture glows, emitting visible light with a range of wavelengths from 7800 to 3900 angstroms. I believe that light waves are compression waves (that move back and forth like a "slinky" coil, first stretched out, then compressed) along the line of travel, but I may be mistaken --
LP: I believe you are right, but the waveform does not matter. It is the length and frequency that makes the color -- or sound pitch, or radio wave, or whatever -- but continue.
I: Then: this collection of waves of various wavelengths hits the rug, as waves on a lake hit the lakeshore --
LP: Some of them absorbed by the lakeshore -- or the rug in this case -- and others reflected off of the object --
I: Correct. This step acts as a kind of "filter" -- which removes some of the wavelengths from the ray of light cast onto the rug --
LP: And then to our eye.
I: Right -- and this is the important point, despite being reflected -- the energy entering our eye -- passing through the lens and striking the rods and cones in the retinal sheath at the back of the eye --
LP: And absorbed by those light wave-sensitive rod-and-cone-structures --
I: Yes, up to this very point, this light is *still* -- er -- light, is it not?
LP: Yes, it's still the same stuff emitted from the light bulb: light waves vibrating in the 7800-6200 band of visible radiation -- give or take. Whatever wavelengths are filtered out of the original complement of light waves ranging from 7800 to 3900 angstroms and reflected onto the lens of our my eye --
I: And, at the point at which this 7800-6200 band of wavelengths strikes the eye -- the rods and cones at the back of the eye -- there *is* a transformation, is there not? We are no longer dealing with light waves, are we?
LP: Well, at this point, technically, the medium in which the color information is being transmitted changes, from visible light to chemically-generated electrical impulses. When a rod or cone of the right type is hit by the appropriate wavelength of light, the light wave itself is absorbed -- like a wave absorbed by the shoreline. It disappeared. In its place, we have an electrochemical impulse generated by the rod or cone which carries the same information that was in the wave, in a different form, in the new medium of electrochemical energy. An analogy might be, if you were watching waves on a lake, and you saw those water waves hit a buoy, and the energy was transferred from the water to the buoy. You would see wave patterns in the water moving along, until the water hit the buoy, and then the water ceasing to move towards shore, but now the buoy rocking back and forth or moving up and down. Same quantity of energy, same pattern of impulses, but in a different medium. By observing the buoy, one could infer the movement of the water surrounding it -- even at night, when the water was invisible in the darkness, if there were a light mounted on the buoy.
I: That is a good example of how a great many invisible phenomena are made visible, while preserving critical information about the phenomena.
LP: That is exactly the case with most of the "astronomical" and "subatomic" phenomena that would otherwise -- as it had been for thousands of years -- be completely invisible to us. By following the causal trail, we can infer truths about all that lies outside our immediate perception.
I: However, you still have a problem concerning "red". You got as far as the retina, where "red" light waves strike the rods and cones embedded in the retina. Just as the buoy in the water converts water waves into the swaying of the light mounted on it, the retinal array of sensors converts electromagnetic radiation into electrochemical pulses -- which are still not "red".
LP: Well, to continue the analysis, yes, at this point, the information carried by --
I: "Information"? What information? All we have so far is "only" physical phenomena.
LP: Ye-s. It isn't information until it is interpreted -- call it phenomena if you like.
I: But what are "phenomena", according to the Positivist account?
LP: The objects, the events of the physical world -- the things we see, observe --
I: Wait a minute. You do appreciate that there is a fundamental distinction between what we perceive, and what there is -- ?
LP: Of course. But we do not see all that there is, and what we do see we do not always see clearly --
I: We see *what* we see.
LP: But we do not always correctly *interpret* what we see --
I: Hence your goal of "reducing" human observations to scientific phenomena --
LP: Yes. The Positivist goal is to discover how things actually are, not how they appear to us. Post-modernists -- and other cranks -- prefer the latter --
I: Like Don Quixote, preferring the appearance of giants to the reality of windmills --
LP: Exactly. So many people -- otherwise serious, intelligent, educated people -- are engaged in the study of appearances, of ideas -- concepts that exist only in their own heads, with no grounding in reality --
I: That takes us back to the "verifiability theory of meaning": the meaning of propositions, like "They resemble windmills, but they might be giants" rests on the verifiability of concepts like "giant", "windmill", "resemble", "be" and "they" -- and "might". How does one verify the actual physical entity we refer to as "might", by the way? For example, "This might be a windmill"? Is "might" an object, or a property of physical objects, or -- what?
LP: Well, there is no mysterious aspect to "might" as the Positivists use it. In the process of perceiving a phenomenon -- oh, say, a light-emitting object in space that satisfies the description of either a comet *or* a planet -- it *might* turn out, on further examination, to be a planet, say, and not a comet after all. "Might" refers to our anticipated result of discovery, not to the object itself, which is either a planet, or a comet, or something else. It also applies to quantum theory, when we have an indeterminacy, such as an atom that has or has not broken down into smaller particles, but until we observe it, its status is indeterminate.
I: Like the health status of Schrödinger's cat. I notice that you seem to be using "phenomena" to denote two entirely different things. On one hand, phenomena are the actual, specific manifestations of things, of objects and their properties and the events in which they are involved -- like a particular wave crashing into a particular buoy, setting it swinging in a particular manner -- and on the other hand -- phenomena as "what appears to us", what we *see* happening -- like the buoy light bobbing up and down, seen as an indicator of the rhythm of the waves on a dark night. Now "appearance" and "reality" are hopefully related in some way, when we are using observed phenomena to infer the status of reality -- but surely you would agree that one is *not* the other.
LP: Of course. Phenomena -- things as they appear to us -- give us clues as to what is actually out there.
I: But what sort of clues? And what is this relation between objects and appearances? How do we discover it? We cannot even perceive "causality" -- the relation between one set of circumstances and the next, as Hume so drolly pointed out -- how can we assert that a bobbing light at sea at night is a reliable indictor of ocean waves patterns, and not, say, a sailor with a flashlight sending an SOS?
LP: Through "constant conjunction", as Hume pointed out -- the observation that two separate phenomena -- here I mean two actual events -- are associated by proximity in space and time -- like associating the crackle of thunder with lightning flashes.
I: But again, that supposes a great deal -- including that (a) we see -- perceive -- all that is significant in rendering judgments about the world --
LP: Which is by no means simple and straightforward, but may require a great deal of work, and error, always with less than the amount of data we might wish for.
I: True, and (b) that we are looking for the right things, in the right places. This brings us back to the problem of justifiable "reduction", and the tendency for Positivism to summarily throw out whole classes of things that may provide us with insight into reality.
LP: Such as --
I: Well, such as "people". For example, in your reduction of "red" -- which I would like you to complete for me -- you refer to waves of light, of electricity, to eyes and other objects -- but when we left off, we were no closer to understanding what "red" is than when we started -
LP: Ah, well, let me continue --
I: We left off at the optic nerve, which was transmitting an electrochemical signal analog of our red light wave along to the -- well, where does this signal go next?
LP: To the visual cortex, a part of the brain that processes sense-data -- in this case, visual data that comes from the eye.
I: Uh-huh. What does "processing" consist of?
LP: Well, I am not a biologist, or an expert in brain-processes --
I: You're among friends --
LP: Ha! Well, just as a TV set takes a stream of electronic impulses and assembles them into a two-dimensional picture with color and shading, so too, the visual cortex assembles, organizes the data coming from the eye through the optic nerve to form an image in the brain --
I: A *mental* image?
LP: People tend to refer to it is a "mental" image, but in fact it is *all* physical. So-called "mental" states and phenomena and processes are really a special type of physical states and processes --
I: Our talk of "mental" thoughts, memory, reasoning -- that's all really physical stuff occurring in the brain, which is also physical --
LP: Yes. Unfortunately we do not "see" ideas, or memories, or reasoning as such. We only perceive their results through behavior of beings with minds, or rather, brains.
I: This purely physical view of mind is a tenet of Behavioralist psychology, correct?
LP: Yes, "mind-talk", as well as "personality", "feelings", "spirituality" and the like are terms that suppose -- wrongly -- that there is a *separate*, non-physical feature of persons called "mentality" --
I: Gilbert Ryle disparagingly called it "the ghost in the machine" --
LP: We Positivists don't believe in ghosts either, or other entities that do not refer to anything in the actual, physical world.
I: So all mental phenomena "reduce" -- completely -- to physical phenomena --
LP: Yes.
I: So let us return to the Positivistic / Behavioralist account of "red". We have been following our quantum light waves on a long trek now, from being emitted from light sources to bouncing off of carpets and apples and fire trucks and Little Red Riding Hood's hood, into the eye, through the eye, then into the brain itself where the visual cortex "organizes" these waves once again. We seem to be no nearer to "seeing red" than when we started. Are you familiar with the "step paradox"?
LP: Not the term. What is it.
I: It is a classic fallacy in "taking the limit' of an ongoing progression. It comes up in calculus, where limits are very important of course. First, let's look at a good example of taking a limit; the example of Achilles chasing the tortoise --
LP: Is that the one in which Achilles starts out some hundred feet from a tortoise, and with each time interval, he races forward, cutting the distance between himself and the tortoise, but never reaching it?
I: Yes. In the first interval, Achilles runs one hundred feet to where the tortoise stood -- er -- sat -- lay -- at the beginning of the race. But over the same time interval that Achilles moves forward to where the tortoise is, the tortoise is moving, however slowly, ahead, say, ten feet.
LP: And so Achilles has not yet caught up to the tortoise. Zeno used this example and the one about the arrow to prove that we cannot move -- clearly an absurdity.
I: Well, our understanding of motion and change has -- changed -- since Zeno. Now that Achilles has moved to where the tortoise was, and the tortoise has moved a bit further along, Achilles spends the next time interval covering the ten feet between himself and the tortoise, but as he does this, the tortoise, moving at the same rate of speed (one tenth of Achilles' rate), moves ahead a foot.
LP: Yes, yes. The point being -- from the perspective of modern calculus and the summation of infinite converging sums -- that the tortoise does not -- as Zeno opined -- elude Achilles forever, racing all over the planet, but that the sum of their respective steps meets at a point that is 111.1111... feet from where Achilles first stood.
I: Exactly. Now the "step fallacy" exploits this notion of an infinite series, but to bad end. It is used to prove that the diagonal of a unit square is equal to two.
LP: That's ridiculous.
I: And false as well, which is the crux of the fallacy. The point, I will say in advance, is that infinite "process" is *not* the same as infinite "progress". Here is the fallacy. We begin with a unit square -- one foot by one foot if you prefer specific physical measurements. If you draw a line from the upper left corner of the square to the lower right corner -- a downward sloping ramp -- you have a line that measures the square root of two units in length --
LP: According to the Pythagorean theorem -- one squared plus one squared equals two, and since the square of the diagonal is two, the length of the diagonal must be the square root of two -- and not two.
I: But -- instead of drawing the diagonal outright, let us sneak up on it by approximation, as we did with the calculation of the length of Achilles' path, by adding up an infinite series of lengths. Suppose that instead of moving directly along the diagonal of the square from the upper left to the lower right, we move along a step: drop one-half of a unit -- half a foot -- straight down from the upper left corner -- then move to the right half a foot (to the center of the square), then drop down to the bottom of the square -- in the middle of the base -- then over half a foot to the lower right corner.
LP: That would form a zigzag path from the upper-left-to the lower right corners --
I: Consisting of four half-foot-long segments -- which adds up precisely to two feet.
LP: But a zigzag is *not* a diagonal line. The diagonal of a square is not a zigzag path, but a straight line.
I: And this is where the notion of converging limits comes in. Why stop with half-foot steps that clearly do not follow the diagonal, but diverge considerably from the diagonal? Let us take smaller steps, and sum them up, getting a path that is closer to the diagonal. Starting again at the upper left corner, we drop down only a quarter of a foot this time, keeping closer to the diagonal than the half-foot-step process did, then moving right a quarter of a foot, then down another quarter, and so on. You now have a path that still zigzags, but far less than the previous path, cleaving more closely to the diagonal line. and, adding up the steps of the path -- twice as many as before, but each only half as long as before, and we get the sum of eight quarter-feet rather than four half-feet --
LP: -- and you get the same length -- two feet. But that is *still* not a diagonal line, but a series of up-and-down, left-and-right steps. The slopes are different -- as are the lengths.
I: But we can continue making the steps smaller and smaller, producing a path that is closer and closer to the diagonal line all the while remaining exactly two feet long, some point-eighty-six feet longer than the diagonal --
LP: But -- dammit! -- you never get a diagonal line -- even if you go splitting up those steps until doomsday -- or infinity. Yes, your zigzag path *appears* to resemble a diagonal line more and more -- if you are talking about very high resolution computer graphiscs you can still get a visual "match" at about a thousand steps. But at no point in this process -- *ever* -- does your path bridge the gap between an alternating vertical / horizontal line and a forty-five degree slant, which is the diagonal. Look --if you were to add up all of the infinitely many diagonals of all your infinitely many -- sub-squares, or right triangles -- the total length of all of these sub-diagonals sum up to the square root of two, while the height and bases of all of your sub-height and width lines would add up to *two*. All of your steps -- however many of them -- *never* closes the gap between the length of the diagonal of a square and what really amounts to the sums of the sub-lengths of the two sides of the square --
I: No?
LP: No.
I: So you admit that an epistemic process which makes no progress towards its goal is futile?
LP: Absolutely.
I: Well, to put it delicately, your efforts -- and those of many Positivistic "psychologists", or "mind-scientists" -- Paul and Patricia Churchland to cite a prominent example -- to describe mental phenomena, such as "seeing red" or "hearing middle C on a piano", or the "aroma of a warm cinnamon bun" -- to say nothing of far more complex and involved "mental" phenomena, do not succeed at all. All this talk and hand-waving and excruciatingly detailed analysis of wave-transformation and signal patterns -- while significant in its own right -- gets us nowhere with the sorts of questions being posed about human experience, about mental phenomena -- certainly about human behavior, in particular deliberate, intentional "rule governed practices", and certainly *not* "ethics", which Positivism puts in the same basket as superstition, mysticism, and other "meaningless" -- that is to say, non-referring -- concepts such as unicorns and four-sided triangles.
LP: Well, look -- one may have an idea *of* anything, but that does not entail that that idea corresponds *to* anything in reality --
I: What about our perceptions? Do *they* exist?
LP: I don't know what you mean.
I: I have the idea of a unicorn -- I imagine it in terms of sights, sounds -- even smells. There is no unicorn, only a collection of ideas associated in my mind *as if it were a complex sense-datum*, or, if you will, a set of sense data. I see a red unicorn, say. I am almost certainly mistaken in my judgment that there is a red unicorn "out there". but, am I mistaken in my judgment that I am sensing something -- at the very least, that I am having an experience *of* something, even if it is only an imagined something, no more than a loose collectin of sense-data, old memories --
LP: A fragment of beef, a bit of underdone potato? Seriously, you mistake perception with imagination.
I: Well, perhaps imagination -- the act of conjuring up "images" in our minds -- I know you don't believe in "minds", but bear with me for a moment -- is a mental construct, that is, a form of "information" processing that is very loose, and prone to error or distortion. But does that mean that we truly do not have any internal experiences *of* things, real or imagined, or somewhere in between, as when one sees a statue in the distance, and mistakes it for a live human being?
LP: If you are saying that we make mistakes in perception, I would agree. Hence the need for careful objective measurements using scientific instruments --
I: Doesn't a perceptive human witness make for a good observational tool, in its own way, as much as a camera, or a fingerprint kit?
LP: Now you're being very dismissive -- and very dramatic.
I: [Sigh] Getting back to your account of "red", the "information" stored in the visual cortex -- pertaining to 7000 angstrom wavelengths -- what exactly *is* it, in reality?
LP: Eh -- as I said, I an not an expert on brain structure and process -- but it would be something analogous to formatted computer data, stored in a flesh and blood medium, rather than silicon chips. Information about this sense-data would be stored as biochemical structures --
I: Just a moment. Let us stipulate that from the moment light is emitted from a ceiling bulb or lamp, to the moment the visual cortex converts, organizes, stores and presents analogous data from the "red" band of this beam of light that there is some physical state of affairs: light waves traveling from an electrified bulb filament, light reflected off of the surface of an apple, light being refracted by the lens of an eye, light hitting photosensitive cells in the retina, electrical signals generated by these cells traveling along the optic nerve to the visual cortex -- let us grant all that, and that Positivist empirical science gives us a richly detailed and unimpeachable account -- which it has -- of this complex process. Now that we are at the visual cortex, what is "red" -- the color we experience *as* red. Where is it? How do we perceive it as such? Is this structured matrix of cells in the visual cortex "red"?
LP: Of course not.
I: That is fortunate, for we not only experience things as "red", but as "ice cold" or "razor sharp" or "as big as a house" -- and we certainly can't have frozen, razor sharp objects as big as houses stuffed into our brains --
LP: Certainly not. What is in the visual cortex is *information*, which is read by the conscious brain --
I: Did you say "read', or "red"? The latter is certainly not the case --
LP: I appreciate your pun, but no, I mean this information is read -- r-e-a-d -- by the brain, as a scanner or electric eye or other mechanical device "reads" the presence and the structure of information pertaining to "red".
LP: Worse and worse! When we see the red apple, we are "reading" the apple for its color, aren't we?
I: Y-es, in a manner of speaking. We -- as physical beings -- sense physical phenomena through sense organs designed to detect that information. That is "reading", in a sense, much as we read words, or symbols on paper.
I: Well, now, several long and complex steps later, we have a brain state -- a collection of cells that - like a region of a computer memory chip, have some physical status -- not one's and zeros, surely, but a "code" of some sort, causally produced by the red band of the beam of light that enters our eyes -- but no "red". Now you say that this physical brain state -- a wad of protein-based nerve filaments insulated in fat -- adipose, lipids, what have you -- exists, rearranged in some way, like a computer chip, or a school chalkboard, so that -- if read by an observer -- that observer can infer that red is present.
LP: Yes.
I: Well, this "brain state" -- which as I say is nothing more than information -- like a stop sign message, or a slip of paper with the word "red" printed on it -- is not *red*. If we poked in a well-lit brain biopsy tube and looked at this area of the physical brain, it would not look any different if it contained information about "blue", or "the smell of bacon frying", or "middle C on the piano".
LP: Of course not.
I: Then where is the "red"? By that, I mean, on your account of "seeing red", where, and how and why does "reading" the formatted information at this brain site *look* red?
LP: Well, of course, there are other parts of the brain that interpret this data. Somewhere in hardwired memory -- just like a computer -- the information -- based on its content -- is transformed into the color red.
I: How so?
LP: Well as I say, in a computer, "red' is usually symbolized by a particular code. In the RBG system -- or is it RGB -- I forget -- all of the colors that appear on a computer color monitor are encoded as combinations of the three primary colors of light: red, blue and green. So in the coding "990000", the "99" would indicate medium intensity red (on a scale of zero to 255 -- in hex -- base sixteen), while "00" would indicate no blue and no green, meaning that "990000" represents pure red -- pure magenta, that is. Other codes would indicate other colors in the visual spectrum.
I: So when a computer is processing a program, and comes upon the instruction: "display 990000" onscreen, a spot of red appears on the computer monitor?
LP: Exactly!
I: What part of the human brain -- or any other part of the body -- corresponds to a computer display monitor?
LP: Er --
I: Well, you would agree that a computer that "sees", or detects "990000" produces the color red -- magenta -- onscreen. Real, bona fide red we can see -- like we see when looking at an apple. What is the analog in human beings as far as color perception is concerned.
LP: Well, our brains don't have computer screen displays --
I: Or a slot in which we can insert "a penny for your thoughts" and have our thoughts projected for public display --
LP: Seriously, the "screen" as you put it might be thought of as our "consciousness" -- the part of our brains that "visualizes" mental images: colors, shapes, relations between objects --
I: The "mind's eye"? On the Positivist account, what is the part of the brain that "visualizes" red? Or "feelings" cold, or sharpness? Or senses the expanse that is "as big as a house"?
LP: I -- am not an expert on the details of cognitive perception --
I: But you don't have to be to appreciate the claim that is being made here by positivists. Positivists -- at least every Positivist I have ever come across will grant that we "see" red as *red*, and not as waves of a certain frequency. Nor will positivists dispute that if we move along the *same* electromagnetic spectrum we will come across another band of frequencies we "hear" as noise or music or speech, and that this experience is *nothing* like seeing. And, neither seeing nor hearing is symbolic of something else, in the sense that the word "red" printed on a sheet of paper, or an F above middle C note on a music sheet are semantic symbols of some other phenomena. Red is red; middle C is middle C, as the flavor of caramelized sugar is not that of ketchup or mustard or rancid oysters, notwithstanding the fact that is there is associated with these tastes a complex chemical interaction between the molecules of a blob of mustard and the taste buds on the surface of one' tongue --
LP: Granted that this is our interpretation of colors and sounds and condiments, but --
I: Interpretation? Then this *is* a matter of semantics? Do we *learn* to experience mustard as a flavor and not a note in the alto range? Or is it a matter of "waves" again? Look, if at some point 7000 angstrom light waves -- however processed, translated, manipulated or transmogrified -- are perceived as "red", then there is something that is being perceived as such -- what is it, and how does this perceptual experience, on the Positivist account, occur?
LP: I was just thinking -- this debate goes back to the Empiricist debate over "secondary qualities".
I: Which are?
LP: Well, primary qualities of objects inhere in the objects themselves: physical extension, shape, heat, stickiness and so forth. They are clearly *in* the object itself. A sugar cube is, say, 3/8th of an inch in height, width and depth, while our impression or conception -- experience you would say -- is *not* extended, otherwise we certainly could not have the idea of the Moon in our heads as it would be some two-thousand miles in diameter. But color is the paradigm example of a "secondary quality" -- one that does seem to exist in our heads, and not in the object itself. As you say, when the light is turned off, or the viewer is color-blind, the color of an apple, say, is absent.
I: That is both interesting and obliging, but -- what are secondary properties or qualities, and more to the point, *where* are they, and *why* are they? Why is red "red", and where in the brain -- or in your sense-perception schema -- is red located?
LP: I -- really do not know. It seems to me, now that I have reflected upon it, that an appeal to "reduction' is appropriate here. We can trace the wave effect from light to apple to eye to brain -- and clear through the entire brain process, even when one is giving a psychological account of a driver stopping in response to a red light.
I: So along with magic, unicorns, local customs, ethics and other states of mind, we give up color as well?
LP: We don't give it *up*, exactly, but at some point we lose our objective viewpoint. Mental experience is "private", while waves of light are not --
I: You could, given your faltering account of electrochemical sense-data perception, invoke an homunculus located between the visual cortex and the "left-brain" which process quantitative data -- a little man sitting between the frontal lobes like a couch potato in a leather chair who looks at the input from the visual cortex and cries out "magenta!" --
LP: In response to the little man inside *his* head who sees the light wave -- seriously, the perception of sense-data by humans eventually leads into a subjective world --
I: Do you mean that color is subjective -- a function of the individual person?

"Roses are red, violets are blue,
For me at least, if not for you?"

LP: [Laughing] It's not as bad as all that. Remember, the image we see -- we have in our minds -- of a red apple is of the *same* red apple --
I: But how do we know that? You have brought a classically objective sense-datum into serious question. Worse, you seem to be saying that there is no knowable fact of the matter as to what is going on in a given human mind. Granted the Behaviorist theory of mind is sparse, even impoverished -- but -- no *color*?
LP: Well, as you have done previously in our conversation, you have played fast and loose with Positivist doctrine. I say again that Positivism deals with what is publicly and generally knowable, with what can be proven by Positivist methods --
I: But as someone who sees an apple, and experiences the color of that apple, as well as attributes meanings and significations of all sorts to that apple: deliciousness, *mine*, happiness, juiciness, worms and brown spots -- which may not have been perceived at all through sense-data -- are my experiences of, my meaning of, my -- constitution -- of that apple -- are these all "subjective"?
LP: Of course. They are not true OF the apple, you see. At least, they are not -- invoking the verificationist theory of meaning -- logically or causally related to the apple you see. These -- impressions -- are in your head, not in the apple. They are not true OF the apple, and hence, they fail the "meaningfulness" test -- they do not refer to things in the world.
I: Could I at least say that these ideas -- experiences, impressions, constitutions, meanings, exist in my mind? For example, the apple looks red to me, hence I take it to be ripe, and therefore edible. So, by Behaviorism, I reach out for it.
LP: Well, we can infer from your behavior in reaching out for the apple that you desire it --
I: But you really have no commitment to "states of mind", do you? Preferences, feelings, interpretations, and the like.
LP: Only insofar as they manifest themselves as behavior in the physical world.
I: Why do I stop when I see a red light?
LP: Ultimate, internal state programming. You perceive 7000 angstrom light waves, which prompts a brain state that causes you to stop your car.
I: Why do some people race through the red light then?
LP: Different programming states. 7000 angstrom light waves interact with brain states to produce a signal in the right leg that presses down on the gas pedal.
I: What goes on in our minds as far as "consciousness" -- self-awareness -- introspection into our mental states -- er -- brain states?
LP: On the atomic level of causality -- which is what "mental activity" reduces to -- a causal chain of physical interactions.
I: A different causal chain of interactions for each person thinking about different things?
LP: Probably. If the internal state of two persons were the same, they would be thinking about the same thing.
I: And if the internal states of two persons were different, they would have to be thinking about two different things?
LP: Undoubtedly
I: How would you know?
LP: By examining their physical brain states.
I: If I were thinking about a red apple, what would my brain states have to be?
LP: I'm sure I don't know. But whatever they were, they would reflect the causal nature of their origin -- that is, they would be the causal result of the beam of light bouncing off of the apple.
I: What if I were thinking of an apple without there being an apple present to produce the causal sense-data?
LP: Then your mental state -- "image" -- of an apple would be derived from memories -- stored sense-data -- acquired on an earlier occasion.
I: And if I were thinking of a unicorn -- with no previous sense-data experiences to draw from?
LP: You would draw that image from a picture -- an artist's conception -- you had seen of a unicorn.
I: And where did the artist get his conception of a unicorn from?
LP: As Locke would have put it, from the fanciful assembly of images of things you had seen -- a horse, a lion, a deer, and so forth.
I: Imagination is the concatenation of observed, experienced sense data?
LP: Yes.
I: What motivates the original assembly of the body of a horse, the tail of a lion, the hooves of a deer, the horn of some other animal, and so forth, into a unicorn? What causes that image?
LP: The mind is free to assemble, or to abstract out, sense-data images. I can think of a triangle without it being any color, or assembling basic geometric shapes to come up with a new building design.
I: And the motivation, the impetus, for this production of original ideas?
LP: Purely causal.
I: I see we are running out of time. I would like to follow up on your views of human behavior, what humans perceive, and why, what humans *are*, and what Positivism can tell us about specifically human properties, such as free will, ethical and other rule-governed practices, as well as purpose and meaning.
LP: Well, we can take a stab at it.
I: As the post-Modernists would say, that is "doing violence to language" -- but that will come later. I still have to ask you about humaan experience.
LP: I look forward to it.

I: Last time I pointed out some potential problems with Logical Positivism, and I wish to explore these further, with regard to knowledge in general, and ethical knowledge in particular --
LP: And I said that you might not be pleased with my answers --
I: And I raised the point that this may reflect faults with Logical Positivism as a theory of knowledge.
LP: Well --
I: Now Positivistic knowledge is based on the logic of generalities: All X are Y, no W are Z, some U are V, and so forth.
LP: From true generalities we can deduce true instances.
I: But how do we establish the truth of the generalities in the first place?
LP: Well, to take an example from mathematics, all even integers are evenly divisible by two --
I: There are infinitely many integers. You can't test them all individually. You'd never finish examining infinitely many numbers --
LP: And one doesn't. We construct the set of integers in such a way that we know they have common properties. And then we use these properties to infer other properties using mathematical induction --
I: The "falling domino" principle. IF something is true for the first of a series of cases, and IF it is true that if it is true for an arbitrary case it must be true for the next case, then it is true for all cases, even infinitely many cases.
LP: Yes.
I: But in such a case you are presupposing a general truth -- about all of the objects under consideration --
LP: But validly. The set of integers is well-defined. We *know* integers have certain properties (like evenness) in virtue of the fact that we created them that way --
I: But that begs the question. How can one validly go from analytic truths about numbers to truth claims about the natural world -- the orbits of planets for example? How do you justify such a huge leap?
LP: Because it has been shown time and again that that the physical universe operates upon mathematical principles --
I: But *which* mathematical principles? The Ptolemaic model of the solar system, mathematical as it was, was wrong. The Newtonian model of the universe was very accurate -- but wrong. The Einsteinian model not only is still under revision, it seems that parts of it entail uncertainty -- hardly a plus in a theory of knowledge.
LP: Well in practice, two or more models may approximately fit the natural phenomenon. Greater precision settles the matter as to which one is more correct.
I: But if there are limits on precision -- as their certainly seem to be, especially given uncertainty, then we must remain ignorant of fundamental aspects of the universe -- again, hardly a recommendation for a theory of knowledge. And when you say "in practice", doesn't the acquisition of knowledge imply practice? It seems disingenuous to say that "in theory" we know what the orbit of Mars is, but in practice we don't. Isn't knowledge about practice in some fundamental sense?
LP: Well there is a difference between being able to find out things and not being able to -- that I think is a more important difference than whether we choose to find out things based on economics, or personal or social interests.
I: But doesn't this take us back to the problem of mathematical proofs,, where, if you are unfortunate enough to seek an answer that can't be proven in a finite number of steps -- a *small* finite number of steps, I should hasten to add -- then you must remain ignorant of the answer to your question?
LP: In practice -- heh-heh -- I shouldn't say that, should I? Well -- let me put it this way, the assumptions and methods of Positivism screen out mysticism, relativism, occultism -- spurious claims, contradictory claims -- and it provides a basis -- an underlying structure for knowing -- actually discovering what is true and what is not. If we cannot learn everything that is so with our finite minds and finite resources -- including the very important resource of time -- we can at least do our best to pick he truth out from the various rational possibilities. Look -- Pi -- the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter -- is infinitely long, and the sum of an infinite mathematical series, but if one wished to build a circular table, we know that 22/7 is a good value to choose for Pi, and that 7/22 is a bad value to choose, and that ten decimal places is more than we would need for almost any physical application. That is useful knowledge; it is enough to answer the questions "how do I construct a round table five feet in diameter?" and "is this a round table?" with acceptable accuracy. If our measurements are not perfect, they are at least based on perfection, and not error, like those who wrongly maintain that Pi is a rational number.
I: So because the usefulness of Pi is a function of its decimal length -- the first dozen or so decimal values are the most important, the next dozen or so less important, and so forth, we can "contain", and access, the most useful knowledge of Pi, the most characteristic value of Pi, in the first dozen digits, and write off the rest.
LP: Exactly. We cannot always get exactness, but we can contain it within a reasonable margin.
I: But this still leaves us with questions whose answers do not fit into this paradigm -- the jellybean problem, for example. Suppose we were to assemble a million jars of jelly beans --
LP: I thought they were "jelly bellies" --
I: Even better -- they are smaller, and have a wider variety of flavors --
LP: Over a hundred, I understand.
I: We have, let us suppose, a million jars of jelly bellies, each jar containing a thousand jelly bellies in any permutation of more than a hundred flavors (and colors) --
LP: One of them all coconut, one of them half licorice and half caramel --
I: Well, we don't know what are in the jars -- the jars are opaque --
LP: We are talking about a billion jelly bellies --
I: Not only that, but grouped into a million jars, with each jar characterized by the composition of jelly bellies it contains. One jar may, as you say, to be precise: one thousand coconut, while another may be 499 licorice, 500 red cinnamon, and one tutti-frutti.
LP: Sort of like gene pools, each jar can be characterized by a "string" or formula, like a molecule: C(12)H(14)O(8) -- twelve coconut, fourteen honey and eight orange --
I: Exactly. Only characterizing the content of all of the jars means opening up a million jars and counting a billion jelly bellies --
LP: At one JB a second, that would take over three years --
I: Longer, as there are a hundred thousand warehouses like the one we are considering --
LP: A hundred trillion -- you would need more counters, but the principle is the same.
I: But the knowledge is *not* the same. Determining the exact contents of one jar is fairly straightforward, but classifying one hundred billion like jars is a formidable task. As the subject of study becomes more complex, or more populous, or both, the surety of our knowledge drops drastically.
LP: But as usual, there are methods that provide drastic shortcuts. Statistical sampling, for example. . .
I: But there are fundamental limits as to what kinds of knowledge statistics can tell us.
LP: Well, it certainly is no substitute for an exact count, but that rarely makes a difference in such large quantities. An ordinary glass of water contains much greater numbers of hydrogen atoms, one of which may turn out to be a deuterium -- a "heavy hydrogen" -- atom instead, but so what?
I: So what? In cases where it makes a difference whether all of the atoms are hydrogen atoms (one electron and one proton) or deuterium (the same, but with a neutron thrown in), it is the difference between things being a certain way, and things *not* being a certain way. Either/or.
LP: Yes, but one would have to have a reason for making that sort of distinction in practice. In physics it rarely makes a difference -- at least on a daily basis. And if the "odd-man-out" *does* make a difference -- as for example when we were trying to discover the *existence* of the very elusive neutrino -- then we look at the oddball case, and not all of the normal cases -- that shortens the search considerably.
I: So if, to use the "rare atomic particle search" analogy, if we take a large enough sample from the one billion JBs, we can get a "probably" answer to the question "are there any licorice JBs among the coconut ones --
LP: Supposing that there are nearly a billion coconut ones, and -- oh, say -- two licorice ones, we could make a good estimate as to how many jars to open up, and how many JBs to take from each jar and examine in order to have such and such degree of probability that there are, or are not, any licorice ones in the mix -- right?
I: If the proportion of coconut to licorice ones was about even -- fifty-fifty -- we could probably take a sample of a dozen JBs from only one jar to discover our errant licorice JB --
LP: And if the proportion of licorice ones were smaller, say one percent, or one hundredth of one percent, we would want to open up more jars -- 20, say -- and examine more JBs -- a hundred say, to be confident. Again, it is a matter of probability, as a shortcut to examining all one billion, or all one-hundred trillion, JBs, which is certainly impractical, and would not shed any more light on the question.
I: Well, that depends upon what the questions is. Supposing we were interested not in the presence or absence of a particular flavor of JB, but a composition. Suppose we wanted to know if there is a jar, among our million, that contains exactly 42 coconut and 21 licorice JBs?
LP: Now you are talking about "species" of jars.
I: Well, only if, say, in our warehouse of jars it turned out to be the case that a number of jars shared some distinct properties. If it turned out that certain jars -- a thousand, say, -- each had exactly one hundred cinnamon JBs in them, that would see to be a pattern, especially if this characteristic were not part of a normal random distribution -- a "bell curve". If the only time cinnamon JBs appeared in our jars was when exactly one hundred, no more and no less, appeared in the given jar, and this occurred for a significant number of jars, then it would seem we have a significant pattern.
LP: An example of an expression of a law of nature --
I: Or an example of an expression of policy at the Jelly Belly packing plant. In any case, it would be like the normal "species" of candies a company produces: chocolate candies, chocolate candies with nuts, without nuts, with caramels, with nuts AND with caramels, cherry-filled, cream-filled, et cetera. We would have bona fide "kinds".
LP: Yes, and this can be done very well with statistical sampling --
I: But only if species are of a certain nature, and a large degree of simplicity.
LP: Simplicity?
I: Sure. In the case of atomic elements, there are about a hundred different elements, characterized by very simple permutations of protons and neutrons, including isotopic variations. All you have to do is to count the protons, and that gives you the element. one proton is hydrogen, seventy-nine is gold, ninety-four is plutonium, and so forth. But supposing -- as I suggested last time -- there were not one hundred elements, but one hundred *thousand* elements, the identity of each element being a function of *all* of the more than 200 known subatomic particles. Imagine trying to do chemical analysis upon materials (made up of invisible parts of some one-hundred thousand kinds) and discover patterns among them. We might still be trying to discover the precise chemical composition of water, using the stoichiometric methods of the early 19th century. And that is assuming that "kinds" fall into neat and discrete groups. One hundred elements go to form a half million naturally appearing compounds, a very few of them so common as to appear familiar to us in every day life.
LP: And your point is that in the case of our jelly bellies, unless they happen to appear in jars in simply and commonly occurring combinations, we would end up with -- let's see -- one thousand JBs per jar, and 100 flavors -- that would be ten to the three hundredth power (10^300) possible combinations in a jar.
I: With ten to the eightieth power (10^80) being Eddington's estimated number of subatomic particles in the known universe. That would make the number of possible jar combinations ten to the two hundred and twentieth power times (10^220) as plentiful as the number of subatomic particles in the universe.
LP: Which would make statistical sampling look pretty good -- compared to counting all of those combinations of JBs.
I: But your assumption is that the "essence", the "essential properties", of these jars can be captured using your traditional statistical methods -- can they?
LP: I'm not sure I understand.
I: Well, suppose that, as in the case of the atomic elements, only the proton count is essential to what makes an atom this element and not that. Suppose in the case of the JB jars that only the count of the licorice JBs matters to the "essential characteristic" of the jars -- do you follow?
LP: I think so -- you are supposing that what "matters" in differentiating the million jars of jelly bellies in your warehouse is solely the number of licorice ones in each, just as the proton count in an atom determines what periodic element it is.
I: Exactly. And, suppose further that the possibilities for each and every jar are very low -- say, zero, one, two or four licorice JBs, and that no other combinations appear. In our imagined jelly belly physics, only zero, one two or four licorice JBs ever appear.
LP: Our licorice "quantum numbers", eh?
I: In a matter of speaking, only this time around "color" and "flavor" are not abstract names, but actual properties. You can actually look at (and lick) the JBs to determine their classification. How would your statistical samplings work in such a case?
LP: Well, uh -- the problem lies in that most of the JBs in a given jar are "noise" -- they don't affect the L-number -- they could be any of the other ninety-nine flavors and it wouldn't make any difference to our "kinds" of jars. Only the zero or one or two or four black ones would matter.
I: And so in taking a statistical sampling of the million jars in each warehouse (one hundred billion jars in all!) you would have to take a sampling of jars from the set of one million jars -- say, ten jars --
LP: You'd need a larger sample than that! For the accuracy you would need to make a good estimate --
I: Well, you take X jars -- ten, a hundred, a thousand -- as your sample of the one million jars in the warehouse, and then you have to take a sample from each jar to "guesstimate" how many licorice JBs are in that jar.
LP: Yes -- but your situation is ridiculous -- you would need huge samples from each jar to be assured that the number of licorice jelly bellies in that jar was *not* zero, but one or two or four. Otherwise you would come to the possibly highly erroneous conclusion that there were no licorice JBs in the vast majority of the jars, when it could easily be the case that most, if not all of them, had at least one or perhaps two or four licorice JBs in the jar. If you give me a few minutes to do the math, I can tell you how many jars, and how many JBs from each jar you would have to sample in order to get even a standard plus-or-minus 5% error margin --
I: It would be a lot of jars, and a lot of JBs, wouldn't it.
LP: It would be an absurdly high amount. Your hypothetical situation is most unusual --
I: Oh, but it isn't usual at all. It simply is not a situation well-suited to statistical analysis, as much of physics and chemistry and other material sciences tend to be -- that is what the statistical tools were designed for -- those aspects of nature in which the typical cases fall *within* the standard deviation of the bell-curve -- the big hump in the middle -- the "ends" of the curve are very small and skinny -- terra mathematical incognita, so to speak.
LP: To be sure, but nature is not like that.
I: Oh, but parts of it is. All human DNA is some 99.98 % identical between all persons, and yet every person is a permutation of six billion base pairs, each of which has four values: AG, GA, CT or TC. That's four to the six billionth power, or ten to the 3.612 billion power base pairs. Now take 0.02 % of that -- the part that varies significantly -- and you still have an enormous number --
LP: Overall similarity, with critical differences --
I: Yes, for it is the *differences* -- the 0.02% -- that characterizes the individual human. And it get worse if we look at the multiple states of the hundred billion neurons in the typical human brain. Again, unlike the carbon atom, which we identify by its *similarities* to other carbon atoms, in the case of persons, we look to the *differences* for characterization.
LP: Still, that is mere number crunching. Mathematics is a powerful tool; we can handle numbers in any quantity --
I: But not in real time. It is just like the problem with those mathematical theorems that take a billions years for a computer to prove. For all practical purposes, we can't get answers to questions of that type -- we lack such knowledge.
LP: But you are assuming that the important questions are all of this excessively long type. Science --
I: I am not assuming that *all* questions are of this type: the "too-large" answer type. I am only pointing out that any question we pose that has an answer of this type is unanswerable -- for all practical purposes, theory be damned. There are practical limits to Positivist number-crunching.
LP: Well, one serious objection to your gloomy perspective is that there are no "patterns" -- that nature deals with the random and the arbitrary *and* that the important knowledge tends to be "too big" or too complex to be discovered. In fact, many laws of nature tend to be elegantly simple; e = mc^2, for example.
I: I am not arguing that all important facts about the universe are too complex for Positivism to handle, or that there are no practical methods for handling them. For example, in the jelly belly case, supposing it were the case that all of the jars were packed by one manufacturer, who sells three mixes: a fifty-fifty coconut/licorice mix, a 25-25-25-25 cinnamon / tutti-frutti / tropical punch / chocolate mix, and a 30-35-35 mix of licorice, cinnamon and coconut. In such a case, a relatively small sampling would give a very accurate accounting of the warehouse's contents -- however many jars there were of each mix --
LP: Of course -- stock personnel would have an easy time of it.
I: But that is a cheat -- you are assuming a pattern, then look for confirmation of it. You may assume that your warehouse is stocked with items by Candy Distributor A -- the three defined mixes -- and that the jars were filled according to A's three "recipe" mixes. But, what if the jars were in fact packed by Candy Distributor B -- which has seven entirely different mixes? What if there was a packing error in A's mixes -- a fifty-fifty coconut / cinnamon mix, for example? Would your statistical sampling pick that mistake up if you assume you are looking at A's mixes correctly packed?
LP: Well, with enough testing, with a sufficiently precise sampling we could discover the inconsistency between A's mixtures and what was in the warehouse --
I: But again, aren't you going to find only what you are looking for?
LP: Well, that reminds me of the search for the various subatomic particles some of them, like the neutrino, very hard to detect at all, others, like the various mesons and leptons, too short-lived, or too rare, to observe. but you will remember that there was relationship between all of these particles. They weren't merely arbitrary mixes of beans in a jar; they had roles to play in the mechanism of the atom. The neutrino, for example, was originally an accounting concept. It was discovered that there were several "quantum numbers" as they were called: charge, mass, spin and so forth. When an atom broke down into parts, the quantum numbers of these parts had to "add up" to the quantum number of the whole atom. If they didn't add up, you had either properties and particles disappearing into thin air, or worse, popping up out of thin air. It was found that time and again, a certain set of quantum numbers: zero mass, no charge and certain other positive or negative numbers kept coming up again and again. That immediately suggested a missing piece -- a particle with those properties. The neutrino, as it turned out.
I: So again, you are depending on the principle of "neat and simple consistent patterns" to rescue you from such dilemmas --
LP: They are not ad hoc solutions -- not like "mystical forces" that are never explained, or even revealed, mere appealed to. That is superstition.
I: But again, if you assume certain principles, like "homogeneity", or "stoichiometry", or even "Occam's razor", aren't you making assumptions you never really prove --
LP: Well, they ARE supported by our findings. Atoms -- even atoms in the Andromeda galaxy -- give off spectral patterns of light just the way atoms on Earth do when heated up. Gravity seems to be the same everywhere --
I: But you are missing the point. To say that results of an investigation are "as if" they were the result of the *same* underlying causes is *not* the same as demonstrating that they ARE the result of the same underlying causes.
LP: I feel a reference to Bayes Problem coming up --
I: Yes. Bayes worked out important results in probability, namely that given a set of certain possible causes C1, C2, C3 and so on, and an effect E, we can determine from the fact of E the likelihood that C2, say, was the cause of E, as opposed to C1 or C3.
LP: Yes. We can "work backward", so to speak, to determined causes from the effect they produce. That is an important tool on probability. It applies to your jelly belly case: given that we have a warehouse with a certain assortment of jars and their contents, we can calculate the likelihood that they were packed by Candy Distributor A and not B, or that they were packed correctly by A, or incorrectly by C, and so forth.
I: The problem is that you are assuming what possible causes there are to begin with --
LP: We aren't just pulling them out of thin air --
I: Well, the reverse is also a problem -- you may be trying to link a result to one of a pre-selected set of known and familiar causes rather than uncover a new and previously undiscovered cause.
LP: The case of the age of the sun. In the 19th century, physicists assumed that the sun was made of conventional fuel, and tried to estimate how long it have been burning, and how long it would continue to burn. They all assumed, in those pre-atomic energy days, that caloric content could be estimated by known types of combustion -- if the sun were a lump of coal, or a glob of kerosene, and so forth. They had no idea of the yield that atomic fusion could produce, and so they came up with estimates that supported a Biblical history length of the age of the sun and Earth -- some ten thousand years -- and then a somewhat longer age -- ten million years -- still a very sort time, which was inconsistent with biological and geological evidence.
I: It seems that Positivism relies upon the universe being a certain way, and then only responds when it hits a wall.
LP: That is not a bad method -- especially when you start out in total ignorance and there are so many limitations put upon investigation.
I: But would you agree that the sort of knowledge yielded by Positivism is of a certain sort -- if I may characterize it:
- You are looking for instances of easily generalizeable cases of simple universal laws.
- You are looking for *similarities* that characterize instances of general cases, rather than differences that distinguish exceptions to general cases, or simply to things in themselves, regardless of whether they are members of some "kind" or not.
- You are looking for properties that are overtly visible to the senses, and to traditional scientific instruments and methods.
- You are looking for *repeatable* experimental results.
- You are using mathematical structures as your paradigms -- not only that, you are looking for *simple* paradigms in which to fit your observations.
LP: I get the idea. But these are appropriate principles for the sorts of entities we have been studying in the 20th century -- atoms, stars, planets, gravity, heat, light, even molecules and living cells. These are good paradigms for these sorts of objects --
I: I would agree -- the problem I have is with "reductionism" --
LP: The principle that more complex and mysterious phenomena are reducible to simpler and more easily understood phenomena -- what's wrong with that?
I: There are a number of problems with that. First, in saying that "these are appropriate principles for the sorts of entities we have been studying" you are arguing in a circle. You observe certain kinds of things (physical objects and phenomena), and not others, so you develop methods for studying these things, and not others. You are pleased with the results -- which are many, and deep and fruitful -- and commit the fault of "cherry picking" --
LP: Cherry picking?
I: Just as in mathematics, where the theorems provable by some algorithm or other method are the ones we accept as true, and the unproven, or unprovable, theorems are given a different, lesser status. Because they are unproven, or even unprovable by our methods, we push them off into a suspect category, or even into the realm of mysticism. They are "less true" by the Positivistic standard, and by public perception.
LP: Surely you don't want to accept as true statements that are unproven, putting them on an equal status with statements that *have* been proven!
I: That is exactly the point I am trying to make: Positivism equates proof with truth, rather than with knowledge. What we *know*, and what is *true*, are two very separate and distinct things. The fact is, under the tradition of Positivism that has dominated our institutions of knowledge this last century, truth has become what is "official" -- proven according to certain standards that are not suitable or successful for *all* truths, only for certain kinds of truths, mainly, those that are covered by the traditional "scientific method". And we use those findings to construct -- even define -- our notion of reality, which in turn reinforces the methods we accept and use to add information to our store of knowledge. We end up with a reinforced, self-perpetuating and skewed picture of reality.
LP: Now that is unfair -- and false. Logical Positivism does not introduce falsehoods into the picture, or ad hoc them, as many other systems of knowledge do. We do not presume the existences of souls, or "The Good", or angels or dragons or humors or ghosts simply because tradition dictates they exist. That has been the problem with so many systems of knowledge that operate on "Occam's Shopping Cart" -- grab what you want from the shelves and toss them in the cart, then wheel them to the cash register and ring them up. All sorts of pseudo scientific knowledge arises in this way -- look at the most recent fad: "Intelligent Design". Assume God exists, and that God is this and that, and does things this way and not that way -- and then proceed to find evidence that supports your assumptions. When the police do that, it is called framing a suspect. Hardly just, and certainly not defensible as truth, much less known truth -- knowledge.
I: But just because you are cautious in screening out spurious truth claims does not mean that you are unbiased. There is a telling problem in mathematics where it has been established by Gödel and others that the theory of arithmetic is *sound*, but not complete. That is, all of the theorems of mathematics you *can* prove are indeed true, but at least some of the theorems you cannot prove may also be true as well. You are missing information.
LP: Well of course. No one claims that in practice one can know everything!
I: But -- to return to the analogy of the jelly bellies -- there is more to this issue than missing minute statistical details , than an nth degree of precision. If a jar of jelly bellies is a jar of *coconut* jelly bellies with an occasional licorice JB thrown in, that is one thing. But if we are considering jars of jelly bellies in terms of jars with no licorice JBs, one licorice JB, two licorice JBs or four licorice JBs, then we are assessing entirely different facts of the matter. Rather than being statistical anomalies -- the occasional and minor packing accident -- these minute appearances of licorice JBs serve as fundamental characteristics of the "kinds" of jars under consideration, just as the "Y" chromosome in a cell is not merely a variation on the "X" chromosome -- one of 26 pairs of chromosomes in a random cell, but the indicator that the body in which this "Y" chromosome is found is a male and not a female -- a pretty big difference.
LP: Nonetheless, Positivism does pick up on these differences, and very well, despite your skepticism.
I: Does it? We can gather empirical evidence, we can examine it, and not understand what we are looking at. The truth may be staring us in the face, but we may not recognize it. Consider the ancient astronomers who saw specks in the sky and could not tell that one of those specks was the Andromeda galaxy, and not another ordinary star. Or consider the alchemists who say all of the chemical reactions we see today, but read "evolution of primary substances" into the processes they witnessed, and not "recombination of elements". Consider the more modern -- very recent really -- history of microbiology, as depicted in "The Microbe Hunters" and "Rats, Lice and History". Data, data, data -- on disease, on patterns of spread, on symptoms, on superficial observable generalities, and all the while the entity underlying these illnesses is invisible not merely to our senses, but to our methods for seeking data.
LP: Of course, the early medical researchers did not know what they were looking for --
I: And that raises the question: if we do not know what we are looking for, how does our Positivistic methods for attaining knowledge help us? How do we form justifiable generalizations if we do not perceive the very individuals we are generalizing about? We construct our generalities based on what we see, but what we see is not all that there is -- even worse, how we see what we see may not reveal what there is. We "see" the contents of a million JB jars by picking a few of them at random, and sample a few of the JBs in each jar. The vast majority of the jelly bellies we make judgments about we never even see. We see stars, but do not see the galaxies among the stars -- and we certainly do not see the black holes, asteroids, extra-solar planets and other items in space. We see the effects of disease, but not the agents of that disease. So when we form generalizations, we are making mathematical models based on our mathematical concept *of* the individual objects in question, and not on the transcendental nature of the objects themselves. We generalize abstractions, and obtain generalizations about abstractions --
LP: But we can fill in the gaps in the abstractions with further investigations --
I: Investigations into what? Into what we see? In "seeing", we do not apprehend all that there is, only what we detect. And that does not merely mean we are missing information, even important information, but that we are *interpreting* that information in light of our preconceived notions of just what it is we are looking at. We see specks in the sky, discover that they are stars, and then see a galaxy, which looks just like a star to the naked eye, or to a weak telescope, and judge it to be a star as well, which goes to support our generalizations that objects in the sky are stars --
LP: But further examination reveals dissimilarities, and the truth that it is a galaxy and not a star that we are looking at.
I: But how does this "further examination" fit into the Logical Positivist model? LP has "Occam's Razor", which removes spurious hypothetical claims about our observations, but not "Occam's Shopping Cart", which would, presumably, add to our list of knowns by embracing the possibilities of new entities. Such imagination, and discovery of exceptions to the established generalities really "lies outside" the LP process. Where in the Positivist epistemology does it say: "If you observe X, then X may be a good candidate for being something new" -- that is, something not yet detected and generalized, but needs to be added to the "known" -- the terra cognita? What part of "The Scientific Method" addresses *that* situation?
LP: You are asking for an algorithm that handles the unknown. That is like looking for a suspect in a criminal data base who is not in the data base, because he has never been arrested or printed --
I: Exactly! And -- to use your analogy -- should we assume that "all of the usual suspects" (in our data base) include *all* suspects, including our perpetrator, who may not be in any criminal record?
LP: Of course not. But to appeal to Occam's Razor, should we routinely assume that the suspect is *not* in the database, and that we should not look there as our first step?
I: That sounds reasonable, but look at the nature of the search as it is practiced. Such searches take time, and one may -- acting as a dutiful Positivist -- spend one's entire efforts looking in the database of existing knowledge, and never find reason -- according to Positivism -- to look outside the database. There are famous examples of this happening. The Pythagoreans, who denied the existence of irrational numbers, because such numbers did not fit their theory of number, or Einstein, who looked for a unified field theory based on "hidden forces" (of the type to be found in the old and established classical physics). One may limit one's search not only to "known land" but to familiar methods -- appropriate or not -- and never discover what one is looking for, because it is not to be found within the scope of inquiry, or by set methods.
LP: But one can always enlarge one's search scope, and certainly expand one's methodology.
I: Can, yes, but will -- perhaps not? Once one defines the parameters of the search, is it not reasonable to end the search once it is discovered the object of your search is not in the realm you are searching, or that it is not revealed by vetted methods? At some point, on occasion, one needs to say, X is not the case, because X has not been found to be the case.
LP: And your fear is that the search may have been prematurely called off, or the area of search too limited. Again, I say, one may always expand the search, or the methods used to conduct the search.
I: Well, this brings us to my second point: reductionism.
LP: Conflating two or more theories -- bodies of knowledge -- into one, by explaining, let us say, everything in theory A by the elements of theory B, the classic case being explaining all chemistry objects and phenomena in terms of atomic physics.
I: Yes. The danger, of course, is that sometimes the "reduction" is not full and complete. The theory being "reduced" may be reduced not by complete successful adaptation of theory A into theory B, but that, like the guests who sleep in the bed of Procrustes, the parts that don't fit may be cut off. Unquestionably many aspects of chemistry are reducible to physics, as many aspects of biology are reducible to chemistry, and many aspects of psychology are reducible to biology. But often the reduction is too quickly accepted, and unjustifiably so.
LP: But surely you would agree that if chemical entities are made up of physical entities, then chemical theory is reducible to physical theory --
I: Only if *all* aspects of chemistry are explainable purely in terms of physics. I would argue that in practice this reduction is assumed to be doable, rather than demonstrated as having been done. I find it curious, giving the Positivist deduction to "proof" that in its most critical cases, proofs are assumed, or swept aside. What I am leading up to is the failure, in practice, of reductionism. I see our time for today is up, but next time I would like to address a couple of faux reductions that turn out to be linked: the reduction of the color red to energy wavelengths, and the reduction of mental objects to physical states.
LP: You are going to introduce "subjective experiences" into the field of objective knowledge.
I: That is how it may appear to a Positivist. but in fact, I will be introducing individual phenomena that are "facts", but ones which may not lend themselves easily, or at all, to generalization. That is a different thing entirely.

INTERVIEWER: I've been thinking about your theory of knowledge since our last meeting, and I have some questions for you.
LOGICAL POSITIVIST: Certainly.
I: I don't expect a complete and comprehensive analysis of Logical Positivism -- I don't even want to parse out the "official philosophy" and the non-official offshoots from the broader influences and legacies --
LP: "Emanations radiating from the penumbras" and all that -- I understand. You want the -- "core values", so to speak, not a list of qualifying members.
I: So to speak. You state that the basic structure of Logical Positivist knowledge consists of premises -- verified by observation -- from which logical inferences are made, generalizations formed, and conclusions drawn. "Sound" arguments consists solely of true premises and valid inferences -- inferences which preserve truth value -- is that correct?
LP: It is. This is the highly efficient and fruitful culmination of the tradition of "getting the facts" and forming universal laws about the nature of reality. The virtue of this approach is that it eschews spurious claims of truth and invalid inferences, each of which lead to spurious claims, outright error, falsehoods, dogma, propaganda, superstitions, overgeneralizations, the willful exclusion of certain truths --
I: I think a Positivist "core value" as you put it is that truth claims are justified by "proofs" -- not merely proofs of individual and specific claims as such -- but -- as true in virtue of being instances of universal laws -- certainly a fairly strong criterion for truth claims.
LP: Indeed -- but that is the point. The goal of LP is not to come up with a "plausible" view of reality, a convenience in making practical judgments -- but truth claims -- claims about the nature of reality. After all, to give an example, the Ptolemaic and Copernican -- the geocentric and heliocentric -- models of the solar system both work as a methodology for predicting the positions and motions of the planets. At most, only *one* of these models is true of the world -- the way things actually are.
I: You make a distinction between reality itself, and our perception of reality --
LP: Yes, claims about the former are true, or false. Claims about the latter are irrelevant; they are not knowledge.
I: David Hume and others have pointed out that general laws are universal statements: "Matter cannot be either created or destroyed", for example, applies to all matter, all the time.
LP: That is correct.
I: But Einsteinian physics has shown us that matter CAN be destroyed, converted into energy in fact.
LP: E = MC^2 in fact. Yes.
I: Isn't that a contradiction?
LP: Well, no, it turns out that the original claim that matter cannot be created or destroyed was false, at least for the sort of cases that Einstein addressed. It turns out that matter and energy are two different forms of the same thing, and in a special class of interactions, the law does not hold. So the generalization needs to be adjusted. Still, the original claim does hold for ordinary circumstances.
I: Well how should we generally interpret this "ordinary circumstances" approach? Can we say that under ordinary circumstance, light travels at 300 kilometers per second, but that under extraordinary circumstances it might go slower, or faster?
LP: Oh, no. The constancy of the velocity of light is an established law.
I: Established how? It seems to me that if you only observe light in "ordinary circumstances", then you might not be aware of what velocity it would have in -- as you said about matter -- in "extraordinary circumstances" -- under water, for example.
LP: Uh, no -- its velocity would be slower -- the constancy of the speed of light holds only in a vacuum --
I: An "ordinary" vacuum?
LP: Well, we speak of "standard conditions" --
I: Or sometimes "ideal conditions" --
LP: The point is, we do not merely make use of empirical observations, we use mathematical logic to handle the full set of cases. We cannot drop every apple from every tree to see if it falls to earth. Fortunately we are justified by mathematical induction to draw universal conclusions from well-defined specific cases --
I: Wait, wait -- how does mathematical induction justify claims about the physical world? And what is a "well-defined case"?
LP: First, experience with the natural, physical world shows us that -- miracles aside <he-he> -- the physical world is based on mathematical principles: 2 + 2 = 4 in practice as well as in theory. Second -- and this is very important -- in science, when we make generalizations from specific cases, we "abstract out" the universal features of a particle case. When we combine two moles of hydrogen with one of oxygen --
I: -- a "mole" being a basic quantitative unit of atoms of a particular element or molecules of a particular compound --
L: -- a pair of jacks, a six-pack of beer, a case of scotch (12), a gross of eggs (144), a mole of hydrogen atoms -- when we combine two "units" of hydrogen with one of oxygen, we get one "unit" of water -- H2O. We do not take into account the atypical properties of individual hydrogen atoms, say -- one might be a deuterium atom --
I: -- with a neutron added to the hydrogen nucleus --
LP: Yes. That would be an "accidental" property of that atom in this case. The law states that two moles of hydrogen atoms and one mole of oxygen atoms forms precisely one mole of the molecule H2O.
I: That reminds me of an experiment in Davis and Hirsch's book "The Mathematical Experience" in which they demonstrate empirically that 1 + 1 = 1.
LP: Wha --
I: They take -- and I have tried this -- one cup of air-popped popcorn to which they slowly pour in one cup of milk, allowing the popcorn to absorb the milk, The result is one cup of -- er --mush.
LP: Well -- that is --
I: -- not ordinary circumstances?
LP: Well, a cup of popcorn added to another cup of popcorn would make two cups --
I: So are we "mixing apples and oranges", to mix metaphors? Or "mixing hydrogen and oxygen"?
LP: Well, no -- you're playing with the standardized conditions --
I: But I guess my question is, what does Logical Positivism have to say about these "ordinary circumstances" and "standardized conditions". How, for example, do we judge when it is the case that we are properly abstracting the essential features of an object or event, and when we are merely over generalizing? I say this, because we do have scientifically conducted tests -- putatively scientific anyway -- which claim to measure "psi" forces (telepathy, for example), yet which are clearly not sound in their results. Now obviously, given that we have set up a set of procedures and guidelines (Logical Positivistic procedures and guidelines, for example) for what constitutes "knowledge", we can differentiate what -- according to the LP standard -- counts as "knowledge". My question is what justifies the LP standard?
LP: Its -- objectivity -- its universality --
I: Well, lets take a universal law -- a generally accepted law -- the law of gravity, which is fairly uncontroversial. We have the famous inspirational image of Newton watching an apple fall from a tree, and his Law of Gravity which states -- among other things that objects are gravitationally attracted to one another: release an apple, and it and the earth are attracted to one another -- the attraction -- the weight -- being on the side of the much larger earth.
LP: And I would point out that the witnessing of the falling apple does not constitute PROOF of the law, only a metaphor. Newton used empirical observation of planetary motion in a vacuum to construct a mathematical model incorporating only those general features common to all matter to form his law.
I: Yes, but how does this law deal with the apparent exceptions?
LP: Exceptions?
I: Yes. I hold a helium balloon. I release it. the balloon goes u--
LP: That is not an exception! The surrounding air is heavier -- subject to greater gravitational attraction -- than the balloon, which is pushed UP by the air. In a vacuum, the balloon would fall like a lead balloon--
I: Well what about a pigeon?
LP: A pigeon?
I: I let go of a pigeon, it flies SIDEWAYS. The pigeon is heaver than air, by the way --
LP: That is like the balloon -- gravitational forces imparted to the balloon and to the pigeon are superceded by other forces, the force of the surrounding air, or the force of the pigeon's wings upon the air.
I: And if I drop a hint?
LP: A HINT? I don't understand -- oh, "drop" -- you are playing with semantics now. "Drop" does not mean the same thing in the physical and the metaphorical cases. Puns are not knowledge -- they play on superficial similarities --
I: Aren't alchemy, and astrology and other pseudo-sciences based on those sorts of similarities? In alchemy, for examples, the chemical process of purification of an element occurs in a "crucible" -- the act of "crucifying" is analogous to Christian purification of the soul, and the transformation of -- lead, say -- into gold is a process of purification analogous to spiritual cleansing.
LP: Exactly! A theory of chemistry interaction that is modeled on the airy conjecture of spiritual meliorism! Lead is "redeemed" into gold. Only we know better through more rigorous investigation that lead is not "better" than gold, that atoms of one element do not "evolve" on any reasonable interpretation of the events, and that if anything, gold is not lead with the impurities removed, or improved -- and that the alchemic account is simply -- wrong.
I: The issue of the significance of "proof" would take us into many interesting areas -- but for now I would like to look at Probabilistic Inference -- the importance of which Locke discusses in his Essay on Understanding as I recall. As much as LPs exalt complete, sound proof for justification for its truth claims, the fact is, we cannot "prove" every truth claim that is made, can we? In actual practice, we do not justify -- logically prove -- every universality we then appeal to in support of some particular case. We see a lot of white swans, conclude that all swans are white on the basis of this, then -- and only then, once the "all swans are white" law gains public acceptance, the black swan of the family turns up, and we are forced either to make an embarrassing retraction, or to come up with a plausible "spin" on the now-discredited rule in order to save it, and Logical Positivism's principles and methodologies.
LP: You make it sound so shoddy and haphazard --
I: Well, isn't it? I am talking about actual implementation -- the *practice* of Logical Positivism in the "workplace" so to speak. It would seem to me that a theory of knowledge -- especially one as labor intensive and as exacting as Logical Positivism -- ought to have a good productivity record. As I mentioned earlier, Hume, and others, have claimed that we routinely do two things that are NOT justified by LP -- not even permitted by LP in fact.
LP: They are -- ?
I: Issuing claims of perceptions of Causal Interaction, and inferring universal statements from Inductive Generalization.
LP: Mathematical Induction, you mean.
I: It includes that, only -- it is not so mathematical -- and it is not all that hot among some mathematicians --
LP: The Finitists, you mean, those --
I: Well let's not get ahead of ourselves. Lets take a look at induction, "universalization" and probability inference, shall we?
LP: All right.
I: Generally speaking, knowledge based on true premises and valid inference takes the form of "If X, then Y"?
LP: That is correct for inferential knowledge, direct observation take the form of "Y is observed to be so".
I: So if I look at the bottom of my shoe and see a hole, then the claim "I have a hole in my shoe" is justified by direct observation. On the other hand, if I step into puddle of water and my foot feels wet, I make an inference, such as (1) my foot feels wet --
LP: Direct observation --
I: (2) If my foot feels wet (and it does), there is water in my shoe --
LP: Logical inference based on (1), and on a bit of general knowledge of the "conditional form" --
I: Well that is what I'm getting at: what justified (2) in this case? My foot could feel wet for other reasons -- my nerves are not working right, my foot is bleeding -- there are other possibilities --
LP: I see what you are getting at -- but you are misrepresenting the reasoning process -- oversimplifying it --
I: How so?
LP: You attach weights to likely inferentials. Look, you pick the "conditional" knowledge on what is likely and appropriate. (1) Your foot feels wet. (2) is really a conjunction of all the possible ways your foot could become -- or feel -- wet; your nerves are shot, you have a hole in your sole, it is raining inside your shoe, your foot is melting, you are bleeding, and so forth. Given the conjunction of "your foot is wet" and "you just stepped into a puddle", it is reasonable to pick the "if your foot feels wet, it is because there is water in your shoe", especially given the conjunction of "my foot has started to feel wet right now" and "at the very same time, I just stepped into a puddle of water".
I: You seem to be appealing to close conjunction (in this instance), and to the general rule of "constant conjunction". But as Hume has pointed out, the constant conjunction of two events is insufficient to PROVE connection, much less a causal relation between the two, much less which (if either) is the cause and which the effect. It may be for example that both are the effects of some third circumstance -- there are other possibilities --
LP: But let us be reasonable -- experience SHOWS us that --
I: Now wait a minute. Logical Positivism says nothing about our "experience" of events, much less any rationale for concluding from "experience" alone that such-and-such is the general rule. We OBSERVE A, and then B, and we observe A and then B *again*, and a third time, and a forth -- how often must one conclude from that that if A then B, or "A causes B", or "A is the harbinger of B", or whatever you wish to conclude. And where, in the name of Hume, do we observe the so-called "casual link" between A and B, no matter how many times we observe the two together?
LP: We can infer the link --
I: Based on what? Yes, you can argue that given "A and then B" we infer "A *therefore* B" -- but what is the justification for this conclusion?
LP: Well, one way to argue this is that if the two events or circumstances are related in some way -- one is the cause of the other, or both are the effect of some other common cause, or that there is some other connection -- then they are very likely to appear together, and not separately, and that one -- the cause -- is very likely to appear before the other -- the effect.
I: "Appearance" being our observation -- the first class of "knowables", the second being our inferred generalizations?
LP: Yes.
I: And "likelihood" -- the probability of A then B (or as another British empiricist and mathematician, Thomas Bayes put it, the probability of A, given that B is the case) -- is justified by -- what?
LP: I don't know what you mean.
I: Well, assuming that (1) your foot feels wet -- a direct observation -- then what justifies your claiming (2): if your foot feels wet, then there is water in your shoe rather than (2'): if your foot feels wet, you are experiencing a deteriorating nervous system (your brain, perhaps), or (2' '): your foot is bleeding, or (2' ' '): some ice from your drink slipped down the side of your sock and down into your shoe, and so forth. What is it that you are observing, or know from general truth claims (knowledge) that justifies in ultimately drawing the *sound* logical conclusion that water leaked in through a hole in your shoe and not as a piece of ice from your drink?
LP: Well [laughing] I can always look at my shoe --
I: But we can't always do that. Remember Einstein's image of the universe as a sealed pocket watch we can observe, and speculate upon, but cannot open up. But let's take a look at "probably inference", shall we? Suppose we have -- let's make it interesting -- a bottle of 499 orange-colored vitamin E capsules and one black-colored licorice jelly belly about the same size, shape and feel as the capsules.
LP: All right.
I: Now keeping in mind that we are making a metaphysical assumption -- that there ARE 499 orange vitamin E capsules and one black jelly belly candy in the opaque bottle, I wish to examine LP's reasoning in determining whether or not there is a jelly belly in the vitamin bottle, or that there are only vitamin E capsules in that jar.
LP: All right.
I: I jiggle the jar around for a bit, and draw an orange vitamin E capsule. I repeat this process twenty-nine more times, and come up with a total of thirty vitamin E capsules. What conclusion should I draw based on these results?
LP: Well, the rules for probability are not nearly as "chancy" as some take it to be. There is a well specified mathematical definition for what these results mean, which can be expressed in a couple of different ways. Basically, without knowing that there is a black pill in the bottle, given the number of "pills" in the bottle and the randomized drawing and the result, we can say that the chance that *all* of the pills are vitamin E is extremely high --
I: Despite that there is in fact a licorice jelly belly in the bottle?
LP: Yes. Probability talks about what is likely the case, not what IS the case. What IS the case is a matter of fact: there is a licorice jelly belly in the jar, or there is not. If we need to know whether this is the case, we need to go through the entire bottle. This is usually not the case in scientific matters; the natural world tends to "bunch up into discernable kinds". One classic example is basic chemistry, in which atoms of particular elements appear in molecules in reasonably balanced proportion. Sucrose is C12-H22-O11 while salt is Na-Cl and sulfuric acid H2-S-O4. You just don't find molecules with ten million hydrogen atoms and one carbon atoms.
I: But its that so because thee are no such molecules, or because we do not look for them, and hence do not find them.
LP: <laughing> Well, if there were such molecules, then there would be substances made up of these molecules, and we would examine such substances, and discover molecules that violated the basic principle of stoichiometry --
I: The principle that atoms appear in molecules in definite, discrete -- and relatively small proportions, as in water (H2-O) and not in varying amounts such as H3-O, H2-O2 and the like, or in proportions of a million to one --
LP: That is correct. I should add that all of nature seems to "bunch up", or occur in repeatable, normalized proportions. Cows tend to be all about the same size and shape and alike in other characteristics, as are pine trees, and diamonds and asteroids. There is no continuous variation between objects that are more cow like and less asteroid-like at one end of the spectrum, and more asteroid-like and less cow like at the other. If there were then it would be impossible to recognize, or view, much less make generalized claims of knowledge about them, to be sure. We could not conduct repeatable experiments, or make predictions about the nature or behavior of the natural objects of the world -- there would BE no science.
I: Then if there were only "one" of everything, even if -- *especially* if -- there were a great many one-of-a-kind objects in the physical world -- then we would not have "knowledge" of the kind you described earlier.
LP: Absolutely not. There would BE all of these infinitely diverse objects -- a billion different elements, sextillions of different molecules, sheer astronomical numbers of different *species* of life in a single backyard -- if you could even call them "species". Even if there were some relation between a parent and offspring of some life form, how would we know, unless we were present at their birth? We would know *nothing* about the relations between -- well -- anything. Causality, and kind, and properties would be completely invisible to us, just as in mathematics where irrational and transcendental numbers are impossible to write down completely, or compute with precisely, except when symbolized, as in the case of the square root of two, or "pi", or "e", or for any of the omega numbers --
I: Omega numbers?
LP: Infinitely long decimal numbers for which there is no short-hand way of denoting them. They are not the result of solving an equation, or summing up a series -- they simply have to be written out to be distinguished from each other -- and they cannot be completely written out; any process for writing them out, or for reading them, or computing with them would take forever.
I: That leads to another line of questioning. There were two serious blows against Logical Positivism in the early 1900s -- one was the Heisenberg Principle in physics, and the other was Godel's Incompleteness Theorem --
LP: They were -- they exposed limitations upon the Logical Positivist programme, I'd prefer to say --
I: I'll get back to Heisenberg in a moment. First, as part of the LP "programme" as you call it, Godel showed that you could not -- even in mathematics -- even in elementary school arithmetic, fully resolve the question as to which truth claims in arithmetic were true, and which ones were false -- despite the fact that every one of these statements IS either true or false.
LP: Well, that is because we set a higher standard of "proof" for the truth of a statement than others do . . .
I: It isn't enough to SAY that two to the billionth power is such-and-such -- you require a "proof" in order to claim that one *knows* the value of that expression -- can you explain that for me?
LP: Well let's take a simpler case by way of illustration. Let us show that 2 + 2 = 4 is a provable theorem of arithmetic --
I: What does that mean -- "a provable theorem"?
LP: It means that we not only assert that "2 + 2 = 4", and that it has a certain specific interpretation, but that it has a step-by-step proof, starting with our assumptions, and using logical inferences to reach our theorem. The assumptions we use for theorems of arithmetic are the five Peano axioms -- very basic axioms:
(Axiom 1) Zero is a number
(Axiom 2) If N is a number, then N ' (the successor to N) is a number.
(Axiom 3) Zero is not the successor of any number.
(Axiom 4) If the successors of two numbers are equal, then those two numbers are themselves equal.
(Axiom 5) (Induction Axiom) The set of natural numbers is defined as the set of numbers including zero and the successor of every number in the set of natural numbers.
I: What does that get us?
LP: It gets us the proof that "2 + 2 = 4". Look, we know -- it is given -- that zero is a natural number, right? Then the successor to zero is 1 -- a natural number by axiom (2), and therefore the successor to 1 is 2, also a natural number. Then we define addition as a successor operation: N --> N ' is defined as "addition by one": N + 1 = N '. From this we can show that 2 is zero plus 2 [Z ' ' = Z + 1 + 1 = 2], and then that 4 is 2 plus 2 more [2 = Z ' ' = Z + 1 + 1, and (Z + 1 + 1) + 1 + 1 = (Z ' ' ) ' ' = 2 ' ' = 3 ' = 4]. QED.
I: If Axioms 1 - 5 are indeed axioms, then what justifies their truth?
LP: The obviousness of their truth. Suppose zero was not a number -- what then? Besides, these axioms are *useful* because one can prove all of the theorems of arithmetic from them witout the need for any additional axioms -- the entirety of arithmetic is condensed in these five little statements.
I: A very neat "reduction" -- which is a hallmark of LP. But I am still concerned about these axioms and their applications. You say that the justification for the claim that zero is a number is that it is "obviously true"?
LP: Well, we have our observations from nature and from working with numbers --
I: So mathematics is *empirical*? What about the cup of popcorn added to the cup of milk --
LP: That's not math -- that's cookery. Look, some axioms, like (1) are definitions -- arbitrary and useful for proofs -- others are choices -- like Euclid's Fifth Postulate -- you know: "parallel lines never meet". The fifth postulate was really a choice made between three possibilities: parallel lines never meet, parallel lines converge, and parallel lines diverge -- three geometries, three choices. Or if you like, we can take a broader view of geometry and drop the fifth postulate altogether: Projective Geometry, in which the distinctions between "lines" and "points" are dropped --
I: That reminds me -- axiom (5) -- that all of the successors -- succeeding successors I mean -- of zero are natural numbers. Couldn't you prove that by applying axioms 1- 4?
LP: A finitist might insist upon it -- Finitist mathematicians doubt the metaphysical existence of infinity -- they regard it only as a "device". If you were to go about "proving" axiom (5), you would start with the first four axioms, and begin by proving that zero is a natural number, which is can be done in one step: invoke axiom (1). We prove that 1 is a natural number by applying axiom (2): showing that it is the successor of a number we know to be a natural number, namely, the number zero. Now that zero *and* one are shown to be natural numbers, by repeatedly applying axiom (2) to the result, w can eventually show that any given positive integer 'n' is a natural number by showing it to be the nth successor to zero --
I: So, you've proved the fifth axiom --
LP: No -- we have only proven that all of the integers up to some finite number 'n' are natural numbers. There are infinitely many more natural numbers, so it would take an infinitely long proof to show that *all* of them are indeed natural numbers.
I: Wait a minute -- you mean it is TRUE that all of the numbers zero, one, two, three and so on are natural numbers -- you just can't PROVE it?
LP: [Sounding embarrassed] Eh -- no. The problem is that the proof is not finite. If you prove that *all* of the number of a given set up to 'n' are positive integers -- natural numbers -- *that* doesn't prove that the next number in your set (n + 1) will be a natural number -- not until you construct a proof for that number as well -- and then you still have to do that for all of the succeeding numbers. you can't just say "this is the set of natural numbers because the first one million of them are natural numbers -- ". You either argue in a circle: this set of numbers is the set of natural numbers because we say it is, or you accept it as an axiom --
I: Which is a formalized way of saying exactly the same thing. Now about Godel's Incompleteness theorem --
LP: Which in a non-fancy way of stating is the fact that when you set up a mathematical language, with symbols and quantities and operations and the like you are, in virtue of the grammar of the language, able to form "statements", like "2 + 2 = 4", "7 - 7 = 12" --
I: Which is *false* --
LP: Of course. the problem, as Godel discovered -- proved -- is that when you set up any mathematical language and start grinding out statements, you immediately face the "characterization problem" --
I: Which is the question: "Does this particular statement go in the "true" bag, or the "false" bag?"
LP: Exactly. It's easy at first: "2 + 2 = 4" is true, "7 - 7 = 12" is false -- but when you get to general statements, like "x + x = 2x", and "There is no number 'n' that satisfies Fermat's Last Theorem", the strategy for finding a proof gets harder and harder -- and longer and longer. In the case of universals, you are dealing with proofs that are not merely infinitely long, they are longer than that -- the language cannot handle such statements -- or the proofs that are required to show they are true (or false). Of course we can always do as we did with Euclid's Fifth Postulate: list the alternatives and pick one of these as a new axiom --
I: But which one -- and *why*! It sounds to me like you are ad hocking a system of knowledge, not establishing provable "truths".
LP: well, yes, that *is* a problem --
I: I wish to move on to physics now -- the other LP darling. The LP claim is that physics is "mathematics actualized".
LP: Well, some of my colleagues used to believe that --
I: Burned by "The Uncertainty Principle"?
LP: Well, the thing about that is we started out -- 1890, 1900 -- with a Newtonian Universe based on Euclidian Mathematics, and by the 1930s we were working with a post-Einsteinian Universe based on Godel's Incomplete Arithmetic. It kicked the notion of "formal proof" out from under us.
I: How did the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle hurt?
LP: Well, even if we could never measure the physical universe in all of its properties and states and form and structure in *practice*, we could at least do so in theory, and chalk up the error to measurement flaws. But quantum mechanics -- the new physics -- it is like a carpenter discovering that however precise a ruler he has, he can never measure his tables, chairs, sideboards any more accurately that one inch give or take. no matter what he does, he cannot make any measurement, cut or sand any piece of wood, drill any hole -- more accurately than to within one *inch*.
I: Quantum physicists are split as to whether this "margin for error" is the result of the ultimate limit of our measuring tools, or whether objects *themselves* -- tables, chairs, slats, holes -- are "fuzzy" in dimension. Electrons are not hard little balls, but probability manifolds. A certain electron is said to be "mostly within this volume of space", and not definitely here or there. Is the fuzziness of our descriptions -- our *knowledge* -- of physical reality due to the limitations of our instruments, OR, to the definiteness of the objects of our world?
LP: Answer that definitively and then go pick up your Noble Prize in Oslo come next year [laughter].
I: Putting aside the perceived fuzziness of the physical world it seems to me that there are other, perhaps more immediately series problems with LP physics --
LP: You are figuring this out, *now* [laughter].
I: Well, going back before the contemporary physics of the last century, back to the Empiricists, in fact, of the 1700s -- many skeptics -- Berkeley and Hume, to note only a few --
LP: You are talking about the problem of "causality" I presume?
I: Yes, as Hume put it, we see the cue ball, we see the target ball, the cue stick, the hole and the felt pool table top -- but we do NOT see the "causes" when the cue and the balls move. we merely conjecture them and hope for the best.
LP: Well, I use to say that "probability" was our way out -- that if something happened 99 times in the same circumstances, then it was safe to bet it would happen the 100th time around -- but purists still hold to that, while cynics tend to hold to the opposite -- you know the guys who kept betting on black at Monte Carlo when the ball landed on red 22 times in a row -- that's about one in four million --
I: -- and the bank broke the gamblers. Doesn't that apply in the natural world as well -- the mathematical world as well, too. The highly useful Pythagorean theorem is not only provable, it is easily generalized to any number of dimensions. The four color map theorem, the Goldbach conjecture, Riemann's Hypothesis, and Fermat's Last Theorem, however, have been terribly hard to solve -- Riemann and Goldbach are still unsolved as I understand. True, they may not have the immediate practical applicability of Pythagoras's theorem, but --
LP: You will note that the theorems you just mentioned are mainly "pure math" theorems -- they seem to be the most difficult ones - the "fun and games" problems. The practical ones we can knock off fairly easily -- why do you suppose that is?
I: An interesting question -- well, for one, the physical world -- insofar as it is mathematicizable -- seems to be much simpler than the more varied and extended world of mathematical objects, most of which have *no* analog to reality --
LP: Infinity, for example -- "primeness", "spaces" -- a lot of them I suppose -- though Newton's "Three-Body problem" is a very practical one in orbital mechanics, and yet it has eluded exact solution.
I: Getting back to physics and probability -- and my point about -- "long-shots" I guess you'd call them -- if our knowledge, about mathematical or about physical entities is merely a matter of betting on the short-odds -- on the easily provable "laws" --then isn't our knowledge of the world -- the mathematical or physical world -- a matter of "cherry picking" -- knowledge is whatever is "easy for us to prove" by some fairly objective methodology of proof?
LP: You put that rather grimly, but in practice, yes, our methods for ascertaining knowledge in the "hard" sciences is skewed towards the easily demonstrated cases. Which leaves open the question as to what are the *important*, the fundamental -- axiomatic or "law-like" generalizations, laws, rules or what have you. That the general rules we have discovered about the mathematical and physical world tend to be a function of their ease of discoverability rather than of their fundamental importance or "support" in the structure of knowledge -- that is troublesome. It makes you wonder what we don't know, and why we do not know it --
I: And whether it is knowable at all --
LP: Indeed. I am a little less certain of the claims of LP epistemology than I first thought I would be. One final topic for this time -- and then I would like to talk to you again about a separate set of matters, namely "persons" and their properties in the LP model of reality -- and that is this issue of causality. LP claims to identify, isolate, objectify and structure what is basically real -- the stuff of hardcore reality, apart from religious bias, from rationalistic notions having no support in reality -- LP has --and still is, for many people -- been a epistemic purgative. Anything that does not fit, that does not have actual support in nature (or in mathematics), that does not have *some* necessary and visible basis in observed phenomena -- is suspect. Hence, no Santa Claus, no "crystalline spheres", no "best-of-all-possible-worlds", no "invisible" or otherwise unmanifest phenomena --
LP: "Hidden forces", as Einstein called them. He was a Classical Newtonian to the bitter end.
I: -- and yet, ever since Hume, we have confronted, and never really nailed down -- one of the most fundamental, relied upon and trusted in of LP concepts: causality. Now in math, as complex and intricate as it is, the "laws" tend to lie on the surface -- the law of cosines, for example, the rules for mathematical operations, and so forth -- they are all justified by explicit, well-defined "rules". But -- physical causality -- laws of nature -- Hume disparagingly called them "constant conjunctions"; individual cases observed again and again and again -- like the finite instances of your infinitely long mathematical "proofs" -- the ones that are never finished for the general case. You take probabilistic samples, and deduce a Law from then on the basis of the absence of counterexamples. Is his -- *knowledge*?
LP: Well, it is certainly better than guessing, faith, or out-of-the-blue ideas deduced purely from pet views about the way things ought to be.
I: But even so, the more one examines the philosophy of science, and realizes the holes in major -- even structural -- inferences about the world -- it -- is disturbing to say the least. One of the things that bothers me the most is the problem related to Bayes theorem of probability: the probability that the cause of Y was X, given that Y *did* occur. We do not *perceive* cause -- observation being the first principle of your logical positivist system -- and we cannot *infer* a cause from an insufficient number of -- well -- insufficiently *causally* related cases -- valid inference being your second principle. I think we have run out of LP principles. But I would like to question you on the LP position on very troublesome, though not at all problematic entities: people, minds and related objects.
LP: I'll try to give you the LP position on these -- but I assure you that you won't be happy . . .
I: The question is whether my unhappiness is a fault in myself, or in Logical Positivism . . .

In my last blog, I briefly described the Logical Posivitist theory of knowledge, and posed the question: how good is this theory of knowledge? The first questions skeptics will ask - how can we know the answer to this question? If we don't know (in some special, authoritative, sure-fire way) what knowledge is, then how can we know we know what knowledge is. This leads (as so many naive lines of philosophical thought do) to an infinite regression which only delays the inevitable and satisfies no one. This is a faulty approach, and one which, oddly enough, Logical Positivism and its fundamentalist brother, Rationalism (think Logical Positivism without reliance upon empirical data) are highly vulnerable to. The mistake lies in thinking we must build our foundation upon a rock, when -- as spiders illustrate -- one can begin construction of an amazingly strong structure upon the wispiest of filaments, providing our method of construction is sound.

In the case of Logical Positivism, we can begin with the premises for its model of knowledge and examine them, asking questions as to the plausibility of these premises, their truth value, their relation to one another and to the world they purport to describe, most importantly what, if these premises put into practice, we will actually get.

I suggested that one could devise a list -- a test of sorts, or interview sheet -- of systems of knowledge, and apply that list of principles to the epistemic theory in question. Again, there will be the objection that this is like trying to find out how long a stick is -- use a yardstick. But how long is the yardstick? Measure it with another yardstick. Infinite regression, and no certainty to be found along the way. But this is not, in fact, how yardsticks -- of which we have developed many kinds -- come into being, through some sort of higher metaphysical legitimacy. What happens in practice is, first, we decide what it is we wish to measure, and then develop some concept of measure appropriate to the properties of an object we wish to measure, and then develop the measuring tool itself which may be highly imprecise and just as highly arbitrary, and begin measuring. For the yardstick this may have taken mere moments. For the devices used to measure neutrinos, considerable invention, time and effort (and sweat and tears and funding) were required.

The epistemic problem of the validity of measurement (like the philosophy of every other of the many topics I have broached so far) is a complex and involved one, and in mentioning it briefly here, I do not wish to suggest to anyone that my brief initial approaches to issues are a substitute for longer, arduous investigation and debate, much less the end of the matter. It will be a long and overarching theme of my essays (one to be found in all of philosophy) that philosophical begins with naive, almost childlike (not childish) questions -- and answers -- and continues into the entirety of the "deep matter" of the universe, which is why philosophical discussions always run late into the night (and early into the following morning). This is not a flaw of philosophical discussion -- or of its participants, only a consequence of the fact that philosophy is the trunk of a very large tree, and the pursuit of knowledge may involve much scampering along the many branches. The antidote to initial skepticism is that in philosophy one may make assertions (or premises, or assumptions, or tentative or conditional claims at very low cost. The catch of course, is that eventually, one must "cash in" one's claims through some sort of verification of their truth, or face watching one's elegantly crafted argument bounce higher that a three-party out-of-state check.

So let us make some general assumptions about principles of knowledge, what a theory of knowledge is, or should be, and apply them to Logical Positivism. In doing so, we may question the list itself, as well as the system under scrutiny (we will in fact, and in doing so, learn something about what knowledge really is, and -- getting back to our original question -- actually demonstrate and support the claim that we have no moral knowledge, and discover some clues as to why this is the case.

Let us look at a short and general list of "interview questions" we as employers of such a theory of knowledge) might ask. (There is absolutely nothing authoritative, sacred, universal or inviolate about the questions on this list; they come from my experience, which only means that they are not likely to be completely stupid or off-the-wall, and nothing more):

(1) According to your epistemic theory (theory of knowledge), what IS knowledge? What counts as knowledge (according to your theory) and what does not? Are there shades and degrees of knowledge (like high confidence, strong belief, educational guesswork, mere hunch and the like) or is it all or none (complete certainty, or absolute ignorance), or what?

(2) According to your theory, what can we have knowledge OF? What kinds of "things" are there? In what ways, and to what degree and to what extent can we "know" about these things? Are there (possibly -- we may not be able to know) things that are not covered by your theory? Why not? More generally, are all truths knowable, only some of them, or none of them?

(3) What methods, procedures, devices, tools, processes, senses and/or anything else you can come up with is required to obtain the knowledge your theory offers? (Telescopes? Naked-eye witness? Naked ears? Computers? Histories? Video/audio tape? ESP? Purely rational thought. Good hunches? Sacred texts? Brown bags and tweezers? ? ? Interviewers? Rumors and myths? Bones (either as fossils, or as mystical predictors.)

(4) How does one evaluate / verify (confirm, justify, review, correct, revise) / organize (store, collate, organize, generalize, compare and contrast, otherwise relate) / access (distribute, teach, expand / apply this knowledge? Is getting such knowledge practical, or only theoretical?

(5) How stable is the set of knowledge claims your theory offers? Are your system's knowledge claims testable. Are they compatible with one another (internal consistency), and with other systems? How often are such claims found to be incomplete, and why? How difficult are they to "complete", or expand? How often are they found to contain mistakes, and why? How often does one need to revise one's body of knowledge, and under what circumstances? What is the scope of this knowledge (how generalizable is it?
One could ask other questions, and one may wish to kick the tires and ask for a 4-year warranty in the bargain. Note that none of these questions presume that knowledge exists, or is possible, or acquirable in practice, or economically or in a timely manner. They only pose what I think -- and what many people in practice (who use knowledge for some end) -- have found to be prudent questions. It does not imply that any system of knowledge will satisfy the interviewer at all, much less to the degree hoped for.

Skeptics are free to questions these questions, but must pay for their skepticism (as responsible skeptics always do) by explaining and justifying their doubt. For example, one may argue that there is no general definition of knowledge, that it is non-cognitive (i.e., "intuitive", like Justice Potter's definition of pornography ("I know it when I see it")). However, it seems like a bad start for a competing theory of knowledge to claim that it does not know what the subject of its own theory is. (And yet, GE Moore, in his "Principia Ethica, 1903 -- the start of our current troubled period in ethical history -- makes exactly that claim about ethical knowledge, that it is at best intuitive, and at worst, purely subjective.)

Skeptics might also argue that it does not matter how we collect the data, so long as the data is good -- which only begs the question: how do we know the data is good? Questions about our tools and methods for collecting facts (if there are any for the subject at hand) I would argue are appropriate. It is certainly not controversial to ask if some old tool or new methodology will do as it is expected under the theory in question. To give a fairly significant historical example, the claim of British Empiricism was that deductions about the nature of the world were based on "sense-data" -- on our experiences and perceptions as gathered through our eyes, ears, noses, etc. Well and good you might say.

But the Empiricist epistemic principle: base your knowledge judgments on sense-data, was compromised from the start. By the time Locke, Hume and others espoused this principle, scientists had already accepted (for better or worse) non-Empirical data and methods of inference. Two notable and highly popular inventions -- the telescope and the microscope -- violated the principle that our senses should be the sole source of experiential data. True, we acquired visual sense-data by looking through these scopes -- but sense-data of what? Did these instruments truly preserve the causal relation between the sense-data we receive, and the objects these sense data are purportedly of? The matter is not trivial. Although questions regarding the telescope and microscope have been largely resolved (but remember that every time you see a color photo of a germ or a nebula, chances are that the colors are "fictitious" -- artistic renderings used for visual contrast, and not the actual colors of the objects you see in the photo), the slew of instruments that have come since increasingly test the basic principles of Empiricism, and the patience of critics of scientific endeavor. At present, String Theory -- the theory that the "fundamental" particles of the universe are closed loops (think donuts, or hula hoops) -- is based almost purely on mathematical models, a methodology that goes back at least as far as Einsteinian Relativity Theory. (Einstein's justification for the reliability and scope of Relativity Theory's claims about "unseeables" was that the universe at this level was like a pocket watch: we see the hands move across the dial and hear the ticking, and construct models as to what (generally speaking) must, or at least could, be going on inside.)

The point is not -- as the post-Modernists will later claim -- that we have no knowledge of anything, but that finding epistemic principles that will justify our acceptance (or rejection) of knowledge claims is by no means easy, straightforward or settled.

Lets take a peak now at Logical Positivism:

Mindful of our "list" (which I will not go through point by point here, I will only highlight certain positives and negatives) we can imagine the pitch:

"Logical Positivism carries the principles of Empiricism to its logical conclusion. LP claims are based on two things: empirical observation and logical inference. If an entity exists, we can detect it in some way, if not directly by sight, sound, smell and the like, then by extension from instruments and methods that "make visible" the properties of that object. So even "invisible" entities like germs (too small to see), black holes (too dark), radio waves (we don't have a sense to pick up radio waves), plate tectonic shifts (too slow), proton decay (too fast) and the Big Bang (we were born too late) or the Sun going nova (we were born too early) can be inferred by reliable methodologies. To make such inferences we using valid logical argument, which preserves the truth value of any true assumptions we make. And of course, by relying only on Empirical sense data, we know that our assumptions are correct. We do not "multiply entities endlessly" (as William of Ockham's "razor" principle cautions us -- weaving stories or creating imaginary objects or phenomena to support our claims -- we stick to the facts, and to logical proofs."

"What sorts of facts? What kinds of proof? Well, we start wit our sense (going back to Rene Descartes' "Meditations") and work from there. By adding new observations and making logical inferences from them we gradually fill out the picture. Everything we can know, which is to say, everything that there is, has some influence on the universe as a whole, which means we can, through a reliable chain of causality, make inferences about anything that really exists. "Gravity", "black holes" and "atoms" were once "metaphysical speculations" -- Newton didn't believe in "action at a distance" (gravity) -- but time and dint of effort reveals all that there is. All knowledge claims come from verified observation: it is either a direct perception, or a logical inference from direct perceptions. Inferential knowledge claims are fully supported by evidence, and proofs are supported by true assumptions. Moreover, through logic, we can generalize. Things are not things in themselves, but instances of some "kind". All carbon atoms are alike, so we can conclude that chemical or atomic interactions involving carbon atoms will always turn out the same, other things being equal. Hence we can not only make specific claims about individual observations, we can infer by similarity that like cases involve the same entities and processes -- you don't have to open up every watch to understand how clockworks function. By careful observation and sound inference, we can deduce the general laws -- the "Theory of Everything" as they call it nowadays -- that define the entire universe.

"This thoroughness of knowledge is based on the fact that the natural world is physicalized mathematics. In mathematics, the vast multitude of numbers and operations and other mathematical entities logically follow from a very tiny number of very simple premises and operations -- the "seed" of information that produces the entire "plant" of the universe through the expression of these laws. And not only is Reality mathematical, mathematics is logic: sound and complete. That is, every deduction (every proof of fact) from basic principles is valid; LP, properly applied, produces no falsehoods. AND, every truth out there is provable. If you cannot prove a claim, by direct observation or by inference using the scientific method, it simply isn't true."

Well, thank you for your presentation, LP. You make some very impressive claims for your system. I'm running late just now, would you mind coming back again so that I may clarify some questions I have?

Certainly.

Thank you very much.

[Next: Logical Positivism On the Rack.]

TWO EXTREMES IN THE SEARCH FOR KNOWLEDGE

Before offering a more pragmatic approach to knowledge (in support of the claim that we have at present no store of ethical knowledge), I would like to present two views of knowledge that have defined the parameters of 20th century knowledge and which permeate our present-day view of the world -- for well or ill. Diametrically opposed -- often flatly contradictory -- these theories compete for our attention and our acceptance, as heated business rivals vie for market share, each offering their own explanation and methodology for ascertaining truths about the natural world and the world of personal experience.

The first, which rose to unprecedented fame and influence in the first half of the 20th century, is Logical Positivism, an epistemology that has characterized and shaped our modern view of secular, natural science. The second -- in keeping with its anti-analytical, anti-systematic view of reality -- has no specific official designation, but encompasses Subjectivism, Relativism, post-Modernism and a host of other late 20th century views of knowledge, and has absorbed traditional "mystic" knowledge of all kinds, from personal intuitions to cultural and religious lore -- all of the "knowledge" that doesn't fit into the Logical Positivist straightjacket, but which Positivists -- and others -- would claim is not genuine knowledge .

As I hope to argue later on, each of these accounts grasps certain intuitions about reality, only to let other parts of reality slip away. Nor is it simply a case of "putting the two pieces together" to get the complete picture, for the knowledge claims of these two epistemologies is fundamantally incompatible -- although either is believable, they cannot both be true ("true" in the same sense in both cases). Something must give: either one of these views of reality is simply wrong (or inferior to the other), or our very understanding of "knowledge" is wrong in some important way, and needs to be corrected or completely revised.

I will not attempt to give a full and complete account of either position here, much less describe the heated controversy that has raged over the last few decades; here I will only sketch out the general form of each epistemic position, with an eye to the "rules" for each position's criteria for counting certain assertions as "knowledge". I will examine Logical Positivism (in an extreme and probably oversimplified form) in this and the next blog; following that, I will examine the other view -- for simplicity's sake, referred to as "post-Modernism" (again in an extreme and oversimplified form). Again, the aim of this present discussion on epistemology (the study of what we know, and can and cannot know) is to understand why we have at present no ethical knowledge.

RAISING THE EPISTEMIC BAR: FORMALIZATION, UNIVERSALIZATON AND REDUCTIONISM

The first phase of 20th century Epistemology: Logical Positivism, is the father/mother of our modern image of scientists and of the institution of Science itself. The scientist is a priest, donned in a white robe (lab coat), sworn to vows of objectivity (the view from nowhere), cold, emotionless, dispassionate, persistent dedicated, unbiased, disinterested and unprejudiced. (S)He/it is gender neutral -- a social drone -- apolitical, unreligious, unaesthetic, impersonal and unfeeling. (S)He/it seeks Truth for its own sake, not for personal interest or gain, nor even for practical or political application. Indifferent to society's needs, wants, concerns, understanding or support -- even survival -- the scientist is a monk stationed in a laboratory, the scene for his/her revelatory work. This image, as presented, has worked its way into our folklore (think science fiction B-movie clichés) and our culture (from commercials appealing to studies by "leading scientists", to labs, institutions and mounds of "data"), to the point where the mere appearance or invocation of scientific imagery has a persuasive force upon its consumers comparable to that of a priest or shaman of a religious-based culture bearing a holy relic.
Logical positivist claims of knowledge are not merely true, but settled. The results of Scientific Methodology are truth claims that are universal, couched in the form of "laws". These laws are invariably neat, simple, unambiguous, few, complete, certain, exceptionless, precise, inevitable and universal. Science itself -- the methodological structure by which knowledge is acquired, evaluated and confirmed is not a work in progress, subject to review, correction and revision, but a sound and complete and system. Scientific methodology -- the carrying out, or "expression", of the rules of scientific inquiry -- is attained through a rigorous, exacting and demanding process. It is the careful, persistent and ritualistic application of a precise, well-defined, algorithmic method, an exhaustive set of principles of investigation that yield all and only knowledge.
A belief that is not supported by science (the word "science" means "to know"), isn't knowledge; such beliefs are spurious, and may be superstition, opinion, fiction, myth, speculation or delusion -- but not knowledge.
The world in all of its facets is entirely disclosable to us. "Hidden" forces (that Einstein and others appealed to in preference to an acceptance of quantum mechanics (which threw the first monkey-wrench into the Logical Positivist program) are non-existent. All that is true is provable (or otherwise demonstrable) in principle. Discovery is essentially a matter of persistent application (i.e., the iteration) of fundamental principles of discovery, the legendary calculus of the Scientific Method. Progress in science consists of eliminating unprovable or ungrounded beliefs and unconfirmed vagaries; it is a process of demystification, a kind of cosmic "inventory" in progress.
An essential feature of Logical Positivist science is Reduction. Occam's razor (first conceived of by William of Ockham in the 1300s) -- the principle that all unnecessary aspects of an explanation be discarded from the final theory -- is but one piece of silverware in the Positivist Reductionist arsenal of cutlery. Reduction takes many forms, and can be thought of as an integral part of the fundamental process of Generalization: the gathering of individual truth claims into Universal laws. Here are two illustrative examples. (1) Empirical Generalization: We observe that this swan is white, and the swan over there is white and that all of the swans seen this week in this region are white, and after more such like observation draw the general inference "All swans are white" from our collection of individual truth claims (generalization by Scientific Induction). (2) We (mathematically) observe that "1 + 1 = 2 x 1", "2 + 2 = 2 x 2", "3 + 3 = 2 x 3" and so on, and using mathematical induction, conclude that for all integers 'y', "y + y = 2y". An even more powerful form of reduction occurs when one set of phenomena -- chemical phenomena, say -- can be "reduced' (explained fully, without loss of truth claims or introduction of falsehoods) to another set of phenomena, say physics. (If all knowledge of chemistry can be explained in terms of physics, chemistry is merely a subset of physics, and the former is "reduced" to the latter. On the mathematical front, mathematics (thanks largely to Gottlob Frege, Bertram Russell and Alfred Whitehead in the first decades of the 20th century) has been (or been attempted to be) reduced to arithmetic: all more complex mathematical operations and entities can be simplified to arithmetic: a transcendental number like Pi can be reduced to a series of arithmetic digits (3.14159...), calculus operations can be reduced to series of arithmetic operations (sums, or divisions, etc.) The long term goal of logical Positivism is to reduce all physical sciences to Physics, to reduce Physics to Mathematics, and finally to reduce Mathematics to Formal Logic. When accomplished, knowledge -- all knowledge could then be fed into a computation "machine", and given time, all truths could be generated by the appropriate algorithm automatically, ending the need for "creative thought", "hunches", "inspiration" and other haphazard methods of inquiry. Obtaining the answer to any question -- any question at all -- would then be a matter of waiting in line until one's number is called.

As brief and simplistic as this sketch of Logical Positivism is, it should be familiar to most of us -- so familiar in fact that the average person is likely to think that that is what knowledge is, or at least likely to think that that is what society thinks that knowledge is. One may or may not be pleased with this "official" approach to knowledge. Some find it overbearing and pompous, if not cold and indifferent to social concerns -- and sometimes outright malevolent (the all-too-familiar "mad scientist" stereotype is at least as familiar as the scientist-as-sage-and-provider). And many see it as limited, or even demonic in its wholesale rejection of religious and spiritual traditions, all of which fall under the razor. Others still -- in light of the wealth of discoveries rigorous modern science has brought us, and in the face of the discomforts and horrors it has also brought us -- embrace Positivistic science as the armed and armored guardian that shields us from traditional superstition, occult mysticism and blind faith (epistemic models fraught with their own problems). Whether the move from traditional belief to Logical Positivism is itself a step forward, a step backward, or merely a side-step has been debated at length. Certainly the overwhelming public acceptance of Positivism in this last century has not meant that general understanding of the world has increased, only, as it seems at times from public reaction, that one idol has been replaced with another.

Now it is time to introduce a bit of "meta-philosophy" -- philosophical analysis applied to philosophy itself. Just as a diamond (the hardest known substance in nature or laboratory) is put to good use by cutting other diamonds, so too, philosophy can be used to evaluate itself. (One may be suspicious of this "fox-guarding-the-henhouse" maneuver, but with experience one finds that philosophy is perhaps the most effectively self-critical discipline there is. Still, one may -- as always in philosophical discussion and analysis -- withhold one's judgment until thoroughly convinced; there is never any pressure or obligation to "buy".)

What I am going to do is this. Having given a (very rough) sketch of the principles of Logical Positivism, which as a particular epistemology (a philosophical theory of knowledge) makes certain claims as to what knowledge is, and how to get it and why to trust to it, I will now set up an examining table on which Logical Positivism itself is to be evaluated. After all, anyone cam some up with assertions as to what is knowledge, and what isn't. If it were a mere matter of faith, or personal preference, or mere convenience, one could accept the first theory of knowledge to come along, and pay no more attention to its actual effectiveness or reasonableness or practical usefulness or reliability than a new diet book or spiritual guide.

But if a theory of knowledge -- like Logical Positivism -- steps forward and claims that it is the right or best or most appropriate way to uncover and evaluate knowledge, we can certainly ask whether it really works or not. After all, the landscape is littered with bust-developers, scalp-massagers, diet pills and exercise equipment sold on the specific claim that they would enlarge one's chest, regrow hair, lower one's weight or build muscle, and they either do these things, or they don't (most don't). It is only fair and reasonable -- if one seeks knowledge in the first place -- to ask for assurances, or some sort of proof or evidence or reasons, that the propounded theory will do as it advertises. We can ask of Logical Positivism, or post-Modernism, or of any procedure or practice whether it works as advertised. And now I will do just that.

I said earlier that Epistemology is the branch of philosophy which studies what we can and cannot know. If a particular methodology claims to give us knowledge, we may ask whether it does, and if so, how we know that it does, and how such a methodology works, and what kinds of knowledge it will indeed give us (if properly applied).

To make such an evaluation, it is helpful to ask just what it is we expect in the way of the product; in this case, just what we expect Logical Positivism (or post-Modernism, or some other epistemology) to give us. We can even set up a general checklist of things to look for (as we might for purchasing a new car or cyclotron, or hiring a housekeeper or professional hit-man). What would such a checklist for an epistemology look like, and how would it help us? Well, as we are looking for a useful and reliable epistemology, we would expect a candidate for our desired epistemology to do certain things. One epistemology may offer different features than another, one may be easier to implement, or harder, than another, and the expected results may be different -- an epistemology of mathematics (a very hot topic in the early 20th century) would help us find and evaluate mathematical theorems and formulas -- not at all helpful if one is a social psychologist looking for a theory of human behavior, but just the thing for a mathematician trying to organize a theory of arithmetic, or a more complex mathematical model.

To get to the point, here are some "checklist" items one shopping for an epistemology might keep in mind (and ask the dealer about):

(1) According to this epistemic theory (theory of knowledge), what IS knowledge? What counts as knowledge (in this theory) and what does not? Are there shades and degrees of knowledge, or is it all one or the other (certainty, or ignorance)?

(2) (Again, according to this theory) what can we have knowledge OF? What kinds of "things" are there? In what ways, and to what degree and to what extent can we "know" about these things?

(3) What methods, procedures, devices, tools, processes, senses and/or anything else is required to obtain the knowledge this theory offers? (Telescopes? Naked eyes? Naked ears? Computers? Notebooks? Audio tape? Eyewitnesses? ESP? Brown bags and tweezers? ? ?)

(4) How does one evaluate / verify (confirm, justify, review, correct, revise) / organize (store, collate, organize, generalize, compare and contrast, otherwise relate) / access (distribute, teach, expand / apply this knowledge?

One may think of many more categories of questions, and certainly many more specific levels of questions about our epistemic theory, but these at least give a good idea of what questions we can, and should ask about any epistemic theory. The (correct) answers to these questions will shed light on what we may expect in the way of results in applying this theory, just as discovering that a car has seven (or no) wheels, or that a housekeeper is blind, or speaks only Farsi, or has an uncanny ability to remove dust and stains from furniture, would help us determine what to expect in the way of performance or services in those respective areas.

[And as frivolous or pointless as this may seem in the abstract (it will get a lot less abstract in just a moment) this is no idle exercise. My (East) Indian philosophy professor, Dr. Naryan Champawat taught a survey course in the various philosophies of India (spanning some 4500 years and a continent-sized region of the world) and used exactly this method in presenting evaluating and comparing each of the philosophies under review. He did this by using a very simple approach: breaking down each of the many and varied (!) philosophies into three meaningfully anatomical parts: Metaphysics (what "things" there were, according to the particular philosophy), Epistemology (as we have seen -- what "knowledge" is, how it is acquired, and what it is OF, according to the philosophy being examined), and Ethics (what obligations and permissions people have under this theory). One can meaningfully and fruitfully analyze the most radically different philosophies under this approach, as we will soon see.]

So what does Logical Positivism have to offer its buyers?

In my next blog I will offer a consumer evaluation of Logical Positivism, and in the following blogs, a comparable evaluation of post-Modernism. After that, the task will be to show that ethical knowledge falls cleanly through both of these sieves (for radically different reasons), and as a result, we have no such knowledge because our current theories of knowledge simply do not capture the sort of knowledge that ethics requires.

The task then will be to argue that (a) there is such a thing as ethical knowledge, and (b) how we may go about looking for it and getting it, and evaluating it and storing it and applying it.

In my last blog, I made the assertion that our society has at present no moral knowledge. In this and in the next few blogs I wish to probe this undoubtedly disturbing, even unbelievable, thesis further. I will introduce a simple but apt and intuitive notion of knowledge (to be developed further later on) and apply this notion to our purported ethical knowledge to demonstrate that we indeed lack such knowledge. Next I will present the findings of two independent studies that led their finders to the outrageous but valid and well supported conclusion that we lack ethical or moral knowledge. From there, I will go on to discuss why this particular lack of knowledge is a serious problem worthy of out attention. Finally, I will discuss the practical application of philosophy to this problem, and argue that it is the most useful tool available to us to address this problem.

Knowledge: Fundamentals and Issues.

The question "What is knowledge?" covers a third of the field of Philosophy and is referred to by philosophers by the term "epistemology" (the study of knowledge). (The other two traditional fields of philosophy are "metaphysics" (the study of what "things" there are), and "ethics" (the study of -- well -- that is the subject of my project; let us say for the moment that it is the study of systems of voluntary human conduct, with the caveat that our discoveries along the way will reveal more of the nature of the subject, and expand and sharpen, and perhaps lead us to revise our perspective of just what it is we are looking at.).

Now as Philosophy itself covers "everything" (at the least, everything that can be comprehended by human intellect), the "What is knowledge?" naturally promises to be a large and sweeping -- and unwieldy and controversial -- one. Fortunately, unlike many areas of science, and metascience (i.e., philosophy), we all have some personal experience and gut intuitions about Knowledge: when you know something, when don't know something, when you merely believe something (a hunch), and when your belief is rock solid (good enough to bank on). (It is also true for the "average" person that (s)he has some pretty definite and reasonably well-grounded (if limited) ideas about what kinds of things there are and what codes of conduct exist and are appropriate to the circumstances at hand; Philosophy, as more than one philosopher has wryly pointed out, is the one field of study you enter already knowing about the subject.)

When it comes to "knowing" how things are, where to get useful information, and what to do (in regard to one's daily affairs), people tend to be very adept, persistent, innovative and resilient. If one does not ordinarily understand the breadth and scope of the universe at large, it is because one does not ordinary experience the universe at large on a daily basis. For this reason most people have not formed definite and reasonably well-informed attitudes towards quarks, galaxies, Hittite kitchenware, "bubble"-chip technology, Sherpan diet, the poetry of William Shenstone, the tastiness of kryll or praseodymium.

Nor does it mean that because the average person has knowledge of this or that facet of reality that this knowledge is definitive or unerring, or even that it reflects general understanding of phenomena. To know something is not to know everything. Ancient and medieval astronomers could predict the motions of the planets and stars with remarkable reliability and accuracy, yet they did not know that the earth revolved around the sun, what the planets were made of, or of the existence or nature of gravity. Applied chemistry existed long before the discovery of its fundamental unit, the atom, and practical biology: medicine, animal husbandry and agriculture have been established arts for many thousands of years, despite the fact that most of what we know about biology was acquired during the last century.

Knowledge appears to admit of degrees, from pure understanding to pure ignorance, and the knowledge that people have seems always to fall somewhere in between. Why this is so is a good epistemological question. And it should always be kept in mind that there is a material, not merely theoretical, difference between little knowledge and much knowledge. Knowledge -- and I have not offered any definition of it as yet -- improves people's ability to achieve their aims and ends. And human achievement shapes, even determines, human existence. And that is material indeed.

Knowledge is one of a set of concepts that tend to blur together in practice: certitude, confidence, belief (support to varying degrees), intuition, divination, faith, doctrine and dogma, and superstition.

This list is not a linear characterization of good to bad -- although some take this to be the case -- with "truth" lying at one end of the spectrum. Truth turns out to be independent of this dimension of belief. One may disbelieve true claims and believe falsehoods with a free abandon that ought to shake most serious-minded people to the core of their souls.

This lists rather suggests a dimension of supports for belief (not knowledge), from overwhelming evidence in favor of a belief to a sheer break with sensible reality. All are specific forms of states of human being, the attitudes one may have towards truth claims. This axis presents a scale of justifications for belief: what one chooses to hold to be the case, and why one does so.

But how does Being (human being) come to figure into Knowledge? Because knowledge is an intentional relation between the Self and something else -- perhaps something real, and perhaps something that is only a figment of one's imagination, or something in between. Our common-sense presumption has always been that knowledge is the correct apprehension of the way things are. A claim about "the way things are" is a true claim if (and only if) that is indeed the way things are. (The classic example in Semantics and Philosophy of Linguistics is, "The statement: 'Snow is white' is true iff (if and only if) snow is white".)

Implicit in this account of truth is the fundamental relationship between a thing (here "thing" is extremely broad, and not restricted to material -- or even existing -- entities) and an observer that "sees", "feels", thinks of", "considers", "is aware of", "dreads", "loves" or otherwise "apprehends" that thing. Here is the ubiquitous "OF-ness" relationship central to the field of phenomenology (much more on this richly complex subject later). Phenoneology is the study of human experiences OF things. For there to be "knowledge of", or "belief about" or "thought of" some thing, there must be an "intentioning" being -- a person -- that has an idea of or attitude toward the object of its thought. This complex and elastic relationship between subject of thought and object of thought makes knowledge, belief, thought and other attitudes of persons -- their experiences OF the objects of their thought possible. Moreover, it makes our understanding of these apprehended things far more complex. A camera, microscope or telescope produces a straightforward analog (or digital) image of its intended object, the human mind does not. It does something far more intricate and involved, essentially recreating itself in response to what it perceives. A human being does not merely see, or taste or feel, or read or detect things, passively taking in data as a machine does, (s)he changes his/her being as a result. More than that, this relationship is determined in large part by the subject, and not merely the object, making for one of the most curious "Cause-and-Effect" relationships in nature. Human beings exist "as persons" in virtue of it.

A Terminological Aside

Here I would like to interject a terminological clarification in an attempt to forestall no end of pointless and needless ongoing confusion. There is a clear and important distinction between "knowledge" and "reality", two terms laymen and philosophers freely and sloppily interchange to their and their audience's peril. As I (and responsible philosophers) use these terms, "reality" is -- in the words of the Roman philosopher Lucretius -- "the way things are". (That, in fact is the title of one of his most popular works). "Reality" does not assume or presume any observer; if three pebbles lie at the bottom of a pond, the pond and the pebbles exist "as they are" (the formal term is "transcendence" -- lying above and beyond any perception, conception or "point of view") an intentioning being may have OF them. They exist in themsmselves, as they are, independently of any witness to the fact. Note that this definition of "Reality" does not assume or presume that "reality", as such, exists, only that this is what we mean by reality. There might (however odd and unlikely this may seem to us) be no state of affairs independent of observation. (In fact, certain aspects of quantum theory strongly suggest this possibility, although debate has not yet been settled on this fascinating and errie subject.) It may be the case that the only things that exist, exist in virtue of being observed. (The British Empiricist Bishop Berkeley, responding to Locke's comprehensive view of modern (empirical) science and to David Hume's skepticism (which effectively roped in Locke's magnanimous claims of knowledge derivable from human perception), suggested that all things exist only in virtue of being observed (but that, fortunately for us, God observes all, and hence all (that He created) exists.) Does Relaity exist? That is, do things exist in and of themselves, apart from the mental image persons (or dieties) have of them? I believe so, and so do many others, but in the last few decades, a great many people have revived an old and rather bizarre notion that reality is a state of mind, and with many minds around, there are thus many different realities. Comedian Robin Williams put this in a wonderfully pithy phrase: "Reality -- what a concept!" While some hold that reality is (nothing more than) a concept, I will take the view (and support it as needed) that Reality is something, of which we have apprehensions, ideas and concepts.

Truth and Knowledge, on the other hand, are clearly dependent upon observers, thinkers, apprehenders. Truth is a property of statements (or truth claims, or propositions). "Things" are not true, statements about things are true (or false) of the thing referred to in the statement, proposition or truth claim. Statements, in turn, along with propositions, truth claims, ideas of, attitudes towards, and thoughts of in general, require a thinker, speaker, observer or apprehender. Hence the "of-ness" of these conceptual objects comes into play. Signs, symbols, references, representations and meanings are objects that possess "of-ness": they are objects that are of other objects, a product and function of persons capable of being aware of the world, and of having ideas about it.

And why all this talk of Epistemology when the subject is Ethics and Morality? Simply, if we are to have a body of knowledge of ethics, and not simply a list of marching orders (which can be thrown aside as easily as followed, and more easily than followed correctly and/or faithfully) then we must be able to make true statements about ethical objects and phenomena. If we can't, it is difficult to say in what sense we "know" what ethics is, even to comment on its existence or non-existence. If such were the case, then -- as many of the 20th cnetury have held, ethics would be "non-cognative" (i.e., unknowable to us). This may turn out to be the case, just as it may turn out to be the case that there is no objective reality, just a bunch of disembodied minds thinking about each other, or, in the Hinduist tradition, one mind -- Bramin -- talking to himself, or in the Buddhist tradition, no one talking to anybody. (Or as they say -- who, you might ask is saying this?!? -- "Being Nobody, Going Nowhere" (also a book title)).

Nor is this issue of the tension between Objectivity and Subjectivity an idle concern. Not all epistemological systems have acknowledged this essential "relationship" feature of knowledge (between knower and thing known), which has leading to curious and often outrageous and untenable conceptions of knowledge. In fact, the 20th century has been dominated by the two most radical positions on epistemology that one can possibly take: in the first half of the century the epistemic view that there are no observers, only things putatively to be observed ["The View From Nowhere"], and in the second half, that there are only observers (and observations), and nothing out of these to observe ["Man is the Measure of All Things"].

The radical agendas of these two epistemic theories -- unbelievably coming at us back to back, and at times side by side, despite their absolute polarity -- have severally and jointly contributed to our dearth of ethical and moral knowledge. An understanding of their premises and goals -- and attractions -- will shed light on the depletive effect these two theories have had on moral knowledge. In my next blog, I will describe these two epistemic theories in more detail, and explain how -- despite the efforts of each of these to enlighten us in certain aspects of reality, managed to hobble our efforts to gain a thorough understanding of things in general, and specifically to cripple our understanding of ethical and moral matters.

After than I will present discussion on a more down-to-earth view of knowledge that will far better serve the investigator into ethical knowledge. The motivation for my taking the time and trouble to come up with an appraoch to knowledge than that offered by the extremists of 20th century is that (a) to have knowledge of Reality, one's Epistemology needs to be suitable and appropriate for the subject of study (more on this soon), and (b) to have knowledge of ethics -- a subject that appears to involve persons as subjects, and not merely as objects, of inquiry, action and being -- one requires a clear and full understanding of both elements of the knowledge relation: subject and object, as well as the peculiar but vital link between them: "of-ness".

RDB

Since 1903, when G E Moore declared in his "Principia Ethica" that the terms "ethics" and "good" had no definable meaning but were merely "intuitively understood" terms, our store of ethical knowledge has been draining rapidly. As of the new millenium our store has been empty. Distress at this paucity and the effect it has had on human society has led to a resurgence of interest in ethics among the philosophical community and concerned laypeople. With traditional ethics theories suspect, even discredited, and with no solid foundation for the current investigation to build on, this renewed examination of ethics must begin from scratch.

How can a society lose knowledge it once had? A recent report on the NASA Space Program illustrates one such way: contemplating a return to the moon (after some 30 years), space engineers attempted to look up the old blueprints for the Apollo lunar vehicle system. They discovered that most of the plans had been lost or thrown away. There are other ways in which knowledge can be lost: it can be discredited (fairly or not), rejected or ignored in keeping with changing social views, or simply abandoned and forgotten.

The knowledge a society actually possesses is warehoused in institutions, tended by custodians who gather, vet, organize, collate and distribute that knowledge to society that makes use of the knowledge. Many societies have allowed their stores of knowledge -- science, literature, engineering, agriculture, law and so forth -- to deteriorate and disappear. In many cases these stores have been deliberately purged of knowledge that conflicts with, frustrates or obstructs the facile wielding of political, cultural, religious or other social authority. Social expediency serves every bit as well, and is far more effective, as a lit match for the destruction of knowledge.

As a result, the purgative effects of skepticism, secularism, logical positivism, multiculturism, deconstruction and post-Modernism on the one hand, and the Frankensteinisn resurrection of religious medievalism, myth, dogma, superstition and mysticism on the other, we are presently left with a bare cupboard. But despite our stoic front, we sorely feel the absence of just and appropriate guidelines for social and personal behavior. We have rediscovered the distinction between freedom and anarchy. The canard that Freedom is the ability to do as one pleases, and that government (of any kind) is the limitation of that freedom is gradualy being abandoned as people realize that ethics is not about the repression of humn beings, but the cultivation of human Being itself.

My thesis, which I will defend in coming essays, is that ethics is the particular form of being that humans have. To lack an ethic is to lack human Being -- the most severe and extreme form of non-freedom imaginable.

A few years back, a CNN reporter stationed at the Capitol steps covering a story on rampant governmental corruption thrust a microphone into a congressman's face, asking him what avenues were available for dealing with this unchecked plague of misconduct. Speaking confidently and matter-of-factly, he began: "This problem can always be sent to the Congressional Ethics committee --" and then he wilted. Breaking off in mid-sentence, a pained grimace on his face, he stood silent, like the captian of a sea vessel, realizing for the first time that all of the lifeboats have been cast off, and there is nothing left to do but go down with the ship.

Mankind in the past has survived greater setbacks than the present dearth of ethical knowledge. As science writer Arthur C Clarke once observed in a survey of possible future catastrophes, human history has demonstrated the ability people have for enduring the most amazing and outrageously harsh and squalid circumstances nature can offer, but that mere base-line survival is a very low state indeed for creatures that aspire to and are capable of so much. Unlike famine, disease or catastrophic climatic change, human ethics is an entity of our own making. Mythologies aside, organanized and fruitful human existence is man-made; if we erected such systems once, we can rebuild them again, and if old systems reflected ignorance and prejudice, we can construct new systems that better serve its members and participants.

To flourish, to live a life worth living and embracing, will require a far better understanding of ethics and far more skilled application and implementation of ethical knowledge than the 19th and previous centuries have demonstrated. And such a life cannot be achieved and maintained in the environment of 20th century's "laissez-faire" attitude toward ethical beings and institutions. Ignorance is not bliss, but a numbness that separates people from the world, and from themselves.

At the beginning of the 21st century, the time is ripe for a fresh, hard, clear and vigorous re-examination of human practices, of human nature itself, and of human Being, in order to resolve the current dilmemmas that plague us and to avert future nightmares of our own making that will make the errors and atrocities of the 20th century pale in comparison.

RDB