Relating Ourselves to Indirect Knowledge, Pt. 2

In part 1of this series, I began a discussion of how we can use reason to relate ourselves to indirect knowledge. Indirect knowledge is, briefly, knowledge that we ourselves do not know the immediate reasons for its truth. Instead, someone else knows the reasons, and we are related to that knowledge through them by their mediation. Examples include complicated mathematical proofs (like the one recently demonstrated for  Fermat's Last Theorem). We might not be able to follow the logic, but the mathematicians can, and we can appreciate what the mathematical geniuses have done. Or scientific claims like global warming, in which we cannot possibly conduct or review the science ourselves, but instead must trust what the relevant experts say about it.

Relating ourselves to indirect knowledge is very different than relating ourselves directly to knowledge. The latter involves a consideration of truth immediately in terms of the fundamental reasons for something's being true or not. There is no mediator. In the former, the crucial question is how we judge the mediator, since we must take his word respecting the fundamental reasons for the truth of falsity of something. In my earlier post, I pointed to Socrates as an example of how to evaluate mediators, and used his example in the Apology: We must test a mediator to discover whether he himself is able to separate his knowledge from his opinions, and so give us only his expert knowledge and not also, in addition, his non-expert and perhaps poorly founded opinions masquerading as expert knowledge. I gave Carl Sagan as a classic example of the expert who fails Socratic examination. In such cases, an expert can still be useful, but we must be very careful to separate what he genuinely knows through his expertise (the wheat) versus the mass of non-expert opinion he gives along with it (the chaff).

We may also consider that indirect knowledge can never contradict direct knowledge. There is only one truth and it is the same for us as it is for everyone else. Thus we know 2+2=4 directly, and any purportedly expert theory that ends up contradicting that truth (implicitly as well as explicitly) must be suspect; for whatever the expert knows, he can't know that 2+2 equals something other than 4. That's an obvious and trivial example, and better examples are not hard to find. Let's look at what Jerry Coyne tells us about truth, fact and knowledge on pages 186 and 195 of Faith vs Fact:

(Begin quote)
For consistency, I'll again use the Oxford English Dictionary's definitions, which correspond roughly to most people's vernacular use. "Truth" is "conformity with fact; agreement with reality; accuracy, correctness, verity (of statement or thought.)" Because we're discussing facts about the universe, I'll use "fact" as Stephen Jay Gould defined "scientific facts": those "confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent." Note that these definitions imply the use of independent confirmation - a necessary ingredient for determining what's real - and consensus, that is, the ability of any reasonable person familiar with the method of study to agree on what it confirms... Finally, "knowledge" is simply the public acceptance of facts; as the Dictionary puts it, "The apprehension of fact or truth with the mind; clear and certain perception of fact or truth; the state or condition of knowing fact or truth." What is true may exist without being recognized, but once it is it becomes knowledge. Similarly, knowledge isn't knowledge unless it is factual, so "private knowledge" that comes through revelation or intuition isn't really knowledge, for it's missing the crucial ingredient of verification and consensus...

"I'm hungry," my friend tells me, and that too is seen as extrascientific knowledge. And indeed, any feeling that you have, any notion or revelation, can be seen as subjective truth or knowledge. What that means is that it's true that you feel that way. What that doesn't mean is that the epistemic content of your feeling is true. That requires independent verification by others. Often someone claiming hunger actually eats very little, giving rise to the bromide "Your eyes are bigger than your stomach."
(Emphases in original and end quote).

Socrates once put forward the observation that flute-playing implies a flute player. Similarly, knowledge implies a knower. There is no knowledge without someone knowing that knowledge or, in other words, knowledge is the substance of the act of knowing. What this means is that, contra Coyne, all knowledge is subjective, meaning that all knowledge is knowledge only because it is known by someone, somewhere, at some time. The fact that all knowledge is subjective is a piece of primary knowledge - it is something we can know directly for ourselves simply by reflection on the nature of things. Thinkers like Coyne like to speak of the abstraction "science", as though it is a disembodied process generating results all on its own, but we should remember that science is but the activity of scientists, and to the extent that anything is known by science, it is known by individual scientists here and there.

The "independent confirmation" of which Coyne writes is a useful and wonderful thing, but he fails to realize that it is dependent on the "subjective truth or knowledge" that he disparages. "I'm hungry" is certainly one thing we can say; another is "I hear or have read your experience in confirming my scientific experiment." The latter is as subjective as the former. Coyne claims that the former needs independent verification of its epistemic content (that content apparently being "I need food.")  Well what about the latter? The epistemic content of the latter is that "it is a fact that you have confirmed my scientific experiment." This would seem to need independent verification as well. How will I get it? By listening to something else you say or write, or what someone else has said or written? Then those subjective experiences - which as experiences are also of the form "I am hearing you say that..." - are themselves subject to the same requirement of independent verification. We have an infinite regress here, and for a very good reason. Any contact I have with reality will be subjective, simply because I am me, and science can escape that truth only on pain of indulging in magical thinking. Introducing a radical divide between our subjective experience and its epistemic content destroys not only Coyne's intended target of religious belief, but the very possibility of knowledge.

"I'm hungry" does not always mean that I need food. But in the normal course of events it does; that is why nature gave us the feeling. "I hear you saying that you have confirmed my experiment" doesn't always mean I have heard you say that - I could be dreaming, hallucinating or simply have misheard you - let alone that you have in fact confirmed my experiment. But in the normal course of events it does, and in the normal course of events I might reasonably take for granted that you have in fact confirmed my experiment. Subjective experience is not indubitable; the attempt to make it indubitable (as in the thinking of Descartes) only leads to yet more fundamental and dangerous misunderstandings. But it is literally all we have got.

The only basis from which to critique our subjective experience is through yet more subjective experience. Doesn't this just involve us in yet another infinite regress? No, because this involves us in the philosophical process of dialectic. Subjective experience does not go on to infinity, but turns back on itself, We criticize subjective experience A in terms of experience B and B in terms of A, deciding what makes the most sense based on how our theories make sense of experience comprehensively.

For instance, consider the ancient philosophical question of the difference between sleeping and waking. How do I know I'm not sleeping right now? I notice that in certain cognitive states the question of whether I am sleeping or waking never occurs to me, and seems like it could not occur. These states, of course, are when I am sleeping, and in fact when the question occurs to me as to whether I am sleeping or waking, I know I am in the processing of waking up. So the difference between sleeping and waking seems to be that waking is aware of both itself and the state of sleeping, while sleeping is not aware of either itself or the waking state. Now since I am aware of the distinction between the two states, I must be awake. Thus we have the subjective experience of sleeping (experience A) being critiqued from subjective experience B (waking), with both experiences shedding light on the other (from the perspective of B) leading to a comprehensive insight into both experiences.

Or consider the process of science itself. While flute-playing implies a flute-player, and knowledge implies a knower, science implies a scientist. That is, all science occurs in the context of the subjective experience of a scientist. This is a very valuable piece of direct knowledge that is surprisingly often overlooked. Scientists, being people like you and me, can and must take the everyday world of common sense for granted; not just in their everyday life, but in their scientific endeavors as well. If the microbiologist starts wondering whether he's really looking through his microscope, or the physicist that he's really discussing his results with other physicists and not merely a Matrix-like simulation meant to deceive him, then his science will never get started. There is therefore a dialectic between ordinary experience and the specialized experience of the scientist in the lab.

Coyne seems to be in the grip of a mythical belief that the scientific method allows one, in the moment of science, to transcend human nature itself and reach the otherwise unattainable realm of the "objective." Like all truth myths, it  isn't recognized as such but serves as an unarticulated background assumption.

And the cure for it is philosophical reflection on direct experience.

Science, Philosophy, Direct and Indirect Knowledge

For many, including Jerry Coyne, the significant distinction in knowledge is between scientific knowledge and all other kinds of knowledge (if there are any; in his Faith vs. Fact, Coyne can barely bring himself to acknowledge anything other than science.)

But the more important distinction for us is between direct and indirect knowledge. Direct knowledge is knowledge that is known immediately by us and on our own authority. Indirect knowledge is knowledge that we are related to only through someone else; it is mediated by those others and therefore always involves the issue of authority, for it is on the basis of authority that we determine whom to listen to or not.

Examples of direct knowledge include things like the fact that you can't be in two places at the same time, that you are younger than your parents, and that dogs are produced by nature but automobiles are only products of human artifice. Some (but not all) of mathematics is direct knowledge. You don't need an authority to tell you that 2+2=4. And if you can follow Euclid's proof that there are an infinite number of primes. then the fact that there are an infinite number of primes is direct knowledge for you.

Suppose you can't follow the proof. Then you can still be related to that fact as knowledge, but only indirectly through the authority of someone else who can follow the proof. A consequence of this is that the same piece of knowledge can be known directly by some and indirectly by others. Everyone knows 2+2=4 on his own authority; but very few people know that Fermat's Last Theorem is true on his own authority, for its proof is so sophisticated that only the most educated mathematicians can follow it.

It can be seen that indirect knowledge depends on direct knowledge. If I'm taking something on the authority of another, it is not unreasonable for him to be taking it on the authority of another as well, but somewhere the chain has to end with someone who simply knows it directly. Otherwise we have a train with nothing but freight cars and no engine. (An example is a child who believes in the Big Bang on the authority of his teacher, who in turn believes it on the authority of cosmologists. But the cosmologists know it directly because they have gone through and understand the scientific case for the Big Bang.)

What about science? Jerry Coyne tells us on page 187 of Faith vs Fact that "I see science as a method not a profession... Any discipline that studies the universe using the methods of 'broad' science is capable in principle of finding truth and producing knowledge. If it doesn't, no knowledge is possible." So to have "science" in the strict sense we must produce it through the method that defines science. Unfortunately, very few of us - actually no one - has the time or resources to develop his entire base of knowledge through the application of scientific methods. We must, to a great degree, rely on the application of the scientific method that others have performed and take their results as a given; or, rather, we can only be related to their scientific knowledge indirectly through appeal to their authority as scientists.

The irony of the advance of science is that the more it advances, the less it becomes directly available to any individual man. Back in the early days of modern science, an intelligent amateur could keep abreast of, and perhaps reproduce, most of the crucial scientific results. It's not hard to reproduce Galileo's experiments with rolling balls and, if he can get his hands on a telescope, verify the existence and movements of Jupiter's satellites for himself. And he can easily reproduce Franklin's experiments with electricity or Pascal's with atmospheric pressure. But as science advances, it requires increasingly expensive and elaborate apparatus to construct experiments; and those experiments themselves require a much larger base of knowledge to understand. A high school student can be brought to an understanding of Galileo's experiments in acceleration in the course of one day's class. He'll need another four or so years of intensive education, at least, to understand how and why recent experiments have demonstrated the existence of the Higgs boson, assuming he is capable of mastering the relevant material at all. And that student, while mastering physics, will not be spending his time mastering biology and genetic science, so that, however much he might end up directly related to knowledge in physics, he will still be indirectly related to all that genetic science produces, and all that the other sciences produce. So the more science advances, the more all of us are indirectly related to scientific knowledge, including scientists themselves.

It thus becomes crucial for us to understand the distinction between direct and indirect knowledge, how they are related, and how to handle each type of knowledge appropriately. I've already discussed the distinction between the two types of knowledge. How are they related? As pointed out above, indirect knowledge is dependent on direct knowledge, since indirect knowledge is really just direct knowledge removed some number of times from the original source.

But indirect knowledge is dependent on direct knowledge in another way, and that is subjectively. By that I mean the only means we have available to evaluate indirect knowledge is through direct knowledge. When a scientist says that the Big Bang is true, how do I know whether to believe him or not? I could appeal to some other instance of indirect knowledge, for instance that other scientists agree with him, but this only pushes the problem back a step, since I now have to think about how to evaluate that piece of indirect knowledge. Again, at some point I must have recourse to something I simply know directly, through which I can evaluate competing claims of indirect knowledge.

The process of analyzing and appropriating direct knowledge is philosophy. The crucial distinction with direct knowledge is that it is not mediated; that is, it must ultimately be known without reliance on anyone else. Kierkegaard discusses this in his analysis of Socrates in Philosophical Fragments. A true teacher - that is, in my terms, a teacher of direct knowledge - is only the occasion by which someone comes to know, and the process has only completed when the teacher has become dispensable. It is for this reason that philosophy does not "progress" or produce "results" - one of the perennial charges against it. A "result" is knowledge that can be appropriated without reproducing the process by which it came to be known - for example, when an engineer uses the facts about electronic devices to design a system without first proving all those facts scientifically for himself. "Results" are therefore by nature indirect knowledge. Philosophy cannot produce "results" without falsifying itself; and everyone who would make progress in philosophy must reproduce for himself the process by which philosophers have come to know - and in the process, make those philosophers dispensable. There are no "results" that can be handed on from Plato's Republic. But someone who reads it may come to know things for himself that he might otherwise not know.

The fact that the teacher becomes dispensable is one characteristic of philosophy; another is that it appeals to direct experience as its evidential basis, on the eminently reasonable principle that it is the only possible basis. For my own, immediate experience is the only direct contact I have with reality (if in fact I have contact with reality at all); anything else is mediated and therefore a subject of indirect knowledge. This too, like the fact that philosophy doesn't produce "results", sometimes puts people off philosophy, for it makes philosophy seem a matter of purely "subjective" preference. And it is subjective, in the sense that it is only I that have access to my own experience. This is true, necessary and unavoidable, nearly tautological, yet is frequently overlooked. From p. 195 of Faith vs Fact:

"I'm hungry," my friend tells me, and that too is seen as extrascientific knowledge. And indeed, any feeling that you have, any notion or revelation, can be seen as subjective truth or knowledge. What that means is that it's true that you feel that way. What that doesn't mean is that the epistemic content of your feeling is true. That requires independent verification by others. Often someone claiming hunger actually eats very little, giving rise to the bromide "Your eyes are bigger than your stomach."

The fact you feel hungry is a fact concerning reality as much as any other. Whether you really need to eat or not is irrelevant to the truth that you in fact have the feeling . Ultimately, science itself depends on subjective knowledge, because scientists must read meters and look through microscopes - "I am seeing an amoeba through this lens" or "The voltmeter says 5 volts." There is really no way to escape the subjective nature of these experiences. For instance, trying to "independently verify" them as Coyne suggests, for instance, by asking someone else whether they see 5 volts as well, may be a reasonable procedure, but it only works because we take our subjective experience of what someone else tells us - "I am hearing Joe say the voltmeter reads 5 volts" - as itself not in need of independent verification. Otherwise, we are back to the familiar infinite regress that comes up so often in this context.

The philosopher faces the fact that all our knowledge - direct, indirect or otherwise - can ultimately be evaluated only in light of our own personal experience. The philosopher serves as an ultimately dispensable aid in analyzing and discovering the significance and meaning of that experience. The scientist simply takes the meaning of personal experience for granted so he can get on with his science. And he is perfectly justified in this, but he is in danger, like Coyne, of misunderstanding the real relationship between science and philosophy - which is really a misunderstanding of the basic human condition.

Coming next: How direct knowledge is used to evaluate indirect knowledge. Hint: Read Plato's Apology.

Coyne and Scientism

In his Faith vs Fact, Jerry Coyne in passing gives us his definition of "scientism":

In a debate with Steven Pinker about "scientism" - the notion that science often intrudes into areas where it doesn't belong - the New Republic editor Leon Wieseltier...

Of course science can intrude wherever it likes. The problem - the problem of scientism - comes up when scientists (or anyone else) thinks they are drawing a scientific conclusion when in fact they are expressing a philosophical prejudice. An example of this was given in one of my earlier posts on Coyne, where Coyne defines science as involving the exclusion of purpose in its explanatory framework, then later concludes that there is no ultimate purpose in the universe because science has not discovered any.

In his book Coyne often expresses frustration that the average man does not always accept conclusions that are presented to him by the consensus of the scientific community. He cites climate change and evolution among the topics on which there is resistance. The average person - Kierkegaard's "plain man" - is wiser than Coyne gives him credit for. For the average man may not be able to define "scientism", or describe with precision what is going on, but he sometimes rightly senses something amiss in the pronouncements he hears from the scientific community. When he is told that science demands that he accept that evolution has proven that man is purely the creation of blind, material forces, he rebels because he is skeptical that the most important things about man - his mind, his rationality, his ability to love, come immediately to mind - are things that can even in principle be explained by purely material forces. And he is right about that - for the ability to explain the mind in purely material terms is a notoriously difficult, and, in my opinion, impossible philosophical problem.

The standard response to this point is that, while it has not yet been demonstrated how evolution can account for the mind, we can have confidence there will be an explanation sometime in the future. The "god of the gaps" and all that. In other words, the scientist writes the plain man a check he promises can be cashed someday, although the scientist does not yet have the funds in his account to cover it. And the plain man is perfectly within his rights to reject that check until he knows it won't bounce.

Christianity and Disproof

Jerry Coyne, on p. 61 of his Faith vs Fact, asks the question:

It's a useful exercise to ask religious people what it would take for them to either abandon the "nonnegotiables" of their fath - like the view that Jesus was divine or that the Quran is the world of Allah - or to give-up on their faith entirely.

That's easy and well-known: Were the corpse of Jesus to be discovered, Christianity would be decisively disproven. And it's not so ridiculous as it might sound: We have in fact found the tombs of victims of Roman crucifixion.

Were the tomb of Mary to be discovered, especially with a body in it, that would disprove Roman Catholicism since the Church has taught the Doctrine of the Assumption authoritatively, but it would not necessarily disprove Christianity as such. But I would have a hard time continuing in Christian belief in such an event since my own faith is based on the historical witness of the Church.

Theological Arguments for Evolution

I don't have a problem with the theory of evolution, insofar as it is considered as an explanation for the material origins of life. The diversity of life is generally explained through descent with modification - although I will add the caveat that evolution does not seem capable of explaining the non-material aspects of human nature (i.e. the human intellect).

But the arguments you often hear in defense of evolution sure make it difficult to avoid asking the question whether the scientific advocates of evolution really understand what they are doing. Jerry Coyne, in his Faith vs Fact, makes one such argument on page 33:

Further, oceanic islands like Hawaii and the Galapagos either have very few species of native reptiles, amphibians, and mammals or lack them completely, yet such creatures are widely distributed on continents and "continental islands" like Great Britain that were once connected to major landmasses. It is these facts that helped Darwin concoct the theory of evolution, for those observations can't be explained by creationism (a creator could have put animals wherever he wanted). Rather, they lead us to conclude that endemic birds, insects, and plants on oceanic islands descended, via evolution, from ancestors that had the ability to migrate to those places. Insects, plant seeds, and birds can colonize distant islands by flying, floating, or being borne by the wind, while this is not possible for mammals, reptiles, and amphibians.

What is disturbing is that the claim that the observations can't be explained by a creator isn't a scientific argument; it is a theological argument. And it's not a good theological argument at that. Since a creator could have put animals wherever he wanted, he could have put them where we have in fact found them. So the lack of mammals and reptiles on oceanic islands does nothing to disprove that a creator might have been responsible for their origin.

That does nothing to diminish the fact that the distribution of animals is very suggestive of the evolutionary scenario Coyne offers. If he had kept to that argument, and left out the lame theological argument, his case would be more persuasive. For adding a theological argument to a case that is supposed to be purely scientific suggests to the reader that Coyne doesn't really understand the difference between theology and science.

Stephen Jay Gould used to do a similar thing, deploying theological arguments in an allegedly scientific case for evolution. His favorite was to argue that bad biological design (from our perspective) was proof of evolution, since a creator would never make what appears to us to be a poorly designed creature (this is a broad paraphrase of Gould's original argument, which I am quoting from memory).  Again, this is a bad theological argument, or at least an unsupported one, since Gould never gave any arguments as to why a creator would never create apparently poorly designed creatures. But the real point is the same with Coyne - the very scientists who are most insistent on keeping religion out of science insist on making theological arguments in support of their biological theories.

Jerry Coyne and Mistaking the Definition of Science for a Conclusion of Science

Sometimes an author puts two things together that make it clear what is going on in his project. Jerry Coyne, while discussing the nefarious influence of the Templeton Foundation's money on science (p. 20), tells us this:

The notions of ultimate purpose and "teleology" (an external force directing evolution) are simply not part of science: this mixing of the scientific with the metaphysical is characteristic of Templeton's approach.

Then, on page 23 while quoting L.R. Hamelin, we are informed that:

Centuries of scientific investigation show that the best scientific theories, testable by observation, include nothing like a personal God. We find only a universe of blind, mechanical laws, including natural selection, with no foresight or ultimate purpose.

In the first quote, we are told that the exclusion of purpose is part of the definition of science; in the second quote, the exclusion of purpose is presented as though it is a conclusion of science, as though "ultimate purpose" was something science in principle might have found, but just didn't as it turned out.

Foresight and purpose, of course, don't need to be discovered by science to be known as real. They are manifest to common sense and, indeed, their denial makes a hash of science itself (see my first post on Coyne). Coyne had a purpose in writing his book, you have a purpose in reading this blog, and I have a purpose in writing it. That's just the data. A theory can either account for it or not - or perhaps, define it out of existence to avoid the uncomfortable problem of dealing with it.

Jerry Coyne and the Miracle of Atheism

I'm reading the hot New Atheist book by Jerry Coyne, Faith vs Fact: Why Science and Religion Incompatible.

We Christians, obviously, believe in miracles, and in particular the miracle of the Resurrection. Indeed, the miracle of the Resurrection is front and center in Christian faith. That centrality is, in fact, one of the reasons I find Christianity attractive. There is truth in advertising: The Resurrection is not (or should not be) an easy thing in which to believe - it is, according to St. Paul, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Greeks (1 Cor. 1:23). Every week at Mass we Catholics repeat the Nicene Creed and remind ourselves that being Catholic means believing in the staggering event of the Resurrection. But once that truth is accepted, everything else becomes easy: The entire Catholic Faith makes perfect sense in light of the Resurrection. The Church does not hide the stumbling block; it tells you up front that being Catholic means believing in something so difficult to believe as the Resurrection.

I find the opposite to be true of secular worldviews. Such worldviews are typically advertised as following from reason and skepticism, supposedly never demanding belief in anything that cannot stand the test of rational investigation. But as you examine the worldview in more depth, you inevitably discover some belief smuggled in that is at least as incredible as the Resurrection, and probably more so. Unlike the Resurrection, which is highlighted by the Church just to make sure you don't miss it, the incredible aspects of the secular worldview are passed over quickly, perhaps in the hope you won't notice them, or maybe because the advocate of the worldview hasn't even noticed them himself.

In Coyne's case, he tells us the following on page 15:

In other words, the notion of pure "free will", the idea that in any situation we can choose to behave in different ways, is vanishing. Most scientists and philosophers are now physical "determinists" who see our genetic makeup and environmental history as the only factors that, acting through the laws of physics, determine which decisions we make. That, of course, kicks the props out from under much theology, including the doctrine of salvation through freely choosing a savior, and the argument that human-caused evil is the undesirable but inevitable by-product of the free will vouchsafed us by God.

Of course, determinism kicks the props out not only from theology, but a lot of other things as well - including science and Coyne's book project itself. For if genetic makeup and environmental history are the only factors that determine which decisions we make, then Galileo's decision to believe in the heliocentric rather than geocentric model of the solar system was determined by genetic makeup and environmental history acting through the laws of physics just as much as any religious individual's belief in a savior. But of course Coyne doesn't really believe that - he thinks Galileo accepted the heliocentric universe because it is true, that truth having been discovered through science, genetics be damned. And what is the point of Coyne's book but to convince us through argument to decide for science against religion? I can only do that if the truth of Coyne's arguments is a causal factor in my decision to believe him or not. Truth, however, is not a causal agent in genetics, environmental determinism, or physics. The only possibility is that science, and popular books about science like Coyne's, somehow provide a miraculous or magical exception to the rule that our decisions are determined only by genetics and environmental history.

And in that case, the miracle at the center of Coyne's worldview is more incredible than the Resurrection, for the Resurrection is at least in principle possible in a theistic worldview. But Coyne's worldview explicitly excludes the possibility that our decisions might be determined by something other than genetics, environmental history, and physics. That's pretty much the definition of magic - an event that in principle cannot be rendered intelligible in terms of a principled understanding of the world.