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.

VDH and Chesterton

Victor Davis Hanson (VDH), in a series of books, most especially in Carnage and Culture, develops the theme of the peculiar Western advantage in war-making. Hanson traces this all the way back to the emphasis on rationality in the ancient Greek origins of Western culture. He shows how, throughout subsequent history, the West has consistently (although of course not perfectly) subordinated other considerations to rational ones when it comes to the martial sciences. This has given the West a decisive and enduring advantage in war over the East, an advantage that is by no means absolute but that eventually resulted in the civilizational domination of the East by the West.

The standard line on why the West has dominated the East traces the cause almost exclusively to technology. The West, for whatever reason, was able to develop modern weaponry before the East and the East simply could not compete. Spears vs. machine guns.

But, of course, the Western development of military technology is itself the expression of the emphasis on rationality that has distinguished it from the East. It is well-known that many of the crucial breakthroughs in military technology - gunpowder, for instance - were first developed in the East. It was the West, however, that typically imagined the military innovations possible with these breakthroughs and exploited them - in the case of gunpowder, with firearms. The West has consistently maintained a lead in military innovation, with the East playing catch-up and never quite getting there.

Neither can the Western dominance be attributed entirely to technology. Hanson uses the example of Cortez who, with a few hundred conquistadors, was able to conquer a sophisticated Mexican empire that numbered in the hundreds of thousands. The crucial difference between Cortez and the Aztecs, Hanson shows, was the way Cortez interpreted Mexican civilization vs the way the Mexicans interpreted Cortez. The Mexicans interpreted Cortez's advent in terms of myth and religion: Was he the white God foretold by their myths? They eventually came to the conclusion that he wasn't, but they never made a genuine attempt beyond that to understand the Spaniards in themselves. Neither did they make efforts to adopt and master Spanish weapons (e.g. swords, armor and cannon) after the superiority of those weapons was made manifest. The Aztecs had access to swords and armor from captured Spaniards as the conflict endured, yet they never made a systematic effort to exploit the captured weapons. Aztec warriors never appeared in captured armor wielding swords, something a Western army would have done as soon as possible when it encountered novel but superior enemy military hardware.

Instead, religion dominated rational considerations of warfare and the Aztecs stuck with their religiously based methods of fighting. Their weapons were designed to stun rather than kill, so that the enemy might be dragged back for ritual human sacrifice. The Aztecs never changed this tactic even when it was obvious that such tactics were particularly unsuited to attacking men wearing chest armor and helmets.

Cortez, on the other hand, made a rapid and systematic evaluation not only of Aztec military technique but also of the political structure of the Aztec empire. He was able to turn the subject peoples of the Empire - who were required, among other things, to provide regular victims to Aztec human sacrifice - against the Aztecs. And after his first attempt to conquer the city failed, Cortez analyzed his failure, came up with a plan based on Aztec vulnerabilities, exploited them, and ultimately conquered.

That's just a brief foray into Hanson's work on cultural history. My real point in this post is to point out that G.K. Chesterton anticipated much of this work way back in 1906, in his August 18 column in the Illustrated London News. (Randomly reading through Chesterton's essays is an exercise that is rarely disappointing, with the occasional discovery of real treasures). What is especially interesting about Chesterton's take on this theme is that he explicitly links it to the Western moral imagination, in contrast to Hanson, who emphasizes what he believes is the amoral character of Western rationality applied to military matters. Here is Chesterton:

Whether or no these details are a little conjectural, the general proposition I suggest is the plainest common-sense. The elements that make Europe upon the whole the most humanitarian civilization are precisely the elements that make it upon the whole the strongest. For the power which makes a man able to entertain a good impulse is the same as that which enables him to make a good gun; it is imagination. It is imagination that makes a man outwit his enemy, and it is imagination that makes him spare his enemy. It is precisely because this picturing of the other man's point of view is in the main a thing in which Christians and Europeans specialize that Christians and Europeans, with all their faults, have carried to such perfection both the arts of peace and war.

Hanson would point out that men like Cortez were hardly humanitarians. One thing the Aztecs did figure out, and pointed out to Cortez's native allies, was that Cortez was not interested in liberating them but in exploiting them. But the natives made the calculation that whatever Cortez was about, it had to be better than serving as a victim in the lethal religious ceremonies in Tenochtitlan.

I don't think Chesterton's point, in any case, was that every Western encounter with the Other had noble intentions. I think it is more that the Western imagination made it possible for Western man to have treat his enemy humanely, because he could imagine him as a human and imagine his point of view. The man who cannot imagine his enemy's point of view doesn't really imagine him as human. In this context Chesterton references another case Hanson treats, that of the conflict between the English and the Zulus:

They [Christians and Europeans] alone have invented machine-guns, and they alone have invented ambulances; they have invented ambulances (strange as it may sound) for the same reason for which they invented machine-guns. Both involve a vivid calculation of remote events. It is precisely because the East, with all its wisdom, is cruel, that the East, with all its wisdom, is weak. And it is precisely because savages are pitiless that they are still - merely savages. If they could imagine their enemy's sufferings they could also imagine his tactics. If Zulus did not cut off the Englishman's head he might really borrow it. For if you do not understand a man you cannot crush him. And if you do understand him, you probably will not.

Well, Chesterton's example of the Zulus is itself a counter-example of that sentiment, since the English certainly did crush the Zulus after the disaster at Isandlwana. But his broader point remains, which is that the Western man, because he can imagine the point of view of his enemy, creates at least the possibility that he will treat him humanely. Aztecs, on capturing Spaniards, would drag them off to be sacrificed, it never occurring to them to do otherwise, even if interrogating them and, possibly, learning from them were they only ways to avoid conquest by the Spaniards. For purely selfish reasons the Aztecs should have treated the Spaniards more humanely.

And I think Hanson would agree with that.