All Life Is Problem Solving

Over the past years, I’ve spent many enjoyable Saturday afternoons participating in Washington, DC’s Cafe Philo group (a face-to-face public philosophy group), and have occasionally participated in its list serv. Over the past couple of days a friend responded to my support of the statement “No statement can be justified,” by asking whether I was: “saying that we cannot evaluate the reasons given for claims about where babies come from, why it rains or whether there were WMD in Iraq or involvement by Iraq in 9/11 without resorting to intuition? That science cannot evaluate claims without resorting to intuition? That critical distinctions that are made all the time (especially by language) cannot be evaluated and challenged based on such an evaluation? That it is okay that people just accept claims of all sorts without questioning them, particularly on important matters? I can think of nothing more problematic in human history and experience than the acceptance of all sorts of beliefs and claims without question; for invalid reasons. Can you?”

I answered my friend initially, by distinguishing beliefs and claims and reasoning in the following way. Statements are not beliefs. They are linguistic formulations, Entailment is a logical relationship between statements. Thus statements entail other statements.

Beliefs, however, are mental orientations or predispositions arising out of mental processes. They are not linguistic in character, and one belief, therefore, doesn’t entail another. It may precede another. It m ay be associated with another. It may correlate with another. It may influence another, But it can never entail another. Thus, since “justification,” in the context of “Justified True Belief,” requires that one thing entail another, it follows that one belief can never justify another, simply because it can never entail another.

I then went on to amplify by saying that statements express linguistic “content,” including both factual descriptions and evaluations, rather than “beliefs”. Colloquially, we may say they “express beliefs.” But whether or not they have a connection to beliefs that allows us to say that they “express beliefs,” our expressions are not our “beliefs,” but just our expressions. Our beliefs, our feelings, our attitudes, our values, all the stuffs of our mental processes are non-linguistic in character. Thus, nothing follows from belief in the logical sense of the term “follow.” Beliefs entail nothing, even if the statement “Harry is an innocent civilian,” has logical implications.

My friend then asked me what becomes of “the burden of proof” under sich a doctrine. I replied by saying there is no burden of proof for claimants because no statement can be proved in the sense of Justified True Belief (JTB). All that can happen is that the past record can show that some claims perform better than others when faced with criticisms, tests, and evaluations.

Now, this means that when we are confronted with a statement of someone else’s or a statement of our own, we should critically evaluate that statement if we care about whether or not it is true (in the case of descriptive statements), or legitimate (in the case of statements about intrinsic value). For even though we cannot prove truth or legitimacy we can develop criticisms of competing statements and can then evaluate and decide which ones are false, undecided, illegitimate, or non-legitimate. The remaining statements at any point in time survive and constitute our body of objective knowledge at that time, provided none among them are insulated from criticisms, tests, and evaluations by authorities.

Going back to the idea of “burden of proof,” that burden is not one of proof in the sense of JTB. Instead, in criminal cases, it is proof beyond a reasonable doubt which is sought and the way that “proof” is secured is by the prosecution getting the jury or judge to falsify the defendant’s story about what happened, while preventing its own alternative account of what happened from being falsified by the defense. That is, rather than there being a “burden of proof” for the prosecution there is a burden of falsification and avoidance of falsification that it assumes. If you want to call this “burden of proof,” that’s OK, because we’d now be into arguing over labels and such arguments don’t matter. What does matter is that there is no burden of proof in the sense of absolute justification of one’s beliefs or statements in the law.

Furthermore, when we get to scientific activity, here too, there is no burden of absolute proof. In fact, Popper’s CR views are much more popular among scientists than they are among philosophers just because many scientists do think that science works through testing and falsification and not through proof or overcoming burdens of proof. Now, science doesn’t always work this way, of course, and there are many cases where people seem to be viewing things in terms of “burden of proof,” yet nearly all scientists agree that all scientific knowledge is contingent and that any of it may prove invalid tomorrow. Thus, scientists know that absolute JTB-type proof of their statements is impossible, and many of them believe that our most respected theories: Quantum Theory, General Relativity, the neo-Darwinian synthesis, and others are all subject to reasonable doubt, so that our best scientific theories don’t even meet “the burden of proof” imposed on our legal theories of a case.

But here we come to the normative question, when science works in the “burden of proof” mode, should it do so, or is it really unscientific to work in this way. Critical Rationalism and those who accept it believe that when science works in this mode, and places a burden of proof on new theories that explain the world just as well as old ones, it is, in truth, being biased and therefore unscientific in character. And so they deplore the tendency of Quantum Theorists to adhere to the Copenhagen Interpretation, and to prefer it to the MWI, Bohm’s model, and even Popper’s, when all of these theories equally well account for the experimental evidence. The result of such biases is the slower progression of science because of the lack of support within it for devising crucial experiments that would distinguish between the competing versions of Quantum Theory.

All of this ties into the distinctions between CR and Thomas Kuhn’s institutional view of science. In looking at these competing views. we need to clearly distinguish the descriptive from the normative issues involved. In reading both CR and Kuhn it is sometimes hard to distinguish the boundary between the descriptive and the normative. But for me, it’s always been the case that Popper’s account should mainly be viewed as normative and Kuhn’s as mainly descriptive. However, there’s no doubt that followers of Kuhn have taken his theory as normative and have viewed paradigms, incommensurability of competing theories, scientific revolutions, scientific institutions, conservatism in theory evaluations, and isolative scientific cultures, as the way things ought to be. They have used Kuhn’s work to shore up post-modernism, constructivism, and other forms of relativism in our societies. This attempt by Kuhn’s followers to move from the facts as Kuhn saw them to the way that science ought to be, is an illegitimate inference from the descriptive to the normative.

I am not a believer in the fact-value dichotomy (See my “Against the Fact-Value Dichotomy” in the Cafe Philo Dialogue Yahoo Group files), and my views on this matter are not classical, but I do agree with the Humean criticism that one cannot move from the flat assertion that something is a particular way to the view that it ought to be that way. Contrary to Pangloss’s fellow-travellers, this is not the best of all scientific worlds, and even if all scientists acted according to the Kuhnian model, it would still be the case that that model would prescribe unscientific behavior, when it suggests conservatism in theory evaluation and protective belts around our favorite theories. This point is fundamental to any scientific philosophy, because it is the distinction between science and religion. Science should not favor its pet theories. Religion is about doing just that.

Moreover, I cannot end this without pointing out that Kuhn’s views about the facts of scientific behavior also do not hold up under close examination and have never done so. Kuhn’s views are based on the idea of “paradigms,” but his use of that term in “Structure . . . ” was so ambiguous, that his views on what has occurred in science relating to paradigm change are hardly testable. There are arguments on both sides. But after 46 years there’s general agreement that Kuhn’s model of revolutionary scientific change rarely applies to scientific events as a matter of fact, and that his account is poor history.

Popper’s normative notions about how science should work, on the other hand, have fared better. Many prominent scientists have taken up his views in whole, or in part, and still do take them up today. Others, such as Richard Feynman, have developed similar views without, evidently, being influenced directly by Popper — in this way indicating that Popper’s insights into the heart of the scientific endeavor, as an activity based on critical, negative evaluations of competing views, that is neo-Darwinian in character, are essentially correct. For these people, as well as explicit adherents to CR, science is not about justification and proof, but about testing, criticizing, and evaluating competing theories to find those linguistic constructs that prove strongest in the face of our best efforts to refute them.