Derek asked:

I am 16 years old and teaching myself philosophy. I plan on becoming an cognitive experimental psychologist. I am currently developing my own philosophical thoughts and beliefs. I strongly believe that answering philosophical questions with logically sound, valid and truthful arguments that are without fallacies is most important. I got overwhelmed by attempting to answer a question of mine a few weeks back. Are human beings capable of knowing objective truth through our subjective experiences and if so, how much and what objective truth are we able to know? Any insight that you may have would be very appreciated because I do not even know how to begin to answer the question. I do not even know if it can be answered. Thank you for your time. It is much appreciated.

Answer by Hubertus Fremerey

I would begin with two separations: First the separation of “truth” from “facts”, and the the separation of “sciences” and “humanities”.

A simple fact, a stain of blood, say, will tell you not much. It can be from nosebleed or from a murder case. Thus you need some “theory of a situation” to make sense of the fact.

The facts that led Newton (“the apple”) and Einstein (“the speed of light”) to their pathbreaking theories were banalities in themselves, as much as a common fag that may be the clue for a Sherlock Holmes to solve a case. An oblong small object in the grass can be a little branch or a serpent. One has to find out.

But even if you have got a context that seems to give meaning to your facts, your theory may be wrong or contested and doubtful. Think of Marx: Was he right? Who decides and by what arguments? There may be no final answer. Marx is from the field of humanities. Einstein is from the field of “sciences”. But he too could be wrong.

So even if you have some theory and explanation, you may be wrong and perhaps unable for a long time or forever to decide what to call “true”.

What you do in fact is: Invent models of the situation that seems to make sense to available facts and then check those models against other models that may be as plausible.

The models of Marx and Freud (and many others) are just plausible (while stimulating) suggestions and always doubtful and thus “neither true nor false”.

Here Popper’s concept of “falsification” steps in which requires to find an experimentum crucis that would show your theory to be wrong.

Look up Popper on this, I will not dig into it here. Even this has its shortcomings.

Start reading the entry on “truth” in the IEP and in “SEP”, see https://plato.stanford.edu/ and https://www.iep.utm.edu/

My answer was just a start. I could write many pages now, it is difficult.

The idea of “objective truth” is overall a naive one. To understand that is a first step in the right direction.

Charles asked:

Please, can you briefly explain the paradigm shift of Thomas Kuhn.

Answer by Jürgen Lawrenz

In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) Kuhn had come around to the view that our common notion of science as a means of accumulating knowledge is too simple-minded to be true. For example: We don’t know or understand X, so let us run experiments. Involved in this is the assumption of an objective factual state and an objective observer, who asks questions of nature and receives an answer. This result is added to an overarching current theory. The name for the latter is “the current paradigm” and the experimental result is assumed to comprise an enrichment of the paradigmatic coherence.

What if the result does not conform to expectations? Then the experiment was either a failure and must be repeated; or else it is absorbed in the current paradigm as a refractory instance. Now it may happen along with the improvement of experimental techniques, that increasing numbers of experiments contradict the paradigmatic theory, and add embarrassment instead of enrichment. The general belief is, that this is to be expected and that therefore the paradigm will gradually change in accordance with these divergent findings.

Too simple and historically untrue, says Kuhn. Paradigms don’t grow like trees nor change their fruits from cherries to apples in a gradual way. They grow as one or the other; and if the soil becomes uncongenial to cherries, you must stop and seed apple trees. In a like manner, science does not watch one paradigm slowly phasing out and a new one phasing in. There comes a point when the old must be dismembered and the new installed in toto.

The reasons for this are threefold:

(a) We cannot work with two contradictory paradigms side by side. That’s not science, but higgledy-piggledy.

(b) An experimenter is not a ‘neutral’ observer, but a participant, as he builds up the structure and process of experiments from known facts and with a specific target in mind.

(c) It follows from (b) that the current paradigm hovers above the experiment in terms of the expectations associated with it. For this state of affairs Kuhn coined the expression “all experiments are theory-laden”, meaning they are saturated beforehand with the terms of discourse dictated by the current paradigm.

From which, finally, his thesis emerged that paradigmata are never simply abandoned on the strength of mounting contradictions. They are tenaciously held beliefs and will resist even partial demolition for years and even generations. What tends to happen instead, is the emergence of idea that binds all the conflicting new ideas together in a new coherent structure, which will then displace the old by way of a revolution, in a relatively short time. Capital instances of such paradigm shifts were Newton’s synthesis and Einstein’s relativity theory.

Himangsu asked:

What is a “thing”? Can we call a conscious being a “thing”?

Answer by Georgios Tsagdis

In his 1950 essay ‘The Thing’, Heidegger examines a maximal and a minimal definition of what a thing is – both turn out to be unsatisfactory.

In the maximal definition, one starts by selecting entities that may be termed ‘things’ and realises that in the broadest sense, everything is a candidate: a colour, a state, an idea, a project, a tradition, etc. Even God doesn’t escape the orbit of the maximal definition and Heidegger has it on good authority: Meister Eckhart, for example, refers to God as a ‘great thing’ (‘groz dinc‘).

On the other hand, the minimal definition shows that hardly anything is a mere thing. A little child might be called a ‘poor thing’ for example, but one soon defends the humanity of the child against reification. The animal fares no differently. Even a stone, the favourite thing of philosophy, soon appears not to be a mere thing (after all, from Plotinus to Latour, rocks grow, store and exchange information, set processes into motion, etc.). Accordingly, to call anything a ‘thing’ is both too much and too little.

Heidegger begins thus on a ‘second sail’, attempting to define not the extension of the term, but its ‘intension’. That is, he embarks on an examination of the meaning of ‘thingness’, rather than an account of the members that might be included under its scope. Understanding what constitutes a thing, or what a thing constitutes, demands much more than a few lines. It is conducive however to keep reflecting on the differential of the ‘thing’, both to the ‘object’ and the ‘body’: each term opens a multiplicity of philosophical histories.

Tung asked:

Can Cartesian dualism successfully account for the existence of consciousness?

Answer by Geoffrey Klempner

This question is deeper than it looks. The question we have to address isn’t how Cartesian dualism compares with other theories of the mind such as material monism, or even whether Cartesian dualism is a defensible theory. Then, what?

Imagine that no-one has ever thought of an alternative to dualism. The very idea of a materialist explanation of consciousness has never occurred to anyone, ever. Cartesian dualism states that there exist two fundamentally different kinds of substance in reality. These two types of substance are identified by their essential properties. The essential property of material substance is that it has mass and occupies space. The essential property of mental substance is that it is presented in consciousness to an ‘I’, a subject of thought and experience.

But why does consciousness exist? Why does material substance exist? Maybe Descartes was wrong about God being the Creator. Maybe, it would not be so bad if we just had to accept contingent existence as the beginning of everything, as in my five-word treatise on Metaphysics:

Something exists.
Deal with it.

Something exists. It’s just a fact. And what exists, according to the dualist, is two kinds of ‘something’, a material universe in space and time, and a conscious subject, or subjects like you and me.

On this view, ‘accounting’ for the existence of consciousness means exactly what it says: we are taking an account, making an inventory OF reality (as I argued in my book Naive Metaphysics). This isn’t ‘accounting-for’ in the sense of explaining (as in, for example, the deductive-nomological model of explanation proposed by Carl Hempel) but rather just acknowledging what is there. Acknowledging a fact, the fact that consciousness exists.

But this is where things begin to get fuzzy.

I said, ‘the fact that consciousness exists’. Whose consciousness? Yours, maybe? You can take it as read that I am talking about you, whomsoever you are — whoever happens to be reading this — but as far as I am concerned is very far from being a ‘fact’ that you exist at all, let alone your ‘consciousness’. I don’t know you. And even if I did, there’s that worrying epistemological gap between perception of a another person’s speech and behaviour and the supposition, or assumption — or inference? — that there ‘exists’ something ‘inside’ that accounts for these outward physical manifestations.

No, I am talking about myself. Just as Descartes did. I know that I exist. I know my consciousness, or, at least, I know it now, at this very moment in time (maybe my memory systematically deceives me, maybe I have only existed for these few seconds, maybe…).

I know that I exist now. What kind of knowledge is that? Knowing that I exist now, at this moment, I also know that this ‘existence’ is not necessary but contingent. I might not have existed now, at this moment. And what then? One possibility is that the author of this post was never born. There was no individual called ‘GK’. My parents’ only son was called Simon Klempner, and he became a successful City of London banker.

But it is the other possibility that troubles me: that GK was born, sixty-nine years ago give or take a few days, studied Philosophy, got his doctorate, ended up here, on a high and very bare plateau of his own creation, posting his lonely thoughts on the Internet. But that GK, be he ever-so much like me, is not I. Because I never existed:

I might not have existed but someone exactly like me might have existed in my place.

Obviously — duh! — Cartesian dualism cannot account for there being I, because it can’t explain why I exist rather than someone exactly like me who is not I. My existence or non-existence is not to be ‘accounted for’ on the basis of the existence or non-existence of some substance, as Descartes thought. The metaphysical theory of substance, which he derived from the great Aristotle, is simply inadequate to account for what is.

What is, is that there is a world, and there is I. Or, in the words of Ludwig Wittgenstein in his 1914-16 Notebooks:

“There are two godheads: the world and my independent I.”

Later, in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Wittgenstein pulled back from this momentous claim, realizing that according to his own theory of language and meaning, the thing he wanted to say simply could not be said, or even ‘thought’. Wittgenstein’s contemporary, the redoubtable Frank Ramsay alluding to his teacher’s fondness for playing the recorder quipped, ‘What you can’t say you can’t say, and you can’t whistle it either.’

— I will leave the question there, because I don’t know what else there is to say.

Mia asked:

Hello, I am a student in middle school, and due to my unfortunate intellectual immaturity, I’m have trouble understanding dialectical materialism. I have two questions on the subject:

If you ever to look at, for example, Darwin’s theory of evolution, through a dialectical materialism thought process, how would your opinion on the subject change?

Why was dialectical materialism created? Did it support a certain political perspective?

Hope to hear from you soon.

 Answer by Jürgen Lawrenz

I’m impressed that as a middle school student you seem ready to tackle socio-philosophical issues! But I will keep things radically simple. It is more important to have an overall grasp; the details can follow later.

Dialectical materialism involves a conception of society as an economy, i.e. producer and consumer of commodities (goods and services). Its basis is, that every citizen in any society has needs that must be fulfilled for them to live a decent life. Therefore they have to work and be paid for it, so as to be able to go out and buy what they need. But this issue has always been a huge problem for mankind. Throughout history, societies have been stratified into “classes” — the rich, the middling and the poor. Most of the time this does not reflect the deserving of the people who make up these classes. Rather it is the case that some people enjoy privileges based on birth right, i.e. nobility, large property ownership, industrialism, fame as entertainers etc. The poor, on the other hand, are often denied the opportunity to crawl out of poverty on their own merit.

This was Marx’s perspective when he founded the Communist Movement. His dialectical materialism served for the analysis of what has to change in society for everyone to get an adequate share of what is called in England, the “common wealth”. It is dialectical in that it comprises a pattern of examinations in form of a disputation, where (e.g.) two conflicting social situations A and B are to be reconciled in a synthesis C, which ought to benefit both parties. Thereafter the enquiry continues with C and D and so on. The word ‘materialism’ indicates that it is goods and services that are under debate, not merely theoretical principles.

Ideally, a civil society should ensure that all the benefits are equally distributed, or at least in the form of merit that reflects the quality and quantity of individual input. Whether any communist state has ever achieved this, may be doubted, but that’s the ideology behind dialectical materialism.

Where does Darwinism fit into this? Basically not at all. Its catch phrase “survival of the fittest” tells you by implications that it emerged from the mercantile environment of England, where the fittest are invariably those who know how to play the game of capitalism to their advantage. So this ideology (when transferred to politics) is merely another form of generating privilege. Bear in mind now that Marx worked in England, the home of evolution theory and of capitalism, and that his life span overlapped partially with Darwin. It explains something. But irrespective of this accidental coincidence, Darwinism and Marxism are absolutely incompatible.

Alan asked:

Is the essential freedom proposed by Sartre contradicted by all types of determinism?

Answer by Geoffrey Klempner

This is a question about which I have changed my mind. I had a view — quite a strong view — about this, but I now realize I was wrong.

This is what I used to think: that everything that Sartre says about ‘free will’ and ‘bad faith’ can be fully taken on board by a ‘compatibilist’ — someone who believes that free will is compatible with determinism. What exactly is the debate over compatibilism?

The debate got going with a thought famously expressed by David Hume in his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding:

“Actions are, by their very nature, temporary and perishing; and where they proceed not from some cause in the character and disposition of the person who performed them, they can neither redound to his honour, if good; nor infamy, if evil.”

In unit 2 of The Possible World Machine, I offer the following gloss on Hume’s remark, put into the mouth of my fictional student ‘Derek’:

“What it means… is that if your idea of free will is not being determined to do whatever it is that you’re going to do next by your own unique character and innate dispositions, then you’re no better, in effect, than a roulette wheel. The action you ‘freely’ choose to do, according the this idea, is just the accidental result of whatever number in the roulette wheel in your head happens to come up. That’s not anything anyone would recognise as freedom.”

If Derek’s claim were true, then in order to have good Sartrean ‘free will’ we would want determinism to be true. The actions I do in good faith, or avoiding bad faith, proceed from my ‘unique character and dispositions’. They are caused by me, the kind of person, the agent that I am. Actions that are not the product of my character are actions that I can take no credit for. They are not ‘mine’ in any meaningful sense. Ergo, someone who believes in Sartrean free will ought to believe in determinism, or at least hope that determinism is true.

Schopenhauer makes a similar point when he argues against a conception of free will conceived as the ‘freedom of indifference’. If my free actions are only those that occur in cases where my character and motivations are not sufficient to decide one way or the other, then they are of no interest. What interests us, as moral agents, are those actions that we have a reason and a motivation to do, the actions we choose, for reasons.

This is just plain wrong!

If there is one thing we know about the philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre, absolutely and for sure, is that he is adamant that determinism cannot be true. He doesn’t merely express the hope that determinism is false. He knows that it is false. He knows that he is radically free. But, in that case, how does he escape Hume’s dilemma?

There is a way to avoid the dilemma. But in order to see it we have to rid our minds of the kinds of example that are normally put forward in discussions of free will. (It was Wittgenstein who remarked, ‘A main cause of philosophical disease — a one-sided diet: one nourishes one’s thinking with only one kind of example’ Philosophical Investigations para. 593.) We imagine cases where there are reasons for doing A and also reasons for doing B. We balance the reasons for A and B against one another and decide that A is, all things considered, stronger than B. So we do A.

It is true that we do sometimes balance two incompatible courses of action against one another and decide which to opt for. But far more commonly, we find ourselves in a situation were we don’t know what to do. There are lots of possibilities, not just two. And thinking ahead, through the various things that could happen, more and more possibilities branch off.

I would argue that it is far closer to the human decision-making process to see it as a kind of creative reverie. We indulge in this kind of reverie even when we are not required to make any decision. The thought comes into my head, ‘Suppose that such-and-such were to happen.’ It might be extremely unlikely that such-and-such could ever happen in any possible world that I was remotely connected to, but such considerations are irrelevant in pure reverie. In reverie, I can travel the universe, or become Pope, or machine gun my enemies to death.

When creative reverie is put to use, on the other hand, we find ourselves at the apex of multiple story lines, any one of which could actually come to pass, but at most only one of them will. But here’s the thing: The story lines have to occur to me. I entertain them in my mind, let them in to my consciousness. They crowd round. Which one should I choose first? It is true that at this precise point my freedom is indeed the ‘freedom of indifference’ as Schopenhauer calls it. My thoughts go one way when they could just as well have gone another. Nevertheless, I take responsibility for that choice. The thoughts are indeed mine.

Though I could hardly see myself committing murder in the real world, the thought of what I would do to so-and-so with my machine gun really did happen, I cannot deny it. And now suppose that by some incredible sequence of events my enemy stands before me, and I just happen to have a fully-working machine gun in my hands…

It is in this sense, and for these reasons, that I can imagine that I might not have existed but someone exactly like me might have existed in my place, who ten minutes ago when I started composing this answer decided to watch the TV news instead. With the result that this answer was never written.

Writing this answer today was an act of free will, an event that could not have been predicted by a Laplacian Super-Mind on the basis of the way the Big Bang banged because a possible world not just similar to but exactly like the actual world, up to ten minutes ago exists, with someone exactly like me in it, who happened to wonder what Boris was up to today and decided to put on the TV news.