Thursday, February 03, 2011

How Morality "Seems" to Sam Harris: A review of The Moral Landscape

Alisdair MacIntyre points out that the only rational choices when it comes to a philosophy of morality are Aristotle and Neitzsche. Sam Harris, the atheist author of Letters to a Christian Nation, instead chooses Pollyanna.

In his most recent book, The Moral Landscape: How Science Determines Human Values, Harris claims to offer an argument for his position that science can objectively ground morality. While his method of proof is long on earnestness, it is short on argument. In fact, he seems to think that he can establish many of his conclusions by simply willing them.

All throughout the book, we encounter expressions that assure us in the most sincere terms that what follows them is true: terms such as "are bound to," "in my experience," "there simply must be," "cannot be," "it seems inevitable," "surely," "the good life must relate," "will necessarily," "cannot be denied," "science should one day," "most of them are surely wrong," "we must first acknowledge" "change will necessarily depend," "values seem to arise," "it seems to me," "it seems clear," "there is every reason to think," "is bound to be," "of course," "I believe," "there is simply no question," "there must be," "the inescapable fact," "we already have good reason to believe," "I consider," "almost surely," "we can be reasonably confident," "could also," "it seems quite possible," "this certainly appears," "do not seem to," "there is probably," "it is widely believed," "we all know this," "it is only reasonable," "at the very least," "I have no doubt," "I am nearly as sure," "I strongly believe," "it is quite clear to me," "it seems possible," "it is easy to see," "it also seems," "I suspect," "be assured," "apparently," "it seems quite clear," "we can imagine," "we can see," "it now seems," "it is reasonable to wonder," "there is no reason to think," "there is a sense in which," "there can be no doubt," "I cannot conceive," "it is also conceivable," etc., etc., etc.

You get the idea.

Real logical expressions like "for," "since," "because," and "therefore" don't stand a chance against the avalanche of seemses and musts and surelys. In fact, Harris' argument is powered largely by adverbs.

Just several pages in I started to notice this tendency to presume upon the reader's presumption. Then I kept noticing it, and I saw it again, and again, and again. I just started circling them as I encountered them, page after page. There were key components to Harris's "argument" which were just "supposed" to be clear to me: to be "undoubtedly" true, to be "reasonable," to be "probably" be this way, or "inescapably" that.

It is a rhetoric that fits the photograph--a photograph that graces all his books and captures the look of the Randian hero: confident, determined, and free of all doubt.

I finally realized that Harris just thinks that the main steps in his case that science can establish morality are obvious. He wasn't arguing with me, his reader, that his assumptions about these things were true, he was expecting me to simply acquiesce to their self-evident truth on the mere grounds of his confidence in his own assertions.

When you're setting forth a position, it's reasonable to assume what you're readers actually do assume. But when you are overturning 2,500 years of thought on an issue (really only about 400 years worth, since he only really tries to counter Hume--the prior tradition he ignores), it's probably not a good idea to assume what your reader does not actually take for granted.

One of the admirable things about St. Thomas Aquinas is that he always tried to put his opponents' arguments into a rational form, sometimes stating them more logically than they did. Since Harris himself won't do it for us, let's try to cast his argument into some kind of logical form. If we did, his main argument would run something like this:
Questions about well being can be scientifically understood
Moral questions are questions about well being
Therefore moral questions can be scientifically understood
Harris's whole argument hangs on his middle term: "well-being." If it means the same in his major (or first) premise as it does in his minor (or second) premise, then the argument has some plausibility: he can reasonably claim to have connected together the two ideas in his conclusion--morality and science. But if it doesn't, then he has committed the fallacy of equivocation, and the argument falls apart.

And his concept of well-being will have to have more support than Harris's own assertions of "seems" or "appears" or "I strongly believe."

What Harris does--wittingly or unwittingly--is bank on our traditional moral conception of "well-being" in his minor premise and then go on happily defining "well-being" in an entirely scientific and non-ethical way for purposes of his major premise, so that, by the time he gets done, he has two entirely different middle terms on his hands that cease to be able to keep the subject and predicate of his conclusion together. He has, fact, constructed his whole argument on this equivocation--and the term "well-being," being sufficiently vague, suits his purpose nicely.

It's a good try. But no one should be fooled.

Harris starts out by observing what he considers to be the two main schools of moral philosophy: the religious school that considers that moral truth exists because "God has woven it into the very fabric of reality"; and the evolutionary school that believes that moral values are culturally constructed. These are two of the three standard schools of ethics: the first is duty ethics, and the second consequentialism. Both, he says, are mistaken.

But the real bogey throughout the book is David Hume's "fact/value"distinction, a distinction which, given certain presuppositions (one's which Harris and other New Atheists share) prevents you from going from one to the other. Facts are things that are; values are things that should be; and things that are and things that should be are two entirely different kinds of things. To confuse them is commit what philosophers call a "category mistake."

To say that science, the study of what is, can have something to say about what ought to be is like applying the standards of what constitutes good music to determine how to bake a cake, or saying that the standards of good accounting practice can be used to determine the quality of a piece of music.

This distinction is assumed by most advocates of both schools Harris mentions: protestants assume it as much as secular philosophers, although it is largely rejected in Catholic thought. Harris is clearly aware of this problem, and articulates it competently in the introduction. The problem is that, once it is acknowledged, the then proceeds as if he had never heard of it.

Catholics (at least those in the Aristotelian/Thomist tradition) largely form the third school of ethics--virtue ethics, in which you can get around the distinction because of the prior distinction between man as he is and man as he would be if he achieved his telos or purpose. Both of these things are facts--the way man is and the telos which is the fulfillment of his nature, and ethics is simply the best way from one to the other.

But Harris does not believe in an objective telos--or that man has a particular nature to which this telos would correspond. So how does he get around the fact/value distinction? And this leads us to the second main argument of the book.

Harris argues that if factual statements and ethical statements both derive from similar brain processes, then they are the same kind of belief. He doesn't argue for this view, he just asserts it. And he seems to think that his assertion can be transformed into an argument by simply piling on evidence that both derive from similar brain states. But the problem in bridging the gap between the fact that a particular brain process occurs for two different kinds of belief and the conclusion that brain state to kind of belief is no less daunting then bridging the gap between facts and values.

Once again, we are forced to do Harris' work for him. Here is the argument:
Any belief that is produced by a certain brain process is the same kind of belief as any other belief produced by the same brain process
Factual beliefs and moral beliefs are both produced by the same brain process
Therefore, factual beliefs and moral beliefs are the same kind of beliefs
Harris spends all his time proving his minor premise, and simply assumes his major premise. He never attempts to prove it, yet it is precisely the assertion at issue.

"[B]eliefs about facts and beliefs about values seem to arise from similar processes at the level of the brain," he says on p. 11. "The division between facts and values does not make much sense in terms of underlying brain function," he asserts on p. 121.

He has tracked his seemingly divergent quarry and, following the trail to hole in the ground he calls the "medial pre-frontal cortex" (which he invests with the authority of scientific mysticism by crowning it with an acronym: MPFC), he calms the hounds and declares he has proven the objects of his hunt to be the same.

But why should anyone believe that a particular process--or a particular geographical location of the brain--dictates or limits the kind of thought or belief that occurs in it? Why does the nature or meaning of a statement have anything to do with the fact that it derives from a certain "brain process"? It is as if someone were to tell you that beef and milk are essentially the same thing, since they both derive from a cow, or that fried chicken and eggs easy-over were essentially the same kind of food because they are both the product of a chicken.

The same brain produces different kind of beliefs. Why shouldn't the same gland produce them?
He doesn't say. It apparently "seems" that way to him and "no doubt" must "appear" that it is "only reasonable."

If a particular brain process can only produce the same kind of thing, does that mean that if two contradictory statements derive from the same brain process (a contingency not precluded in Harris' account) that truth and falsity are fundamentally the same? Again, it all hangs on whether we are assured by those comforting adverbs.

It is the same old scientific reductionism that we constantly hear being invoked, and seldom hear being rationally justified. It certainly isn't in this book.

And this brings us to our third point concerning Harris' book. The most publicized passage in it truly sums up the book:
Throughout this book I make reference to a hypothetical space that I call "the moral landscape"-- a space of real and potential outcomes whose peaks correspond to the heights of potential well-being and whose valleys represent the deepest possible suffering. Different ways of thinking and behaving--different cultural practices, ethical codes, modes of government, etc.--will translate into movements across this landscape and, therefore, into different degrees of human flourishing.
"Well-being" and "human flourishing" serve interchangeably as equivocal terms in Harris' argument. But this passage highlights another weakness in Harris' rhetoric: he employs metaphors that masquerade as arguments.

His rhetoric of "peaks" and "valleys" is an old weapon in the quiver of those who reject traditional morality, and the defense against it was articulated over 100 years ago. In his 1908 book Orthodoxy, G. K. Chesterton describes the tactic as taking "refuge in material metaphors:
[I]n fact, is the chief mark of vague modern people. Not daring to define their doctrine of what is good, they use physical figures of speech without stint or shame, and, what is worst of all, seem to think these cheap analogies are exquisitely spiritual and superior to the old morality. Thus they think it intellectual to talk about things being "high." It is at least the reverse of intellectual; it is a mere phrase from a steeple or a weathercock. "Tommy was a good boy" is a pure
philosophical statement, worthy of Plato or Aquinas. "Tommy lived the higher life" is a gross metaphor from a ten-foot rule.
Chesterton points to the same tendency in Nietzsche:
Nietzsche always escaped a question by a physical metaphor, like a cheery minor poet. He said, "beyond good and evil," because he had not the courage to say, "more good than good and evil," or, "more evil than good and evil." Had he faced his thought without metaphors, he would have seen that it was nonsense. So, when he describes his hero, he does not dare to say, "the purer man," or "the happier man," or "the sadder man," for all these are ideas; and ideas are alarming. He says "the upper man," or "over man," a physical metaphor from acrobats or alpine climbers.
Harris' "peaks" and "valleys" serve the same role as Nietzshe's "higher" and "lower": they create the illusion of moral substance. He invokes them just like he invokes "well-being" and "human flourishing": as a sort of incantation he thinks will make the real problems with his argument go away. But we are never told exactly how it does this.

And so we are left with two different conceptions of well-being or flourishing, one a truly ethical conception which renders the minor premise of his first argument meaningful, and another a purely emotive or utilitarian conception which serves to establish his major premise. We are left devoid of any rationale for believing that the nature of a brain process dictates anything about the ontological or epistemological character of the judgments it produces.

And we are left with the feeling that, in the final analysis, his "moral landscape" with its "peaks" and "valleys" sounds attractive and plausible, but when you actually investigate it you find it doesn't show anything about how science determines human values, but is little more than the product of Harris' own imagination.

Finally, there is the whole issue of the legitimacy of Harris' project. What, if anything can science say about morality? How can a discipline devoted and designed only to tell us the how say anything the why or the whether? As Alastair MacIntyre has pointed out, the moral project of the Enlightenment has failed. Morality cannot be grounded in any of the things so many modern thinkers have thought it could be: the reason, the will, or the emotions. Kant, Kierkegaard, and Hume all come up short in their attempts to establish in on their respective bases. It defies any such analysis.

The only ethics worthy of the name was abandoned at the Renaissance: the classical conception which incorporates formal and final causality: that everything, including man, has a nature and a purpose, and that the approximation of that nature and the accomplishment of that purpose are what make him more truly what he really is. To say that a man is a "good man" is no fundamentally different than saying that dog is a "good dog" or a tree is a "good tree." Is it being what it really is and is it serving the purpose intrinsic to it? If it is, then it's good. If it's not, then it's not.

That's all you can say.

As to what the nature and purpose of human being is another matter, but it doesn't help in the task of determining these things to say that they don't exist. And those who say that they don't exist have the responsibility, if they want to cling to a notion of right and wrong, to provide an alternative account. So far, all such attempts have failed, and Harris' is not exactly one of the more impressive ones.

29 comments:

KyCobb said...

Martin,

As I have mentioned before when the issue of morality has come up, morality evolves over time as the consensus of society changes. This is particularly true in the U.S., which is a pluralistic society in which many different moral traditions are espoused and none are dominant. I'm not saying this is how it should be; obviously everyone should behave in accordance with my moral principles ;) but that it how it is.

Martin Cothran said...

KyCobb,

You clearly think that morality is the "consensus of society," so it can hardly be explained, as you say here, by the consenus of society. This, of course, is completely circular.

You then go on to assert that just because there are many moral views, no one of them is any more valid than another. There are multiple views on scientific issues like evolution. In fact, the "consensus of society," by some accounts, is against the theory. Can we therefore conclude that no one view of evolution is any more valid than another?

Why is it that sloppy thinking like this is tolerated on issues like ethics, but it is rejected in fields like science?

Singring said...

'You then go on to assert that just because there are many moral views, no one of them is any more valid than another. There are multiple views on scientific issues like evolution. In fact, the "consensus of society," by some accounts, is against the theory. Can we therefore conclude that no one view of evolution is any more valid than another?'

So now you are comparing the elucidation of moral values to a scientific theory? We can show that going by societal consensus when it comes to evolution is a bad idea because we have testable, observable, empirical data that supports evolutionary theory (vast amounts, in fact).

So then I assume who have observable, empirically testable evidence in support of a moral value that you can use to counter the societal consensus on, say, abortion in US (http://www.lifenews.com/2009/10/01/nat-5529/)?

I'd love to see any empirical evidence that shows there is a moral rule that states abortion is wrong in all or most cases.

Martin Cothran said...

So now you are comparing the elucidation of moral values to a scientific theory?

Step #1 in the Singring Dialectic: Interpret your opponent's position as exactly the opposite of what he actually said.

I think it is fairly clear that I was applying KyCobb's own reasoning to another, similar case. Go look up "reductio ad absurdum."

Martin Cothran said...

Singring,

I'd love to see any empirical evidence that shows there is a moral rule that states abortion is wrong in all or most cases.

Then maybe we could investigate the historical evidence that triangles have three sides, or the mathematical proof that I like the taste of spinach, or the chemical evidence that Shakespeare's Hamlet is better than last Daniele Steel novel.

After you've found the definition for "reductio ad absurdum," go look up "category mistake."

KyCobb said...

Science is about the application of theory to observable facts. You can't do that with ethics.

Martin Cothran said...

And morality is about the application of formal and final causation to human behavior. So why is one at the mercy of the "consensus of society" and the other isn't?

Singring said...

'I think it is fairly clear that I was applying KyCobb's own reasoning to another, similar case. Go look up "reductio ad absurdum."'

Of course you were. But the implication was that we can't rely on censensus to derive morals because - just like in science - we have better ways (i.e. empirical) of doing so.

So what are they?

'Then maybe we could investigate the historical evidence that triangles have three sides, or the mathematical proof that I like the taste of spinach, or the chemical evidence that Shakespeare's Hamlet is better than last Daniele Steel novel.'

So then we are agreed - there is no empirically verifyable way of arriving at moral rules. What we are left with are subjective, that is to say completely relative, standards by which we derive moral rules, just as we use relative standards to determine which novel is best.

'And morality is about the application of formal and final causation to human behavior. So why is one at the mercy of the "consensus of society" and the other isn't?'

Show me any empirical evidence for any 'formal' or 'final' cause and you have a point. So far, in all our dicussions, the best you have been able to come up with justifications for your moral positions are statements like 'it's self-evident' or 'its a metaphysical necessity' or 'my intuition tells me so'. You obviously couldn't care less what the 'intuition' of a gay person or a woman who wants an abortion tells them is morally right and wrong, so why on earth should we or anyone else care anything at all about what you thinkis morally right and wrong?

Martin, as much as you would love to do it, you can't claim first that moral standards are subjective and then second that only yours are valid.

Martin Cothran said...

Singring,

So then we are agreed - there is no empirically verifyable way of arriving at moral rules.

Right. Just as there is no empirically verifiable way of arriving at the conclusion that empirical verifiability is the test of moral claims.

Martin Cothran said...

What we are left with are subjective, that is to say completely relative, standards by which we derive moral rules

Only if you accept the false dichotomy between empirical verifiability and subjectivism. That dichotomy assumes that empirical verifiability is the only kind of objective inquiry, which of course it is not.

Singring said...

'That dichotomy assumes that empirical verifiability is the only kind of objective inquiry, which of course it is not.'

Then tell me - how exactly in your 'intuition' of what a man has to do with his genitals an objective truth, whereas a gay man's 'intuition' is not?

I already asked you once to give me a single objective truth derived by philosophy - the only one you coulod come up with is that 'science is not the only path to truth'.

In other words, you answered the questions 'Please name one element in the set of objective truths obtained via philosophy' by saying 'there is a set of objective truths that is not obtained via science'.

To call that a non-answer would be too kind.

Singring said...

'Right. Just as there is no empirically verifiable way of arriving at the conclusion that empirical verifiability is the test of moral claims.'

Correct. I never claimed there was. Remeber - I am a complete moral subjectivist. In other words, I don't believe there is any way to derive objective moral rules, whether by empirical methods or otherwise. So while that may be a problem for you, it certainly isn't for me.

KyCobb said...

Martin,

So why is one at the mercy of the "consensus of society" and the other isn't?

I didn't say that was the way it should be Martin, only that that is the way it is. Quantum mechanics isn't subject to the "consensus of society" because if the societal consensus is wrong, then computers don't work. Most people's morality, otoh, is based in their religious traditions. You either believe in the Trinity, Jehovah or Allah or you don't. You either believe the Torah, the Bible or the Quran is the word of God or you don't. People argue about how holy books should be interpreted, but the differences can't be resolved.

Martin Cothran said...

Singring,

'That dichotomy assumes that empirical verifiability is the only kind of objective inquiry, which of course it is not.'

Then tell me - how exactly in your 'intuition' of what a man has to do with his genitals an objective truth, whereas a gay man's 'intuition' is not?


That's what you call shifting the ground of argument. Are you or are you not assuming that empirical method is the only kind of objective inquiry?

Martin Cothran said...

Singring,

I already asked you once to give me a single objective truth derived by philosophy - the only one you coulod come up with is that 'science is not the only path to truth'.

The Law of Non Contradiction.

The Dictum de omni

The Dictum de nullo

The Law of Reciprocal Identity

The Law of Reciprocal Non-Identity

That there must be three and only three terms in a valid categorical syllogism

That the middle term cannot occur in the conclusion of a valid categorical syllogism

That if a term is distributed in the conclusion, then it must be distributed in a the premises of a valid categorical syllogism

That the middle term must be distributed at least once in a valid categorical syllogism

That no conclusion follows from two particular premises

That no conclusion follows from two negative premises

That if two premise are affirmative, the conclusion must also be affirmative

That if either premise is negative, the conclusion must be negative

How many more do you want?

Singring said...

'Are you or are you not assuming that empirical method is the only kind of objective inquiry?'

I am. However, I am not assuming it as one would any old assertion or idea, I am assuming it because so far as it has proved to be successful. In other words: I can give you any number of 'truths' the empirical method has produced for us, at least to a very high level of confidence.

I assume you agree...I doubt you would want to claim that Newton's Principia are nonsense, that electromagnetism is a fib or that the germ theory of disease is not 'true'.

So we both agree that empiricism gives us access to a set of 'truths'.

You are making an additional claim. You have done it before, you do it here again: You claim that not only does empiricism, or science, lead to 'truth', but there are other method(s) that do so as well.

The only problem is that, asside from asserting this, you have given us no reason at all to accept that this is so, as I have laid out above.

So until you have done so, I am very much justified in dismissing any claims to moral 'truth' that have nor been empirically verified.

Martin Cothran said...

I just did.

Singring said...

'How many more do you want?'

Martin - all these rules of logic you have listed are no more 'true' than the claim that unicorns exist. They have no 'truth' content in and of themselves, such as the statement 'the moon orbits the earth' has.

Tell me, how do you know that the Law of non-contradiction is 'true'?

All they are are rules, conventions we have laid out as starting points from which to build models of reality. They have as such no direct link to reality and can be nagated simply by making the inverse claim. In other words, they are axioms - or derived from axioms, but there is nothing that would stop me or anyone else from coming up with all kinds of other sets of rules just as there are several kinds of logic and geometry that all rest on different axioms that are different from your list, but that would still produce an internally consistent model.

The only way to find out if these models are any use at all at predicting 'truths' is to test them against reality.

When you say that the Law of Non Contradiction is 'true', then I can simply claim that the law of Contradiction is 'true'. These would then simply be two competing axioms and the only way - the only way to confirm whether the models derived from either yield 'truth' would be to test them against reality and see which one works best.

The only way to do that is empirically.

On a final not: Some of the axioms of logic do not apply at the quantum scale. They are not even universally applicable axioms.

Singring said...

By the way, the reason I keep putting 'truth' in apostrphes is because I want to emphasize that we have different understandings of what a 'truth' is. To me, a 'truth' is only so if it applies to reality - in other words, if it has been confirmed by testing it against reality, or if it is derived from a consistent model that has been extensively tested against reality.

Your idea od 'truth' seems to be that any conclusions derived from a set of axioms (i.e. the laws of logic) is a 'truth'.

For example, I could simply state that the 'nature' of all men is that they are immortal.

I could then state:

'All men are immortal
Socrates is a man
Therefore Socrates is immortal.'

Now if you truly were consistent in your ideas about 'truth' you would have to concede that Socrates is indeed immortal.

Of course that is nonsense.

The only wy we can find out that it is nonsense, though, is by going out and checking whether all men really are immortal.

They are not.

The same has to be done with all of your laws of logic...tehy aren't 'true' by feat - we can only find out if they are by testing them against reality (and some of them don't even apply to all of reality, see QT).

Martin Cothran said...

Singring,

Yes, your answer to my question whether you were assuming that all objective truths are empirical in nature came in about one minute after I had posted that comment.

So your assertion is:

All objective truths are empirically verifiable.

Is that correct?

Singring said...

'All objective truths are empirically verifiable.'

If you are using 'truths' in the sense that I am (as I have described above), then yes, that is so. Though I have to stress once again that all and any 'truths' arrived at via empiricism are tentative and subject to change should our set of evidence change, so while we may call them 'objective truths' for the purpose of this discussion, I don't think they would be 'objective truths' (i.e. eternally unchanging, applicable everywhere etc.) as you understand them.

Martin Cothran said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Martin Cothran said...

Singring,

Okay, so the statement "All objective truths are empirically verifiable." is your kind of truth? An empirically verifiable truth?

Singring said...

'Okay, so the statement "All objective truths are empirically verifiable." is your kind of truth? An empirically verifiable truth?'

No it isn't. Its an axiom - a starting premise, if you will. It's what I believe, but I could be wrong. There could be many truths that are not empirically verifiable - the thing is that I have never been given any reason to believe that there are any truths that are not empirically verifiable.

The thing is: we both agree that empricism gives us access to some truths. After all, you would agree that we know that men are mortal thanks to empiricism, just as we know that the earth moves around the sun thanks to empiricism. So I doubt you would refute my axiom wholesale. I think you might want to change it - sto allow that there are some truths we can know without empiricical support.

So go ahead: all you need to do to show me that there are truths that we can know are true (i.e. statements that accurately reflect reality) without the help of any empiricism and you have blown my axiom out of the water.

Good luck.

Martin Cothran said...

Singring,

I am trying to reconcile these two comments. First what you said in your last post:

1. ME: 'Okay, so the statement "All objective truths are empirically verifiable." is your kind of truth? An empirically verifiable truth?'

YOU: No it isn't.

And 2. ME: 'All objective truths are empirically verifiable.'

YOU: If you are using 'truths' in the sense that I am (as I have described above), then yes, that is so.

In 1. you say it not true using your sense of truth as something that is empirically verifiable and in 2. you say it is.

Have you changed your mind?

Singring said...

'Have you changed your mind?'

Martin, you seem to forget that my definition of 'truth' already contains an element of uncertainty, a tentative character - so nothing I assert or believe is meant to have absolute character.

I understand this is difficult for someone who is religious who believes in absolute truths, absolute morals, right and wrong, black and white. It is extremely hard for you to grasp that people may operate under assumtpion that simply 'may' be true, until shown good reason to do otherwise.

Let me be as accurate as I can in delineating the difference here:

I believe that, based on what I know now, all truths are empirically verifiable. In that sense, I 'assert' this to be so. This is simply an expansion of the premise 'some truths are empirically verifyable'.

However, I freely admit that this may be a false belief - a false premise. There would be a very simple way of showing me I'm wrong: any example of a truth that can be obtained or has been obtained wholly removed from empirical verification.

The fix you find yourself in, Martin, is that you would love to just dismiss my premise that there are truths that are empirically verifiable (just as I would dismiss your premise that all men are mortal), but you know that would be absurd, because it is the most fundamental assumption a human can make - that his or her senses and experiences represent truth.

So we both accept the premise that at least some truths are empirically verifyable, I simply go a step further. You would like to stick with the 'some' premise, whereas I go for the 'all' premise.

I could settle for the 'some' premise, but it implies that there are truths that are available without empirical verification - a notion I have no reason to accept.

So, in a nutshell:

We both believe some truths are empirically verifiable. If you would like to give me any example of a truth that is not empirically verifiable to make me change my premise, go right I ahead. I'd love to hear it.

But I'm not holding my breath.

Martin Cothran said...

Singring,

So what does this peculiar view of truth you are extrapolating have anything to do with the question I just asked you?

I asked you if your assertion that all truth was empirically verifiable was empirically verifiable was true, and you said, "If you are using 'truths' in the sense that I am (as I have described above) [i.e. as empirically verifiable] then yes, that is so."

Then you realized the corner you were being trapped in, and then, in your very next post, you denied that your assertion was empirically verifiable, engagig in a direct contradiction.

So either you are saying that your view of truth justifies you engaging in contradictory assertions or you're trying to change the subject.

Which is it?

Singring said...

'So either you are saying that your view of truth justifies you engaging in contradictory assertions or you're trying to change the subject.'

Martin - you are being very misrepresentative again. This is what you asked me in your first question:

'So your assertion is:

All objective truths are empirically verifiable.'

All you asked me was whether or not that was my assertion or not. I confirmed.

Then, thinking you were being oh so clever and you had caught me in a contradiction, you proceeded to ask me whether that assertion was empirically verifyable.

I said it wasn't. I said it was a basic assumption, an axiom, a premise I use to understand and model the world. Analogous to your rules nof logic.

Now I know this must be frustrating - because you would just love to prove me wrong by simply dismissing my premise just as I did with your premises on logic being 'true'.

But you can't.

Because you agree with me that some truths are empirically verifyable. A sane human being has to assume that this is so - that when you see, feel, touch a chair it is really there, that when you measure the length of a leaf to be 3 cm it is in fact 3 cm and not 2.5 cm long.

But you have one other option: To show that only some truths are empirically verifyable. That would allow you to maintain your premise and simultaneously show mine to be false.

So go ahead. I'm still waiting. The best you have done so far is claim that there are such truths. I'm still waiting to actually hear about one of them.

Singring said...

Maybe this will amke it easier to get a handle on the issue:

We both work from the following premise:

'What is empricially confirmed is true.'

So we both have the same basis from which we go. You make an additional claim:

'Some things which have not been or cannot be empricially verified are true.'

I don't accept the second premise on teh face of it. So taken together with the premise above, I can summate my positions as: 'All truths are empirically verifyable.'

Now it is clear that the burden of proof is on you to show me some examples of truths that cannot be or have not yet been empirically verified so I am compelled to accept your additional premise.

Its as simple as that. So far you have failed at doing so.