Hypothesis: Every deduction is a concealed induction. (See below)
The previous post, Fundamentals of Liberal Thought, offered a beginning discussion of foundations—of the grounds of reason.
This post attempts elementary notes on the nature of fact and truth, from the Enlightenment liberal perspective. As before, the chief contestant for prevailing concept of truth is the archaic assumption implied by Plato's philosophic idealism. This is that entities have essences, that truth is a knowledge of essences, and thus that truth is absolute. A corollary is that what is true is necessarily so.
Liberalism's concept of truth is closely related to the perspective of empirical science: Truth is probabilistic. If a fact arrived at by induction is falsifiable—Karl Popper's famous proposition—it cannot be absolute.
Let's try a couple of definitions derived from the premise that truth is empirical and probabilistic:
- Truth is a function of the current state of our knowledge; and
- A truth is that conclusion, from the best available evidence that, when acted on, tends to produce the expected results.
(1) fits the Newton/Einstein case. At one time Isaac Newton's Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica was considered the ultimate revelation of the laws of nature. 'Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night: God said, Let Newton be! and all was light,' exclaimed Alexander Pope. But a glitch was discovered:
A long-standing problem in the study of the Solar System was that the orbit of Mercury did not behave as required by Newton's equations.
The work of Albert Einstein revealed what had happened. Newton's conclusions were based on observations of non-relativistic phenomena, and worked satisfactorily under those conditions. The Principia was a brilliant analysis of the knowledge of its time. Newton's formulae are still widely used in a wide number of practical cases, where velocity is not even close to the speed of light, and the sort of powerful close-to-a-star gravity well experienced by Mercury is not a factor. In such non-relativistic conditions, Newton's math is far simpler.
Newton's treatment of the regularities of nature is a subset of Einstein's treatment of the regularities of nature. Einstein's propositions and equations apply under a much wider set of conditions. (There was a debate in the USENET discussion group rec.arts.books, where humanities professors could not understand scientists' argument, that to say that Newton was "wrong" and Einstein was "right" is simplistic. Degrees of confidence does not fit an outlook derived essentially from Plato.)
It could be said that Plato's philosophical idealism was an attempt to solve the problem of induction* by deriving all knowledge from deduction, thereby achieving metaphysical certitude. (His model may have been theoretical mathematics, which some mathematicians see as a great structure of a priori truths existing before and outside of the "reality" we think we experience. The idea or Form is a similar a priori construction which is immaterial, eternal, perfect, unchanging, and imperceptible to the senses.)
The scientific/liberal response is that there are no absolutes, and metaphysical certitude is a will-o-the-wisp. The Forms, after all, are off in some invisible Platonic heaven (which only the Philosopher can see). By contrast, "The moderns [liberals] built on low but solid ground" (Leo Strauss quoted by Allan Bloom). Induction can give results which are certain for all practical purposes. Did you ever run across a street dodging cars? In doing so, you wagered your life on where moving cars would be (an ephemeral truth if there ever was one) when you went.
Hypothesis: Plato's effort was doomed from the start for the reason that it is impossible to start from deduction because every deduction is a concealed induction. A familiar universal principle, i.e. deduction, from theoretical mathematics such as "2 plus 2 equals 4" becomes, in applied mathematics,** an induction, such as "2 oranges plus 2 oranges equals 4 oranges." This induction is falsifiable. All it would require is a case where a grocery clerk put 2 oranges in a sack, then another 2 oranges, and the sack, upon inspection, contained any other quantity than 4 oranges.***
"2 plus 2 equals 4" is not necessarily true; if it were, it would be a prophecy about the future which we mortals are not permitted to make. (Nevertheless, most of us do not anticipate a disjuncture between integer mathematics and household purchases.)
For a more wide-ranging discussion of liberal modernity's objection to Plato, see Footnotes to Plato: Is Your Child's Humanities Professor Scornful of Your Values?
(*) The problem of induction is that it consists of conclusions derived from observation of physical reality (which Plato calls the realm of "appearances") and, according to Plato, produces "opinion" rather than "knowledge." A future observation could contradict those on which the induction is based—that is the problem.
(**) One can say that Plato engaged in equivocation, acting as if applied mathematics possessed the immutability of theoretical mathematics. (Equivocation: When a key term is used in two different senses in the same passage without acknowledgement. An example of legitimate equivocation (because the reader is aware of it) is Pascal's The heart has reasons of which reason knows nothing.)
(***) Perhaps this would be an example of definition (2) above: A truth is that conclusion, from the best available evidence that, when acted on, tends to produce the expected results.
As stated in The Liberal Founding, modern liberalism's immediate antecedent was the scientific revolution of the latter half of the seventeenth century. When Barack Obama remarked, back when he was a senator, We need a politics of evidence and reason rather than ideology, he was articulating what modern liberalism owes to the scientific outlook.
This is in fundamental conflict with another great influence on our thought, Plato's rejection of empiricism. As Carl Sagan wrote in Cosmos, "Plato urged astronomers to think about the heavens, but not to waste their time observing them."
Which is to say that liberalism will not substitute belief or ideology for evidence and reason where evidence and reason apply. This gave the Founders a rhetorical problem: How to speak of the ground of liberal principles? Reason works from foundations. A syllogism works from two premises, both held to be warranted. But what is a foundation founded on?
The Declaration of Independence, for example, begins
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
"Self-evident?" "Endowed by their Creator?"
Human beings must operate on working assumptions which at the most basic level do not have an antecedent (which would be a more basic level). These values are what, as the Founders wrote, we "hold." Their ground, if any, is not their precedent but their consequences. All that we can ask is that a value be well chosen.
That every person is to start out enjoying equality rather than subservience, and that a universal moral obligation exists to honor each person's right to life, freedom, and autonomy, for example, is not the only choice that could be made. In recent memory a nation declared that the world-historical mission of a master race (its own) should be the paradigm.
One can encounter a relativist argument that, absent proof concerning which is better, the choice is arbitrary, and therefore indefensible.
Liberals answer that they hold with what Fritz Stern* (who had seen the master race concept in action), called "the institutional defense of decency." And hold fast.
(*)
as cited in The Liberal Founding
At such times, old-fashioned liberal values like free speech
and robust, open debate seem like tainted adjuncts of an oppressive
system, and it’s still possible for radicals to believe that the ideas
suppressed as hateful won’t be their own. – Michelle Goldberg, The Nation
Abraham Lincoln fought not only to defend America's physical integrity (by preventing its split into two nations), but America's spiritual integrity—its soul:
Lincoln wrote of the plantation owners' denial of the principle of equality in the Declaration:
The
principles of Jefferson ["all men are created equal," etc.] are the
definitions and axioms of free society. And yet they are denied and
evaded, with no small show of success. One dashingly calls them
"glittering generalities." Another bluntly calls them "self-evident
lies." And others insidiously argue that they apply to "superior
races."
The above was from an article in this blog responding to Ta-Nehisi Coates' claim, in The Atlantic, that a wish to degrade, debase, and enslave another people was the hidden essence of the Founding. We cited numerous instances in which Abraham Lincoln documented the actions the Founders took to set in motion the elimination of slavery in the United States.
In "The Limits of Free Speech," The Atlantic continues its disingenuous sabotage of the soul of America. Kent Greenfield writes (March 13):
We are told the First Amendment protects the odious because we cannot trust the government to make choices about content on our behalf. That protections of speech will inevitably be overinclusive. But that this is a cost we must bear. If we start punishing speech, advocates argue, then we will slide down the slippery slope to tyranny.
If that is what the First Amendment means, then we have a problem greater than bigoted frat boys. The problem would be the First Amendment.
No one with a frontal lobe would mistake this drunken anthem for part of an uninhibited and robust debate about race relations. The chant was a spew of hatred, a promise to discriminate, a celebration of privilege, and an assertion of the right to violence–all wrapped up in a catchy ditty. If the First Amendment has become so bloated, so ham-fisted, that it cannot distinguish between such filth and earnest public debate about race, then it is time we rethink what it means.
The sort of cowardly abandonment of liberalism represented by this thread in The Atlantic was skewered last April by a writer possessing the courage of her liberal convictions:
“Call
it left-wing anti-liberalism: the idea, captured by Herbert Marcuse in
his 1965 essay “Repressive Tolerance,” that social justice demands curbs
on freedom of expression. “[I]t is possible to define the direction in
which prevailing institutions, policies, opinions would have to be
changed in order to improve the chance of a peace which is not identical
with cold war and a little hot war, and a satisfaction of needs which
does not feed on poverty, oppression, and exploitation,” he wrote.
“Consequently, it is also possible to identify policies, opinions,
movements which would promote this chance, and those which would do the
opposite. Suppression of the regressive ones is a prerequisite for the
strengthening of the progressive ones.”
Note
here both the belief that correct opinions can be dispassionately
identified, and the blithe confidence in the wisdom of those empowered
to do the suppressing. This kind of thinking is only possible at certain
moments: when liberalism seems to have failed but the right is not yet
in charge. At such times, old-fashioned liberal values like free speech
and robust, open debate seem like tainted adjuncts of an oppressive
system, and it’s still possible for radicals to believe that the ideas
suppressed as hateful won’t be their own,” – Michelle Goldberg, The Nation.
Justice Holmes rejected Greenfield's suggestion that the First Amendment has become "bloated" more than eighty years ago, noting, in United_States_v._Schwimmer, that freedom of speech is "freedom for the thought we hate":
Surely
it cannot show lack of attachment to the principles of the Constitution
that she [Rosika Schwimmer] thinks that it can be improved. I suppose
that most intelligent people think that it might be.
Some of her
answers might excite popular prejudice, but if there is any principle of
the Constitution that more imperatively calls for attachment than any
other it is the principle of free thought—not free thought for those who
agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate.
"As our Constitution provides," Firmin DeBrabander asserted, "liberty entails precisely the freedom to be reckless, within limits, also the freedom to insult and offend as the case may be."
