Browsing in the library I recently stumbled across Edward O. Wilson‘s ambitious book Consilience, in which the famous biologist tries to propose a unified account of knowledge – one in which the natural sciences take a supreme role. I have a certain sympathy with Wilson’s project – his attempt to unite the different realms of human knowing is not so different from my own long-term goal of constructing a philosophy that draws from many (and preferably all) traditions of inquiry. It’s unfortunate, then, that Wilson’s attempt falls flat in a wide variety of ways – but they can, at least, be highly instructive ways. They do very well, especially, at illustrating the limits of an empiricist account of knowledge.
The example that first struck me is Wilson’s critique of Immanuel Kant’s metaethics. Wilson characterizes Kant’s ethics as follows:
Nature, Kant said, is a system of cause and effect, while moral choice is a matter of free will, for which there is no cause and effect. In making moral choices, in rising above mere instinct, human beings transcend the realm of nature and enter a realm of freedom that belongs to them exclusively as rational creatures. (Wilson 248-9)
Wilson isn’t wrong in his characterization so far. But he goes off the rails when he says Kant’s view is wrong because it “does not accord, we know now, with the evidence of how the brain works” – and then adds “I find it hard to believe that had Kant, Moore and Rawls known modern biology and experimental psychology they would have reasoned as they did.” (249) (There’s no room here to talk about Wilson’s placing of G.E. Moore in the same category as Kant.) If there is any doubt that Kant would laugh heartily at such a characterization, it would only be because Kant didn’t laugh much in general.
Kant’s system is a system of transcendental idealism, which means that, like Anselm, most of his arguments proceed a priori, independent of sense knowledge. The whole idea is that they’re not arguments that can be proven true or false by empirical evidence; rather they are part of the conditions that make empirical knowledge, and action in the world, possible in the first place. Wilson’s argument in the preceding pages against a transcendentalist view, alas, shows no awareness of any of this; it is merely an argument against a popular kind of religious belief, one which he admits is “the one I first learned as a child in the Christian faith.” (Wilson 248)
On the matter of free will, Kant already knew, three hundred years ago, that if we study the patterns of human behaviour (whether using the methods that would become biology, psychology or sociology), we can make modestly reliable predictions. His point is that from such a standpoint our own behaviour is unintelligible. The very idea of my making an action, making a choice or decision, makes no sense whatsoever unless I consider my action to be free of causal determination, and consider it instead to be my own. This is all true even though we can study human behaviour in ways that make it predictable; all such study approaches our behaviour from a third-person standpoint, but for our own actions to be intelligible we must approach them from a first-person standpoint.
There are reasonable ways to rebut Kant’s argument here; I don’t think the argument is ironclad. But Wilson never suggests that he has understood it, or even attempted to do so. And I think Wilson’s lack of understanding is telling: he just doesn’t seem to get the idea that something might be true without being empirically testable. He’s inheriting an empiricism from David Hume, who famously said that if any statement is neither a definition nor empirically testable then we should “commit it to the flames”; but he doesn’t seem to realize that Kant’s whole philosophy was a reply to Hume’s, an attempt to show Hume wrong.
One can try to defend Hume against Kant, but to do so one must take Kant on on his home turf of logical argument; one can’t refute him with empirical evidence, because the whole point is to go beyond empirical evidence. There is a drastic flaw in the basic idea that only empirically testable statements or definitions are meaningful: that basic idea is itself not empirically testable. Therefore, by its own standard, either it’s a mere definition of “meaningless” (and therefore a semantic quibble) or it’s meaningless. It therefore is quite straightforwardly self-contradicting, and is not worthy of sustained consideration as a candidate for truth. We need standards for truth and meaning beyond empirical verifiability or falsifiability. Kant knows this, and his whole philosophy proceeds from this understanding.
Wilson is correct to say: “Sometimes a concept is baffling not because it is profound but because it is wrong.” In this case, however, Wilson was clearly baffled not by Kant’s wrongness, but rather by his profundity.
Amod:
I’ve never read any of Wilson. On philosophical matters from the Wikipedia account it seems like ‘antropology’. When you stray from your specialism and are without wisdom you are just the man on the next bar stool.
Well, this is the problem, but it’s a very difficult problem. The easy answer is to stay within our specializations where we can feel unassailable, and that’s exactly what contemporary academics do. But to the extent that that’s our approach, all we will do is produce ever more obscure, ever more rarefied, ever more irrelevant reams of trivia, unconnected to any other realm of knowledge or human endeavour. One of the key purposes of this blog is to stray from my specialization: I’m the first to admit I know precious little about Islamic philosophy or neurobiology or Confucianism, all topics I’ve blogged about here at some length. That’s why I bothered giving Wilson a hearing in the first place: even though his attempt to produce a wider account of knowledge fails miserably, it’s still worth making the attempt, and I wanted to acknowledge that. I hope that I have been doing something similar with more wisdom, but it’s no easier for me than it is for Wilson.
Amod:
To expand a little. Wisdom lies in being aware that our particular specialism is not a global answer. A large measure of general humanistic culture is essential for the philosopher and you reflect this. The analytic school in its attempt to be more scientific can fall into the trap of arid focus. Kant could be rigorous and yet venture into religion, aesthetics, science etc from the point of view of first principles.
Ah, then we are in agreement.
I’m still puzzling through the ideas from three posts ago, Amod, but the train of thought from the anti-NOMA post seems to continue here. I find myself dissatisfied with both positions presented here.
Can I ask you point-blank, Amod, do you think we can, even in theory, find and agree on an incontrovertible foundation for knowledge? Idealism and empiricism may disagree, but they share the project of grounding knowledge in reason, a goal you seem sympathetic to.
I just don’t have such a high opinion of reason. Instead, I want the contingencies of community and language to form the core of any theory of knowledge to which I might subscribe.
I definitely think we can find a foundation for knowledge, and one grounded in reason. I just doubt that it will be incontrovertible. I explored the topic of certainty a little while back; I didn’t come to a definite conclusion there, but it has increasingly set me to believing that complete certainty is impossible. I like your formulation in the previous post of “knowledge without certainty” – I think that hits the idea exactly – but I don’t want to emphasize the “without certainty” part so much that we lose the “knowledge” part.
I am much more reluctant to place the final ground of knowledge in community (or in language identified as relative to community, as opposed to a wider sense of Greek logos or Hegelian concept). That way, I think, lies a relativism that denies the ways in which ideas can and do cross cultural boundaries all the time.
Thanks for that clarification! I’m going to look back at your earlier posts and try to put this all together…
By all means! And let me know if anything doesn’t make sense – I know there are many ways my ideas are not coherent with each other yet, and I appreciate getting called out on it.
The “epistemology and logic” category might have other posts relevant to the topic.
Amod and Michael: Don’t you think that a possible way out of the specialization-superficiality dilemma is to join efforts? I do not know enough about rhetoric, but I am glad when I can work side by side with a colleague who can explain me tropoi I would not be aware of, etc.
Yes, that definitely helps – and it’s one of the reasons for starting this blog, as well. One of the hard things is just finding specialists in other fields who are interested in the conversation, since academia offers so few rewards for being a generalist. I’m delighted to have a diverse group of commenters here who know a lot about things I don’t – it gives me ideas I could never have just on my own.
Thoreau would have liked Wilson for his enthusiastic ant-watching, but disagreed that a naturalist must accept a disenchanted view of nature. As Kant pointed out with respect to the “freethinkers” of his day, someone who says “I’m an empiricist, I accept only what is evident and proven,” is always making assumptions about the nature of the world. There really isn’t any neutral, unbiased standpoint to occupy, despite what the naive materialist might assume. We all have our tacit ontology.
Hi Rick – welcome to the blog! Hope you’ll stick around. I agree, we all have some sort of ontology, whether coherent or incoherent, and whether we know it or not. When empiricists claim to do away with metaphysics, what it typically means is that they’re accepting the completely incoherent metaphysics of logical positivism.
Coleridge has a remark on the Empiricist difficulty:
September 21, 1830 ……He told me that facts gave birth to, and were the absolute ground of principles; to which I said, that unless he had a principle of selection, he would not have taken notice of those facts upon which he had grounded his principle. You must have a lantern in your hand to give light, otherwise all the materials in the world are useless, for you could not arrange them. “But then,” said Mr.–, “that principle of selection came from facts!” – “To be sure!” I replied; “but there must have been an antecedent light to see those antecedent facts. The relapse may be carried in imagination backwards for ever, – but go back as you may, you cannot come to a man without a previous aim or principle. He then asked me what I had to say to Bacon’s induction: I told him I had a good deal to say, if need were; but that it was perhaps enough for the occasion to remark, that what he was evidently taking for the Baconian induction was mere deduction – a very different thing.”
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