...coupled with the inexplicable historical fact that repeated experiments produce identical results in virtually every domain we play with.
Well, in a world without consistency, science and knowledge (at least knowledge of the world) are not possible.
Actually, there's nothing requiring that empirical consistency entails logical consistency.
No, what i was getting at was that logical consistency results in empirical consistency. Maybe i should have elaborated that by natural laws i meant the usual definition of a real "law", not the more specific scientific definition of: repeatable empirical observation which can be described with a mathematical formula.
For example, there is a class of logics called
paraconsistent logics in which contradictions occur in certain parts of the domain, but not in all parts. So weirdness happens locally, but doesn't explode into chaos if you don't fall down the rabbit-hole.
Our experiences being necessarily finite, there's nothing to assure us that the universe is consistent across space and time and not paraconsistent across the whole domain, but locally consistent in our experience of it. We even have to ask ourselves whether causality is not manufactured in part from our perceptions and memories (and that question is still in doubt).
Well, let me point out again that a pragmatic truth standard is what we apply during the majority of our lives, and it is what science operates with. While interesting philosophically, it is disingenuous or careless to operate with an absolute truth standard while criticising science. Paraconsistent logic, while interesting mathematically, is neither very relevant nor very surprising for natural science.
Consistency is
not predictability. For one thing, consistency is retrospective and descriptive, whereas prediction is prospective and prescriptive. To explain one car accident is not to forecast the next one. Indeed, there are some theoretical studies [
1,
2] that raise into question whether we can
ever predict some systems within tolerance.
I think you're going for a different definition of consistency here. Usually, consistency begets predictability since consistency works (has to) both retrospective and prospective. This is logical predictability, mind you. It does not mean at all that we would actually be able to utilize it. Chaotic systems are a prime example of that. They follow consistent rules, and are thus completely predictable. We can not however do that, since predicting future states of a chaotic system requires an accuracy of knowledge of the current state that quickly approaches infinity as one tries to predict points in time farther into the future.
Moreover, even if the universe is utterly consistent, there are some
logical results to show that human language is too limited to even express some truths, much less prove them. And it
turns out that the language we'd need to express some propositions is also logically inconsistent and badly-behaved. So we may well have a choice of being mad or systemically ignorant in our rationality, and it may be that the Universe is either utterly reliable or playing a very funny game with us -- and we may well be stuck never quite knowing which.
You are again talking about a category of truth that has its place in philosophical discussions, but not discussions about natural science.
I personally don't believe that we have a well-formed language with which to discuss metaphysics, much less a decent calculus with which to work it. For that reason, I dismiss all metaphysical propositions, whether secular or sectarian, as being fictive gibberish. I don't believe that they have truth-values, much less having any clue as to how to evaluate them. In my view we can have fun pretending to do metaphysics, but I see it as entertainment more than science. We can't talk seriously about metaphysics until we can engineer the objective behaviour of the reality we live in -- and we haven't demonstrated that yet.
Well, that might depend a little on how you define "metaphysics", but beyond that, then there's hardly a point arguing about you not believing that arguing is possible, is there?
This is probably a circular definition, Lhun, because it hinges on what you consider knowledge to be.
No, it is a pragmatic definition.
Here are two possible definitions, one supporting your thesis and one refuting it:
- Knowledge is any information empirically tested and shown reliable;
- Knowledge is any information on which we're willing to act and learn from, regardless of how much is empirically verified.
Definition 1) means that physics is a body of knowledge while theology is not. Definition 2) allows that both physics and theologies are bodies of knowledge. You might argue that a scientist can only support definition 1), but I think you'll find that 'soft scientists' like psychologists, anthropologists, sociologists and economists have fondness for 2) because behaviourally it acts like 1) -- even if it's not based entirely on empirical study, and it predicts human behaviour better.
In both cases most of your definition of knowledge depends on your definition of information. But besides that, definition 2) is useless. It does nothing to distinguish information and knowledge, because the only difference it posits is the state of the one possessing that information, which is not a predicate of the information itself. As such you have just defined knowledge out of existence.
For a useful definition, there must be something inherent to certain packets of information which qualifies them for the "knowledge" moniker, as opposed to other information packets.
If we examine it pragmatically again, we will find that we only consider information knowledge which we are willing to consider true, and observer-independent true. The most important feature of truth (as knowledge is merely information about a truth we might just talk about truth directly) is that it is true, or not, regardless of the person considering it. We do not call something truth if it is only true for some people. And the scientific method is designed to eliminate personal bias. It is not so much that we only consider scientific knowledge to be true in the modern age, but that science was designed to produce information which we consider true. But what we consider truths hasn't changed much over the ages, and there aren't really people who have a different definition for it. Just a lot of people who engage in special pleading for one belief or another.
Epistemologically I don't at all like the ambiguity between definitions 1) and 2). To avoid rhetorical tricks and semantic confusion I want to use different words for these things. I often use 'knowledge' for 1) and 'lore' for 2. But I can't preclude some future revelation from collapsing 'knowledge' into 'lore'. It just hasn't happened yet.
I think i understand what you want to get at, basically a consensus standard for truth as an alternative to a pragmatic standard for truth. Though i'm sorry to say that you definition 2) fell a bit short there.
You need to include at least the requirement of a majority of people, or a significant number of people, who are willing to act on information. Otherwise anything would be knowledge (or lore) as long as you find at least one nut willing to act on it.
The important point however is that usually, people do not make the distinction between knowledge and lore that you make. I won't argue with you if you want to state that there are other ways to arrive at lore than to derive it from knowledge. I will however argue with anyone equivocating lore and knowledge, and stating that there are different ways to arrive at knowledge. Which is, sadly, more often the case than the former. Especially among postmodernists or the newage crowd, who are just engaging in special pleading. Though it inspires some extremely funny beat poems. (a cookie for whoever gets the reference)
Also behaviourally, I have to acknowledge that a lot of investigations into 1) have been guided by 2). Newton and Einstein for instance, were both Deists who happily let their metaphysical lore direct their empirical enquiries, and without question we are richer for their work. So not only can I not provide assurance that science is not simply lore, I can't even assure myself that science doesn't need revelatory lore to progress.
I'm afraid your argument doesn't hold here. What defines knowledge is how one arrives at it. Having non-knowledge as inspiration, or seeking to confirm non-knowledge scientifically as in trying to prove lore knowledge, does not change the result. If it full-fills the criteria, it is knowledge, that's all. Whether science could be done in a vacuum or needs non-science as inspiration is an interesting question but a different discussion. Though let me just say that inspirations in science are a bit like ideas in writing. They're a dime a dozen, and what made Newton and Einstein great wasn't their deism (though i'd dispute that Einstein was a deist) but that they followed their ideas through.
Finally, I have to acknowledge that most people I know don't and can't operate from 1. For various psychological reasons they much prefer to operate from 2, or sometimes (e.g. in childhood), they have no choice.
I disagree. Most people operate from 1) most of the time. Few people all of the time. It's just that most people have some beliefs they engage in special pleading for. (I'm not talking religious here, the stupid monty hall debate is a prime example) Another thing are memes like urban legends, that just seem to plug into some irrational part in our brains. Though a big part of that is probably because there's no relevance to urban legends and the like.
So I'm faced with the situation of either defining two classes of thinkers and getting all supremacist about rationalism, or taking the more humanitarian tack and acknowledging that people who are functioning without being strictly rational are the norm -- and that any compassionate discussion of knowledge must take that into account. Because for me, the search for truth connects to compassion and because I'm sometimes horrified at the inhumane lunacy of ultrarationalists, I've tried to take the latter course.
Well, i don't think there are two classes of thinkers, just people who more or less often think critically, see above.
But i hardly think there's a connection to humanism here. I'd say you are extending the debate from epistemology to areas such as ethics, where ultrarationalism can lead to bad conclusions. But in a discussion just about truth, that's not relevant.
However, what I can assure myself is that lore without empiricism is hellishly unreliable. I'm a rationalist but not a rational-supremacist. I don't rely on lore to give me truth any more than I'd trust a kleptomaniac as a banker, but that still doesn't mean that all kleptomaniacs make poor investment decisions.
No, rejecting lore as wrong because of what it is, is jumping the gun. That does happen quite often to scientifically minded people, and if that was the only thing the post-modernists and newage crowd criticised they'd have a point. There's of course quite a difference between recognizing that lore is inherently unreliable and stating that it's inherently wrong. One shouldn't take the insistence that lore isn't knowledge as the letter either though.
