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The End of Reason.

By Anthony O’Hear

ONE OF PHILOSOPHY’S LONGEST-known but best-concealed secrets is that science itself is, in a certain sense, irrational. Its irrationality derives from the fact that scientific knowledge, if we have any, depends on the assumption that the universe is ordered, at least to the extent that things we have observed and discovered in the past are a good guide to the future we have not yet experienced.

David Hume

This assumption is known to philosophers as the principle of induction. And, as in their more scholarly moods all philosophers will tell you, in the eighteenth century David Hume, drawing on earlier sceptical arguments, provided a conclusive demonstration of the lack of justification of any such principle. Clearly there is no guarantee in logic for it; there is nothing illogical in thinking that the sun might not rise to-morrow morning, and one day indeed (which would be the last day) it may not. In the absence of a logical guarantee, the principle is normally defended by saying that such reasoning has served us well in the past; in the past reliance on inductive reasoning has proved successful, in the main. But while this is no doubt true, as a proof or justification of induction itself, the move is a non-starter, as Hume showed. For we are invoking what happened in the past to justify our future reliance on what happened in the past, as neat a case of assuming the truth of what we want to prove as one could wish for.

 But while all philosophers know everything I have just said, and also that no one has subsequently provided a satisfactory answer to Hume, in the main people, including philosophical people, have carried on as if it really did not matter. Pragmatically this may well be sensible – after all relying on the past is as good a method as we have, and maybe our only method in that through what Hume calls our ‘animal belief’, we are programmed to do it anyway. But – and this is Hume’s point – animal belief (which amounts to thoughtlessly doing what we can’t avoid doing) can hardly amount to rational justification or anything approaching it.

The conclusion, to put it more starkly than it is normally put, is that at its core science is not rationally justified. For relying on a prediction made on the basis of a previously successful theory is just what induction is, and this is what we do in science all the time – without any rational justification.

WE WILL LEAVE ASIDE here the quixotic attempts by Sir Karl Popper and his followers to show that science can be done without any reliance on induction, save to remark that unlike the vast majority of philosophers Popper does at least recognise that there is a problem here. For indeed there is, particularly for those who want to invoke science as the best example we have of rational enquiry, and to beat around the head those whose methods of belief formation they find wanting from a scientific point of view. Science itself lacks rational justification at its core, so those attacked for being irrational from a scientific perspective have a perfectly good answer to their critics. You are as irrational as us.

Despite Hume and Popper, most philosophers prefer not to worry their heads about induction. This, I surmise, is because most of them are at heart enlightenment rationalists, taking science as the paradigm of rationality, rather than admitting that at its core it is worryingly unstable, rationally speaking. Science is accepted on its own terms, while, in the name of critical thinking, other fields of human activity are subjected to devastating appraisal. So perhaps we should not be all that surprised when we find the so-called ‘new atheists’ – scientific rationalists to a man – seem blissfully unconscious of the precariousness of their own standpoint from the point of view of their chosen weapon of critical rationality.

Actually the problem of induction, so-called, is only one example of the type of philosophical conundrum which arises when we try to delve beneath one of our basic assumptions – and discover that they are just that, assumptions which cannot be further justified or rationally proved. Examples where reasons give out, leaving us with a basic belief not further justifiable, might be free will, the existence of God, the self, moral goodness, the external world itself.

Some react to this giving out of reasons by embracing scepticism about the topic in question; others will point out that, as in the case of induction and the order of the world, our lives or some large part of them (or at least of their lives) are impossible without the assumption in question. No doubt a great deal should be said about each of the cases mentioned, and about others too. But all I want to do here is to hint at the extent to which our lives are framed by assumptions without rational justification, or too deep for rational foundation, and that one of these assumptions underlies the practice of scientific enquiry itself.

At this point, though, a worry is bound to arise. Does understanding the groundlessness of our basic assumptions lead to a general relativism, in which no one can have anything effective to say in criticism of the assumptions of another, in which any criticism would be handed off with the same tu quoque the religious believer used earlier against the militant scientific atheist? This is a deep problem, whose difficulty we should be far more ready to recognise than we generally are when we are confronted with someone whose world-view is alien to us, or even repugnant to us.

It seems to me, though, that the groundlessness of our beliefs need not lead to relativistic stand-offs whenever people with different assumptions come up against each other. The very fact that each can, up to a point, understand the position of the other (and that and how they disagree) shows that there is at least enough common ground to begin a conversation. What would prevent a fruitful conversation at this point would be a dogmatic stance on the part of one or other of the participants; we see uncritical dogmatism all too often these days in the case of the noisy and self-publicising public spokesmen on the part of religious unbelief and belief (both). But an appreciation of the ultimate groundlessness of their respective positions ought to lead them to eschew dogmatism in favour, accepting that in ultimate matters partial truth is the most any of us could have. The conversation could then be conceived as a common pursuit of true judgement, progressing beyond the sterilities of blind faith, religious or scientific.

Anthony O’Hear, the director of the Royal Institute of Philosophy, is the author of Introduction to the Philosophy of Science, among other books, and an editor of The Fortnightly Review.

 

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Richard L.A.Schaefer
Richard L.A.Schaefer
14 years ago

The point by Boyles (related to O’Hear’s) about results of the collider experiment being unknown and pooh-poohed recalls that Fermi really didn’t know if his experiment would blow up Chicago or the world; but he went ahead. Helpful in the intellectual grounding of intelligence and religion are Fr. Bernard J.F. Lonergan’s books Insight: A Study of Human Understanding (Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan) and Method in Theology.

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