THERE IS A VIEW of philosophy which sees it as primarily critical and analytical – philosophy itself as the organon of criticism, perhaps. We could think here of J.S. Mill’s idea that one thing philosophy should do, perhaps the main thing it should do, is continually to challenge and criticise our assumptions and prejudices, even the most apparently solid. In a Millian spirit it would, of course, be easy to come up with arguments against many of Blake’s ideas; Blake would be slain by the sword of critical rationalism. His ideas would not survive testing by experience and observation, if only because most of them are not in that sense testable. Nor are his views immune to logical analysis. No doubt there are plenty of contradictions in his writings too. There is, though, this:
‘[O]nce atoms had no color; now they also have no shape, place or volume… There is a reason why metaphysics sounds so passé, so vieux jeu to-day; for intellectual perplexities and paradoxes, it has been far surpassed by theoretical science. Do the concepts of the Trinity, the soul, haecceity, universals, prime matter, and potentiality baffle you? They pale beside the unimaginable otherness of closed space-times, event-horizons, EPR correlations and bootstrap models.’
– Bas van Fraassen
No doubt we will be told that the theories which deal with space-time and the rest have survived severe testing at in the most precise way; but does that make the theories more believable? Does that in itself dissipate the air of paradox and uncertainty which hangs over them? Does it do much to close the gap between the calculations and observations and the extraordinary conceptions these calculations and observations are held by men of impeccable scientific sense to support?
Maybe it does. Maybe critical rationalism, if it leads us to quibble over the best scientific theories of our time, fuss over their apparent contradictoriness and so on, should just be told to get lost here, given that the theories in question are immensely workable, useful and empirically precise to an unimaginable degree. In any case scientists are not going to dispense with them, whatever philosophers might say, any more than you or I are going to stop treating our friends and lovers as free, or our inductive beliefs as probable, whatever Hume and his followers tell us. The point here is that if we are thinking of philosophy as the organon of criticism it is hard to cordon off our essential commonsensical beliefs from its strictures. One lesson Hume teaches is that they will fall too, if examined too critically. Too critically, we say. But is excess of criticism a notion available to the Millian critical rationalist. Mill: ‘even if the received opinion be not only true, but the whole truth, unless it is suffered to be, and actually is vigorously and earnestly contested, it will, by most of those who receive it, be held in the manner of a prejudice, with little comprehension or feeling of its rational grounds.’ Rational grounds after vigorous and earnest contestation…amazing really that Mill wrote this decades after Hume.
