Guiding Question: Does "science only improve?"
Lancelot, beguiled by his passion, seems at least temporarily
to represent faith without reason. Lancelot certainly had faith in
the ennobling (and therefore good) effects of the love of his Queen, yet
we learn from the hermits that his love had been misplaced. He has been,
in fact, blinded by his love, and distracted from what should have been
his true goal: to purify himself in order to be worthy to participate in
the mysteries of the Grail. Although he is a sincere seeker, he has great
difficulties becoming "cleansed" of his past sins so that he can see reality
"as it is." Rene Descartes, during the first half of the 17th Century,
attempted a similar sort of "cleansing." Withdrawing from his own secular
life, Descartes retreated to Amsterdam, seeking sanctuary. There
he went into deep "Meditations" by retreating into the confines of a huge
furnace (which was of course not in use) in order to keep from the distractions
of the world. As we have seen, by doubting the reality of his own
perceptions, and even identity, he attempted to determine the "real" through
the "light of pure reason."
Faith in knowledge grasped through reason alone
came to be called "a-priori," or knowledge which preceded experience
and was based upon pure reason, such as mathematics. The antithesis to
this form of reasoning would come initially from John Locke, who in his
Essay Concerning Human Understanding, took exactly the opposite
approach.
For Locke, the mind was a Tabla Rasa, or
a blank slate, which recorded data acquired through sense perception. The
blank slate analogy might be better expressed in our time by the analogy
to a computer. The mind, like a computer, contains all the necessary components
to process, and even abstract, information; but that information must come
from without. The mind is not the origin of this data, it rather processes
information and abstracts, synthesizes, and formulates information. The
conclusions reached on the bases of acquired data, however, were subject
to mistaken conclusions through the misassociation of perceptions, such
as the conception that everything red is hot.
Superficially, we can see that this conclusion may
have been initially drawn based on some form of experience. Fire, for example,
often appears as red, as do certain heated minerals. But the color red
has nothing essentially "hot" about it, any more than blue indicates what
is cool. In fact, flame can be blue if it reaches a certain heat, as can
superheated metals. So the concept that red is hot and blue is cool is
a "mistake" based on common experience, but which cannot be considered
as knowledge. For Locke, what we must do to determine whether or not our
abstractions of data are mistakes or not is to go back to the world and
test our conclusions through demonstration. Of course, this remains the
major method of the "empirical" sciences, which include all of the laboratory
sciences. To this day such scientific investigation depends upon experience
under tight conditions (or experimentation) and demonstration under these
conditions to verify conclusions. By establishing this criterion for validity,
however, Locke may have even further widened the gulf between what was
to be considered faith, and what was considered to be reason, for Locke
believed in intuition (viz. primarily as it concerned the existence of
God), but all intuition, to be knowledge, had finally to be demonstrable:
". . .intuition and demonstration are the degrees of our knowledge; whatever
comes short. . ." no matter . . . with what assurance soever embraced,
is but faith or opinion, but not knowledge. . ." Notice that in the
above quotation, faith and opinion, are placed into the same dubious category,
as faith begins to lose credibility as a foundation for knowing.
We may again find a parallel in our story when Lancelot does not seem to
have the understanding, reasoning power or intuition to make the right
choices.
David Hume, himself an empiricist, adapted Descartes’
skepticism and applied it to Locke’s empirical method in a unique way.
The conclusions we verify through demonstration might, for Hume, be mistaken
as well if we misasssociated data in terms of cause and effect. For example,
I might take a rooster living in Eastern Standard Time in the US and notice
that every dawn the rooster crows. I may repeat this observation many times,
and finally conclude there is a cause and effect relationship between the
sun rising and the rooster crowing. However, if I took this same rooster
and put him on a jet to Hawaii, and thereby radically changed time zones,
he would crow at the time when the sun was rising in Eastern Standard Time.
Thus my conclusion would have been mistaken, precisely on the basis of
cause and effect. The sun rising was not causing the rooster to crow. If
I investigated this further I might finally discover that the rooster is
crowing in accordance with the brooding cycles of the hens, which is dependent
largely upon when they are fed. Thus a superficial observation might yield
mistaken conclusions. The practical effect of this on experimental methods
was to tighten up the conditions under which experiments were conducted
to control variables and give a more certain basis upon which to draw conclusions—and
thus in empirical method skepticism remains the dominant assumption (just
as it was for Descartes) that findings are only relatively certain, and
must constantly be retested for verification.
On the theoretical level, Hume went on to question
whether or not cause and effect were actually a firm basis upon which to
draw conclusions about the facts of the physical world, as well as our
own identity. Hume suspected that cause and effect may just be the way
in which we perceive the phenomenal world, as well as ourselves, but may
not be ultimately the condition under which phenomena function. For example,
thunder and lightening occur simultaneously as a result of the super heating
of the atmosphere, although because light travels faster than sound, it
appears that the lightening may be causing the thunder. Hume held that
much of what occurs in common phenomena may be the same, and that cause
and effect relationships are only the way in which phenomena show up in
the dimension of time we inhabit. This form of radical skepticism was adapted
by other empiricists, including Bishop Berkeley and others, but was largely
considered an eccentric notion at best until the very recent advent of
quantum mechanics in physics, in which subatomic particles do not appear
to function under cause and effect relationships, nor to obey any of the
laws of time-space we normally consider to be the context of all phenomena.
Thus an eccentricity in the history of the philosophy of knowledge eventually
appeared to be a fact in the research of the peculiar nature of the physical
universe. This also radically rephrased the classical question of a "first
cause" considered by Aristotle, Anselm, Parmenides, to mention a few. There
was, under Hume’s skeptical eye, no first cause at all. Everything occurs
simultaneously, much as it is conceived of in Chan Buddhism, as well as
other systems of Oriental thought.
The practical outcome of the two approaches to knowledge
which held that certainty could only be assured through demonstration and
experimentation (the empiricism of Locke and Hume), and the conception
that only pure reason revealed certainty through logic and mathematics
(the rationalism of Descartes) was to create two paradigms for science:
rationalism and empiricism. Empirical knowledge contrasted with rational
knowledge in a key way. The rationalism of Descartes was "a-priori,"
or coming before experience, and this implied that the mind, independent
of sense data or any experience of the world whatsoever, was capable of
arriving at truth through pure reason. Empirical knowledge was "a-posteriori,"
and truth could only be acquired through experience and experimentation
with the world itself. It was Immanuel Kant who would attempt to synthesize
these two apparently contrasting methods.
Required Reading: "Week 6" in the Study Guide; The Quest of the Holy Grail, pp. 134-161; Galileo Galilei: Dialogue on the Two Chief Systems of the World (1632); John Locke: Essay on Human Understanding; David Hume: Selections from A Treatise of Human Nature (1740).
Homework:
Discuss reasons for a preference for thinking of the stars, moon and
planets as material objects or as divine personalities. Enter your
thoughts in this week's conference and in your online journal.
(Note: Sections of the Study Guide for Week 6 are paraphrases or excerpts from a manuscript by Laurence L. Murphy and Dominick A. Iorio, both of whom are amongst the Authors of the general MAPS Curriculum.)