Chapter 3.   Part D 

      Various further attempts to nail down what scientific thinking does, and to prove that it is a truly reliable way of knowing, have been made in the last hundred years, but they have all come to insoluble conundrums of their own.

               

      The logical positivists, for example, tried to bypass Hume’s problems with the terms in scientific laws and to put the burden of meaning and proof onto whole propositions instead. A key point in the logical positivists’ case is that all meaningful statements are either analytic or synthetic.  Any statement that does not fit into one of these two categories, the positivists say, is irrelevant noise.

   Analytic statements are statements whose truth or falsity is determined by the definitions of the terms that they contain. For example, “All bachelors are unmarried men” is an analytic statement. If we understand the terms in the sentence we can immediately verify, by thinking it through, whether or not the statement is true.

   Synthetic statements are ones whose truth or falsity we must work out by referring to evidence found in the real world, not in the statement itself. In Science, the needed evidence is found in human observations of the real world. “All substances contract when cooled” is a synthetic statement (not quite a true one, as observations of water/ice can show). So is “If a creature is a whale, then it is a mammal”.

    The logical positivists aimed to show that the talk that goes on between scientists in all branches of Science can be made rigorously logical and, therefore, can gradually lead us closer and closer to true knowledge. They intended to apply their analytic-synthetic distinction to all statements in such a rigorous way that any statement made by anyone in any field could be judged by this standard. If the truth or falsity of a statement had to be checked by observations made in the real, material world, then it was clearly a synthetic statement. If the statement’s truth value could be assessed by careful analysis of its internal logic, without reference to observations and measurements made in the material world, then the statement was clearly an analytic statement. All other statements were to be regarded as meaningless. 

   The logical positivists argued that following these prescriptions was all that was needed to make the scientific talk that scientists engage in with each other, as they explain their research and size up the research of their fellow scientists, logically sound and so to lead scientists by gradual steps on to true, reliable knowledge of the real world. All other communications by humans were to be regarded as forms of emotional venting, empty of any real content or meaning.

Rudolph Carnap 

  

  Carnap, especially, set out prove that these prescriptions were all that Science needed in order for it to work and to progress in a rigorously logical way toward making more and more accurate statements about the real world – generalizations that could, in time, be seen as universal truths. (1.)

Willard V. O. Quine

 But the theories of Carnap and the other logical positivists were taken apart logically by later philosophers such as Quine, who showed that the crucial positivist distinction between analytic and synthetic statements was not logically defensible. Explaining what makes an analytic statement (e.g. “All bachelors are unmarried men”) analytic requires that we first understand what “synonymous” terms (like “bachelors” and “unmarried men”) are. But if we go into the logic very carefully, we find that explaining what makes two terms “synonymous” presupposes that we first understand what “analytic” means. Trying to lay down precise rules for defining the difference between analytic statements and synthetic ones only leads us to reason in circles. (2.)

   Quine’s reasoning, in turn, was further critiqued and refined by still later philosophers like Hilary Putnam. As Putnam eventually put the matter:     

“… positivism produced a conception of rationality so narrow as to exclude the very activity of producing that conception.”

“… the whole system of knowledge is justified as a whole by its utility in predicting observations.” (3.)

   In other words, logical positivism’s rigid way of talking about thinking, knowing, and expressing ends up in a logically unsolvable paradox. It creates new problems for all our systems of expressing our ideas and doesn’t help with solving any of the old problems.

  We can see that most of the laws that have been formulated by scientists really do work. They guide us toward ways of living that get results. Why they work is a lot trickier to explain.      

         Now the problems described so far bother philosophers of Science a great deal, but such problems are of little or no interest to the majority of scientists. They see the law-like statements that they and their colleagues try to formulate as being testable in only one meaningful way, namely by the results shown in experiments done in the lab or in the field. Thus, when scientists want to talk about what knowing is, they look for models not in Philosophy, but in the branches of Science that study human thinking. However, in the realm of material proof of Empiricism, i.e. in brain science, Empiricism also runs into problems.           

   In his writings, the early Empiricist, John Locke, basically dodged the problem when he defined the human mind as a “blank slate” and saw its abilities to perceive and reason as being due to its two “fountains of knowledge”, Sensation and Reflection. The first, he says, is made up of stores of sensory experiences and memories of sensory experiences. The second is made up of the “ideas … the mind gets by reflecting on its own operations within itself”. How these “operations” got into human consciousness and what it is that is doing the “reflecting” on these “operations” he doesn’t say. (4.)

               

      Modern empiricists, both philosophers of Science and scientists themselves, don't care for their forbears giving in to this kind of mystery-making. Scientists, especially, aim to figure out what the mind is and how it thinks about things by studying physical things, such as the human genome, and what it makes, namely the neurons of the brain. That is the modern empiricist way, the scientific way.

    For today's scientists, talk about what knowing is, no matter how clever the talk, is not getting us any closer to understanding what knowing is. In fact, scientists don't respect talk about anything that we may want to study unless that talk is backed up with scientific theories or models of the thing being studied, and the theories are further backed up with research done on real things in the real world. 

    Scientific research, to qualify as scientific, also must be designed so that it can be replicated by any researcher in any land or era. Otherwise, it’s not credible; it could be a coincidence, a mistake, wishful thinking taking over, or simply a lie. Thus, for modern scientists, the analysis of material evidence offers the only route by which a researcher can come to understand anything, even in this case in which the thing that she is studying is what is happening inside of her as she is studying.

    She sees a phenomenon in reality, gets an idea about how it works, designs an experiment, tests her theory, then records the results and interprets them. The aim of the statements she then makes is to guide future research onto more and more fruitful paths and to build technologies that are more and more effective at predicting and/or manipulating events in the real world. Electro-chemical pathways among the neurons of the brain, for example – individual paths and whole patterns of such paths – can be studied in labs and correlated with subjects’ perceptions. (The state of research in this field is described by Delany in a 2011 article available online and also in several articles, notably Revonsuo’s, in a book edited in 2000 by Metzinger, also available online.) (5.) (6.) 

    Material things are the things that Science cares about. The philosophers’ talk about what thinking and knowing are is just talk.   

Notes 

1. Carnap, Rudolph; “The Logical Structure of the World and Pseudo-Problems in Philosophy”; Carus Publishing; 2003.

2. Quine, W.V.O.; “Two Dogmas of Empiricism”; reprinted in

 “Human Knowledge: Classical and Contemporary Approaches”; 

  Oxford University Press; 1995; p. 255.

3. Putnam, Hilary; “Why Reason Can’t Be Naturalized”; 

   ibid; p. 436.

4.Locke, John; “An Essay Concerning Human Understanding”;           William Collins Sons and Co.; 1964; p. 90.

5.Delany, Donelson E.; “What Should Be The Roles Of Conscious       States And Brain States In Theories of    Mental Activity”;      http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3115306/

6.Revonsuo, Antti; “Prospects For A Scientific Research Program     On Consciousness” on p. 57 to p. 76 of “Neural Correlates Of    Consciousness: Empirical And Conceptual Questions”, edited by    Metzinger, T.; available online at: http://books.google.ca