Chapter 3.                                        (continued) 

Scientists now know that most of the concepts we use to recognize and respond to things are concepts we were taught by the mentors and role models we had as children; we don’t discover very many concepts on our own. Our childhood programming teaches us how to cognize things. After that, almost always, we don’t cognize things, only recognize them. (Why our childhood mentors programmed us in the ways they did will be explored in upcoming chapters.)

Empiricists claim that all human knowing and thinking happens in this way. Watch the world. Notice the patterns that repeat. Store them up in memories. Pull the memories out and, when they fit, use them to make smart decisions and react effectively to life. Remember what works and keep trying. For individuals and nations, according to the empiricists, that’s how life goes. The most effective way of human life, the way that makes this common sense process rigorously logical, is science.

There are arguments against this way of thinking about thinking and this model of how human thinking and knowing work. Empiricism is a way of seeing ourselves and our minds that sounds logical, but it has its problems.

Opponents of empiricism and science have long asked, “When a human sees things in the real world and spots patterns in the events going on there, then makes statements about what she is spotting, what is doing the spotting? The human mind, and the sense data–processing programs it must already contain to be able to do the tricks empiricists describe, obviously came before any data processing could be done. What is this equipment, and how does it work?”  

Philosophers of science have had trouble explaining what this mind that does the knowing is, and thus what science, the most rigorous form of knowing, is and is trying to do.

Consider what science is aiming to achieve. What scientists want to discover, come to understand, and then use in creative ways in the real world are what are usually called the “laws of nature”. Scientists do more than simply observe the events in physical reality. They also strive to understand how these events come about and then to express what they understand in general statements about these events, in mathematical formulas, in chemical formulas, in rigorously logical sentences in one of the world’s many languages, or in some other symbol system used by people for conveying their thoughts to other humans. A “natural law” statement must describe one of the ways in which reality works, and, to be considered scientific, the statement must be set down in such a way that it can be tested in the real world.

If claims about this newly discovered real-world truth are going to be worth considering, scientists must be able to test those claims in some real, material way. Thus, any natural law statement that is made, to be of any practical use whatever and to stand any chance of enduring, must first be expressed in some language or symbol system that humans use to communicate ideas with other humans. A theory or model that can be expressed only inside the head of its inventor will die with her or him.

The following is a verbal statement of Newton’s law of universal gravitation: “Any two bodies in the universe attract each other with a force that is directly proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them.”

In contrast, the mathematical formula expressing Newton’s law of universal gravitation looks like this:

                                  

And consider another example:

The Pythagorean theorem is a mathematical law, but is it a scientific one? Can it be tested in some absolutely unshakable way in the real world? (Hint: How can you measure the sides and know you’re exactly accurate?)

The big problem occurs when we try to analyze logically just how true statements like Newton’s laws of motion or Darwin’s theory of evolution are. Do statements of these laws express unshakeable truths about the real world or are they just temporarily useful ways of roughly describing what appears to be going on in reality – ways that are followed for a few decades while the laws appear to enable scientists to predict events in reality, but that then are revised or dropped when new problems they can’t explain are encountered?

Many scientific theories in the last four hundred years have been revised or dropped altogether. Do we dare to say about any natural law statement that it is true in the unassailable way in which 5 + 7 = 12 is true or the Pythagorean theorem is true?

This debate is a hot one in Philosophy right up to the present time. Many philosophers of science claim that natural law statements, once they’re supported by enough experimental evidence, can be considered to be true in the same way as valid math theorems are. But there are also many who say the opposite —that all scientific statements are tentative. These people believe that, given time, all such statements get replaced by new statements based on new models or theories.

If all natural law statements are seen as being only temporarily true, then science can be seen as a kind of fashion show whose ideas have little more shelf life than the fads in the usual parade of clothes, makeup, hairstyles, television shows, and songs on the radio. Or put another way, science’s law statements all become just more narratives, not necessarily true so much as useful, but useful only in the lands in which they gain some currency and only for limited time periods at best.

And the logical flaws that can be spotted in empiricist reasoning are not small ones.