EPISTEMOLOGY: PHILOSOPHY ON ACQUIRING KNOWLEDGE

When do you take something for a fact? A lot of people seem to have this strategy of taking all kinds of things for a fact, without any proof. There are even people, for example, that believe in the existence of goblins, without having any proof that they are walking around in the forest.

This is called the strategy of believing. Someone tells you that there are goblins walking around in the forest, and then you simply believe this. Or alternatively, no one said so but you believe it at random. In fact this is actually the same thing, but instead of someone else telling you there are goblins in the forest, you tell it to yourself and then start believing it.

This method can lead to mental chaos. This is because people have a habit making claims that contradict other claims, made by others (or even by themselves sometimes). Suppose that on T.V. someone claims that the moon is filled up totally with moon-sand. But in the pub someone tells you that the moon is filled up totally with green cheese. Now if you have the strategy of believing everything someone says, you will believe both. But this cannot be the case, because both claims contradict each other. So if you believe everything that all people tell you, then you will also believe in contradictions. But since the contradictory claims deny the truths of other claims, you will also believe that there are things that you are believing, that aren't actually true. Someone who believes in everything people tell him believe both everything and nothing, because of everything there are people who says it is so and so, and others say it isn't. This will lead to mental chaos, a state of mind in which you can acquire no knowledge about this world, because every claim is both true and untrue.

Then there is the method of authority. This is actually more common. People that use the strategy of authority only believe in the claims of certain people. There are specific people that tell the truth, while the other opinions are not to be trusted. This mostly fits within a certain culture. Lots of times people believe in the claims of church-fathers or dictators.

The problem with it is that you will have to believe that person X is the authority who tells the truth, while person Y, who makes different claims, is not. But what is the reason that you believe that person X is telling the truth? Of course the choice for person X could be random. But then this part of the strategy would again lead you to mental chaos. Because if you trust the opinion of someone that you pick by random, then you might pick someone else as the authority next time, who makes contradictory claims. Another way of believing that person X is the authority who tells the truth, is that you believe this because person X tells you so. Person X "proofs" his own authority in telling the truth, by stating: "I tell the truth", and as he is the authority he can know this. Of cause the flaw in the theory is that when you meet person X for the first time, of hear from him the first time, he was not the authority yet, and then he can also not proof that by simply telling so, because at this moment he didn't have the authority yet to be believed. The same thing goes for holy books. If you want to know wether the book is telling the truth, it is not a valid argument that the book tells the truth because this is written in this book. The book cannot "prove"  itself.

So at some point the authority strategy also leads to mental chaos. Because it only works if we believe that someone is the authority because he simply says so. And then we are back at the strategy of believing everything someone says. So if someone else also tells he is the authority, and the claims contradict each other, then we are again on the path to mental chaos. On the other hand there are things we want to have knowledge about, of which we cannot do the research ourselves or can't even understand the research papers (for being too complex). So than we could trust on the autority of a trusted scientist. But this strategy is dangerous. First of all, if the scientist also gets his knowledge from another authority, and this authority get his knowledge of still another authority we still have the autority-problem of aquiring knowledge. So someone at the source should have a different strategy to aquire knowledge. And also the line between you and the source should be as short as possible. We all know the experiment of a story told in a group of 20 people. I tell the story to my neighbor, he tells it to his neighbor, etc. until the story comes back to me. It is almost allways true that then the story is completely different, important things are left out, and other things are added to the story. This is the reason that authority is a dangerous strategy to get your knowlegde from, and if you have no other choice, than you should be very critical on how the source of your information aquired this info. Here follows a strategy for the scientists, the source of your information, about how he as a scientist could aquire information - and this is not by believing other autorities.

So other arguments for believing a claim should be given. A lot of people are thinking that verification is a good way of proving something. You simply do an experiment, and see what happens. Suppose for example that you shake a tree, and an apple falls down. Now you could adopt the theory that when the stem of the apple breaks, that then the apple will fall down.

The theory of verification is then that the more you will do this experiment, the more truthful the claim will be. This is the process of verification. A problem with verification is that is not clear how many times you should have verified the claim, how many times you should have done this experiment, before you accept that the theory is true. How would you know that if you did this 7 times, and all 7 times the apple fell down, that an 8th time the apple will not fall to the right instead of downwards? The problem with verification is that we do not know that. We just assume that if we repeat it more often, that then the level of truth of the claim increases.

Carl Popper invented the idea of falsification. This is actually the opposite of verification. You just adopt a theory, and with an experiment you will try to prove that the theory is invalid. In this example, you are trying to do an experiment in which the apple doesn't fall down. This experiment could be held for instance somewhere in space, between the earth and the moon. Then the stem breaks, but the apple does not fall downwards from the tree. Now we can reject the theory, and adopt a new one. All of the theories that yet have not been rejected so far, are together forming our view on reality. Furthermore Popper states that only those theories are significant and worthwhile considering, that can be falsified - of which we could have the possibility to deny the theory with an experiment.

Now suppose that for a certain theory, there is one falsification and 10 verifications. The apple fell down 10 times, but one time it fell to the right. So there are 10 successful experiments, and one failure. I would then say it is not a good idea to simply reject the theory - as Popper would do. It could very well be that our theory is in fact correct, but only within a certain context that yet has to be found. Although it could also be the case that our 10 verifications in fact could be explained by a complete other theory. Nevertheless, I think that when there is both verification and falsification for a certain theory, that we must uphold the theory nevertheless - but with the marginal note that it isn't true. Then there has to be searched for a new theory. But the old theory, that has been proven wrong, nevertheless describes the reality in such a way that it is useful for us - even though it is not always true. It is better to have a bad theory than none at all. Only if there is a new theory that explains both the falling down of the apple and the falling to the right of the apple, only then we can adopt the new one and reject the old one (that the apple always falls down after breaking the stem). The new theory could for example be that matter attracts other matter, so that there is a force on all matter to go to other matter (gravity). When there is nothing holding the objects on its place, this force will cause objects to move towards each other. The more mass an object has, the slower is will start moving to other objects. In the example then the apple and the earth want to go to each other. Because the earth has more mass than the apple, the apple starts moving quicker than the earth. When the apple and the earth touch each other, the apple has moved quite a distance where as the earth has moved so little that it is hardly measurable. Now in space between the earth and the moon, maybe at some point the moon was on the right. Then the stem was broken and the apple fell to the right in the direction of the moon. But before this new theory was there, is was a useful theory that the apple always falls down, even though the experiment in space had proven the theory wrong.

To be short, I think that falsification is a very good invention, but when there is also verification, we should not reject a theory when falsified -  but uphold it until we have a better one.

This all is based by the way, on the idea that our observations are telling us something about reality. That this is really the case, I will show later on in this article.

Next to verification and falsification, scientists use the rule that theories have to be elegant. This means that a theory must have as least parameters as possible to explain an observation. This was first presented by te monk and philosopher William Ockham also referred to as Ockhams's razor or Occam's Razor. Ockham's razor is also stated as "when you have two competing theories which make exactly the same predictions, the one that is simpler is the better."

Ockham

I could for instance adopt a theory that all apples contain a little motor, that goes on when the stem breaks, and then move the apple in the direction of the gravity. This theory contains all elements of the simple theory, that the gravity causes the apple to go downwards to the earth. But the theory has one element extra, which is the little motor. This theory is not elegant, because the parameter of the motor starting when the stem breaks and moving the apple in the direction of the gravity, is superfluous. The motor only might join the theory, if the observation could not be explained without it. But in this example that was not the case. The extra parameter of the little motor would be "cut off" by Ockham's razor. I would say that Ockham's razor (or to put it more vaguely the rule of elegancy) is a good rule, but it needs more argumentation than just stating it as being a rule just like that.

Of course it would be possible to cut the apple in half, and see if there is a motor inside. But what I'm interested in for the sake of this argument, is what we think is a good theory before we have cut through the apple, and only saw it moving downwards after breaking the stem.

My argumentation for Ockham's razor is that every parameter in a theory should be evaluated: every parameter of the theory should have an explanatory working in respect to the phenomenon. Every extra parameter, that has no additional value to the explanation, because the phenomenon is already explained without it,  could be understood as a "believe" as described at the beginning of this article (where is also described what is wrong with that).  In the example of the motor being inside of the apple, this motor was not needed for explaining the phenomenon. To uphold the theory with the motor in the apple, while the parameter of the motor is superfluous, boils down to a believe in the little motor being in the apple. It is a random believe of a motor being in an apple, as it is to believe that there are goblins in the forest. In both cases no observations substructure these believes. It is a strategy of thinking that leads to mental chaos. Therefor no parameters in our theory may be superfluous. Every superfluous parameter is an unsubstructured believe, and therefor must be rejected. Therefor we must choose for the simplest, or so to speak most elegant theory that can explain our observations. When we have this theory, it is the task of the scientists to both try to verify and to falsify it. This will lead to an evolution process where the fittest theories take over.

It is also a theory that our observations are right. I would say that it is the simplest theory that we observe the real signals from reality. There could be for instance light signals coming from existing objects, or sounds coming from existing animals. There are however competing theories that we would live in a virtual reality, or that our observations are shadows of perfect objects in an other universe, or all of our observations are hallucinations, etc. These are all theories that contain superfluous parameters. Al these theories contain the existence of an existing reality, in some form, even though this reality may contain only one hallucinating observer. And all theories do contain the observers themselves, receiving signals. But the not-simple theories also contain other parameters that are not necessary to explain this phenomenon.  Therefor it is the best, simplest, theory that our observations are observations of signals coming from reality.  For instance, the theory that all of our observations are hallucinations, contains a parameter that observations are created by ourselves - which causes the illusion that we make real observations from existing objects. Then the creation of these hallucinations by ourselves is an extra and superfluous parameter, where the reality and the observer receiving signals, where enough parameters to explain the phenomenon. If we have more data, this of course makes the issue more difficult. The theory is only true within a certain context. There are special contexts, that we can all place on the map, in which we do see hallucinations, holograms, etc. In the context in which we are normally, our theory is simple and explanatory, thus elegant. But in the context where we have taken a drug like LSD (Acid), you might make observations which do not come from signals of objects in reality. The theory is then that we observe reality unless we have taken LSD. And so there are of course more exceptions, that can all be studied and explained.

So wouldn't it be a simpler theory that we are always hallucinating, and is taking LSD not a superfluous parameter? The effects of LSD help us explain why people that have taken it, make strange observations, that are inconsistent, and not observable for others. Therefor the theory needs to have an explanation for the difference in observations between the state in which we did take LSD and the state which we didn't. When we didn't take it, we make consistent observations, where as when we do take it, the observations are inconsistent. The best explanation is that we normally observe reality, and that we see hallucinations when we have taken LSD and that we see an image of a non-existing object when we see a hologram, etc.

This rule of theory, that it has to be elegant, also goes for the theory of the existence of God, being a man with a long beard that is waiting for us in heaven and who created nature (including us). There are no observations that can be verified or falsified, which could only be explained with the existence of such a God. The extra parameter God does not help explaining the existence of nature. Nature is beautiful and complex. It could be that it came into existence by itself, it could have been created by God, or it could be that this beautiful and complex nature has always already have been there. But the same goes for God. God could have come into existence by Himself, or he could have been created by someone else, or maybe he has always been already there (and after eternity suddenly created the earth). So the extra parameter God does not help us in explaining the coming to existence of the beautiful and complex nature.

 The theory that God would have created it does not explain how, and therefor even has no explanatory working.  And next to that it brings a God into the theory without an explanation of how He came into existence. So the parameter God is not only a superfluous parameter, but also the theory that he created nature does not help explaining the existence of nature. It is not an elegant theory that there is a God waiting for us in heaven who would have created nature, but actually it is not really a theory. The evolution theory is far from perfect, and there is a lot of discussion about it and a lot unexplained. But it IS an explaining theory, and all explaining theories on the existence of nature, are variants of the evolution theory. Therefor the evolution theory in general as a basic theory is the only explaining theory that we have for the existence of nature. Therefor it is the most elegant one as well (not speaking of different competing variants). It is not perfect, but it is our best shot.

Back