Dr. Blue wrote:
Nathanael wrote:
David needs to go brush up on his Bertrand Russell.
Ooooo.... I have always considered knowing about Russell to be pretty esoteric - mostly math or philosophy weenies - and I don't see him mentioned very much. Maybe I underestimate how widely he's known, but an excellent reference!!!
Well, I can't tell you how widely known Russell is, but I confess to being a bit of both -- math and philosophy weenie.
I happened to be reviewing a bit of Russell a couple weeks ago. He has an interesting discussion on epistemological scepticism in which he draws the distinction I outlined above between the logical inferences on which mathematical truths depend, and the analytical and inductive inferences we use to derive all our other knowledge.
The example Russell uses is of two friends looking out a window. As they turn away, one says, "There are houses outside." To which the other, the sceptic, replies, "How do you know they're still there?" The friend glances back and says, "I still see them."
The sceptic responds, "But how do you know they were there in the interim? How do you know
looking didn't cause them?"
The response, Russell says, is that of course we have no way of knowing what the houses look like when no one's looking. If, that is, we insist we can only know things deductively or, as Kant would say,
a priori. The problem with epistemoligical scepticism -- and the reason it's so hard to argue against -- is not that it is illogical, but that it is, in fact, inherently strictly logical. The real problem with epistemological scepticism is it's just plain silly.
History's most famous epistemological sceptic was, of course, DesCartes, who arrived through a strict application of deductive logic to his famous Cartesian axiom, "Cogito ergo sum." And Occam's Razor is simply history's best-known assertion of inductive reasoning. If you come to my house and find the doors locked, the lights off, and no one answering the bell, Occam doesn't rule out the strict possibility that I and my family are being held hostage in the bedroom by a crazed gunman. Inductive reasoning allows for the possibility that a conclusion may be in error. We simply reason from our experience to general principles based on what the most likely result is.
I had been pondering all that vis-a-vis conspiracy theories in general -- and birtherism specifically -- and had just decided that this fits conspiracy theories quite well. The eternal sceptical response to any piece of evidence offered that is not deductively derived is simply, "But how do we know
that's true?" It looked an awfully like birthers' constantly shifting goalposts: COLB --> LFBC --> Vault copy --> ???.
And as I was cogitating on that, low and behold, Farrar, in the discussion several of us are having with him over at Squeeky Fromm's blog, made the statement I quoted above. It just didn't get any clearer than that. Farrar had already prepared his response to the vault copy, and it was "How do we know
that's true?"
So there you have it, folks. Any conspiracy theory can be answered in one of two ways: either by Occam's razor and the argument from experience -- when have you ever seen an extraterrestrial, or a lifelike android? then the assertion that Obama is a robotic ET is just plain silly -- or by asking the sceptic how he ever gets across the street. After all, it's not
impossible, deductively speaking, that a Mack truck suddenly appears out of nowhere the instant I look the other way.
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