Episode #084 - Transcript

Hello, everyone. I’m Stephen West. This is Philosophize This!

So, it seems clear we live in an age of empiricism in today’s world. And what I mean by that is, science at its core is an empirical realm. Ultimately, any experiment you’re going to be doing if you’re a scientist is done by a person: a person looking through a microscope with their eyes, a person listening to wavelengths with their ears, a person organizing all of this data and information through a very feeble and really completely arbitrary set of mental faculties that they have—the hope being at the end of it that, having done this science experiment with our senses, we’ll be just a little bit closer to knowing the way that things are in the universe. The truth, right? We think about the truth that way. The truth is this objective thing out there, exterior to human beings that we’re trying to come into contact with, the way that things actually are.

For example, if every human and every animal was eradicated from the planet tomorrow and no sentient being was even attempting to try to find out what the truth was, it makes sense that in that universe there’d still be a way that things are; we’re just not around at that point to try to access it. But that’s the thing. Even if we were around to try to access it, the chips are stacked against us. We realize our senses are not the greatest tools you could ever have at trying to arrive at this truth that’s out there. It’s the reason we use things like microscopes and telescopes in the first place—to augment our senses and try to access this truth more accurately—this sort of cosmic Wikipedia that’s fully filled out, as I like to think of it.

Now, currently the best way we have to access this is through science, but it didn’t always use to be that way. Let’s all grab our togas and head back to antiquity for a second. Remember Plato’s Dialogues? Remember hearing about Socrates accosting people in the Athenian Agora, begging people to help him arrive at a better idea of what justice is or what beauty is? Some poor, poor person that thought they were really confident about what justice is would give Socrates an answer to that question like, “Oh, Socrates, justice is just the balancing of the scales. When somebody or something wrongs you and takes something away from you, Socrates, justice concerns itself with taking something away from that party so that the scales of justice are balanced out again.” At which point Socrates would execute socraticmethod.exe and would proceed to show them every possible exception to their rule in existence, the goal being to illustrate to them that they don’t actually know everything there is to know about justice but that more thinking and more discussion about the subject needed to be had.

Now, Socrates didn’t just do this with everyday people. He did it with his contemporary philosophers as well. And if you remember, his reason for doing this—his reason for trying to arrive at the end-all-be-all, ultimate definition of the concept of, for example, beauty or good is that, how can we ever begin philosophizing honestly about beauty if we don’t even fully understand what it is we’re talking about? The hope was, if we just have enough of these intelligent conversations with each other talking about beauty—you know, asking people their definitions; finding the exceptions; refining the definitions; finding exceptions to those—that eventually we will have done it. We will have arrived at the true, objective definition of beauty.

Now, if this is what you’re doing, the primary assumption that you’re operating under is that these objective definitions of things exist at all. And what we’re left with after all these years we’ve been having these conversations is not a Webster’s Dictionary with a perfect definition of beauty in it. What we’re left with are common figures of speech like “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” We say things all the time like each culture has their own individual set of ethics, their own idea of what is good to them. In other words, these concepts of beauty and good, and many others for that matter, we don’t think of them as nouns anymore. We think of them as adjectives. We don’t think of them as an objective thing we’re trying to access like Socrates did back in antiquity. We think of them as subjective value judgments that really just describe a particular type of experience that a human being is having in a particular moment.

For example, when I say that a song is beautiful, what I’m talking about is a particular way that song makes me feel, a particular human experience that I’m having that that song is producing in me. I’m not talking about it being representative of some cosmically defined beauty that I’ve somehow gained access to through pondering the concept of beauty. What I’m saying is, Led Zeppelin is not inherently more beautiful than Justin Bieber, just as a class system is not inherently more good than egalitarianism. How good we think egalitarianism is or how beautiful we think Justin Bieber’s music is largely comes down to a very subjective judgment that we’re making based on all of our prior experiences and what sort of feeling is evoked in our body—our human experience of something.

Well, if you agree with the statement that beauty is in the eye of the beholder or if you agree that there is no cosmically defined good that we can arrive at, the guy that we’re going to be talking about today would probably ask you the following question: What if truth was the exact same way? What if truth isn’t some thing out there that we should be trying to access? What if truth is not a noun but an adjective we use to describe a particular type of human experience? Now, on the surface this may seem pretty counterintuitive. Let’s give some context so we understand where this guy’s coming from.

Well, this guy is William James, psychologist, philosopher, 1842-1910. And what William James thought is that if you look back throughout history at the different types of people and why they believed that certain things are true, they can mostly be broken down into being one of two types of people. There’s two types of people in the world—what he calls tender-minded and tough-minded people.

Quick breakdown. These two types of people often find themselves falling into very predictable categories. A tough-minded person is typically somebody that is a skeptical person. They place a high value on something being proven for it to be considered true. A tough-minded person tends to be more deterministic. They don’t believe in things like free will as easily. A tough-minded person is more likely to be an atheist. They prefer to learn things through experience rather than reasoning to conclusions. Now, a tender-minded person would be the opposite of all those. A tender-minded person prefers to learn about things a priori, by thinking about things rather than by conducting experiments. A tender-minded person tends to be more dogmatic. They’re more willing to accept something without a hard proof being there to back it up. They tend to be more religious, etc.

Now, historically, William James would say, this has caused a great deal of tension between people. When you have one of these tough-minded people butting heads with one of these tender-minded people and they’re trying to arrive at a conclusion about what the truth is, not much productive conversation usually gets done. They usually can’t even begin having a conversation at all because they disagree so fundamentally on what makes something true. It makes sense. How could they? Well, William James thought that the philosophical line of thinking known as pragmatism solved this problem. It united the tender and tough minded alike.

But before we can understand why James felt that way, we have to understand what’s known as the pragmatic maxim—an idea laid out initially by a friend of James’s, Mr. Charles Sanders Peirce. And it begins like this. Peirce asks us the question, what is wrong with the following statement? A diamond is actually soft and only becomes hard when it’s touched by something, as opposed to the diamond just always being hard regardless as to whether we’re touching it. What is wrong with that statement? Really, think about it. How do you know that’s not the case? How do you know that the diamond isn’t soft when something’s not touching it? How can you honestly prove that it’s not? Can you?

Now, on the surface this may seem somewhat pedantic, but it’s actually a good point he’s making here. The answer to that question—What’s wrong with that statement?—is that there’s nothing wrong with that statement. There’s nothing false about it. That’s the whole point. Think about it. Whether you believe that the diamond was soft until something touched it or whether you believe that the diamond was hard in perpetuity, absolutely nothing changes about your experience of that diamond, how others will experience that diamond, the potential uses you may have for that diamond, whether you can put it inside of a ring and give it to your significant other as a token of submission. Nothing changes about how we experience that diamond at all. So, our beliefs about this diamond and whether it was soft or hard when we weren’t touching it really ends up not mattering. And think about what that means. It doesn’t matter if you believe that an invisible leprechaun is keeping that diamond hard; nothing changes about the way a human being orients themselves to it.

This is the pragmatic maxim, that the meaning of a concept is the sensory effect of its object. William James has a really famous example that I think illustrates this concept a bit better. He says pretend you’re walking through the woods and you come across a beautiful little squirrel clinging to the side of the tree. And it looks at you, and you see it. And you guys make eye contact. And the squirrel is startled, and it decides to scurry around the tree, clinging to the bark from the other side of the tree as though it’s trying to hide from you. And you say, “No, no, little squirrel; I’m not done with you. That’s a beautiful squirrel. I gotta see it again.” So you sort of crane your neck to the side trying to catch one last glimpse of its fluffy tail or its beady eyes, but you can’t see it. But you don’t give up. So you start walking slowly around the tree to see if you can see the squirrel.

But this squirrel, oh, this squirrel has a vendetta. This squirrel isn’t your show pony. It’s not going to trot around for your viewing pleasure. The squirrel decides it’s going to use its psychic powers to just always know where you are, and it’s always going to stay on the opposite side of that tree so that you can never see it. But you’re not going down without a fight, right? You start running. You start running as fast as you can around the tree four, five times. Eventually you realize, the squirrel’s not going down. The squirrel prevails. His plan works. No matter how many times you go around the tree, you never see the squirrel.

Now, here’s the question. Having circled the tree now four or five times, looking for the squirrel, would you say that you had gone around the squirrel? Now, it seems like there’s two ways you can think about this question. You could say, yes, I’ve gone around the tree. And the squirrel is in between me and the tree. Of course I’ve gone around the squirrel. I just didn’t see it. Or you could say, no, I didn’t go around the squirrel. Its face was always facing me the whole time. What would you say? Did you go around the squirrel or not?

Well, just like the diamond example, whether you think you did go around the squirrel or didn’t go around the squirrel, neither of these accounts about what happened are actually false statements. It really just comes down to how you define “going around” the squirrel. If going around the squirrel means passing to the north, south, east, and west of the squirrel, then yes, we’ve gone around the squirrel. But if it means passing in front of, to the left of, behind of, and to the right of the squirrel, then no, we haven’t gone around the squirrel. Point is, whether you believe you went around the squirrel or not, nothing changes about what actually happened in reality. You’re still having the same human experience of that event.

Now, William James thought this went way beyond vindictive squirrels in the middle of the woods. Us not understanding the practical definitions that another person has in an argument often leads us to disagree with people that actually agree with us about what’s going on in reality. He said that so many of the disagreements that we have in philosophy or any of the natural sciences are not really disagreements about reality but debates about specific words that are being used. Now, this leads us to the question, what is reality? What is truth?

And if you were having this conversation with William James, he’d probably start by saying, okay, let’s talk about this popular concept of objective truth. Let’s establish a baseline here. No one listening to this actually believes in things because they think they are objectively true facts about the universe. Even if you fancy yourself one of these skeptical, atheistic, tough-minded people guided by the evidence and the evidence alone, even if you were the most tough-minded person that ever lived and you only believe in the most unbiased, repeatable, triple-checked scientific synopsis of the way that things are, you still know that one day many of the things that you believe are going to be replaced by better science. I mean, just look at history. That’s the one constant of science is that it keeps improving upon itself.

So, in the sense that you don’t believe in things because you think they’re objective truths about the universe but really just because they’re the closest facsimile of that truth available to you during the years that you’re alive, really, you believe in the stuff you do because you see it as the most useful set of beliefs that a person could ever have. It really has nothing to do with whether they’re actually true or not. And as better science comes out and disproves one of your beliefs and gives you a more useful belief to hold, one hopefully that’s a little bit closer to truth, you’ll adjust your beliefs accordingly and believe in that useful belief. This is what leads William James to make the claim that how truthful an idea is comes down to how useful it is to us or whether it serves the function it’s meant to serve. He says, much like our belief about whether we actually went around the evil squirrel or not, if we have a belief that doesn’t contradict what we already know, and it serves the purpose of explaining the way that things are and accurately predicts things that are going to happen in the future, there’s no reason not to consider it to be true.

Again, think of truth not as a noun like Socrates did but as an adjective describing a certain human experience that we have. James says, “True ideas are those that we can assimilate, validate, corroborate, and verify. False ideas are those we cannot. That is the practical difference it makes to us to have true ideas; that, therefore, is the meaning of truth, for it is all that truth is known-as…The truth of an idea is not a stagnant property inherent in it. Truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events. Its verity is in fact an event, a process: the process, namely, of verifying itself…Its validity is the process of its valid-ation.”

Think of it this way. An idea is a true idea if it serves the purpose of giving us a particular useful human experience just as a piece of artwork is beautiful if it serves the purpose of giving us a particular type of human experience. Now, a common question people ask here is, “Okay, I’m on board here to a certain extent. I agree with the inevitable progression of science—we may not ever be able to grasp that fully. But what about things that are just true, things that are true by virtue of their definitions, like that a triangle has three sides or that all bachelors are unmarried? Can’t you say that those statements are just true statements objectively? You don’t really need somebody to have a useful human experience with them to be able to define those as true.”

William James would say, those are not true statements; they just simply are the case. This is a really interesting part of James’s philosophy. He asks us to remember what we’re talking about whenever we’re talking about the truth. What William James would say is that whenever we’re talking about something being true, all we can ever be talking about is our human experience of something. Now, right here you may say, “Well, that’s just him switching the definition of truth.” But it starts to make a lot more sense when you look at this connection he thinks there is between a human believing something and something being true.

So, for an idea to be true, it needs to be useful. And for an idea to be useful, you actually have to believe in it. I mean, if you don’t believe that the Big Bang was the event that marked the inception of the universe, how can it ever be an adequate or useful explanation to you? His point there is, you believing that something is true is a huge factor in determining whether it’s actually going to be useful to you or not. He gives an example of somebody lost in the woods. A hiker that’s lost—he has no idea where he is. The only thing they really have to go on is this path that they just found. Now, at this point the hiker can believe in a couple different things. They can believe that the path is going to lead them back to safety and civilization, or they can believe that the path is going to lead them deeper and deeper into the bowels of the woods, making their situation far worse.

Now, William James would ask, think of how your beliefs determine the outcome of that situation. On one hand, if you believe that the trail is leading you deeper and deeper into the woods, getting you even more lost, why follow it? Why not do nothing or walk in some other random direction? The useful way to use that belief is just to not follow the trail. Maybe what happens as a result of this belief is you stay lost out there for a couple days, and you eventually starve to death. Now, on the other hand, if you believe that the trail is going to lead you back to safety, think about it, just as we hold beliefs about science that are incredibly useful to us and we consider them to be true—I mean, even though in reality we’re, figuratively speaking, lost in the woods our entire life—by believing that those scientifically founded beliefs are accurate, by believing that the path leads to safety, in other words, it becomes useful to us and therefore becomes true to William James. This is his basis for the quote, “Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does.”

Now, let’s clear some things up here, because I already know what you guys are going to be saying. “Wait, so no matter what I believe, no matter what idea I can possibly come up with, as long as I act on it and it becomes useful to me, it’s therefore true to William James?” Well, no, that’s not what he said. There are certain criteria that William James thinks need to be met by any belief for it to even be considered potentially justifiable. Let’s talk about them!

One is that there needs to be evidence in its favor. There needs to be some discernable thing that you can point to as evidence of why this is a reasonable idea. But James would say, more realistically this usually manifests itself as the majority of the evidence available to you during your time period tends to indicate that that is true. Two, the idea needs to be strong enough to be able to stand up to counterarguments. What he means is, if somebody can just walk up to you, criticize this idea that you have, and leave you speechless in terms of an explanation, it’s probably not passing the test. Three, once you believe in the idea, a common thing that people think is, now it’s off the hook. No, it’s not. James says the idea needs to keep proving its worth to you as something that is useful to you, and part of doing that is consistently predicting future results. If it’s not doing that, probably time to believe in something else that’s a little bit more useful.

Now, the great thing about these three criteria is that they account for both types of people, right? The tender-minded and the tough-minded. They account for essentially all time periods. For example, if you’re living in Western Europe in the 1400s and you believe it to be true that the earth is flat, William James would say that even though we know now the earth is a sphere, your belief that the earth was flat was a true belief back then. Because remember, truth is an adjective describing a specific type of human experience. And the experience somebody had with that belief back in the 1400s is the same as the experience we have today with the idea that the earth is a sphere.

Just to make this more clear, let’s look at this example through the lens of all three of these criteria so that we can see just how similar our experiences really are. First criteria—we need evidence that it’s true, right? Well, just as we in today’s world might point to satellite imagery or something like that that shows that the earth is a sphere, somebody in the 1400s might point to, I mean, eye-witness testimony from the guy with the peg leg in the corner that saw an entire ship of noble fishermen get sucked down into Davy Jones’ locker. He swears it happened. He even saw it with his good eye this time. Nobody, nobody second-guesses his good eye! I’m losing it.

The second criteria—this idea needs to be able to withstand criticism, right? So, in today’s world, somebody might come up to you and offer you a counterargument against your belief that the earth is a sphere. And they might say something like, “Well, look, if the earth is so round, why does the horizon look flat no matter how high up you go? I was on the top of Mount Everest the other day. The horizon looked flat. How do you explain that?” Well, we could no doubt argue back to this person and talk about how things appear to the human eye and fixtures in the landscape that are made possible only by the curvature of the earth. Point is, our idea that the earth is a sphere is going to be able to withstand criticism just as the average person in the 1400s probably isn’t going to be running into many people like Sir Isaac Newton that’s able to provide a compelling argument that refutes their belief that the earth is flat.

Third criteria—the idea needs to continue to help you predict future outcomes. So, in today’s world our idea that the earth is spherical would continue to be reinforced, right? We’d continue to compensate for the spherical shape of the earth. We’d continue to reap rewards for doing that. We’d continue to adjust flight patterns in the interest of saving time by taking advantage of the shape of the earth. We would do that just as back in the 1400s they would continue to hear stories about people falling off the edge of the earth. They’d continue to predict that those crazy people over there that are going on that super-long voyage towards the edge of the earth—they’re probably not coming back. And when they didn’t come back, it would serve as confirmation that what they believe is true.

Point is, just like with the squirrel, just like with the diamond, our human experience of our belief that the earth is a sphere—how useful it is to us, how well it predicts future outcomes that are relevant to us—we have the same experience with our believe that the earth is a sphere that somebody back in the 1400s would have had with their belief that the earth is flat. And to William James, both of these beliefs would be worthy of the adjective “true” when describing them, given their respective contexts and how they allow people to orient themselves to the world.

You know, many people take issue with James because they think he's being far too tolerant of these ideas like the earth is flat. We shouldn’t allow that to be called true. What’s going on? But keep in mind, this is entirely contingent upon them living in a different time when other evidence wasn’t available. He no doubt would take issue with somebody believing in that in today’s world, given how it doesn’t stand up to his three criteria. And in that sense, he's far from being tolerant of people just believing in whatever they want. By the way, it should be said, you aren’t exempt from this at all. These criteria extend onto you as well. Once a more useful interpretation of some subject comes out—for many of us that means it’s more accurate—if your beliefs no longer hold up to scrutiny, he would be equally as abrasive to your beliefs as well.

William James was a psychologist long before he was ever a philosopher. He was fascinated in looking at these different ways that people orient themselves to the world and make sense of it. You know, he wrote an entire book called The Varieties of Religious Experience where he dissects basically every type of religious idea that people have ever come up with and tries to find similarities between them. And the interesting thing is, when he does it, James doesn’t think about religion the same way that we commonly do in today’s world. He doesn’t thing of religion as being limited to things like Christianity or Hinduism or Orphism. No, William James thinks that any type of fundamentalist interpretation of life should be considered a religion because it’s ultimately the same type of thinking going on. And that could be any number of things. That could be unbridled nationalism. It could be racism. It could be sexism. Religion to William James—well, he defines it as “man’s total reaction upon life.”

Oh and, by the way, speaking of quotes, there is a great quote in the introduction of The Varieties of Religious Experiences. He says, “We must therefore, from the experiential point of view, call these godless or quasi-godless creeds ‘religions’; and accordingly when in our definition of religion we speak of the individual’s relation to ‘what he considers the divine,’ we must interpret the term ‘divine’ very broadly, as denoting any object that is godlike, whether it be a concrete deity or not.” Beautifully worded there. Now, obviously what he’s saying here is, look, just because someone’s simplified way they look at things doesn’t have a tin-headed deity with horns involved in it, don’t think that the divine qualities that many traditional religions place on that thing are incapable of being conferred onto something like, you know, the founding fathers or David Duke or anything.

By the way, real quick, I realize there’s people alive today that strongly believe that the earth is flat and that they have tons of evidence to support why that has to be the case. I’d just like to ask those people, if you’re listening, please be understanding of me having to find an example for this episode. You must realize that you’re part of a very small handful of intellectual elites that have all watched the same YouTube videos that you have. And you certainly must realize that the vast, vast majority of us listening to this show right now are uneducated sheep that are victims of propaganda. The point was not to continue my covert shilling for the CIA—actual email I got, by the way—it was to try my best to explain some William James, alright?

Oh and, by the way, if you’re out there, please reach out to me. Please. Nobody did last time I talked about this. I really want to know why all the governments of the world benefit from concealing that the earth is flat. I’m not saying that’s a knock-down argument. I’m not saying there’s not an explanation. I’m curious. I’m a curious person. Why do the governments of the world all want us to think the earth is a sphere?

Anyway, thanks for listening. I'll talk to you next time.