Hello,
I look forward to communicating with you all in this lively forum.
Onto the epistemic issue at hand! I find Cogito's (or C's- for short) stance philosophically interesting on three counts: (1) the nature of our epistemic positioning: especially problematic is the reliance of some thinkers on the principles of logic, which tend towards incompleteness and fallaciousness; (2) the human cognitive-emotive proclivity towards self fulfilling agendas can only lead, in many cases, to the pretension of "truth" seeking rather than leading to an authentic-logic based search for the truth, and (3) science acting as an a adequate model of more or less epistemic purity shows us clearly that positions either based on logic or which tend to defend "objective logic" are indeed, in the end analysis, hopelessly unsecured from the defects mentioned in (1) and (2). These basic 'loosely stated' propositions lead C to conclude that we can never rely-ultimately- on a system of logic that is grounded in human fallacies. The only hope for anyone in this poor philosophic situation is to posit a "God Logic" that is free from possessing the shortcomings of human-perspecitival-logic and is also free from having to be self revealing in that logic, i.e., that God can be the ground of objective thought (or ideas-if you wish to be Cartesian about it) without being subjected to the fallacious logic of human thought (the true and ultimate ontological paradox). Cogito finds evidence for this reasoning in quantum science wherein a particle can be observed to be in more than one place at the same time. Hence, if this is true of some particles, why not of God?
The logic here is simple (pun definitely intended): If science is a more pure epistemic means of acquiring "objective truths" and that science discovered a realm (beyond the Newtonian physics realm) wherein our most precious logical principles breakdown, then we can posit an objective being-God- who's logic operates well beyond our own and who's being is not subject to our more finite, contingent, changing, and utterly fallacious logic. Thus, God can exist-since he's part of existence- (quite logically stated by the way
), and, as a result of the above assertion, God cannot be fully critiqued by the atheist's logic regardless of the accuracy of the human perspectival logical arguments that are designed to refute such an existence.
I submit that the essentials of Cogito's argument (and that's what it is) has already been made--and answered in another respect-- in the works of other philosophers. I will offer up three of the big ones, one in which Cogito-if his sign in name is any indication- probably favors: (a) Plato; (b) Desecrates, and (c) Hume. I do not wish to say that these three thinkers all arrived at their skeptical situation in the same manner or made attempts to resolve the matter in the same way, which they did not, but they all three did arrive at epistemic skepticism at some point or other in their analysis of Human Understanding (to use the partial title of Hume's work). Not all three would agreement with Cogito's specific stance in all respects, however.
Desecrates, for instance, postulates God (not so dissimilarly from Berkeley at one level of analysis) as the efficient causal agent of ideas. Berkeley thought that there must be a way in which all ideas cohere and are maintained when there is no other mind (human-mind) doing the perceiving. Ideas thus exist in a way in which God maintains. Therefore, the room I left will remain the same because God is perceiving the items of that room when I'm not present. Hence, only sensible things (the form of Berkelian Ideas) are real and ultimately cohere and find existence, if you will, in the Divine mind. Similarly, Plato saw the physical realm, as well as many forms of human reasoning, incomplete. However, he thought that through mental self reflection the realm of perfected forms can be discovered. Viola!! The problem of starting off on the wrong epistemic foot is avoided for Plato. Plato, like Cogito, sought for a realm wherein reason and infallibility meet.
Hume, on the other hand, was an empiricist skeptic of the highest order. He thought that our causal inferences were adequate for most things. He just thought we could never rationally justify them for much of the same reasons Cogito mentioned. With Hume, however, there is an enormous break with Cogito (recall that Cogito couples the discovery of quantum mechanics--a scientifically discovered body of knowledge-- with the notion of God behaving in ways that transcend our other modes of logic): because we can never prove our causal inferences-by means of logical necessity- we can never prove the existence of God or even reliably posit such an existence! Hume realized that once one starts down the skeptical path in this way, that science (or naturalism in his day) wasn't safe from epistemic uncertainty. One cannot say science, which is derived from human fallacious assumptions, is any better at logical-truth gathering than is all the annals of religious theoretical thinking. For Hume, our causal inferences are justified at the basic level of observation and everyday functioning, but because we cannot get beyond the process of doubting how our causal computations originate or may go awry, we must settle in doubt! In this regard, science was no better off than religion! Both use causal reasoning of the human sort and rely on inferential reasoning that is ultimately grounded in tradition, myth, base natural experience, and the like--all fallible!! On Hume's thinking Cogito is making a false and artificial dichotomy between the sorts of inferential reasoning processes that compel science on the one hand and logic on the other.
Since we employ causal reasoning in both disciplines; since both are man made; since both rely on each other to a significant degree, and both have been found possessing all the fallacies and other human characteristics of questionable- error ridden inferential reasoning, you cannot then say, for instance, that Newton is ultimately wrong, even if you were modest about your criticism; and, moreover, with some certainty in hand, assert that quantum mechanics is relevantly correct. If Newton could be wrong, then our understanding of quantum mechanics is most certainly well within the parameters of doubt. In fact, Polkinghorne (a well renowned physicist and Christian), warns us that there's no reliable means to deduce God or some new age force(s) from the speculations thus far found in quantum mechanics. The push in physics is to understand how our Newtonian physics and quantum mechanics can both make sense (it's typically called a Unified or Final Theory) of both. In one manner of speaking, the physicists would say we are just at a primitive level of understanding these phenomenon, and therefore, to find entire entities of the God sort in these seemingly fundamental particles is extremely presumptuous. So, at least at one level of analysis the scientific community would be on the side of Hume's skepticism concerning the ultimate explanation at this juncture.
Of course Hume's meaning was an indictment on all such epistemic endeavors. In this fashion, Hume would have it correct. Cogito starts out with making a kind of questionable bifurcation in his analysis of what counts as epistemically reliable. He does this without telling us how science is a more reliable means. He only wishes to say that science operates in a way that differs from logic: Science proceeds without "proving" a theory-it just adds supporting evidence for it. This is so only if one buys into Popper's definition of what counts as "proof," and since we have fine reasons to doubt this definition of scientific proof we need not accept Cogito's position here. For example, we don't just add to the theory of evolution by natural selection by acquiring ever increasing evidence for it, we also show how we can base predictions on what we'll find in the natural world on the basis of the theoretical claims given in the theory itself. In other words, if, at this point, evolution by natural selection isn't "true" then the "facts" in science has little to no intelligible meaning. We also know that demons are not the likely cause of disease. Germs are! Hence, any theory proposing something different will have to overturn the entire field of disease-pathology in science, which would not make disease theory less supported by the evidence-- rather it would invalidate it altogether.
As far as Hume's line of criticism would be concerned, Cogito would have to further explain how that reasoning from mere statistical kinds of evidential accumulation equates to a more reliable anything epistemically. Inductive logic and scientific methodology are on the exact same inferential footing: both require the practice of certain cognitive forms of reasoning-again, causal inferences, to make whatever case is being made in science. Hume would say, and did write, that any such reasoning cannot find any resting ground on some imagined place of errorless psychological pasture. Science has the same structure, history, and flawed human motivations as did and do the creators and practitioners of logic. Cogito's point requires a more detailed and refined analysis that allows for his overall position to escape the very skeptical consequences he explicitly and implicitly accepts as the primary motivation behind his own arguments.
Lastly, I find that Cogito, like Plato, Desecrates, and even Hume, inserted hidden premises (although Cogito might not see it that way) into his line of reasoning that are themselves questionable at best: (1) logic is manmade and resembles all the errors that we human beings have, and (2) because of (1) we can have no clear idea of what objective logic is nor can we have a reliable form of epistemic standards to go by in this regard. We could simply say that (1) and (2) compose the central skeptic's assertions concerning our epistemic situation. Since there is error and we human beings are motivated by all sorts of questionable things, concepts like "truth," "justification," and "belief" are all dubious concepts.
The result of this situation leads such skeptics to one of two philosophical choices-generally: (1) there is no ultimate truth. (2) Truth etc. must come from an infallible (incorrigible propositions or axioms) source. This last choice was Plato's and Descartes move. Two problems immediately emerge here. One, there is no reason to think that just because a system of "truth acquisition" is of human origin and fallacious etc. that it is still not generally reliable! It would seem that much of our scientific and other similar endeavors have had these flawed characteristics but they've also led to an increasingly better comprehension of the world and ourselves. Both logic and science have common epistemic and historical roots that have been troubled by these flaws and other problems but yet they have survived in ways that have led to a more refined understanding of things. It isn't clear that a system that already works on the assumption of self refinement shouldn't be trusted merely because it doesn't reach or claim Omniscience status. This is a questionable position at best! Why can't we trust a process that may lead to different schools of thought from time to time but has generally led us down the correct path? Hume's entire criticism (as is all these skeptics-including Cogito) rests on the dubious notion that if error is possible, we can have no truth unless it comes from an error free place. The makings of a false dilemma indeed! All we have to do here is surrender the idea that "truth" and "epistemic justification" requires certainty and we face no real rational (or other) threat. We can modify! Why cannot our understanding of logic and truth etc. be tentative in understanding and still be considered "logical" and "true"? It seems to me that Cogito must show how we cannot make this or similar kinds of claims. We may have our differing ideas, but so what?! Through time and trials of differing intellectual sorts we usually see which ideas succeed and which ones do not. Our mode of inquiry and argumentation is imperfect but we are getting better and better at our refining abilities in this and other fields. So, why does there have to be more than this in order to satisfy a presupposed standard of certainty? Well, this issue isn't clear to me nor to others I should think.
Cogito consulted quantum physics for a more stable line of reasoning to the objective God that transcends our fallacious logic. I would suggest that one start with a Darwinian approach to understanding how we could have both fallacious reasoning and be correct about much of how we do reason and have overall successful commerce with the world. Start with biology I say! In brief, the skeptic relies for his justification of doubt on how much can and does go wrong in the reasoning process; moreover, he also implicitly accepts that in order for epistemic justification and truth to have any meaning they must somehow be understood by either knowing the conditions that make epistemic justification and truth what it is across all possible worlds (to avoid counter-examples) or that an alternative source of epistemic incorrigibility be found, perhaps that principle(s) which in and of itself requires no further explanation, that is, a foundationally incorrigible principle (or being) that is somehow self justifying. The problems with this should be seen: One, again, we do not require certainty as a criterion for any reliable epistemic method; two, which principle or being ought to be used as the infallible source has not been made clear by those who use this line of skepticism to reach their version of certainty, and three, this approach assumes that truth and the epistemic like are somehow mind independent sorts of things that must be discovered.
What is rarely ever acknowledged by such tactics is that truth, logic, justification etc. are merely the mental-verbal means and methods that supervene on natural processes that have had to exist in order for us to have successfully evolved and continue to live in a dangerous and complex world. At the level of evolutionary processes, no organism, regardless of how mindless it may seem, can operate in the world successfully without having evolved to meet the demands of it's environment. In other words, every species begins and sustains its travels in the world by evolving a set of bio-skills that help the species to procreate, gather resources, and compete in a very dangerous environment. Lets be clear, nothing evolves and sustain itself unless it has the means to "interpret" its environment with fine grain bio- precision. One may say that I'm pushing the metaphor of "interpret" too far. I cannot see how! Amebas have been observed moving towards the nutrient rich side of the fluid and away from the toxic sides of the fluid. Natural selection has built into this species a biochemical comprehension of its world. You and I are equally made up of elecro-biochmecials and are consequently oriented to our world in such a way as to survive in some of the world's harshest conditions. The rational goals fundamental to the ameba are also fundamental to us! The human mind evolved along the same trajectory as the ameba. Distinguishing between the good and bad are the hallmark achievements of our and any other species that reaches the level of fitness.
The problem with the skepticism I have outlined above is that it focuses on what we do wrong and how badly our reasoning can go. However, the one thing that hardly occurs to such skeptics is the fact that the vast majority of us, much of the time, are master survivors and remarkable behavioral auditors of other human beings. Even in our errors we find a way to minimize much of the damage that any such errors may inflict on the total quality of our lives. In basic, the one fantastic thing the skeptic overlooks is the sheer limitless things that we get right everyday and in seemingly infinite novel ways regardless of when we are behaving fallaciously in some other ways. Even if we contemplate the many conveniences of modern life, there are still many ways in which we could do ourselves and each other irreparable harm and yet we don't on millions of occasions, probably much more than millions of occasions collectively speaking. Now, I'm not arguing that the error and immoral side need not be adequately assessed. All I mean to say is that both sides are of enormous interests to anyone thinking of how 7-8 billion members of a single species live well together (with notable exceptions, of course). This "function" of survival and managing the other demands of one's environment translates into a remarkable set of "truth" telling mechanisms that are inherent to life itself.
I will call this the Selective Environmental Epistemic Principle (or SEEP for short). Essentially it postulates: (1) that the selectivity algorithm (SA for short) is a bio-function that is inherent in all life. In other words, it's the sorting process of gene flow that "decides" which combination of genes will render the maximal adaptive traits for a species to thrive in their environment. This is known by its effect on the species. We can tell how well a species is put together by how well its members possess those adaptive traits that "help" the species to survive long enough to reproduce. This part of the principle states that in order for a species to be an effective member of the world of species it must properly meet the enormous demands of the niche or niches it finds itself in. Also notice that because (SA) produces an effect and this effect is species wide, the adaptive features apply to all or mostly all members of that species-- or taxonomic category depending on the focus of our classification. We could simply say that (SA)=E/C or the selectivity algorithm equals adaptiveness or is the total trait effects (categorical effect) relevant to a species survival and reproduction. This includes the total inventory of internal genetic effects and external or phenotypic characteristics of any member of that species. The "rule" implicit here is that for an organism to be a member of species X it will likely (almost certainly) have the relevant combination of traits (guaranteed by selectivity) found throughout that species.
The environmental algorithm (EA for short) acts as a continual force on the rule(s) governing (SA). This is an absolutely crucial step in the argument: Since the (EA) never ceases forcing itself on the (SA), the rule for sorting the most effective traits remains intact, of course, but the lines of adaptive traits are modified by the necessity of the environment. The rule of the most fit gene combination remains intact while the organization of those genes must be altered in order to meet the demands of the changing environment. Two universal rules may now be extrapolated: One, that as long as the (SA) is working within a species, it will always refine that species' ability to adapt to the changing forces of that environment. Two, the environment ensures the necessary conditions over which the species and the environment itself will meet acceptable equilibrium. The consequence of these two rules means that organisms that survive in their respective environments must be integrally combined to those environments in order to reach a biospheric stasis. This is so even when an organism may (or likely) change the physical environment itself, at least for a time. The rules of life and the rules governing the world's environments synthesize in what I will call here a Naturalized Dialectic. A set of organisms struggle to emerge in a usually hostile environment by finding the means to metabolize, build cellular walls, and then divide-reproduce. This process makes their fitness value reach the point that ensures long term gene survival. Therefore, life and certain parts and processes of the physical environment may start out as opposites of sorts but the two algorithmic rules work to bring both into a singular relationship. As a wondrous example, our organic self is built on inorganic being, so to speak. Indeed, we are the way the world thinks of itself! Our very being reveals how united to the earth we truly are!
Now, keep in mind that life's rules and the those of the environment are, in a manner of speaking, competing and uniting. As an aside, the environment is other competing life forms as well as the physical environment. One species decimating another can be the effect of, say, species X on species Y and this would be an affect of the environment on species Y. While this synthesis unites life and the environment here and there, a species may part company with the environment here and there (through new mutations, by literally moving geographically etc.). The point is that the process of a species "figuring" out its world is a continuous, and sometimes viscous, form of trial and error. Every organism, therefore, comes equipped with a certain repertoire of 'trial and error' functions: moths can govern their direction by moonlight, sharks senses are so frighteningly sensitive that species of sharks have evolved little over evolutionary time, and primates have a highly developed sense of sight that helps them navigate through certain environments with extreme ease and precision. Challenges faced in the environment by a species are met in that species adaptive traits and abilities. Also, by products and other spin offs of evolutionary creation can place an organism at a special advantage in the competition of life!
Both (SA) and (EA) implies that the process of developing all these traits is through a system of trial and error. In other words, because of the Dialectical splitting and unifying process, (SA) is forced to change it's relations to the world. This would mean that species must modify their abilities or suffer a permanent break with the environment through the means of extinction! Since the fossil record and genetic science show us that most species seem to reach several points of stasis, they do inevitably run upon an (EA) situation that either radically changes the trajectory of that species fitness or the (EA) has modified it in such a way making the (SA) line within that species no longer possible. At any rate, stasis is reached only through periods of steady change. Thus, even when stasis is reached, there is still other forms of dis-equallibrium as suggested above, e.g., intra-species competition as well as inter-species competition. These forms of (EA) force the species to continue refining their abilities to "read the other" in their environment. In every phase, species are working at getting better and better in "reading" their world! In fact, this is what genes and gene combinations do! They interact in such a way as to help the species anticipate and plan for action! This ability to read the intentions of others is a basic rule of (SA)! Every species has its own in built in means of interpreting the environment and much of that environments inhabitants. These means of reading-predicting etc. the world is a requisite for being in the world as a species at all!! Broadly speaking, this is called the existential contract! If you live in the world you must participate in that world by means provided you from within (genotype) and without (phenotype). You must make choices and live in the world that are someway adequate and appropriate for living in that world!
The epistemic algorithms that emerge do so because of the universal rules of (SA) and (EA): again, One, that as long as the (SA) is working within a species, it will always refine that species' ability to adapt to the changing forces of that environment. Two, the environment ensures the necessary conditions over which the species and the environment itself will meet acceptable equilibrium. The consequence of these two rules means that organisms that survive in their respective environments must be integrally combined to those environments in order to reach a biospheric stasis. The adaptive minds that had to contend with the environment, with other species, and within our own species has led us, in our own way, to know the world intimately because the very forces of life that were responsible for our being here are at core universal to all life that must live in an earthen bound world. Once language developed, evolution struck out in an accelerated way in our species. Those who could better communicate passed on their genes, which continued refining our abilities to convey information. Implied in (SA) is the conveyance of information. Since the very beginning, replicating molecules have been conveying information to their offspring. Once we evolved the means for language, our species was able to convey its understanding in wholly new directions. Culture and society emerged and provided ways to accelerate our understanding of the world. Our predictive and information gathering abilities follows the same (SA) process that our genes do. After all, we are gene-meme machines. Now we have a whole new means of "truth" conveyance.
Culture and society have advanced our species understanding of the world in a period of less than ten-thousand years. While much falsity has been generated over this time, much more information that has properly refined our understanding of things internally and externally in such an extremely accelerated rate is far more impressive. Our means of mastering our entire globe has went way beyond effective means for survival and now stands to threaten our very place in it! But, we know why this is and how we may counter it. This refined knowledge of ourselves and our world has helped us see through many illusions, myths, and overcome prejudices that now only hurt our further understanding.
So, from my standpoint, while our epistemic methods have been wrong in the past, we know why they've been wrong. We know that science has corrected science and that Zeus is a myth. We have accurately measured the distance of planets and stars to the degree that we can land probes on distant planets with remarkable accuracy. We can apply the same genetic science that reveals that we have a connection to all things and use to find out who's parents are who's. Our primitive impulses and culturally based ignorance have been and in many quarters of the globe are being fought, and many times successfully! One can look at the enormity of what we know and where we're going as a kind of historic guidance lesson to epistemology. The skeptic can look at certain beliefs and difficulties we have currently and have had and choose to marvel at this. But I think that we are far better served by looking not for some supernatural intelligence, but by looking at the lessons of evolutionary history and our own memetic history. Clearly, we've come a long way baby! That we are here by such feats of improbability and are advancing in our understanding exponentially is something that requires a topographical view of our collective history to comprehend instead of using the more narrow sights of the here and now fallacies. Indeed, "truth" and its epistemic kind are fallible, error ridden, and motivated by human agendas that have little to do with "truth" itself. But "truth" is the product of evolution and it is also progressive, accumulative, and an intimate part of our nature. The very fact that we are curious creatures who have figured out so much more than any other creature clearly demonstrates the we are terrestrially integral cognitive beings with the world. Our epistemology, then, runs along the same rules that all life does: we are equipped automatically to discover and learn about our world in ways that other species could never dream of. However, we are like all living creatures in that our species must adapt and move progressively along what we know. This basic formulation of our epistemology also reveals why we can be right at times as well as wrong at others! You would expect that if our species evolved through a trial and error process that our very mentality would match the same sorts of algorithmic patterns found in all the rules that govern the biosphere. If any life cannot evolve and live in this world without having the remarkable means to change and adapt to this diverse planet, why would anyone think that the fundamental features of our basic epistemology should look any differently? The real issue here may not be our acceptance of the status of our epistemology but perhaps an overall acceptance of our temporal understanding and being in a world that still contains lots of dark mysteries for us to grapple with!
I hope to write more on this later,
Eric D.
