Month: November 2020

If you did not read my first article in this series, I encourage you to. You can find it here.

In that article, I discussed the difficulty of knowing things, and I developed the idea that there is a difference between an object and a perception of an object.

Side note: While the distinction between objects and the perception of objects is logical, I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge that there are other theories about reality (such as idealism). Over time, I will cover some of them but for right now, I am going to stick with this paradigm.

By the end of that last post, we were in a fairly bleak place. If you are a modernist, you may believe that objects are universal, but see all perceptions of objects as relative and thus unreliable. If you are a postmodernist, it is even worse. You may see both the perception of objects and the objects themselves as relative and unreliable.

If you live in this world of unknowing, there is an uncomfortable question you have to answer: how do you get out of bed in the morning?

In other words, when you swing your legs out of bed, how do you know there is going to be a floor under your feet? Why would you assume such a thing? Even the fact that you perceived a floor yesterday is irrelevant. What evidence do you have that your perception will not let you down today?

Obviously, no one lives that way. We all have to put trust in our perception of reality. Even David Hume, perhaps the most famous proponent of this kind of thinking, chose to live in opposition to what he claimed to believe. He actually admitted to that hypocrisy later in life.

This inconsistency between belief and practice is unavoidable if you accept the proposition that either perception of an object or the underlying object may be relative and untrustworthy. We can tout relativism all we want, but we cannot live that way. We have to have a band-aid.

That band-aid is sometimes called pragmatism.

Pragmatism has different meanings, but in a philosophical context, it simply means living in a way that you hope produces the best outcome. It acknowledges that 1) we may not know things for sure but 2) we often have to live as though we know things for sure nonetheless.

Or to put it another way, it is choosing to make unproven assumptions because you have no real choice. Living requires such assumptions. In our getting-out-of-bed example, pragmatism is what gets a relativist out of bed. Relativists choose to believe the floor is there and live as if the floor is there even if they cannot say for sure that the floor is there.

If you show me a postmodernist, I will show you a pragmatist. But if you consider yourself premodernist or modernist, do not turn up your nose at pragmatism, because you are almost certainly a pragmatist too. I am pretty sure that we are all pragmatists whether we want to admit it or not.

What I am about to say is something I have never heard anyone say and is probably controversial, but the best examples of pragmatism I know of exist in two major systems for understanding reality: science and religion.

Let me give another premise before I dive into this a bit. When you go back to our paradigm of objects and perception of objects, religion is a pragmatic solution for the uncertainty of objects in themselves while science generally provides pragmatic solutions for the uncertainty of the perception of objects.

Let us consider each for a bit.

The pragmatic nature of science

I am a huge fan of science, and we all are its beneficiaries in unmeasurable ways. I am typing this during the coronavirus pandemic, and just this month, multiple companies announced successful vaccines after only a few months of development.

However, science has a few problems. First of all, it is primarily based on observation, or in other words, the perception of objects. In spite of all scientists know about the observation of objects, they still cannot answer the deep metaphysical questions about the nature of the objects themselves.

Read that last sentence again. Science at best can provide laws about the perception of reality but not reality itself. Science can tell you how a table operates in the world we perceive but it knows nothing about the world in itself. For example, it cannot answer the question as to whether the world in itself exists in a physical way or simply in our imagination.

That makes science subservient to philosophy. Furthermore, because such questions about the nature of reality will always be unanswerable, science will always be in that subservient position.

Second, science starts with inductive reasoning, which is the process of observation and then trying to work backward towards scientific laws. In other words, if you drop a stone and it falls to the ground over and over, you begin to develop the law of gravity.

There is a problem however with inductive reasoning: it cannot lead to universal truth.

Here is a simple example to illustrate why that is true: let us say you have a bag that contains one hundred marbles and you ask someone to pull out the marbles one at a time and record the color. The first marble is white as is the second marble. In fact, 98 marbles are pulled out of the bag and each one is white.

So what color will the last two marbles be?

You might be tempted to say they will be white because every other marble has been white. You would be wrong however. A scientist can only say that there is a high likelihood that the last two marbles will be white. Even if there were a million marbles in the bag and the first 999,999 came out white, a scientist cannot say for sure what the color of the last marble will be.

That is the huge deficiency of inductive reasoning, and it is also a key reason why science works well in the realm of perception but not so well in the realm of objects of perception. While we can get hints about the nature of such an object, the truth of the object is always slightly hidden. To take the example of the marble, we may be able to say that there is a 99.9999% chance that the next marble out of the bag must be white but science can never guarantee us 100%.

So, for these two reasons, science fails to provide much in the way of universal truth. What science can do is develop highly-probable laws that can provide a way to live in a world of perception. In other words, science is pragmatic in nature.

The pragmatic nature of religion

I am religious, but on this blog, I choose to intentionally step back and look at religion critically and from a secular viewpoint. Some may find this uncomfortable and if that is you, I apologize in advance.

While science uses inductive reasoning, theology uses deductive reasoning. With deductive reasoning, you start with universal truth and develop conclusions from those premises. While this sounds promising, there is a big problem: you have to make assumptions about what universal truth is. There is simply no way around the reality that theological universals cannot be proven.

Let us consider an example. If you ask Christians if they know what will happen to them after death, they will likely say that they are going to heaven. If you ask them if they know that for sure, they will say yes. They will likely be very dogmatic that they know for sure.

Actually, they know no such thing for sure. In fact, they are using the word “know” in a different way than we are discussing here. When religious people say that they know things about God and the eternal, what they are really referring to is a faith paradigm. They are really saying that they are choosing to believe something that they cannot know.

This decision to believe something that cannot be proven and live according to that belief is foundational to religion, and I see no reason for a religious person to feel ashamed of that kind of pragmatism. In fact, in the Bible, Hebrews 11:13-16 acknowledges the pragmatic nature of such faith in a positive way.

¹³ All these people were still living by faith when they died. They did not receive the things promised; they only saw them and welcomed them from a distance, admitting that they were foreigners and strangers on earth. ¹⁴ People who say such things show that they are looking for a country of their own. ¹⁵ If they had been thinking of the country they had left, they would have had opportunity to return. ¹⁶ Instead, they were longing for a better country—a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared a city for them. (NIV)

That being said, it is intellectually honest to note the deficiency of religion. Religion provides universal answers, but does so outside of logic, science, or any other rationalistic systems that we generally look to for proof (or at least strong evidence). Faith is the key ingredient of religion that helps create a successful pragmatic framework for living in an uncertain world. The problem with faith is it cannot prove universal truth any more than science can.

Throughout the history of humanity, we have looked primarily to religion and science for universal truth. As I have demonstrated, both can work in a pragmatic way but both have inherent flaws. That is why I argue that all of us (not just postmodernists) are pragmatists. Neither the deductive reasoning of religion nor the inductive reasoning of science can provide universal truth.

With this background behind us, I want to get into some modern applications in coming weeks.

When you start to think seriously about universal truth, I can think of no better introductory place to send you than Bertrand Russell’s classic book The Problems of Philosophy. (You can read it here for free.)

Russell was a modernist philosopher who wrote in the early twentieth century. He was very technical in his approach and his writing is very dense, but anyone can understand the well-known example of his writing-table that he gives in the first chapter.

Within just a few pages, Russell proves that

• There is a big difference between one’s perceptions of the table (what Russell refers to as “sense data”) and the table itself (the reality/truth of the table).
• While it is easy to identify perceptions about the table, it is very difficult (if not impossible) to know anything about the reality/truth of the table itself.
• The perceptions of the table are relative to the perceiver and the environment and based on many factors that have nothing to do with the table.

Again, if you are not familiar with the concept I am discussing, take fifteen minutes and read the first chapter of that book.

A non-philosopher might look at what I have written so far and wonder why I am making mountains out of molehills. I get that. The distinction between the table itself (what I am going to call an object) and our perception of the table (perception of the object) is possibly unimportant in everyday life.

When you start teasing at the implications though, you get a sense of why this is so important. Discussing a writing-table is one thing but what happens when you start examining other objects including non-physical objects?

For example, how about the concept of justice? If we consider justice to be an object, you could easily argue that the same differentiation exists between the perception of justice and what justice actually is. The same goes for morality and other non-physical objects. In fact, perception is itself an object. Do we have to question our perception of our perception?

What I am discussing here is the essence of philosophy. While throughout history, philosophy has sometimes included many disciplines from medicine to astronomy, today, philosophy primarily limits itself to two important yet unanswerable questions:

1. Metaphysics: What is the nature of reality?
2. Epistemology: What is the nature and source of knowledge?

Russell’s example of the writing desk goes to the heart of these two questions, which are really two different ways of looking at a few bigger questions:

Is there universal truth/reality independent and outside of ourselves and our perception? And if so, how do we learn what it is?

To return to our example one more time, when considering the writing-table, what, if anything, is universally true about the table that exists outside of our perceptions about that table?

Even after thousands of years of bright minds arguing sophisticated theories, this question of universal truth is difficult and every answer is unprovable. If you talk to someone that provides a dogmatic answer, that person is either unfamiliar with the difficulty of the problem or is speaking from a faith paradigm. (As you will see later, I do not have a problem with either of those things.)

Whether unanswerable or not, the question is important. How a person or culture answers that question shapes a lot of things downstream such as religion and science. Yes, I think that the universal truth question is upstream from any religious decision, and it is fairly easy to prove that it is upstream from science. I am going to demonstrate why I believe this in the next post.

Before I end this article, I want to give a very general outline of how Western civilization has historically viewed universal truth. I am going to categorize by time period and also differentiate as Russell did between the perception of an object and the object itself.

I hesitate to do this not only because of the danger of oversimplification but also because there always have been philosophers and theologians that were outside their mainstream. Hume for example lived during the modernist era, but would probably have been more comfortable in postmodernism.

Period	Timeframe	Perception	Object of perception
Premodernism	Ancient Greece – Middle Ages (400 BCE – 1600 CE)	Varied*	Universal
Modernism	Enlightment – modern era (1600 – mid-20th century)	Relative	Universal
Postmodernism	mid-20th century to present	Relative	Relative

Note how the concept of universals has changed over time. While premodernists generally saw objects as universal, modernists decoupled the perception of an object from the object itself, generally accepting the object as a universal but the perception as relative. Today’s postmodernist generally goes further by rejecting the universal nature of at least some objects themselves.

Most of you are probably either modernist or postmodernist at least in a lot of your thinking. Unfortunately, there is a big problem with accepting the inherent uncertainty of either position: if you cannot be sure of universals, how is doing life even possible? In the next post, I want to talk about the band-aid we all use that makes life liveable in a world where our perception of truth/reality may not be reliable.