A Taste for Desert Landscapes

You can believe anything you like. What makes that possible is holism, which I recently called the idea of the twentieth century. It was always possible to believe whatever you like, of course, but it’s only since the twentieth century that we understand how people can manage to believe whatever they like, and know how to avoid it, at least in ourselves.

We believe whatever we like when we embrace theory as ideology. A theory counts as ideology not because of any intrinsic feature it has, but because of the way it is held. Specifically, we hold a theory as ideology when we habitually discount unfavourable observations. And we do this by routinely making up ad hoc hypotheses whose sole purpose is to accommodate them.

Perhaps a few examples will help here. Traditionally, religious beliefs have included such hypotheses as “God is merciful”, “prayer works”, and so on. But anyone can see that there is much evil in the world – anyone can make the observation that nature is often cruel or at least indifferent to suffering. So religious believers tend to make up additional hypotheses to try to accommodate this observation. A first ad hoc hypothesis might be that God gave humans free will, and so humans are free to do evil things. The evil humans do is a lesser evil than the evil that God would have done by not giving humans free will.

That’s fine until we remember that there is a lot of evil that humans are not responsible for, and even some evil that humans have alleviated – such as smallpox – which you’d think God would have alleviated if He were indeed all-powerful and merciful. So along comes the next ad hoc hypothesis, usually something along the lines of “God works in mysterious ways”. And so on.

By habitually ducking and diving, some religious believers in effect ring-fence their favoured hypothesis, protecting it from unfavourable observations by making excuses for it. In slightly more technical terms, they add one or more ad hoc hypotheses to the conjunction of hypotheses that first of all implied an expected observation, but now has to be adjusted to imply the actual observation:

If H₁ & H₂ &… then O

not-O

Er… oops! – All right then, let’s try this:

If H₁ & H₂ & H_ah &… then not-O

(where H_ah is an ad hoc hypothesis). And so it goes.

Of course religious belief isn’t the only “theory” that can be embraced as ideology. Someone might hold that Americans never walked on the Moon, by adding sufficient ad hoc hypotheses, such as that Photoshop was actually developed in secret by NASA in the 1960s (hence the convincing-looking fake pictures). Or he might hold that Marxism is correct, and things went badly wrong in the Soviet Union and China only because in those places it wasn’t followed closely enough.

To take a current example, as I write there appear to be signs of “green shoots” in the depressed US economy. On the face of it, this is a sign that the broadly “Keynesian” policy of “borrowing one’s way out of a recession” seems to work. Followers of the opposed economic theory of Hayek don’t like that, however. Many will be engaged in some “creative hypothesising”, coming up with new reasons why the apparent improvement is merely apparent, and if anything it actually counts as observational evidence for their opposed theory.

I pause here to stress here that that might indeed be the correct strategy. From time to time it is perfectly appropriate to discount an observation as “aberrant”. If you see a UFO, that is prima facie evidence that aliens are invading Earth; but it is more likely to be an aeroplane, or the planet Venus, or a weather balloon, or a trick of the light, or something else that cannot be counted as a serious falsifying observation. The mistake is to make that the routine reaction to repeated unfavourable observations.

So the way to spot ideology is not to look for a particular sort of theory, but to look instead for a particular sort of habit on the part of a theory’s partisans.

I mentioned above that to count as ideology, a theory does not need to have any intrinsically ideological feature. But some theories more than others lend themselves to being held in that habitually protective way. These are theories that suspend disbelief on the part of their exponents in an effective way. Typically, theories that suspend disbelief are (A) those that have a strong moral/political component and so inspire moral fervour, and (B) those that hold out hope of some sort of medical redemption, and so inspire the hope for a cure to our ills. We might call these the two “great suspenders” of disbelief. And they suspend disbelief by engaging with our volition – in how we would like everyone to behave, or in our (forlorn) hopes of immortality. In both cases wishful thinking directs factual judgement. And that is how we come to believe what we like.

The way to avoid ideology is to be on our guard against acquiring the habit described above. We are creatures of habit, unavoidably as Hume saw, but that habit is best avoided if we want our beliefs to be true.

Most myxomatosis-sufferers are rabbits, but most rabbits do not have myxomatosis. Suppose a vet is trying to diagnose a sick rabbit’s symptoms. Does the fact that it is a rabbit give the vet a reason to rule out myxomatosis? Of course not. If anything, it gives the vet a reason to consider myxomatosis as a possible diagnosis.

Yet a similar statistical relationship between outsiders (~ rabbits) and genuine scientific genius (~ suffers from myxomatosis) leads many to dismiss outsiders’ ideas simply because of their provenance.

Historian of science Thomas Kuhn often stressed that most of the great scientific revolutions got started with the ideas of outsiders or newcomers to the field rather than well-established, highly-respected academics. The best new ideas usually “come out of left field” rather than from the “mainstream”.

Of course it does not follow that because someone is an outsider or newcomer, his or her ideas are likely to be the start of a new scientific revolution – most outsiders and newcomers produce nothing of importance (just as most rabbits don’t suffer from myxomatosis). Most might even be described as cranks or lone mavericks. In fact there is no good reason to think that just because an idea came from an outsider or newcomer, it is likely to be any better than an idea that came from a “mainstream” source. NOR, HOWEVER, is there any good reason to think that just because an idea comes from an outsider or newcomer, it is likely to be any worse than an idea that comes from “mainstream” sources. Analogously, there is no good reason to think a rabbit either has or does not have myxomatosis, simply because it is a rabbit. It might be something a gambler might take a bet on, but it isn’t the sort of thing we can reasonably form beliefs about in the absence of further information.

The willingness to take mere relative frequency as a reason for belief is a symptom of inductivism. The (bad) idea goes that a statistical claim about relative frequency (“most rabbits don’t have myxomatosis”) can be understood as a claim about probability (“any given rabbit is unlikely to have myxomatosis”, “the chances that a rabbit has myxomatosis are slight”) which in turn is understood as a positive reason to believe something (“for any given rabbit, we have a reason to believe that it does not have myxomatosis”).

To illustrate with another example, over the years Jews have been very well-represented among great artists and scientists, just as have lone mavericks. But just because someone is Jewish, it doesn’t follow that he or she is likely to be a great artist or scientist. Nor does it follow that because someone is Jewish, he or she is any less likely than others to be a great artist or scientist.

In warning people away from crackpot theories or pseudo-science, we should draw their attention to failures in the theories and methods used. We should not pay any attention to the type of person who proposes the theories or methods. The warning “beware the lone maverick!” is tantamount to “beware the Jew!” Logically, their status is the same: they appeal to an irrelevance.

We really cannot judge an idea by looking at the sort of person who has the idea. To do so is to commit a fallacy of relevance called argumentum ad homimem – an argument “against the man” rather than against his idea, which alone is relevant in science.

“Informal” fallacies tend to bunch together like teenagers – if you see one, you’ll often see another few hanging around somewhere nearby. Argumentum ad homimem often hangs around with “appeal to authority” – usually the authority of “peer-reviewed, mainstream” thinking.

But I’d better leave that for another blog post!

“Philosophy of science is philosophy enough”, wrote WVO Quine, one of the twentieth century’s greatest philosophers. The single most important insight of twentieth-century philosophy of science is known as holism. We might reasonably call holism “the” idea of the twentieth century, as it was first discussed explicitly by Pierre Duhem in 1903, and later explored in the minutest detail by Quine, who died on Christmas Day 2000. The term ‘holism’ is used in different ways in different contexts, so let’s be clear at the outset what I mean in the present context.

By holism I mean the idea that hypotheses get tested in groups, rather than individually. Let’s take a quick look at the logic of testing to see how this works in practice. First, a scientist somehow comes up with a hypothesis. In science, hypotheses usually describe things that cannot be seen directly, such as the behaviour of electrons, viruses or force fields, or the evolutionary emergence of lungfish from water when vertebrates began to walk on land, or the invisibly slow movement of drifting continents.

Next, a scientist deduces an observational consequence of such a hypothesis. This is where holism comes in. Hardly any individual claim logically implies any other claim in the manner ‘it’s a rainy Monday’ implies ‘it’s raining’. Very few simple implications of that sort are of any use in science. Instead, a scientific claim or hypothesis works in concert with many other assumptions to imply something that can be observed. For example, the hypothesis that the universe is expanding implies that the light from faraway objects will be red-shifted – but only in conjunction with a wide range of other hypotheses and assumptions about such things as the Doppler Effect, the fact that light does not get “tired” by losing energy over very long periods of time, the fact that elements have distinct emission spectra, and so on.

We can write this logical situation as follows:

If H₁ & H₂ & H₃ & H₄ & … then O

Once an observational consequence O of a hypothesis H₁ has been deduced or computed, someone looks to see if O can actually be observed as the hypothesis predicted – or rather, as was predicted by the hypothesis in question along with its penumbra of other hypotheses and assumptions.

If O is actually observed as predicted, all is well (for now). But if it isn’t, something has gone wrong. And now we can see why holism is so important. If O is false, then the conjunction of H₁ & H₂ & H₃ & H₄ &… must be false as well. But we can’t say which of these individual hypotheses is false. Something has gone wrong, but we can’t reliably narrow things down to locate a single culprit.

So Popper’s famous idea that a single unfavourable observation “falsifies” a hypothesis is mistaken. Things are much less clear-cut than that.

The empirical evidence for a hypothesis consists of the observations made when the hypothesis passes tests. And there are other forms of evidence than purely “empirical” evidence (a simple hypothesis is better than a complicated one, and so on). Holism does not change any of that. But because each hypothesis only passes tests in concert with many other hypotheses and assumptions, the passing of any test counts as evidence for all of them together. Observations do not imply or narrow down the possibilities to the hypothesis currently under scrutiny – at best they can be considered to “corroborate” it rather than confirm it, to be “consistent” with it rather than imply it.

With holism comes pragmatism. A hypothesis is worth believing if it works well in practice, embedded as it always is in a larger theory or still larger “paradigm” (i.e. an even broader range of assumptions and ways of doing things). This sort of pragmatism is reminiscent of Burke’s political conservatism, which rejects basic principles and instead judges any political system by how well it actually works in practice, given the circumstances and traditions that are an integral part of it.

With holism also must come the rejection of foundationalism. Foundationalism is the epistemological theory that supposes some of our beliefs have a privileged status (such as being “self-evident”) and that these beliefs work as a basis for the rest of our beliefs. Typically, these privileged beliefs are thought to be about conscious experiences, the sort of things we “cannot be wrong about” such as “I’m having an experience of blue in my visual field”.

In the context of scientific evidence, it used to be believed (by Francis Bacon, and somewhat embarrassingly by as great a scientist as Newton) that observations implied scientific claims, in other words that they worked like “units of evidence” or “data” supporting theory. But natural philosophers such as Galileo and Robert Boyle realised that hypothesis (i.e. guessing) and testing (i.e. observational checks on the consequences) were essential. Even so, despite that important correction, before holism there was still the temptation of thinking that individual observations supported individual hypotheses in a weaker than strictly logical way, so the image of science “resting on a basis of data” lived on. All that is over with holism.

As an account of empirical knowledge in general, foundationalism is mistaken. Yet it is incredibly influential. People who do not have a training in philosophy (and alas some who do) widely assume that scientific hypotheses “rest” on a “foundation” of “data”, in much the same way as they suppose, equally wrongly, that empirical knowledge “rests” on a “foundation” of “experience”. Experience and observation are still vital, of course, but they don’t work as a foundation.

Using these ideas, in my next post I will explain why, if we are prepared to bend over backwards far enough, we can literally believe anything we like. We manage this by embracing ideology, or rather by allowing ideology to embrace us. I shall also point the way out of its deathly grip.

A classic “draw” used by con artists is to play on victims’ fears that they might look stupid. This works well in academic life too. All manner of second-rate intellectual flummery is allowed to pass without question because it is larded with intimidating, technical-looking mathematical formulae. No one wants to look educationally subnormal by admitting they don’t follow all that fabulous “science”, so everyone tends to keep their heads down. And the second-rate flummery lives on, to dazzle further weedy minds another day.

There’s a word for tarting something unscientific up to make it look like science: scientism. Scientism was Wittgenstein’s bête noire. With a background in engineering and mathematics, he was well able to see through the con artistry of most technical philosophy. His own collected Remarks on the Foundation of Mathematics is widely despised – by fools – because of its steadfast refusal to leave his favourite genre of aphorisms and doodles. Fools expect impressive-looking jumbles of arcane symbols.

Philosophy of science is especially vulnerable to scientism. Philosophers suffer from a sense of inferiority because our own discipline is essentially parasitic – it only lives by hitching a ride on the more vulnerable parts of other disciplines. And because our hosts are scientists, we parasites get our noses rubbed in our own non-scientific doings uncomfortably often. This sense of inferiority often emerges in the form of (what Dawkins calls) “physics envy” or (what Quine called) “mathematosis” – the pathological yearning to treat everything, however banal or subjective, as something so deep that it requires a “mathematical” treatment. Why can’t I be a scientist too? “Man M crosses road S to enter pub P”.

It isn’t simply that this sort of pretentiousness discredits those who practice it. It spreads and corrupts like an infectious disease.

For example, consider probability. For centuries, something was said to be “probable” if it was thought to be something that ought to be believed, that is, if there seemed to be good reasons for believing it. It was all about belief, reasons, and “ought”. It was messy, subjective, literally a matter of judgement. Each of us has different beliefs, and hence different reasons for believing something new. The probability of a belief’s being true differs from one agent to the next, and even from one moment to the next.

But then, in an important historical development, some brilliant thinkers developed some mathematical formalisms for dealing with statistical claims such as “one sixth of rolls of a pair of dice result in doubles” or “one tenth of balls drawn randomly from an urn are white”.

Once mathematical formalisms were available, philosophers who yearned to treat belief as something “objective” began to confound the entirely distinct areas of epistemology and statistics. The concept of “probability” – the degree to which something ought to be believed – began to be thought of as a numerically measurable quantity, the sort of thing that can be given a scientific or mathematical treatment. Philosophical discourse underwent a change, so that we acquired the habit of talking about ideal situations in which we are all in an equal state of perfect ignorance. For example, if ten per cent of Irish people have red hair, we might say that the “probability” of any given Irish person having red hair is one tenth. If it makes any sense at all to talk about “degrees of entitlement to believe” something, I am entitled to believe that a randomly-chosen Irish person has red hair to a degree of ten per cent – but only as long as I am perfectly ignorant of all other factors that may be relevant to my forming such a belief.

If I were not in such a state of perfect ignorance, I would have other reasons for belief – reasons that would completely change that “ten per cent” figure. For example, my wife is Irish, and as I see her several times each day, I am very confident that she has red hair. I am entitled to believe that she has red hair to a far higher degree than ten per cent.

We are very rarely in such an ideal state of ignorance that we can apply numbers to repeated similar events as our habitual philosophical discourse seems to suppose. At best we can apply such numbers every now and again, when we visit a casino, or play repetitive games of rolling dice, opening doors, or tossing coins. And in those unusual situations, those numbers are best understood as statistical measures of relative frequency rather than as measures of “how much we are entitled to believe” something.

The urge to treat our beliefs “scientifically”, as if they were “objective” like relative frequencies, hasn’t just damaged epistemology. It has done untold damage to science and to society at large as well. Perhaps the majority of the world’s population nowadays think that scientists have magical powers of telling how much we ought to believe things. We have turned them into high priests.

Trivially, whatever you believe, you believe it is true. This is “trivial” in the sense that it follows from the concept of belief – to believe something is to be committed to its truth. But the consequences of this obvious fact are not at all trivial, and are often overlooked.

Like everyone else, you think that every single one of your beliefs is true, at least when considered individually. No one else’s opinions could conceivably get such a high “approval rating” – according to your own standards of approval – as your own opinions. So you think your own opinions are better than anyone else’s opinions. Similarly, you think your own judgement is better than anyone else’s judgement (and everything I say below applies as much to judgement, etc., as to opinions).

Intelligent, reflective people usually pause here and take stock. “I think my opinions are better than anyone else’s in the whole wide world,” they think, “but since everyone else is in the very same position as myself in this regard, they must think the very same about their own opinions.” We cannot all have the best opinions, in fact there must be as many below-average opinion-formers as there are above-average opinion-formers. So merely having a high opinion of one’s own opinions cannot be a reliable indicator of actually having good opinions.

Unintelligent, unreflective people usually don’t get to this stage, where we say “uh-oh – wait – everyone thinks like that, don’t they?” Buoyed by the initial sense that they have better opinions than others, they proceed to form opinions, to judge, and to take action on behalf of others whom they assume must have less good opinions than themselves. They silence views they don’t agree with – and call it “depriving fascists of a platform”. They pass laws to prevent people making their own mistakes – and call it “tackling a serious health issue”. They travel to faraway places to weigh in on one side or another of conflicts that are not theirs, or might even go to such extremes as setting off bombs in public places – and call it “striking a blow for justice”.

It’s about time these arrogant people were no longer celebrated for their moral worthiness. Such worthiness really amounts to nothing more than being a moral busybody. Instead, we should draw attention to their epistemological backwardness. They have failed to grasp that an “internal”, subjective check on one’s own opinions is no indicator of these opinions’ “external”, objective reliability. These people have failed to see the symmetry between individuals that puts us all “in the same boat” as far as our opinions are concerned. Everyone has a high opinion of their own opinions. So you can’t rely on your own high opinion of your own opinions.