Misunderstanding Empiricism

I've been shocked by the content of some of the debate in the past few weeks. Maybe people are getting carried away by rhetoric, but many of the most respected debaters here seem to have been suggesting that science is the only way we can acquire trustworthy knowledge about the world.What started as a defence of scepticism, in debates with LindaLou, seems to have turned into an argument claiming that most our ways of acquiring knowledge about the world are untrustworthy and that only science provides the holy path to truth.I want to challenge this argument; but before I begin, let me make clear where I stand, before anyone starts arguing with me under false assumptions.I don't believe in the supernatural, or ESP, or ghosts. My aim in making this argument is not to defend belief in things that don't have any basis in reality, but to clear up a misunderstanding about empiricism, and point out some of the limitations of using scientific research as an aid to making decisions in life.So to begin...EmpiricismEmpiricism is a philosophical theory about how we acquire knowledge. It makes the following claims:1. That we can only acquire knowledge through the senses, and by reflection on the primary impressions of sense;2. That our knowledge of the external world can never be certain, because it is based on reasoning from past experience rather than on the intrinsic properties of things. Any contrary future experience would prove our assumptions false;3. That, instead of having certainty, we assess the likelihood of something or other being the case by judging whether it is more or less probable based on our previous experience.(It is important to note that empiricism stands opposed, not to personal experience or anecdote, but to rationalism and revelation, i.e. to the notions that one can acquire certainty about the external world through reason or revelation.)Personal experience and anecdoteNow, in the thread Sequel Thread to Holistic Doctors and Medicine, a lurker would have been justified in concluding that most of the pro-science debaters on that thread were making the following two claims:1. That it was possible to acquire certainty or near-certainty about controversial medical issues by reading scientific literature;2. That allowing yourself to be swayed by personal experience or by anecdote would in some way be 'unempirical'.Both of these claims, I would argue, are false.The first because science doesn't provide certainty even when the consensus of opinion leans heavily one way, and in the case of controversial medical issues scientific opinion may be divided, or scientifc evidence may be inconclusive.The second because personal experience and anecdote are evidence. Personal experience, in fact, is the biggest chunk of evidence we have, and it's only through personal experience that we filter the evidence or opinion we receive from the scientific community.Reaching Consensus and Making DecisionsI think a lot of the confusion and misunderstanding on this issue has arisen because the pro-science debaters are conflating four different things:1. The scientific method (as an ideal way of doing science);
2. The way science is done in reality;
3. The way the scientific community reaches a consensus;
4. The way an individual comes to a decision (for example, on whether to give their child the MMR jab).As this post is already getting very long, I'll leave that observation without further comment. I'm sure I'll have to come back and defend it .Edited by JavaMan, : No reason given.Edited by JavaMan, : No reason given.

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'I can't even fit all my wife's clothes into a suitcase for travelling. So you want me to believe we're going to put all of the planets and stars and everything into a sandwich bag?' - q3psycho on the Big Bang

Yes, I think so. Yes, they are overlapping. But it's a more general question I'm trying to address here. Although you might find me dropping into your thread as well .

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'I can't even fit all my wife's clothes into a suitcase for travelling. So you want me to believe we're going to put all of the planets and stars and everything into a sandwich bag?' - q3psycho on the Big Bang

Personal experience is our only route to knowledge, surely. What else could there be? Isn't that one of the fundamental claims of empiricism?How could anyone function in the world if our personal experience weren't, in the main, to be trusted?I think you are wrong to thing of science as being something qualitatively different from our normal experience. In fact, science is useful and successful because it is based on our normal, empirical way of solving day-to-day problems.

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'I can't even fit all my wife's clothes into a suitcase for travelling. So you want me to believe we're going to put all of the planets and stars and everything into a sandwich bag?' - q3psycho on the Big Bang

I don't know why you're objecting, Taz. Isn't Crash implying that there's something else apart from personal experience that we can use to make judgements?What else can these phrases mean? OK, I'll admit it - I'm being obtuse. But for a reason .Crashfrog and I are talking about two different things when we say, 'personal experience'.Crashfrog is taking the viewpoint of the scientific community, assessing the experiences of individuals as separate pieces of evidence, whereas I am taking the viewpoint of the individual, attempting to make a judgement about the world (for example, whether to send my daughter for an MMR jab).

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'I can't even fit all my wife's clothes into a suitcase for travelling. So you want me to believe we're going to put all of the planets and stars and everything into a sandwich bag?' - q3psycho on the Big Bang

You're missing the point, crash. When I make a judgement call, I only have my personal experience to call on. And one of the judgements I have to make is whether to trust the scientific consensus, or whether to trust some other piece of evidence that I have.When I was deciding whether to send my eldest daughter for an MMR jab, for example, there were 4 pieces of evidence I considered:1. The scientific consensus, that there was no link between MMR and autism;2. The research of Andrew Roberts that there WAS a link;3. My personal experience of being barred from taking the Whooping Cough vaccine as a child (because my aunt had suffered adverse effects);4. The evidence from the BSE fiasco here, that a scientific consensus, although backed by evidence, can be wrong. (The scientific consensus was that there was no danger in eating infected beef, because the disease vector couldn't be passed from cows to humans. After several years, it became clear that the disease vector was passed from cows to humans.)So given this evidence, how do I decide whether to send my daughter to get her jab next week?Edited by JavaMan, : No reason given.

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'I can't even fit all my wife's clothes into a suitcase for travelling. So you want me to believe we're going to put all of the planets and stars and everything into a sandwich bag?' - q3psycho on the Big Bang

I don't disagree with anything you say, although I would just note the following: MMR and Autism Yes, I quite agree, if what you're concerned with is the scientific question of whether there is a relationship. But for most people, it is the personal question of whether they should allow their child to take the MMR jab that is important.The first question doesn't require a definitive conclusion. To reach a scientific consensus, it is only necessary that we exclude reasonable doubt. There's also no time constraint on our investigation - if it takes 10 years to reach a consensus, then it takes 10 years.The second question requires a decision: either my child has the jab, or she doesn't. And I need to make the decision by the middle of next month.

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'I can't even fit all my wife's clothes into a suitcase for travelling. So you want me to believe we're going to put all of the planets and stars and everything into a sandwich bag?' - q3psycho on the Big Bang

I'd love to engage in a debate about this, Brad, but I don't understand a word this time. Apart from 'Gladyshev', and I've given my opinion about him before .

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'I can't even fit all my wife's clothes into a suitcase for travelling. So you want me to believe we're going to put all of the planets and stars and everything into a sandwich bag?' - q3psycho on the Big Bang

Why are you getting so upset? We're only having a debate .My aim in this thread is to point out that the power of empricism derives from its insistence that our knowledge of the world is provisional, not from a particular approach to acquiring knowledge.At this rate, it's obviously going to take me a long time to make my point. But, hey, the journey is half the fun .

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'I can't even fit all my wife's clothes into a suitcase for travelling. So you want me to believe we're going to put all of the planets and stars and everything into a sandwich bag?' - q3psycho on the Big Bang

Hmm. That's a sneaky trick, don't you think? Rather than depending on your responses to my arguments, you're using the rhetorical trick of associating me with irrational beliefs.That's something I'd expect in politics, but not in a rational debate.

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'I can't even fit all my wife's clothes into a suitcase for travelling. So you want me to believe we're going to put all of the planets and stars and everything into a sandwich bag?' - q3psycho on the Big Bang

I was assuming that, by using the term in a discussion about empiricism, everyone would understand what I was talking about. Clearly not .Empiricism means there's no magical bullet train to truth. When I make a judgement in the world, I'm working under uncertainty. I can't just take the scientific consensus and treat that as holy writ, because, at bottom, it's just as possible for a scientific consensus to be in error as any other claim about knowledge.And the reason I'm stressing "personal experience" here isn't because I think personal experience has any special access to the truth, but because I'm focusing on that aspect of empiricism that stresses uncertainty, i.e. the notion that our knowledge is limited because our only route to it is through personal experience - there is nothing, not even scientific consensus, that can magically deliver certainty to us.

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'I can't even fit all my wife's clothes into a suitcase for travelling. So you want me to believe we're going to put all of the planets and stars and everything into a sandwich bag?' - q3psycho on the Big Bang

I'm sorry, I obviously didn't make it clear that I was using MMR and autism as an illustration. I'm not interested in arguing about MMR/autism in particular (FYI, I made the decision to take my daughters for their MMR jabs).What I was trying to illustrate was the difference between investigating a scientific problem and coming to a personal decision. Let me use a different illustration instead. (This one is more to my point because it provides an example of a scientific consensus being wrong ).In the 90s we had a BSE epidemic here in the UK, and there was a lot of concern about whether it was safe to eat beef from infected cattle. The scientific consensus for many years was that it was perfectly safe, because there was no way for the disease vector to transfer from cattle to humans. We even had the amusing sight of a government minister force-feeding his daughter a hamburger to drive the point home.Unfortunately, it turned out that it was possible for the disease vector to spread to humans. By the end of the 90s it was shown that many people had contracted variant CJD by eating meat from infected cattle.Now, I don't blame anyone for this. The scientifc consensus was right to be conservative - known disease vectors like bacteria and viruses couldn't possibly transfer to humans under these circumstances. Unfortunately, BSE and vCJD are caused by a disease vector that wasn't properly understood when the BSE epidemic arose.Now one of the interesting things about this case was that there was anecdotal evidence doing the rounds (I don't know whether it was ever confirmed scientifically), that the BSE epidemic itself was caused by cattle being fed the remains of sheep infected with Scrapie (another prion disease). And many people, using analogical reasoning on top of this anecdotal evidence, said to themselves: 'If the disease can spread from sheep to cattle, then maybe it can spread from cattle to humans. I'll give up beef for the time being, just in case.'As I've said to Taz and Crashfrog, my point in opening this thread was to show that the power of empiricism doesn't lie in its providing a special methodology for arriving at the truth, but in its emphasis on the provisional nature of our knowledge.No model of reality can ever be complete. There is always the possibility that some condition we haven't taken into account will require us to overhaul our model. And, in my view, it's the willingness to accept this suspended state of uncertainty that explains the scientific and technological advances that we have seen over the last couple of hundred years.

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'I can't even fit all my wife's clothes into a suitcase for travelling. So you want me to believe we're going to put all of the planets and stars and everything into a sandwich bag?' - q3psycho on the Big Bang

I don't quite understand where you've got that impression from. I'm well aware of the limitations of my personal experience. Isn't that what I've been saying .I'm focusing on scientific consensus just because that's the contentious point. But of course I lay greater stress on what the scientific consensus is, than on, say, what happened to my dog's hairdresser's sister last Thursday in Marbella.Edited by JavaMan, : No reason given.Edited by JavaMan, : No reason given.

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'I can't even fit all my wife's clothes into a suitcase for travelling. So you want me to believe we're going to put all of the planets and stars and everything into a sandwich bag?' - q3psycho on the Big Bang

I still don't understand why you're getting upset .

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'I can't even fit all my wife's clothes into a suitcase for travelling. So you want me to believe we're going to put all of the planets and stars and everything into a sandwich bag?' - q3psycho on the Big Bang

Sorry if I offended you. It was a bit cheap to quote you - I would have been annoyed if someone had done that to me, I must admit. So, apologies.I wasn't making a cheap shot, though, honest . In the opening post I'd claimed that some posters were arguing that science was the only route to knowledge. In his response, Percy said no one was making that claim. Your post was just a convenient example to prove him wrong.The point of this thread is to caution against an overenthusiastic praise of science. In principle, scientific results are no more certain than the everyday knowledge you reach by induction (for example, your knowledge that the sun will rise tomorrow) - science just tests more for conditions that might make the inductive reasoning false.Note that I don't believe there's anything that will give me more confidence than science (or rather, empirical knowledge generally). I'm an atheist materialist empiricist - what else am I going to use?

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'I can't even fit all my wife's clothes into a suitcase for travelling. So you want me to believe we're going to put all of the planets and stars and everything into a sandwich bag?' - q3psycho on the Big Bang

We're arguing at cross-purposes here. No inductive knowledge is certain, whether it's acquired by scientific investigation or our everyday experience. That's all my statement meant.Knowledge acquired by scientific investigation is of the same type as knowledge acquired through our everyday experience. The extra rigour of the scientific method can give us more confidence in the results, but it's a mistake to think that the scientific method gives us access to a special kind of knowledge. I know that's not a mistake you would make, but my OP wasn't aimed at you .I thought it was clear from my opening post that that's what I was saying, but obviously I didn't explain myself clearly enough.As to the question of considering my personal experience as flawed when I make a decision; of course, that's always a consideration. But when we have to make a decision we have to go with what we have, flawed or not. (If you don't know something, how can you take that into account?).I'm stressing personal experience in this thread only because I'm talking about empiricism as a philosophy of knowledge. I'm not claiming personal experience as a special fount of knowledge, separate from the limitations of empiricism. Just the opposite in fact.Does that clear things up.

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'I can't even fit all my wife's clothes into a suitcase for travelling. So you want me to believe we're going to put all of the planets and stars and everything into a sandwich bag?' - q3psycho on the Big Bang