Reasons for Reason - NYTimes.com - 0 views
opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...reasons-for-reason
epistemic principles rationality belief arbitrary science naturalism
shared by Javier E on 03 Oct 11
- No Cached
-
Rick Perry’s recent vocal dismissals of evolution, and his confident assertion that “God is how we got here” reflect an obvious divide in our culture.
-
underneath this divide is a deeper one. Really divisive disagreements are typically not just over the facts. They are also about the best way to support our views of the facts. Call this a disagreement in epistemic principle. Our epistemic principles tell us what is rational to believe, what sources of information to trust.
-
I suspect that for most people, scientific evidence (or its lack) has nothing to do with it. Their belief in creationism is instead a reflection of a deeply held epistemic principle: that, at least on some topics, scripture is a more reliable source of information than science. For others, including myself, this is never the case.
- ...17 more annotations...
-
appealing to another method won’t help either — for unless that method can be shown to be reliable, using it to determine the reliability of the first method answers nothing.
-
Every one of our beliefs is produced by some method or source, be it humble (like memory) or complex (like technologically assisted science). But why think our methods, whatever they are, are trustworthy or reliable for getting at the truth? If I challenge one of your methods, you can’t just appeal to the same method to show that it is reliable. That would be circular
-
How do we rationally defend our most fundamental epistemic principles? Like many of the best philosophical mysteries, this a problem that can seem both unanswerable and yet extremely important to solve.
-
it seems to suggest that in the end, all “rational” explanations end up grounding out on something arbitrary. It all just comes down to what you happen to believe, what you feel in your gut, your faith. Human beings have historically found this to be a very seductive idea,
-
this is precisely the situation we seem to be headed towards in the United States. We live isolated in our separate bubbles of information culled from sources that only reinforce our prejudices and never challenge our basic assumptions. No wonder that — as in the debates over evolution, or what to include in textbooks illustrate — we so often fail to reach agreement over the history and physical structure of the world itself. No wonder joint action grinds to a halt. When you can’t agree on your principles of evidence and rationality, you can’t agree on the facts. And if you can’t agree on the facts, you can hardly agree on what to do in the face of the facts.
-
We can’t decide on what counts as a legitimate reason to doubt my epistemic principles unless we’ve already settled on our principles—and that is the very issue in question.
-
The problem that skepticism about reason raises is not about whether I have good evidence by my principles for my principles. Presumably I do.[1] The problem is whether I can give a more objective defense of them. That is, whether I can give reasons for them that can be appreciated from what Hume called a “common point of view” — reasons that can “move some universal principle of the human frame, and touch a string, to which all mankind have an accord and symphony.”[2]
-
Any way you go, it seems you must admit you can give no reason for trusting your methods, and hence can give no reason to defend your most fundamental epistemic principles.
-
So one reason we should take the project of defending our epistemic principles seriously is that the ideal of civility demands it.
-
there is also another, even deeper, reason. We need to justify our epistemic principles from a common point of view because we need shared epistemic principles in order to even have a common point of view. Without a common background of standards against which we measure what counts as a reliable source of information, or a reliable method of inquiry, and what doesn’t, we won’t be able to agree on the facts, let alone values.
-
democracies aren’t simply organizing a struggle for power between competing interests; democratic politics isn’t war by other means. Democracies are, or should be, spaces of reasons.
-
we need an epistemic common currency because we often have to decide, jointly, what to do in the face of disagreement.
-
Sometimes we can accomplish this, in a democratic society, by voting. But we can’t decide every issue that way
-
Even if, as the skeptic says, we can’t defend the truth of our principles without circularity, we might still be able to show that some are better than others. Observation and experiment, for example, aren’t just good because they are reliable means to the truth. They are valuable because almost everyone can appeal to them. They have roots in our natural instincts, as Hume might have said.
-
that is one reason we need to resist skepticism about reason: we need to be able to give reasons for why some standards of reasons — some epistemic principles — should be part of that currency and some not.