Sokal and Lynch on First Principles - NYTimes.com

• Sokal and Lynch on First Principles - NYTimes.com

  • Epistemic principles tell us what is rational to believe and what sources and methods for forming beliefs are worthy of our trust.
  • But in order to decide on the facts, we need to decide on the best ways for knowing about those facts. And to do that, we need to agree on our epistemic principles. If we can’t, stalemate ensues.
  • The problem of justifying first epistemic principles is very old. It led the ancient Greek skeptics to say that knowledge is an illusion. But over the centuries, it has been more common to draw a different conclusion, one concerning the relative value of reason itself.  According to many people, what the problem of justifying first principles really shows is that because reasons always run out or end up just going in circles, our starting point must always be something more like faith.
  • The trouble is that they supplement the ordinary epistemic principles that we all adopt in everyday life — the ones that we would use, for instance, when serving on jury duty —  with additional principles like “This particular book always tells the infallible truth.”
  • By contrast, the results of modern science can be justified, I think, by using the general epistemic principles that we all share.
  • As the Scottish philosopher David Hume pointed out, you can doubt induction or observation all day long, but you’ll still end up trusting them later that night.  As he put it, it is just part of our “natural instincts” to trust our senses most of the time. That is how we are built.
  • First, the fact that most folks believe some principle doesn’t make it true,
  • The second reason we can’t rest content with the fact that some principles are widely shared is that some debates are over the priority of principles.
  • Certain reasoning patterns tend to promote survival; others don’t.
  • our fundamental epistemic principles, such as observation and induction, are well-nigh universal among human beings.
  • defending scientific principles of rationality by appeal to their survival value is to cite practical, not epistemic, reasons in their defense.
  • The basic thought is: “The methods [of science say, or whatever] can’t be shown to be reliable in a noncircular fashion [insert skeptical argument]. Therefore the methods of science are no more rational than any other.”
  • From this, the traditional ancient skeptic concluded: believe nothing, because no belief is produced by a reliable method. The evangelical concludes: only nondiscursive faith or revelation can get us the truth. The postmodernist concludes: no method can get us to the truth — because there is no (objective) truth.

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