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Introduction
"Thy Godlike crime was to be kind, To render
with thy precepts less, The sum of human wretchedness, And strengthen Man with
his own mind" - Lord Byron, Prometheus
One of the defining features of human beings is the ability to acquire and pass
along ideas. Actually, it is less a
feature than a pathological obsession. Hundreds of thousands of years ago at
least, there is evidence that our ancestors passed ideas and technology on to
later generations. This idea of continuity, of the passing on of ideas and
technology by a group of individuals, is really what is meant by the term culture. Other animals have been said to have distinct cultures;
however, no animal cultures are as complex, versatile, and quick-to-adapt as
human cultures. In fact, the very name
of our species, Homo sapiens,
emphasizes this point.
The Latin word sapien
means "wise" or "learned" and the Latin word homo means "man". For
billions of years, life came into being, lived, reproduced, and died. Over thousands of generations, small changes
in the biology of the animals, combined with external conditions, resulted in
natural selection. Natural selection is
a process by which the organism best suited for the existing conditions
survives while other "less suited" organisms are marginalized or even go
extinct. The problem with natural
selection is it can take (though not always) a long time to produce an organism
adapted for a particular environment. A
more efficient system would be an organism that has evolved the ability to
adapt, rather than an organism that adapts by evolving. Thus it was only a matter of time before
intelligent life evolved.
The term "intelligent life", of course, is a vanity. There is a joke that says that everyone who
drives faster than you is a maniac and anyone who drives slower than you is a moron. By "intelligent life", we literally mean "our
species". This is evident by the
constant revision of what constitutes "intelligence". For instance, the defining characteristic of
intelligence was, for a long time, considered to be the use of tools. Implied in this statement was that the use of
tools must originate from within the species, not from human training. At any rate, it was found that some primates
use tools in the wild - and so the definition was shifted to "has culture", as
in "intelligent life has the characteristic of culture". Of course, further study showed that some
primates displayed distinct cultures. Another
popular definition was "self-awareness", but mirror experiments have shown many
species share that trait with us as well.
Clearly there is no line one can draw and point to where
intelligence suddenly emerges, but our vanity demands it, so we try anyway. Somewhere over the last 100,000 years since
our species evolved, we have come to view ourselves as separate and superior to
the other organisms found in the world.
It's understandable but ultimately illogical, mainly because our criteria
for "superiority" are based on the things we're good at (such as learning). If superiority were instead based on, say
durability, or strength, or quickness, or survivability, or longevity, we would
score quite low. Some argue that our
superiority is self-evident due to the things we've produced; the problem with
that argument is that whoever said the point of existence was to produce
things? Really in the end it is our vanity
as a species that presupposes our superiority, but there is nothing wrong with
that. The instinctive urge for survival
of a species must necessarily produce a certain level of conceit if that
species is self-aware.
With that background, it should not be surprising then that
one of the earliest branches of philosophy to emerge was that of epistemology. Epistemology is the branch of philosophy concerned
with the acquisition, validity, and limits of knowledge. To better understand what that means, we
should probably define knowledge. Merriam-Webster's dictionary defines knowledge as the body of truth, information, and principles acquired by humankind. So epistemology tries to figure out the
validity and limits of the "truths, information and principles" acquired by human
beings. Epistemology also investigates
the methods and means by which knowledge (truths, information and principles)
are acquired. To understand modern
branches of Epistemology, we should first review its history.
The Pre-Socratics
"Everything has a natural
explanation. The moon is not a god but a
great rock and the sun a hot rock." - Anaxagoras
When giving a brief history of any type of philosophy, it is
always popular to start with the Pre-Socratics.
Certainly there have been philosophers as long as there has been man,
and undoubtedly the Pre-Socratics of Greece borrowed heavily from other
cultures that came before them (I'm looking at you Egypt, Crete, Phoenicia, and
Mesopotamia), but we need a starting point and the Pre-Socratics will do. The Pre-Socratics, when it came to
Epistemology, had many different schools of thought. Among the Pre-Socractics are, in roughly
chronological order, the Milesian, Pythagorean, Eleatic, Pluralist, and Sophist
schools.
The Milesian school was significant because of the
(supposed) break from the belief that events were the result of the will of
gods. Instead, the Milesian School
sought a fundamental material from which everything was made and gave it its
properties. They believed that through
observation one could deduce this fundamental material. Although they disagreed amongst themselves
what the fundamental material was, what is significant for our conversation is
their implicit Epistemological belief that nature followed logical rules and
could be understood through careful observation.
The Pythagorean School was significant because it was the
first to tie philosophy and mathematics. The Pythagoreans believed that the
world was inherently mathematical. That
is not to say "being able to be described by mathematics", but rather "is
mathematical in nature". This belief was
taken to an extreme (to mysticism). To
reconcile the idea of the infinite continuum and discrete world we live in, the
Pythagoreans turned to the idea of harmony.
Here is an excerpt from an explanation from Wikipedia explaining this idea:
"A musical scale presupposes an unlimited
continuum of pitches, which must be limited in some way in order for a scale to
arise. The crucial point is that not just any set of limiters will do. One may
not simply choose pitches at random along the continuum and produce a scale
that will be musically pleasing. The diatonic scale, also known as
"Pythagorean," is such that the ratio of the highest to the lowest
pitch is 2:1, which produces the interval of an octave. That octave is in turn
divided into a fifth and a fourth, which have the ratios of 3:2 and 4:3
respectively and which, when added, make an octave. If we go up a fifth from
the lowest note in the octave and then up a fourth from there, we will reach
the upper note of the octave. Finally the fifth can be divided into three whole
tones, each corresponding to the ratio of 9:8 and a remainder with a ratio of
256:243 and the fourth into two whole tones with the same remainder. This is a
good example of a concrete applied use of Philolaus' reasoning. In Philolaus'
terms the fitting together of limiters and unlimiteds involves their
combination in accordance with ratios of numbers (harmony). Similarly the
cosmos and the individual things in the cosmos do not arise by a chance
combination of limiters and unlimiteds; the limiters and unlimiteds must be
fitted together in a "pleasing" (harmonic) way in accordance with
number for an order to arise."
In the above example we see the seeds of the concept of Musica universalis. The above paragraph has subtly
introduced math into a philosophical discussion.
"The so-called Pythagoreans, who were
the first to take up mathematics, not only advanced this subject, but saturated
with it, they fancied that the principles of mathematics were the principles of
all things." - Aristotle, Metaphysics 1-5 , cc. 350 BC
The Eleatics insisted simply observing the world wasn't enough to determine truths. They demanded truths have logical
consistency. From this school of thought
sprang the process where one starts with a sound, indisputable truth and
through progressive logical steps obtain another truth. Also emerging in this school of thought was
the process of disproving a truth through progressive logical steps that lead
to a contradiction (Modernly referred to as reductio
ad absurdum). That last method was
made famous by Zeno (of Elea) and his paradoxes. This method also emerges later often in
Socrates' dialogues (Socratic dialectic method).
At this point, I need to inform any and all reading this
that I am picking out aspects of these schools of philosophies corresponding to Epistemology. At that time, the branches
of philosophy weren't really separated into things like Epistemology, Metaphysics, Politics, Ethics, and Esthetics.
What these Pre-Socratic schools of philosophy did was develop a sort of "supra-philosophy",
a straight forward philosophy from which all phenomena were explained. That's why you get mathematical mysticism
with the Pythagoreans and some Milesians trying to explain how fire may be made
up of water. When we read the
Pre-Socratics today, it is easy to get distracted by the "supra-tenets" at the
heart of these supra-philosophies and miss the subtle, unconscious epistemological
breakthroughs that emerged when they were forced to validate or defend their
supra-tenets. For instance, the Milesian
idea of nature being governed by principles and these principles being acquired
through observation was a huge epistemology breakthrough (probably unfairly
attributed to them when mostly likely such ideas occurred to mankind much
earlier, but alas our knowledge of history is limited to written history). The Pythagorean idea linking mathematics with
nature andthe Eleatic idea of logic superseding the senses as a way of
determining truth were epistemological advances that formed the foundation of
Socrates, Plato, and most especially Aristotle, who were in their turn the
foundation of western Epistemological thought.
Continuing with the Pre-Socratics we come to the Pluralist School, which is notable for replacing the supra-tenet idea escribed above
(reducing nature to a single principle) with the idea that nature consists of
many principles. One of the lasting
ideas of the Pluralists was the idea of the four roots (fire, air, water, and earth) that when combined in different proportions created everything in the
universe. An important concept
introduced by the Pluralists was that human beings never see the entirety of
anything in one glance. For truth to be
fully achieved, something must be examined from many angles. This supported the Eleatic view that
observation alone wasn't sufficient to determine truth.
This summarizes the Pre-Socratic schools of philosophy
contributions to epistemology. I've
omitted the Sophists because much of our understanding of them comes in
criticism of their work and such biased accounts make it difficult to determine
their contributions. Already we start to
see bits and pieces of something familiar in the Pre-Socratics in their approach
to obtaining knowledge. The ideas that
nature is governed by rules, learned through observation and validated through
logic, particularly mathematics, are ideas we still hold today.
In
Part II of this series, we will examine Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle and how
Epistemology matured under their watch and set the stage for the development of
the scientific method.
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Re: The Scientific Method - Part I (Origin Story)
