Dr Greg Bahnsen - Seminary Apologetics: Epistemological Issues, Foundationalists (Part 17)

This message was delivered by Dr. Greg L. Bonson, Scholar in Residence at the Southern California center for Christian studies in Irvine, California. All right, we come to the 20th century now. In our very selective and brief history of the theory of knowledge, Bertrand Russell, who is perhaps the most prolific of the 20th century philosophers, opened his own treatment of the problems of philosophy, published in 1912, with these words. Is there any knowledge in the world which is so certain that no reasonable man could doubt it? This question, which at first sight might not seem difficult, is really one of the most difficult that can be asked. When we have realized the obstacles in the way of a straightforward and confident answer, we shall be well launched on the study of philosophy. For philosophy is merely the attempt to answer such ultimate questions. Is there any knowledge in this world which is so certain that no reasonable man could doubt it? The Theory of knowledge Epistemology is a critical issue in philosophy because we don't merely, as philosophers, ask, what is reality? And what moral obligations do we have? We ask, how do we know that this is real? And how do we know that we're obliged to live? In this way, you could no more avoid the questions of epistemology and studying philosophy than a marine biologist could avoid the ocean. It's not the whole of philosophy, but it's the atmosphere of everything that we do. And so is there any knowledge in the world which is certain? Can anything be known for sure? Is there an answer to the skeptic who says nobody knows anything? Questions like those have been a key motivation in the development of epistemology. The guiding spirit of the Vienna Circle and the founder of modern analytical philosophy, Morris schlick, wrote in 1934 in the article the foundation of Knowledge. These words, all important attempts at establishing a theory of knowledge, grow out of the problem concerning the certainty of human knowledge. And this problem in turn originates in the wish for absolute certainty. The insight that the statements of daily life in science can at best be only probable has again and again stimulated philosophers since ancient times to search for an unshakable, indubitable foundation, a firm basis on which the uncertain structure of our knowledge could rest. Now I want to make an observation about past philosophy in passing in light of this comment. Rationalism and empiricism and idealism and other schools of philosophy, not so much non cognitivism, so you might want to exclude that. But the previous schools of philosophy are all known corporately as foundationalist approaches to knowledge, foundationalist because they are looking for some final foundation that upon which everything else can be built, whether it's the clear and distinct ideas of the rationalist or the indubitable observations of the empiricist, or the transcendental necessities of Kant and others, they're looking for some kind of foundation. And Morris Schlick says over and over again, this is what has stimulated philosophers to seek an indubitable foundation. The search for a foundation for knowledge is pretty much interchangeable with the search for certainty in our knowing. In fact, one epistemologist has recently written, the search for indubitable and infallible truths is therefore a common feature of traditional epistemology. Now, don't your ears perk up just a little when you hear that expression infallible truths? The search for infallible truths, he says, is a common feature of traditional epistemology. Well, that's because all these men were looking for a foundation. For a foundation. What can someone be certain of? What justification is there for claims to knowing? Every philosopher, indeed every person, faces those disquieting questions because everyone, in one way or another distinguishes between sense and nonsense, adjudicates conflicting claims to what is true, and acts upon fundamental convictions. And all of those evaluations implicitly have, as a theory of knowledge, some view of what we can be certain of. One doesn't decide whether to form an epistemological viewpoint and a theoretical basis for certainty or not. He simply chooses whether he'll do it self consciously. Until we reach the 20th century, the foundationalist efforts to find infallible truths, a basis for certainty, which have preceded this century, have been superseded by two schools of thought that you need to be familiar. Pragmatism and linguistic analysis. John Dewey is a, I think, perhaps the best illustration, the pragmatic school of thought. And Dewey wrote a book once on the quest for certainty. That's a traditional problem in the history of philosophy, the quest for certainty. But according to Dewey, in the quest for certainty, knowledge should no longer be understood in terms of theoretical justification. Knowledge should no longer be construed or conceptualized as theoretical justification of the things we believe, that his knowledge should no longer be understood as the final answer to what can I be certain of? And then that's the foundation on which I build everything else that I believe. Dewey said knowledge should be understood more activistically in terms of man's struggle to adapt to his environment. Knowledge should be understood pragmatically, not theoretically. Pragma has to do with action or behavior. So it's not theory that we're interested in, but pragma or activity. Someone should be said to know something when they successfully solve their problems. In adjusting to the environment or responding to its problems, that's all that really counts. Who cares whether you can answer the silly theoretical issues of the skeptic? Who cares whether you can resolve the disputes between rationalists and empiricists and Kantians and Hegelians and all the rest? Dewey felt much like many of you might feel right now, is that I'm sick and tired of all this academic stuff. It doesn't get anywhere anyway. All. All that matters is working out our problems. And so his pragmatic approach to epistemology has come to dominate in the 20th century, even among those who don't specifically endorse John Dewey's pragmatism in the specifics of his theory. Because pragmatism is both. Now listen. Is both. A specific understanding of the meaning of terms, truth and how they're justified is a specific understanding of that. But it's also a more general approach to epistemology. The previous approaches to epistemology, with exceptions, are known today as foundationalist approaches. Approaches to epistemology that say we can't give a broad general systematic theory, we can only deal on detailed problems and work out specific difficulties, and we try to be practical is known as a pragmatic approach. How do you justify your intellectual constructs? The pragmatic approach to philosophy says you justify it by accomplishing certain ends by the success that you have. Now, I've got a major problem with pragmatism, the specific version, and pragmatism, the larger approach to philosophy. I'm not really trying to cop out for you here, but I just don't have the time to go into all the details. I have written about it in an article, pragmatism, Prejudice and Presuppositionalism that you'll find in the foundations of Christian scholarship. And so you can get more detail on this if you. That's your interest. But specifically in the case of John Dewey, I have difficulties with his pragmatic approach to justifying knowledge claims because it's not descriptively accurate. It's not accurate to describe what we mean by an expression only in terms of its cash value or the way in which we would, in behavior, work out the meaning of it. There are many propositions whose meaning has nothing to do with my behavior or response at all. Now, what's the pragmatist going to do when his theory doesn't deal with all the stuff that's out there to describe? Well, what do People do when they get to the airport and they've tried to stuff too much in their bags and they have shirt sleeves and pant legs hanging out their suitcases. We either have to open it up and reorganize your bag, which is to redo your philosophy. We already know people don't like to redo their closets. Or you take out a pair of scissors and you cut out anything that doesn't fit and say, hey, I'm ready to fly. That's what pragmatists do when you point out to them that many of the things we talk about don't fit their scheme. What they do is they take out a pair of skits, scissors, and they just simply cut around the edge of the suitcase and say, everything's fine now. Which is to say what you want to talk about isn't meaningful anyway. You want to make meaning pragmatic, behavioral consequences. I'm going to point to things whose meaning, where there isn't any behavioral pragmatic consequences. And they say, of course that's nonsense. What you're talking about is empty of meaning. Isn't that clever? At lunch, I told the joke. It's probably apocryphal, but it does express accurately the character of Hegel's philosophy. Hegel had this grandiose rational scheme for everything, and his scheme was supposed to account for the development of history, of all things. Many of us would think, well, history has many adventitious, from a human standpoint, contingent variables in it. But for Hegel, everything in history is ultimately part of a rational scheme that's working its way out. So one of his students is said to have pointed out to him, professor, the facts don't fit your scheme. To which Hegel replied, then the facts be hung. Because if anything is to be a fact, it must be rational. To be rational, it must fit the scheme. Since what you say doesn't fit the scheme, then hang it. It's an irrational surd thing anyway. And likewise, the pragmatist tells us anything that doesn't fit our approach, our pragmatic approach is irrelevant. It's impractical. Secondly, the very notion of verification in pragmatism, pragmatism itself presupposes the traditional notion of truth and certainty in order to be workable. Because the pragmatist says the meaning of a sentence is its practical outworking. And sentences are true when they are confirmed, their predictions are confirmed, and they are valuable in solving our problems. But we can only know that the prediction, predictive element of a sentence is confirmed and helpful if we already know what it is for something to be true. When is something confirmed? It's confirmed when it matches up with the truth. Right. And so it turns out that the pragmatist theory actually draws on the older theories of truth in order to be workable. And more generally, I would say that John Dewey's approach to the meaning and the verification of statements has involved in the very heart of it a contradiction or a tension between his view of the world and our way of thinking about the world. On the one hand, Dewey says everything is in flux. Everything's changing all the time. On the other hand, he says in order to know that something is true, you must follow scientific universal procedures that apply to everything. Now, does anybody feel uncomfortable? Do you feel the tension there? Everything's changing all the time except scientific procedures. Accept the standards of science. Well, if everything's changing, then apparently what is scientific is changing all the time too. And so Dewey can't have it both ways. A world of contingency and flux and a world of universals and order. So he has an internal tension in his philosophy. If time allows, by the end of today, I'll be going back and pointing out to you that every non Christian worldview has that same kind of rational, irrational tension. Everything's irrational, it's in flux. There's no order, there's no unity. And yet there is order. There's a rational requirement that's unchanging the scientific standards or procedures that are laid on everything. You can't have it both ways. And now let's look at pragmatism in the most general sense, not just Dewey's specific theory of meaning and truth and verification. But pragmatism more specifically says we should not be looking for certainty and a foundation for all other knowledge claims. We should rather be asking what approaches are beneficial for accomplishing our ends. You see, pragmatism is a consequentialist approach to the theory of knowledge. Things are known. If you gain the consequences that you should. If the consequences, if you solve your problems, if you accomplish your ends, then what you're saying is true and it's an acceptable theory. Now, there's one thing that hasn't been asked though, in all of this discussion, and that is, well, what consequences should we be looking for? What should our aims be? And pragmatism actually is smashed upon the rocks theoretically because it turns out there are so many different things that people say a true theory should be accomplishing. There are biological forms of pragmatism we should be looking for the survival of the race. Whatever helps the race survive is what makes a theory. True. But there are sociological versions of pragmatism too. They talk about what will get a particular class of people or certain group in society ahead. That's what makes a theory true. Sociological theories of truth are very mean spirited. The communist theories of truth, right? Truth is whatever advances the purpose of the party. We have psychological, pragmatic theories. Truth is whatever helps the individual to gain inner resolution and peace or adaptation to his environment. And I'm not going to bore you with the long list. I have another article on the objectivity of science that talks about various versions of pragmatism in our age. My point here is just there are so many of them. And so if pragmatism is consequentialist in its character as a philosophy, then it should tell us what consequence is the right one to pursue. But if you're a pragmatist, there's no way to answer that question, right? That already assumes you know what we should be achieving. The survival of the race, integration for the human psyche, or the advance of your particular social class, whatever it may be. So pragmatism departs from the traditional quest for certainty, eschewing theory, intellectual answers in favor of practice. That which is practical, that which will gain success, but it doesn't tell us what we're supposed to be successful at. Analytic philosophy is another departure from the traditional big questions of epistemology. I can put it very simply. Analytical philosophy teaches that the best we can do is do a dissection and analysis of the way in which we use our language and try to work out the problems that have entered into our thinking. Because we've misused our ways of speaking, we've taken language out of its natural context and put it into an artificial context. To give you an example, when I ask you what time it is, you have no problem with the expression time. When I say, do we have time to finish this lecture? You have no question answering that, or at least knowing what I'm asking about. And on and on it goes. In daily life we use the word time and we all know what it means. It's not difficult whatsoever. But philosophers take time and rip it out of its ordinary language context. And they do funny theoretical things like say, what is time? And now all of a sudden I'm confused. It's very hard for me to give an answer, what is time? So maybe I shouldn't be using the word time. Ordinary language philosophy, analytical philosophers of that School of thought have taught, don't get involved in these theoretical, really impractical questions because the difficulty arises from taking language out of its ordinary setting in our social discourse and creating problems that don't exist at all. Ludwig Wittgenstein, in the second aspect of his career, said that job of the philosopher is to let the fly out of the fly bottle. Why do we have philosophical problems? Ever seen a fly in a fly bottle? You know, buzzing all over the place and bumping into the bottle and so forth, it's just all worked up. But if you take the top off and let the fly out now it's free and everything calms down, everything's fine. Philosophers are like the fly in the fly bottle. You know, they can't work out all these processes because they've created. Created an artificial environment for themselves. So he said philosophy, the job of philosophy is therapy. Basically, we need to let the fly out of the fly bottle. And the way we do that is we take our traditional philosophical problems and try to put things back into their ordinary discourse and do an analysis of the logic of ordinary discourse. Now, when Wittgenstein did this with respect to the question of certainty in philosophy, he ended up making some observations about the nature of certainty as we use it in our language, which are very helpful. Some of his observations are very helpful. One that I've already referred to as Wittgenstein talks about certainty requiring a final rock bottom for everybody. He says, everybody gets to the place where you've reached a point beyond which you cannot go. If this doesn't settle the issue for you, nothing will settle the issue for you. And then he points out as well, but that rock bottom is different for different people or basically different linguistic communities. Some people have a form of life where what is rock bottom seems heretical to people who live this other form of life over here. That too, as a description of the way in which people reason, I think is very helpful. Wittgenstein showed that essentially people have a worldview that governs their use of language. And the way in which language can be used in a way in which it's illegitimate to use language is governed by the central convictions of your worldview. That too, very close to observations made by presuppositional apologists. And very helpful. Sadly for Wittgenstein, this led him to subjectivism. There is no objective universal truth out there. There's just the different ways people use language. Remember I said that co Kant had psychologized causality. Well, now Wittgenstein has in a sociological Sense, psychologized certainty. He does understand the function of the word in our language, but he doesn't think there's any objective certainty out there. There's just one man yelling at another man, Heretic. Paul said, where is the wise? Where is the scribe? Where's the debater of this age? Hasn't God made foolish the wisdom of this world? If you look at the history of epistemology, you shouldn't be intimidated by philosophers or people who want to rest in a philosophical point of view. In arguing against Christianity, what philosophical point of view would they like to pick? They are all easy to criticize and to destroy. Well, does that mean that certainty is not available to us in philosophy? In contrast to what has happened in 20th century pragmatism and linguistic analysis, Christians have an answer to the epistemological question of certainty. We can face up to the standard problems in the theory of knowledge and yet recognize, as Wittgenstein did, the critical function of presuppositions in a person's worldview and yet fully hold to the objectivity of truth and the need for conflicting systems to reason with each other. How do we do that? Let's go back and learn a lesson from Kant. We do it by asking, what would be the self attesting, transcendental groundwork for a theory of knowledge? What is it that would not have internal contradictions and problems in it that would give us an answer to skepticism, provide objectivity and the preconditions for the use of reason and observation? Dr. Van Til has taught us that it's the Christian worldview that does that. That if you'll approach your philosophy of life. Back up another bump here on the outline. Back up here you go back to the development of the worldview as the primary philosophical quest. If you'll begin by using the Christian worldview, then you can have an epistemology that doesn't fall to the defects and the problems of all these other ones that we've been looking at. You can answer the skeptic. There's a way of knowing for sure. You can give a foundation for causality and for logic and provide the objectivity of truth. According to Van Til, it's in God's word that we find the indubitable and infallible truths which have been sought throughout the history of epistemological theorizing. If the history of epistemology is seeking for infallible truths, the Christian says, we've had them all along, here they are. Begin with these truths and you can make sense out of life. Begin with these truths, you can have an objective theory of knowledge, you can know what you know. Throw away these infallible truths and refuse to reason in terms of them and you're reduced to foolishness. Modern epistemology points to the continued necessity for philosophers to find all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge in Christ. Colossians 2, 3. Apart from from Christ and his self attesting word, man can produce nothing but the vain opposition of knowledge falsely so called this beginning to have an echo. Beginning to sound like yesterday. Well, it should, because what I taught you yesterday, I hope I've now from the philosophical standpoint in to show you it's only Christianity that can answer man's problems. We have to conclude, as Proverbs does, that the quest for certainty is successful only if men will start by fearing the Lord. I'd like to quote for you a statement by Harry Frankfurt from the Encyclopedia of Philosophy in the article that he wrote on doubt. On doubt, is there anything that's indubitable, something that cannot be doubted? And after he does all of his philosophical investigation and analysis, Frankfurt writes, and I quote, the claim that a basis for doubt is inconceivable is justified whenever a denial of the claim would violate the conditions or presuppositions of rational inquiry. That's one of the best quotations I ever culled out of the philosophers. Let me read it to you again. Maybe you want to write it down. The claim that a basis for doubt is inconceivable. When someone says there's just no way you could doubt this. The claim that a basis for doubt is inconceivable is justified whenever a denial of that claim would violate the conditions or presuppositions of rational inquiry. One more time. A claim that a basis for doubt is inconceivable. Somebody says it's inconceivable that you could doubt this. He said, that's justified. That claim is justified when the denial of it would violate the conditions or presuppositions of rational inquiry. How do we gain certainty then? We need to ask what are the preconditions of rational inquiry? If we learn what the preconditions of rational inquiry are, then we will find what is indubitable. Very much like Kant, right? The way to get beyond the skepticism of Hume is to ask what are the preconditions for intelligibility? What are the preconditions for the intelligibility of science or the use of man's mind? And so the history of epistemology has hinted to us in Kant and has brought us, if nothing else, by way of negative example through the 20th century, to the conclusion that the only way an adequate theory of knowledge can be formulated is in terms of a worldview that provides the preconditions for rational inquiry, a worldview that provides the preconditions for logic, the preconditions for science, the preconditions for moral absolutes, the preconditions for the freedom of the human mind and the dignity of the human character. All right, enough of history. I'm trying to be flexible here and change my outline as I go along in light of the time, I want now to take up a particular epistemological point of view that most people adhere to today or take for granted. Just assume that it's the way we have to approach the theory of the knowledge. Please turn the cassette over at this time. And a number of philosophers continue to defend over against pragmatism and over against a transcendental approach such as we're going to get to eventually as presuppositionalists. And that is very simply the allegedly presuppositionalist, inductive, empirical approach to knowledge. We saw in our selective history of epistemology that you have foundational theories, one of which was British empiricism. Now, British empiricism obviously has problems. David Hume ran it right into the ground. Philosophy continues beyond that point. But there is a In the Western world, especially in the British and American world, there is a persistent and tenacious temptation to hold on to that imperial empirical approach to knowledge. People say we know things when we experience them, when we observe them, and we don't bring presuppositions with us when we experience the world. We simply have an experience of the world, and the facts speak for themselves. And so this notion that we build up inductively, experience by experience, observation by observation, what we know and that we have these experiences without presuppositions continues to be a theory of knowledge that it's advanced in the world. To know anything is to observe it, to have an experience of it. Indeed, in the 20th century, one of the pervasive or the most popular critiques of Christianity has been that it doesn't even say anything meaningful, because there is no empirical experience that verifies or conceivably could falsify the claims being made by the Christian. And so this presuppositionless, inductive empirical approach, even though it's already been slain historically by David Hume, that approach continues to be advanced in the western world. And I think it calls for special attention, but it calls for special attention also because sadly, that approach is endorsed by some Christian apologists who say that the way in which we ought to defend the faith is to go right along with the empiricist and then show them the facts of history. You know, and argue from what we know about human experience that there's motion, there must be a first mover. We see causation, there must be a first cause for the world. Study history and show from archaeology that the Bible is accurate in its claims. Argue against the evolutionists on their own terms and show that creation is the only alternative. Argue for the resurrection of Christ, Present the facts, the empirical facts. That's the way we defend the faith. And so the reason why, why we're going to go into this next area that is a specific answer to empiricism is because it's one of the reigning epistemologies in history. And despite the history of thought that I've outlined for you briefly, it continues to be endorsed by people in our day and age and continues to be used by Christian apologists as well. As a Christian philosopher, what do I want to say about an empirical theory of knowledge that says that we know things based on observation and experience? Well, as a Christian, I would affirm first of all that God created us to know and to learn things from experience and observation, that that's the way God made us and that's appropriate, that we learn things from our senses, from our observation, from our experience in the world. Indeed, everywhere the scripture assumes the possibility of such empirical knowledge. If I couldn't know whether this is my car or not, I wouldn't be able to keep the commandment thou shalt not steal. So obviously the Bible assumes that I can know things about the world when it says I should apply to the world the stricture don't take someone else's property. If I'm going to have dominion in this world and control this world to the glory of God, I'm going to be able to know things about this world. God made me to that end. And the Christian scriptures repeatedly make affirmations about the world of human experience and observation, the facts of history, the birth of Christ, his death and resurrection. And so as a Christian, I am not anti empirical. Emphasize c a l I am not anti imperial empirical. I do believe in using observation and sensation to learn about the external world. However, as a Christian, I am not committed to empiricism. Cism I.e. empirical observational procedures are legitimate for learning about the world. But empiricism is a theory. Theory that says everything we know is based on observation. And I am not committed to empiricism to the view that everything that I know is based on observation. In fact, I would argue that those empirical procedures that I have endorsed only make sense are only intelligible within the Christian world view because empirical procedures assume the reliability of our senses, the objectivity of the world, inductive generalization based on the uniformity of nature and those sorts of things, induction, objectivity and reliability of the senses only make sense within the Christian worldview. So my commitment to being empirical cull is in fact endorsed by and undergirded by my Christianity. And I would argue against empiricism just because of what my empirical procedures require, namely Christianity. I do that too fast. You all understand me. What's wrong with empiricism is a theory of knowledge. Let me run through some of the difficulties real quickly. Empiricism is the view that all knowledge is based on observation. And if all knowledge is based on observation, then obviously the only thing we can know are particulars. Because no one ever observes a universal right? Many of you have seen particular ducks. Huey, Dewey and Louie. None of you have seen seen duckness. You know, that'd be a strange thing if after class someone came and said, oh, Dr. Monson, I have a book that has a picture of duckness in it. There would obviously be some misunderstanding of what the universal duckness is. If you think there can be a particular picture of a universal all right. None of us have ever observed particulars. And so empiricism is the view that only particulars exist and all knowledge is based on observation. And what's wrong with empiricism? One, the claim that all knowledge is observational is not observed. To put it very simply, do I know that all knowledge is restricted to observation? If I know it and it's restricted to observation, then I must have been observed it. But again, there's nothing you can observe that tells you all knowledge is observational in character. A universal statement of that form is not something you can see. Now, I don't mean you can't see the statement written down. What I'm saying is you can't see the truth of the statement anywhere. Secondly, the uniformity of nature, the uniformity of the future is not something that anybody knows observationally. Are any of you looking at the future right now? If you were, it wouldn't be future, would it? In the nature of the case, the future is not Something that you can know observationally. And yet empiricism requires the uniformity of nature in order to be workable. Thirdly, numbers, the laws of mathematics and the laws of logic are not known observationally. If everything that we know is restricted to observation, then we don't know math. None of you have observed a number. You're aware of that. It's a valuable piece of apologetical information because when you talk to unbelievers, they will many times, in a naive, a very poor philosophical sense, assume that they have seen things that they haven't seen. Nobody's ever seen a number. Somebody says, now I've seen the number two. Have you? Those of you who have ever taught math or thought about it, know that this is not the number two. That's what we call a numeral. It is an instance or one way of expressing the number two. If you think that's the number two, Then I have a question for you. What is this? You say, oh, that's the number two. Two, but that's a Roman numeral. I say, okay, but you said this is the number two. So if this is the number two, that can't be the number two, right? Are there two number twos? Can there be two number twos? I got an even worse problem. Let's forget that we have two number twos and just say we only have one. If that's the number two, I'm going to destroy the number two right now. Now there is no more two ness in reality. There is no more duality anywhere in reality, because you said that was the number two. Well, the problem here is that the number two is what an abstract reality that is expressed in this instance of a number and this instance of a number, and this instance of a number. By the way, the number two is also expressed when the vocal cords, you know, utter the word two and then another language, whatever dose and so forth, those are all instantiations of the number two, if you will, expressions of the number two, but they are not the number itself. Now if you're an empiricist, then it turns out that you can't know the number two, can you? And you can't know the laws of mathematics, can you? And you can't know the laws of logic, because the laws of logic are not something that you, you can observe, you can express the laws of logic and you can express and write down the laws of math, but the laws themselves are not something that are physical or empirically discernible. Fourthly, moral requirements like integrity and honesty are not known observationally. Anybody ever seen the requirement? To be honest, you may have read of it. It's expressed in the Bible. But that's not the requirement itself. Fifthly, personal identity over time is not observed by us. Earlier we talked about Hume. I already covered this, so I'm going to let it go at that. Substances. What is it that is the unifying feature of all the attributes of an apple? Substances are not observed observationally. Generalizations are not observed observationally. Class, ideas and categories are not observed observationally. And by the way, the past is not known observationally. Think about that for a minute. The past is not known observationally as it's known presently. When it was a present tense experience, it might have been known observationally. Although there's problems there, too. But we'll let those go right now. The past is not being observed, is it? This is a real tricky one. Where is the past that I'm in? Observing it right now, you say, well, I've got a mental picture of it. Well, is your mental picture the past? Strange stuff, huh? If empiricism is true and only particular individual things exist, then we can never transcend the individuality of experience and gain a community of knowledge. Empiricism has, as one of its most dreadful consequences that you and I can't know the same thing. You know why? Because only particulars exist. And if only particulars exist, then what I'm experiencing is not what you're experiencing. And if what I'm experiencing is not what you're experiencing, then we're not experiencing the same thing. And so the objectivity or the public nature, nature of what we know is lost if you think only individual things exist and we only know things by observation. Moreover, on the empirical approach to not. Am I going too fast for you? Okay, thank you. Your taskmaster here, he'll push and push and push, but I'll be nicer than Simon Legree back there. I even water my horses every once in a while, you know. Okay, let's go a little slower. If you take an empirical approach to knowledge, then you have other problems in that observational approaches to knowledge presuppose the normalcy of the observer. Why is that? Well, because sometimes when the perceiver is not normal. Normal, we wouldn't want to say that we gain any information from his perceptions. Some people get so drunk that they see things that aren't there. Some people, in fact, get the DTs so bad that they see pink rats running on their bed. There are no rats there. Some people take drugs. Some People have been in accidents, some people have brain damage. And so an observational theory of knowledge is required. I mean, I'm not going to try to work it out in refined form, but in one way or another has to speak about knowing things on the basis of normal observation. You say, well, so what? Well, the problem is that word normal. The word normal is not something you observe, not just the word. The concept of normalcy is not something. Something you observe. So if we can only know things based on observation, we can't import non observational concepts like normalcy. An empirical theory of knowledge also requires that we specify the location of the observer. I mean, I'm being very highly attenuated here. I know that this is not garden variety discussion of important empiricism, but any strict empirical theory ultimately requires you to specify the position of the observer. To specify the position of the observer requires you to specify location. And location can't be specified observationally because location is always relative to something else. And so when you have to have an absolute boundary or some kind of benchmark within which you specify location, you're going beyond observation already. Moreover, an empirical theory of knowledge cannot account for the need for consistency of linguistic usage. The consistency of linguistic usage could never be known observationally. Am I right? We have to assume that you're using words as they've been used in the past. The consistency of usage is not something that you observe. You can observe the way a word's being used or a phrase is being used now, but you can't observe that it's being used in the same way as what you did yesterday, the day before, 10 years ago, or anybody else. Indeed, memory, predictability and objectivity are all things which are taken for granted. But empiricism cannot make sense out of them observationally. And then this is the least of the problems, but it's often brought up by people as being a major one. If you take an observational approach to knowledge, what do you do with the problem of illusion and perspectival variation? The problem of illusion is that sometimes we think we see things and in fact we're not seeing things. Well, if the way in which you know things is limited to observation, then the only way you could correct your illusions is by means of, of observation. But if my observations are subject to illusion, then I could never know that the observation I'm using to correct my illusion is not itself illusory. That as you have an infinite regress, you can never correct an illusion. If the way in which we know things is Only based on observation. We must know something beyond observation or in theory we'd never know that what we see is reliable. And so it turns out that empiricism as a theory of knowledge is self refuting and destroys the possibility of science, the possibility of logic, the possibility of objectivity, and destroys language. I don't think it's a very good idea for Christians to try to line up with the empiricist then and say yes to your empiricism, but you've reached the wrong conclusion. The empiricism that is being advanced by unbelievers is itself done defective as a theory of knowledge. And why would you want to get on a defective airplane? In hopes that it gets you to the right, you know, destination. Better not to get on that plane at all. This is a good place for a two minute break. Well, what do you guys think? Can you make it another hour? Has this been a tough day? Great. I didn't ask if it's been a great day. I said it's been tough. Stretching. It has been stretching. Because I'm really going to drill into the nerve of the tooth now for the last hour I got to make sure you're awake and I got to warn you ahead of time, it's going to be kind of rough sailing here for the next 30 minutes or so, because now I want to look at the empirical dogma of the analytic synthetic distinction of truths. I wasn't sure when I did the outline whether this should just be like point 2 underneath D or whether I should give it its separate place. But I'm going to draw so many conclusions from this discussion that I think it warrants its own specific place. But it is a continuation of my critique of empiricism. At the break one of you mentioned to me, with all of these obvious defects, why is anybody an empiricist? And I probably should tell you I didn't mention this to you then, that in terms of the academic halls of philosophy, not many people are pure empiricists anymore. It's not impossible. There are a few, but they're looked upon like, haven't you been awake for the last hundred years or so? I mean, obviously we need to go beyond that. So there are more refined and sophisticated versions, versions of empiricism that people try to develop and so forth, none of which are available and fully developed at this point, as far as I can see. But the man in the street is tempted to be an empiricist. He says, we know things because we see it. Seeing is believing. And so it's good for you to be able to have. You may not remember all of these, although eventually when you catch on to this, it's really easy to remember. I mean, it's such a defective theory that, well, you can hit them from this side and this side. I mean, it's really tough to say that everything we know is based on observation. Again, I haven't denied that many things we know is based on observation. As a Christian, I believe that. But empiricism as a theory is easy to fault. And I'm now going to go into a discussion that comes from advanced epistemological theory in the 20th century. And the opening salvo in this discussion was entitled Two Dogmas of Empiricism. And it was an article written by Willard Van Orman Quine at Harvard that may be the best known article in 20th century philosophy. If it's not, it's certainly in the top three or five. But I think it's probably on all people's accounts, the most devastating article written in the 20th century. Two dogmas of empiricism. Now, when a philosopher begins by identifying something as a dogma you already know he doesn't think well of it. And so this has got to be a surprise. Quine is no Christian by any stretch of the imagination, but he is trying to do consistent and good, clear philosophy. And when he looks at the school of thought known as empiricism, he identifies two dogmas, only one of which we're going to have time to look at here in the next half hour. And that is the dogma that all of the truths which we know are either of the analytic or synthetic form, the analytics. And I'm going to explain that in a moment. But just so you again see this in context. The analytic synthetic distinction is presupposed by all empirical theories of knowledge. And so down through the ages, you'll find it's the empiricists who keep pushing, if we know things, we either know them as an analytic truth or as a synthetic truth. And so Quine identifies that as a dogma of empiricism, then he proceeds to totally obliterate it. Now, not everybody has been willing to accept Quine's obliteration of the distinction. And so there's been a long history of discussion on that subsequent to his article. And if you want to do further work, again, I'm giving you, for supplement to my lecture material, an article that's available in our catalog entitled Revisionary Immunity. Many of my students say it's the toughest thing that they've ever had to read that I've written. Anyway, one student proposed that I should make up T shirts that says, I read revisionary immunity. You know, it's kind of like, you know, I climbed the rock, you know, And I'm not going to drag you through all of that. It does get somewhat technical. But rather than being scared off by that remark, I would like to believe that what I'm going to do here is going to whet your appetite. And some of you are going to say, I know I'm going to have to go slow, maybe reread a page here and there, maybe every page two or three times, but I'm going to get through this. Some of you have. Right. It's possible to do, isn't it? I don't get a real good affirmation of that. But you can understand this article. It is advanced epistemological material. But the conclusion of it is what I'm going to emphasize. I'm going to take a few moments to drag you through the issue, stretch you a bit, and then I'm going to come back to stuff that you won't find difficult to understand. And that is, what have we learned from the destruction of the empirical dogma of the analytic synthetic discovery distinction? Well, what is the analytic synthetic distinction? Let me see if I can explain this here. According to this point of view, the truths which we know all break down to being. Analytic, that is known upon analysis, or synthetic drawing together elements of our experience, synthesizing elements of our experience. All right, I'll give you an example. The sentence the barn is a barn is something that you know is true just by analysis, don't you? Do you have to go out and look at the world and have any experiences by which you verify that? No. The sentence upon analysis is a logical truth. It just says A is A. So it's an analytic truth. Now, the barn is red, providing it's a truth at all. Is that something that can be known just on analysis? If you just analyze the concept of a barn, you know that it's red. Is that right? Not right at all. Analysis cannot tell you whether the barn is red or not. You can only know that the barn is red by synthesizing a couple things in your observational experience. Experience, the experience of the barn and the experience of redness. So you draw together two pieces of experience or observation in a synthetic truth. And an analytic truth is one that you know is true simply by analysis. Now, I'm going to complicate this a bit. The sentence all bachelors are unmarried, is that a synthetic truth or an analytic truth? Well, what did I tell you? Just in this elementary approach to things, what did I tell you is the difference between the two? Analytic truths are those whose truth can be known simply by analysis. Synthetic truths are those truths which are known to be true on the basis of synthesizing things in our observational experience. Now, to know that all bachelors are unmarried, do you have to go out and do research? Do you have to go and observe the world? You have to learn about all the bachelors. And then you come back and say, lo and behold, look at this. On this survey, every man who is unmarried is also a bachelor. That's silly, isn't it? This would count as one of the analytic truths, wouldn't it? Because we know that it's true simply by analysis of it. But here it isn't. Analysis of a logical form, A is a. The barn is a barn. Here it's analysis of the meaning of terms. This message is continued on the next tape.