#12 Epistemologic Access to Our Principles

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WHERE DO PRINCIPLES COME FROM?

The problem of the source of the foundations of our principles, what I call epistemologic access, is nicely raised by the BrothersJudd BrothersJudd Blog: FROM THE ARCHIVES: BULWARKIANISM:BrothersJudd locates the differences between Conservatives and Libertarians in their fundamental difference in the creative source for Man. Conservatives believe "that Man is Created, that it is from the Creator that right are derived, and that Man is bound by the laws of the Creator."

They cite Edmund Burke http://www.brothersjudd.com/index.cfm/fuseaction/reviews.detail/book_id/741 as an exemplar: "There is but one law for all, namely, that law which governs all law, the law of our Creator, the law of humanity, justice, equity—the law of nature, and of nations."

"Libertarianism in its most extreme, or most immature, form rebels against the notion that even God can limit liberty. That rebellion is the point at which it turns into mere license. Like all extremisms, it envisions itself as uniquely pure and uncompromised, but it must be obvious that having abandoned the idea of a Creator and rights as issuing from Him, this kind of libertarianism becomes incoherent. For if Man is not endowed with dignity by virtue of being Created, then what is the basis for saying that the individual should be inviolate? It can only be that you say it should be so--but if I believe otherwise, necessarily with equal validity, then what may I not do to you? And so a doctrine of liberty that has no other basis than the individual and his capacity to imagine freedom will descend into anarchy."

Now I agree that this Libertarian warrant for their epistemologic access to the truth is insufficient but I think the appeal to God won't do the trick either. It's clean, easy, but at heart still an assertion, an ipse dixit since even if God did create us, we still don't have access to Him. And the grip on our thought that a certain idea has often prevented progress both at the psychological level and at the broad level in the history of science.

It's easy to show how naive conceptions among children compels them to see facts differently than adults and to reason differently. In fact, their facts and reasoning are simply wrong when compared to scientific understanding that has been verified and demonstrated as valid. The fascinating problem is why and how this incorrect form of thought arises and maintains itself in children's thought only later to be gradually replaced by more factual and valid forms. The same occurs at the level of the history of science.

Perhaps the most spectacular example of wrong thought persisting in the face of evidence and reason was Aristotle's physics. It's conceptions of mass and motion had long been disproved, the scientific method had even long been around yet physical science was only conducted within its framework up until the time of Galileo. Why then did it persist in the face of contradictory evidence and why and how did it come to so quickly become supplanted by Newtonian physics? Again, we find certain axiomatic foundations of Aristotelian science controlled scientific thinking. These principles were held as obvious, inviolate, and foundational.

IT HAPPENS IN ALL FORMS OF THOUGHT

The problem of epistemologic access arises in our principled reasoning in morality or political philosophy, economics, and, sooner or later, or perhaps never for some people, we must go beyond asserting the obvious nature of our foundational principles no matter how gripping is our feeling of certitude or logical necessity, to figure out where or how these moral principles and logical certitudes we rely on for the whole of our world view come from or arise. The problem is important because the basic principles with which we begin control everything that follows just as in mathematics, the aximatic principles we adopt, and they can be any as long as they are non-contradictory, determine everthing that follows. We don't have to adopt the foundational axiomatic basis for Euclidean geometry. We could lift some of this principles to create a weaker geometry. Or we could change some to create an alternative geometry. But once we have chosen, then everything else follows. Since they are controllers of our thought, we must demand a warrant of sufficiency for them.

WE MUST JUSTIFY OUR EPISTEMOLOGIC ACCESS

For those principles that are not derivatory for which we assert are absolutely pre-givens then this assertion means we believe we have gained epistemologic access to some truth outside our system of thought upon which our system rests. If so, those principles requires some kind of warrant of sufficiency. Otherwise the whole of our thought lapses into a simple an article of faith. It's true that most truths can be derived from other truths just as in geometry we can derive all kinds of theorems we can prove come from more basic notions previously proven true. Of course for our starting point we take certain axioms or undefined concepts as obviously true only later to realize they aren't necessarily obviously true and we actually have a choice. The problem is that if we admit the choice of axiomatic bases is in fact a choice, how then can we keep it from being an arbitrary and egocentric choice deep down driven by our needs and wants? To hold our principles demands we answer the question of epistemologic access or suffer the charge they are rather arbitrary.

After the opening day of geometry class in which the basic axioms and undefined elements are introduced, the whole of the semester is predetermined by the initial framework and is devoted to using them to build the edifice of geometry. But should the opening day principles be blindly accepted? Must they remain unquestioned? Obviously we need them or we can't continue with geometry but should we not justify them somehow? Before we start, someone must question them. We can do this by comparison to show other possible principles that could be made foundational. Since they also could be used as a starting point but would produce a different system, the problem is to find some basis for choosing between the two.

When someone is attempting to impose their system on us, we can determine our acceptance of their system and do our choosing by demanding to see the warrant of sufficiency to see exactly what the epistemology basis is for the system. What are their foundational principles and how do they come to these? At heart, are their principles based on intuition, on divine authority we have received, on some notions of empirical demonstration or induction, what?

Our teacher must have some warrant of sufficiency for accepting the geometry principles upon which she bases the study of geometry. Does she take the system unquestioningly or does the teacher sees the epistemologic problem and respond? Without this foundation we cannot compare and evaluate the system as a choice among systems, or, if we are naïve, we may have considerable difficulty in accepting the assumptions of the first principles. Either way, for the non-believers, it becomes difficult to "get into" the system. It becomes simply a choice relative to the other person's wants and demands. So how do we know when foundational principles are sufficient as a basis for the edifice of thought we have or intend to construct?

Now back to the Libertarianism and Conservatism example. It seems to me the problem raised by the BrothersJude rests in how to establish a basis for first principles for establishing a political philosophy of freedom. What are the choices? Natural law or Divine Creator? Neither for me are sufficient. I think we must turn to a third alternative, that these principles themselves are a product of the development of thought and are not simply pre-given by divine intervention or natural pre-existence. For me, the question is simply a return to scientific epistemology which returns us to the question of how thought arises in the human species, a problem which has been satisfactorily answered for many instances of human thought and knowledge. We simply need to treat it as another problem for investigation by scientific epistemology.