TWO EPISTEMOLOGICAL PROBLEMS

TWO EPISTEMOLOGICAL PROBLEMS. Our knowledge of the external world. Most people have noticed that vision can play tricks on them. A straight stick put in water looks bent to them, but they know it is not railroad tracks are seen to be converging in the distance, yet one knows that they are not the wheels of wagons on a movie screen appear to be going backward, but one knows that they are not and the pages of English-language books reflected in mirrors cannot be read from left to right, yet one knows that they were printed to be read that way. Each of these phenomena is thus misleading in some way. If human beings were to accept the world as being exactly as it looks, they would be mistaken about how things really are. They would think the stick in water really to be bent, the railway tracks really to be convergent, and the writing on pages really to be reversed.

These are visual anomalies, and they produce the sorts of epistemological disquietudes referred to above.

Though they may seem to the ordinary person to be simple problems, not worth serious notice, for those who ponder them they pose difficult questions. For instance, human beings claim to know that the stick is not really bent and the tracks not really convergent.

But how do they know that these things are so Suppose one says that this is known because, when the stick is removed from the water, one can see that it is not bent. But does seeing a straight stick out of water provide a good reason for thinking that it is not bent when seen in water How does one know that, when the stick is put into the water, it does not bend Suppose one says that the tracks do not really converge because the train passes over them at that point.

How does one know that the wheels on the train do not happen to converge at that point What justifies opposing some beliefs to others, especially when all of them are based upon what is seen One sees that the stick in water is bent and also that the stick out of the water is not bent. Why is the stick declared really to be straight why in effect is priority given to one perception over another One possible response to these queries is that vision is not sufficient to give knowledge of how things are. One needs to correct vision in some other way in order to arrive at the judgement that the stick is really straight and not bent. Suppose a person asserts that his reason for believing the stick in water is not bent is that he can feel it with his hands to be straight when it is in the water.

Feeling or touching is a mode of sense perception, although different from vision. What, however, justifies accepting one mode of perception as more accurate than another After all, there are good reasons for believing that the tactile sense gives rise to misperception in just the way that vision does. If a person chills one hand and warms the other, for example, and inserts both into a tub of water having a uniform medium temperature, the same water will feel warm to the cold hand and cold to the warm hand. Thus, the tactile sense cannot be trusted either and surely cannot by itself be counted on to resolve these difficulties. Another possible response is that no mode of perception is sufficient to guarantee that one can discover how things are. Thus, it might be affirmed that one needs to correct all modes of perception by some other form of awareness in order to arrive at the judgement, say, that the stick is really straight.

Perhaps that other way is the use of reason.

But why should reason be accepted as infallible It also suffers from various liabilities, such as forgetting, misestimating, or jumping to conclusions. And why should one trust reason if its conclusions run counter to those gained through perception, since it is obvious that much of what is known about the world derives from perception Clearly there is a network of difficulties here, and one will have to think hard in order to arrive at a clear and defensible explanation of the apparently simple claim that the stick is really straight.

A person who accepts the challenge will, in effect, be developing a theory for grappling with the famous problem called our knowledge of the external world.

That problem turns on two issues, namely, whether there is a reality that exists independently of the individuals perception of it in other words, if the evidence one has for the existence of anything is what one perceives, how can one know that anything exists unperceived and, second, how one can know what anything is really like, if the perceptual evidence one has is conflicting. The other minds problem.

The second problem also involves seeing but in a somewhat unusual way. It deals with that which one cannot see, namely the mind of another. Suppose a woman is scheduled to have an operation on her right knee and her surgeon tells her that when she wakes up she will feel a sharp pain in her knee. When she wakes up, she does feel the pain the surgeon alluded to. He can hear her groaning and see certain contortions on her face. But he cannot feel what she is feeling. There is thus a sense in which he cannot know what she knows.

What he claims to know, he knows because of what others who have undergone operations tell him they have experienced. But, unless he has had a similar operation, he cannot know what it is that she feels. Indeed, the situation is still more complicated for, even if the doctor has had such a surgical intervention, he cannot know that what he is feeling after his operation is exactly the same sensation that the woman is feeling. Because each persons sensation is private, the surgeon cannot really know that what the woman is describing as a pain and what he is describing as a pain are really the same thing.

For all he knows, she could be referring to a sensation that is wholly different from the one to which he is alluding. In short, though another person can perceive the physical manifestations the woman exhibits, such as facial grimaces and various sorts of behaviour, it seems that only she can have knowledge of the contents of her mind. If this assessment of the situation is correct, it follows that it is impossible for one person to know what is going on in another persons mind. One can conjecture that a person is experiencing a certain sensation, but one cannot, in a strict sense of the term, know it to be the case. If this analysis is correct, one can conclude that each human being is inevitably and even in principle cut off from having knowledge of the mind of another.

Most people, conditioned by the great advances of modern technology, believe that in principle there is nothing in the world of fact about which science cannot obtain knowledge.

But the other-minds problem suggests the contrary namely, that there is a whole domain of private human experience that is resistant to any sort of external inquiry. Thus, one is faced with a profound puzzle, one of whose implications is that there can never be a science of the human mind. Implications. These two problems resemble each other in certain ways and differ in others, but both have important implications for epistemology.

First, as the divergent perceptions about the stick indicate, things cannot just be, as they appear to be. People believe that the stick, which looks bent when it is in the water, is really straight, and they also believe that the stick, which looks straight when it is out of the water, is really straight. But, if the belief that the stick in water is really straight is correct, then it follows that the perception human beings have when they see the stick in water cannot be correct.

That particular perception is misleading with respect to the real shape of the stick. Hence, one has to conclude that things are not always, as they appear to be. It is possible to derive a similar conclusion with respect to the mind of another. A person can exhibit all the signs of being in pain, but he may not be. He may be pretending. On the basis of what can be observed, it cannot be known with certitude that he is or that he is not in pain. The way he appears to be may be misleading with respect to the way he actually is. Once again vision can be misleading. Both problems thus force one to distinguish between the way things appear and the way they really are. This is the famous philosophical distinction between appearance and reality.

But, once that distinction is drawn, profound difficulties arise about how to distinguish reality from mere appearance. As will be shown, innumerable theories have been presented by philosophers attempting to answer this question since time immemorial.

Second, there is the question of what is meant by knowledge. People claim to know that the stick is really straight even when it is half-submerged in water. But, as indicated earlier, if this claim is correct, then knowledge cannot simply be identical with perception. For whatever theory about the nature of knowledge one develops, the theory cannot have as a consequence that knowing something to be the case can sometimes be mistaken or misleading.

Third, even if knowledge is not simply to be identified with perception, there nevertheless must be some important relationship between knowledge and perception. After all, how could one know that the stick is really straight unless under some conditions it looked straight And sometimes a person who is in pain exhibits that pain by his behaviour thus there are conditions that genuinely involve the behaviour of pain. But what are those conditions It seems evident that the knowledge that a stick is straight or that one is in great pain must come from what is seen in certain circumstances perception must somehow be a fundamental element in the knowledge human beings have. It is evident that one needs a theory to explain what the relationship is and a theory of this sort, as the history of the subject all too well indicates, is extraordinarily difficult to develop.

The two problems also differ in certain respects.

The problem of mans knowledge of the external world raises a unique difficulty that some of the best philosophical minds of the 20th century among them, Bertrand Russell, H.H. Price, C.D. Broad, and G.E. Moore spent their careers trying to solve. The perplexity arises with respect to the status of the entity one sees when one sees a bent stick in water. In such a case, there exists an entity a bent stick in water that one perceives and that appears to be exactly where the genuinely straight stick is. But clearly it cannot be for the entity that exists exactly where the straight stick is is the stick itself, an entity that is not bent. Thus, the question arises as to what kind of a thing this bent-stick-in-water is and where it exists.

The responses to these questions have been innumerable, and nearly all of them raise further difficulties. Some theorists have denied that what one sees in such a case is an existent entity at all but have found it difficult to explain why one seems to see such an entity.

Still others have suggested that the image seen in such a case is in ones mind and not really in space. But then what is it for something to be in ones mind, where in the mind is it, and why, if it is in the mind, does it appear to be out there, in space where the stick is And above all, how does one decide these questions The various questions posed above only suggest the vast network of difficulties, and in order to straighten out its tangles it becomes indispensable to develop theories.

Methodology. In accordance with a proposal made above, epistemology, or the logic of scientific discovery, -should be identified with the theory of scientific method. The theory of method, in so far as it goes beyond the purely logical analysis of the relations between scientific statements, is concerned with the choice of methods with decisions about the way in which scientific statements are to be dealt with. These decisions will of course depend in their turn upon the aim, which we choose from among a number of possible aims. Methodology or a scientific method is a collective term denoting the various processes by the aid of which the sciences are built up. In a wide sense, any mode of investigation by which scientific or other impartial and systematic knowledge is acquired is called a scientific method.

What are the rules of scientific method, and why do we need them Can there be a theory of such rules, a methodology The way in which one answers these questions will largely depend upon one s attitude to science.

The way in which one answers these questions will largely depend upon ones attitude to science. Those who, like the positivists, see empirical science as a system of statements, which satisfy certain logical criteria, such as meaningfulness or verifiability, will give one-answer. A very different answer will be given by those who tend to see the distinguishing characteristic of empirical statements in their susceptibility to revision in the fact that they can be criticised and superseded by better ones and who regard it as their task to analyse the characteristic ability of science to advance, and the characteristic manner in which a choice is made, in crucial cases, between conflicting systems of theories.

Such methods, as it was mentioned above, are of two principal types technical and logical. A technical or technological method is a method of manipulating the phenomena under investigation, measuring them with precision, and determining the conditions under which they occur, so as to be able to observe them in a favourable and fruitful manner. A logical method is a method of reasoning about the phenomena investigated, a method of drawing inferences from the conditions under which they occur, so as to interpret them as accurately as possible.

The term scientific method in the first instance probably suggests to most minds the technical methods of manipulation and measurement.

These technical methods are very numerous and they are different in the different sciences. Few men ever master the technical methods of more than one science or one group of closely connected sciences. An account of the most important technical methods is usually given in connection with the several sciences. It would be impossible, even if it were desirable, to give a useful survey of all, or even of the most important, technical methods of science. It is different with the logical methods of science.

These methods of reasoning from the available evidence are not really numerous, and are essentially the same in all the sciences. It is both possible and desirable to survey them in outline. Moreover, these logical methods of science are in a very real sense the soul of the technical methods. In pure science the technical methods are not regarded as an end in themselves, but merely as a means to the discovery of the nature of the phenomena under investigation.

This is done by drawing conclusions from the observations and experiments, which the technical methods render possible. Sometimes the technical methods make it possible for the expert investigator to observe and measure certain phenomena, which otherwise could either not be observed and measured at all, or not so accurately. Sometimes they enable him so to determine the conditions of their occurrence that he can draw reliable conclusions about them, instead of having to be content with unverified conjectures.

The highly speculative, mainly conjectural character of early science was no doubt due entirely to the lack of suitable technical methods and scientific instruments. In a sense therefore, it may be said that the technical methods of science are auxiliary to the logical methods, or methods of reasoning. And it is these methods that are to be considered in the present article. The technical methods of science, as ought to be clear from the preceding remarks, are of first rate importance, and we have not the remotest desire to underrate them but it would be futile to attempt to survey them here.