Has the Skeptic Won?

Let’s take into consideration some matters which have concerned a number of libertarians lately. Briefly, most libertarians know that at the foundations of their activities, either as advocates of a political philosophy or anything else, lie a number of judgements loosely referred to as moral, ethical, or political. It is with the character of these and related judgements that many have been concerned.

There is a tradition to virtually all fields of study, including philosophy. Epistemology, the study of human knowledge, is part of philosophy and happens also to enjoy a rather well discernable tradition. The following is a brief sketch of the tradition which has influenced epistemology, that is: to an understanding of how man knows. Obviously the present treatment will be open to revision and criticism in view of its extreme brevity. Still, it will be a helpful sketch.

Two important traditions in the theory of knowledge have prevailed in Western philosophy (though both have counterparts elsewhere). Pejoratively we may call one dogmatism and the other skepticism. More neutrally, the former is rationalism with its varieties of platonism, idealism, a priorism, etc., while the latter is empiricism, with pragmatism, operationalism, positivism, and so forth as related views. Not all these are the same, but the general point of the first group pertaining to the theory of knowledge is that the primary and often exclusive avenue toward the attainment of knowledge is pure, unaided reason, innate ideas, the knowledge of eternal and fixed ideas or forms, etc. The latter group, on the other hand, opts for experience, sensation, observation, practice, testing, or impressions of sense as the primary or exclusive road to knowledge.

Rationalism and its associates do have something very basic in common with Empiricism and Company — more basic than what they disagree about. Each group has, to a more or less explicit degree, the same model of what must be achieved in order to have knowledge proper. In other words, the model both rationalists and empiricists have about what knowledge would have to be (if it were available or possible at all) is essentially the same. Briefly, the model which theories of knowledge have been striving to satisfy has been the model of the picture. Pictures, it should be noted, are static; they are timeless and unchanging; pictures themselves can errode; but what they depict does not errode or change as depicted; once we have the picture, we don’t need to do anything; we needn’t revise it, modify it, alter it, update it, etc. we have it.

The activity of depicting something, either by stone carvers or portrait painters is as old as philosophy, if not actually much older. We have more data on early depiction than on early philosophy. What is important is that as we look back upon various attempts to give an account of human knowledge (or to demonstrate the invalidity of such attempts and, thereby, arrive at the position of complete epistemological and philosophical skepticism) — as we investigate the activities of philosophers in this regard, we find that the overwhelming majority of them had the picture as the model for what it would be to know. Note that pictures are fixed, while ‘to know’ indicates a dynamic, active sense. Instead of knowing x, one was thought to depict x in one’s mind. These philosophers considered knowledge not as knowledge of things, events, acts — that is, of reality — but of pictures of reality. From Plato’s belief that to know amounted to know the form of things, that is, the nature of things, to Kant’s belief that to know is to know the appearances of things (which cannot be known ‘in themselves’), to Russell’s view that to know is to be acquainted with that which we know, that is, to be in total contact with it — all these fascinating attempts to arrive at an adequate and true theory of knowledge failed because they viewed knowledge as the knowledge of a (static) picture; they did arrive at the characterization of what it would be to know pictures of things, as it were, but, because pictures got outmoded and old, they failed to arrive at a correct characterization of what it is to know that which is, instead of the pictures of those things that are. Though we always knew that we knew, we didn’t know what precisely that involved.

Because rationalists have always taken this as their model of knowledge and because such a model simply did not accord with human experience, skeptics had a jolly old time of knocking off rationalistic accounts of knowledge. And they had a perfect right to do so; if knowledge had to be what this model dictated, then knowledge could never be obtained. After all, reality, experience, things, in general, are all in time; i.e., there is the undeniability of change, motion, development, and, therefore, the need for revision, modification, and updating of what we know and have known. Since we could never exclude the possibility of further additions to a given picture of something — say the picture we have of man (i.e., our knowledge of human nature) — the model of the static picture being an inadequate one for purposes of developing a theory of knowledge which could escape the challenge of skepticism.

For instance concerning knowledge of knowledge itself: if we fail to realize that what knowledge is and what it could be are open to the possibility of change, then we have restricted ourselves to an inadequate view of knowledge a picture of knowledge. After all, have we the (logical) right to exclude from the realm of possibility that what the future has to offer may require the updating of our conception of knowledge itself? Have we the logical right to close the door forever on what will count as knowledge? We don’t; for what is in the future we do not know and as a result we cannot say whether or not the future will require us to update our present understanding of what human knowledge is. (Consider some plausible suggestions about telepathy, etc.) Maybe it would be better to say that we shall discover some additional forms of knowledge.

We have seen why the skeptic’s criticism against the Rationalists and Company has always succeeded: their model of knowledge was that of a static picture while in fact a dynamic model was needed. But empiricism, which most often took off from where skepticism rested its case, fared no better. Empiricism, in the main, accepted the static view and argued simply that, instead of trying to gain knowledge through the use of ‘pure reason’, we ought to be satisfied with what our senses can give us. Experience, not reasoning, is the ultimate ground of knowledge.

But what prompted the empiricists to say this? Simply because they accepted the static picture and, seeing that the rationalists could not go anywhere with it as rationalists, they tried to go someplace with it as worshippers of ‘pure sense’ or ‘pure experience’. To the empiricists everything which had the right to be called knowledge had to be reducible, without remainder, to so-called sensible components. Similarly, operationalists, pragmatists, instrumentalists, positivists and others believe that unless a knowledge claim — that is, a claim which purports to be able to convey information about reality, about the world and man — is ultimately reducible to either certain ostensible or sensible components, or certain tests which we can all see, or the operations of instruments, or facts which have been posited in terms of a well-accepted but ultimately arbitrary logical/formal system or language — unless reductions can be carried out, the claims must be regarded as without meaning; at best they could carry poetic or emotive content, at worst they must be regarded as the mutterings of the insane and feebleminded.

Why do empiricists believe this? Because they have accepted the model discussed above and found only one candidate which would satisfy it: impressions of sense (or sense data, or experience, or perhaps even perception) the nonrational, nonconceptual awareness human beings (and other animals) have of their world. If, in other words, reason does not come into play, we are left, ultimately, with our sensations, the (type of) awareness of our senses. And this form of awareness, when had, is static, final and indubitable. A sensation simply is — we don’t doubt it, just have it, much as we thought knowledge was to be had. We doubt only what it is we sense or what a sensation is, not that we have one. It has become the only one which would satisfy the model followed in the attempts to give an account of the nature of human knowledge.

The skeptic could now attack the empiricist. Is the form of awareness we are capable of with our senses knowledge? Can knowledge be based on that form of awareness alone? Must it be true that claims which purport to convey or express knowledge must be reduced, without remainder, to refer to sense-data, to ‘pure sensation’ or ‘pure experience’, unaided by reason, by conceptual thinking? In short, could man know without thinking?

From Plato, to Descartes, to Hume and Wittgenstein philosophers have answered “no” to this question. Though they may not have been successful in their attempts to offer an alternative analysis they realized the utter futility of attempting to base knowledge on ‘pure experience’.

Yet this did not dissuade them from continuing to propagate the ideal conception of knowledge as that of pure experience of immediate contact with what is. Science (because it deals with ‘pure facts’, tests, well-specified operations, and untainted experience) became the paradigm of human knowledge and, of course, intellectual respectability. Fields of study which did not manage to identify with this ‘scientific turn’ were relegated to the status of speculation and poetic or metaphysical nonsense. A. J. Ayer, the earliest of the disciples of the positivism of the Vienna Circle, announced to the world, in his Language, Truth, and Logic, that only those assertions, propositions and statements could claim intelligibility which could satisfy the verifiability theory of meaning; which meant that only those linguistic activities (statements, propositions, etc.) made sense which (if they were intended to be true) could be tested and verified in accordance with certain formal procedures. As to what made the particular formal procedures which the positivists specified so sensible, Ayer never said. Nor did any of the positivists say it — which is precisely what led to their departure from the philosophical scene. After all this hue and cry about the nonsense of traditional philosophy — including, of course, all of the rationalists and some others, for good measure — the worshippers of scientific factuality left themselves in a position of having to rest their account of all philosophical issues on an arbitrary choice of some formal system. Goedel, who was surely no metaphysician, saw through this grand attempt and promptly, though ironically, constructed a formal argument which rendered it formally impossible to have a purely formal system which is both fully consistent and complete, i.e., one which did not require extra-formal elements. Positivism had no way to account for its choice of the Whitehead/Russell system of (propositional) calculus as the one which did, in fact, accord with reality. So the positivist could get us no closer to knowledge of reality than have any of the earlier attempts — furthermore, they have taken us further away because of their self-righteous pronouncements that no field of study other than those of the ‘natural’ sciences — physics, chemistry, botany, etc. — could offer us knowledge of the world.

With this legacy, the various so-called humane or social sciences — (is economics really so unnatural; or psychology and ethics?) — ran to acquire membership within the pure scientific community, as this was understood by ‘intelligent men’ everywhere (especially in Anglo-American circles). Psychology became behaviourist, law and ethics degenerated into sociology and nihilism, while economics was more or less hanging in between. Inasmuch as economists deal with the activities of human beings, and inasmuch as what men will do is not predictable in the fashion as what rocks or even mice will do, the positivistic empiricism of economics amounted more to a creed than a practice. Economists, after all, work with such concepts as ‘social cost’, ‘property’, ‘value’, ‘public or private goods’, ‘taxation’; none of these concepts can be reduced, without remainder, to purely empirical components — simply because the concept as ‘purely empirical’ is itself a ‘floating abstraction’: there is simply nothing of which we can have purely empirical knowledge, even if agreement about the conceptual framework in terms of which we handle various matters is pretty universal; for example, some could say that the statement “there are four buttons on your shirt” is a paradigm case of an empirical statement; since I don’t know what ‘empirical’ statements are, except in that I know of attempted accounts for such statements, I wouldn’t and couldn’t know if this was right; I know, however, that without a prior understanding of the sense and possible contexts or, to use Wittgenstein’s phrases, ‘language games’ of ‘your’, ‘four’, ‘button’, ‘being’, ‘shirt’, and others which make it possible for us to understand these, the statement in question would have been unintelligible. Furthermore, without understanding the context within which the statement was made — for example that it was not made on a stage but in earnest, that it was not intended to tell anyone anything about shirts and buttons but to serve as an illustration, etc. — without these (nonempirical) factors, the utterance would not have been able to accomplish its intended aim; it would, in short, have been without meaning.

But what follows from this? It doesn’t follow that what economists and other social scientists do, (because it is not purely empirical), is either meaningless, or pointless, or even poetic. It is on most occasions simply ill-described and explained by economists; it may be (and hopefully is) done well, often by economists, namely economic analysis.

Where problems arise is the point at which economists become concerned about their own conception of what they are doing. Some, like the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises, build a philosophical system out of specifically economic tools of analysis; von Mises noted that prices are the result of the interaction of human decisions based on human valuations, and devised a subjectivist theory of market valuation; then he proceeded also to assert that all judgements of value are subjective, a view which not only has nothing to do with economics, but is plainly false.

From some economics departments we hear it said that one’s ‘property rights’ are goods, whereas the concept of ‘property rights’ is a concept of political philosophy and human rights theory and, as such is embedded in a view which renders the suggestion that rights themselves are on par with other goods is a mistake. Even the Founders realized that the right to property was “unalienable” and, as such, could not be lost other than by depriving a person of his humanity. The mere fact that the laws fail to recognize the unalienability of human rights, including property rights, need not induce economists to help them even by simple default. Some say ‘property rights’ function as ‘controls’ or or ‘resources.’ This would help keep out the issue of morality or legality and require that property rights be assumed as part of any economic model asserting the fact of controls or resources as a feature more or less present in all actual markets.

Let us admit that value theory as an enterprise is not in good shape. Neither, however, is any theory (least of all logical positivism, the philosophical foundation of positive economics) which holds that judgements of value (“X is valuable”) cannot be true or false. The prudent thing to do for social scientists is to stop acting as if they could incorporate within their own analyses ethical and political problems.

At this stage of the history of philosophy, when, perhaps due to the extreme dogmatisms of both the political right and left, the dominant attitude is ethical and political nihilism, there are signs that we are developing a sound approach to morality. In short, following much advance in epistemology and understanding and easing of the skeptic, the outlook for defending moral knowledge is good. Not that we don’t already know a lot of things that are good and bad — we simply do not yet understand how we know. Through the account of truth and knowledge, the prospect for discovering what counts as moral truth and knowledge, in particular, is also in sight. This is good news not only for libertarianism — so that the idea that freedom is good need not be viewed as a mystical, poetic or feebleminded daydream — but also for the various fields of the humane studies; it’ll now be possible to sort out those aspects of human life which are the domain of ethics and which lie in other fields. We may also look to discoveries of the right connections between ethics and other fields of investigation.

The present skepticism about the status of value judgements is unfounded: it rests on bad philosophy.

Tibor R. Machan is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at California State College at Bakersfield. He is also the editor of Reason.