"Whatever knowledge is attainable, must be attained by scientific methods; and what science cannot discover, mankind cannot know."
― Bertrand Russell, Religion and Science
Isn't this self-refuting? Unless of course you can devise a scientific experiment that can test the claim, that "Whatever knowledge is attainable must be attained by scientific methods; and what science cannot discover, mankind cannot know."
42 comments:
Was Russell claiming to know this, or was he simply expressing his opinion?
Instead of being self-refuting, the statement might just be an unsupported assumption.
It all depends on what questions you are asking. If you want to know "How big is this?" or "How old is this?" or even "How was this formed?", then science is your best bet to get an answer.
But if you want to ask any "why" question, or any of the really important questions in our lives, such as "Whom should I marry?" or "Is this action good or evil?" or "Who is my neighbor?"... well, science will get you nowhere, as to finding an answer.
Russell states it like a fact. Perhaps it is an assertion of opinion in context, but the quote is delivered like he knows it to be true.
Some more context added to the OP quote:
While it is true that science cannot decide questions of value, that is because they cannot be intellectually decided at all, and lie outside the realm of truth and falsehood. Whatever knowledge is attainable, must be attained by scientific methods; and what science cannot discover, mankind cannot know.
So, instead of buckling down and doing the hard work of philosophy, Russell simply waves the white flag of surrender and announces "The truth is not out there."
Since he has abandoned every tool in the box other than the hammer of science, it's no wonder that he thinks every question of "truth and falsehood" is a nail.
So Russell makes a distinction between what can be known via scientific methods (which are objective facts) and what people think regarding moral issues (which are merely opinions).
Russell has 2 main arguments to support this view (just take a sociology 101 course):
Argument no. 1 states: Since cultures and individuals differ in certain moral practices, there are no objective moral values.
Argument no. 2 for ethical relativism states: Since ethical relativism promotes tolerance of certain cultural practices that members of Western civilization may think are strange, ethical relativism is a good thing.
Russell has this knowledge:
“While it is true that science cannot decide questions of value”
How did Russell attain knowledge of “values”?
“Whatever knowledge is attainable, must be attained by scientific methods; and what science cannot discover, mankind cannot know”
Did the scientific method give him knowledge of values? No.
Conclusion: Self refuting
The fact that Russell has attained knowledge of values, truth, good, evil etc either proves that his thesis is wrong, or that he really doesn’t have knowledge of these things.
A wonderful article on the "Galileo Affair" (HERE), which has some relevance to this topic.
Well, he does say it is his personal belief. http://personal.kent.edu/~rmuhamma/Philosophy/RBwritings/scienceEthics.htm
But he tries to justify it.
Why attempt to justify a belief when its truth isn’t attainable?
“because they cannot be intellectually decided at all, and lie outside the realm of truth and falsehood”
It's a bit rich to say of the co-author of Principia Mathematica that he lacks the stomach for hard work in philosophy.
Unless of course you can devise a scientific experiment that can test the claim, that... No need for any devising. A natural experiment has been ongoing for millennia. It's the failure of philosophical inquiry to arrive at any universally accepted conclusions.
According to Russell, it's questions of value that can't be decided. Not the question of the decidability of questions of value. For Russell, that question is decidedly answered in the negative. But it's not a philosophical question. It's an historical question. Russell is offering an explanation for that historical record of failure.
"It's the failure of philosophical inquiry to arrive at any universally accepted conclusions."
So. As long as there is one person who still believes in the QAnon nonsense, we cannot say it is absolute bunk because such a conclusion would not be "universally accepted"?
Maybe not as long as that one person is a philosopher :-) But in practice, philosophical disputes never get anywhere close to unanimity bar one. Russell's comparison is with science. Yet there is no such comparable thing as 'settled philosophy'. Almost an oxymoron.
Much like when people try to compare science and religion, I would say that comparing science and philosophy is like comparing a hammer to the field of carpentry. The hammer gets particular results, but without a framework the capacity to achieve those results is meaningless.
Science itself is simply a tool. What we do with that tool takes something more than the limited truths science can provide.
I'm afraid I don't follow this carpentry metaphor of nails, hammers, toolboxes.
I think of my personal knowledge as an outgrowth from a core of knowledge by acquaintance (Russell's term) of my immediate surroundings and of my internal thoughts and feelings. By interaction with others I learn what is expected of me and how I and others react to morally charged situations. This knowledge is vastly extended by reading and viewing texts and visual media---Russell's knowledge by description. Scientific knowledge comes in two kinds: empirical facts (water boils at 100C under standard pressure, measured with the aid of instruments) and theoretical ideas (water is H2O molecules), and is almost all acquired by description. I'm not sure that theoretical ideas should count as knowledge in the earlier sense. It's not grounded in quite the same way as the former. But I can come to understand theoretical 'knowledge' and learn how to apply it in practical situations. None of this knowledge requires a philosophical analysis for it to be applicable in life, though many people will find in it philosophical puzzles to contemplate. But I don't at all see where the carpentry metaphor fits into this picture. Can anyone enlighten me?
Since I'm the one who wrote it, I suppose I can.
A hammer has the capacity to drive a nail into material. But being able to drive a nail into material is not useful unless it is for an intended purpose, such as within the field of carpentry. A hammer is a tool, carpentry is the guidance that makes use of the tool's capacity.
Science can tell me that a small object moving at high velocity can be lethal if it strikes a person in a vital area. Science cannot tell me that I should not shoot someone.
Science can design a nuclear weapon. It can't provide a reason not to employ it.
Science can provide much knowledge about how the natural world works, but it is utterly incompetent at making those facts useful. To do that requires something else to direct that knowledge toward a goal.
Philosophy is the framework in which facts are organized and directed. Religion is, in part, a narrative that also provides a framework through which to view the world. They have different purposes than science and operate on a different level. One is a tool, the other a worldview through which that tool is employed.
Another way of putting it that science and religion are like the left and right wheels on a two-wheeled cart. Lose either one, and you're likely to run into a ditch.
Religion without science runs the risk of being mere superstition. Science without religion can all too easily lead to Auschwitz, Hiroshima, and the Gulag.
Starhopper,
Another way of putting it that science and religion are like the left and right wheels on a two-wheeled cart. Lose either one, and you're likely to run into a ditch.
Religion without science runs the risk of being mere superstition. Science without religion can all too easily lead to Auschwitz, Hiroshima, and the Gulag.
Basic ethics is sufficient to rule out Auschwitz and the Gulags, the addition of religion is not needed.
I'd go further and say that science as conceived in the West would not have developed without Christianity as the framework.
For instance, if one believes the Olympian gods control the weather, then why waste time trying to predict it?
Christendom saw science as another way to know God. The God that created the universe with the same laws everwhere in a rational discoverable manner. It was this framework that allowed science (physics) to thrive and grow in the Christian West while it did not elsewhere in spite of fits and starts in various places and times.
I would agree that Christendom was a great promulgator of the notion that all people are worthy of respect and fundamentally equal.
Science has progressed in Christendom, the Islamic countries, under Confucianism, Buddhism, Hinduism, atheism, etc. It has also been held back by governments/ruling powers dedicated to these principles.
Kevin (and Starhopper),
I'm rather uncomfortable with your anthropomorphising of science (and religion): Science can tell, can design, can provide, is incompetent, runs risks, can lead, etc. 'Science' here is metonymic. It stands for 'We humans, applying scientific method and knowledge'. Then you say [Science is] utterly incompetent at making those facts useful. To do that requires something else to direct that knowledge toward a goal. That something else is obviously our human capacity to form goals and apply our knowledge to achieve them. But the wording suggests that the something else is a further kind of knowledge, such as philosophy or religion perhaps. If so, then there is other knowledge beyond the scientific, and Russell is refuted, though not by showing that his claim is self-refuting. But I think the argument hinges on an equivocation between the literal and the figurative interpretation of a metonymy.
Philosophy is the framework in which facts are organized and directed. This backs up the argument by advancing philosophy as knowledge. But to me it mischaracterises philosophy.
David,
Your posting leaves no room for allegory as a legitimate means of expression. Assigning human characteristics to symbolic objects is an effective method of communicating concepts that might otherwise take pages of tedious explanation.
Just look at your own paragraph above. By eschewing allegory, you required many more words to say what was essentially the same thing as proposed by Kevin and myself, simply by saying "science is ...".
DB: It's a bit rich to say of the co-author of Principia Mathematica that he lacks the stomach for hard work in philosophy.
I am not saying Russell wasn't capable of hard philosophical work. But, for example, in dealing with the Cosmological Argument he clearly presented it in a straw man fashion, presuming that it just said "everything has a cause, to the universe must have one, and it has to be God," ignoring the clear distinction between contingent beings and necessary beings.
That is the argument that simply refuses to die. I've seen (on YouTube) Richard Dawkins on numerous occasions thinking he's defeated the Cosmological Argument just by saying, "Well, then who made God?" as though that settles it.
Victor, The first para of my comment at 1:00 PM was in response to Starhopper at 6:38 AM. I could have made this clearer. A budding mathematician interested in logic, my teenage self found something of a hero in Russell.
Starhopper, if 'science' does indeed stand for 'we humans, applying scientific method and knowledge' then 'science is utterly incompetent at making those facts useful' is plainly false. One can hardly explicate metaphorical language by remaining entirely within it. It's worth a few extra words to avoid falling into the Well of Fallacy, in my view.
David,
"Science is utterly incompetent at making those facts useful" were Kevin's words, not mine.
Apologies, Starhopper, I understood from you required many more words to say what was essentially the same thing as proposed by Kevin and myself that you agreed with Kevin at 8:50 AM.
Apologies unnecessary, David. I should have made myself more clear. I wasn't agreeing with the substance of Kevin's posting as such, but rather with his mode of expression, i.e., he anthropomorphism of concepts such as "science".
I use "science is" in the same sense that others would use "Christianity is" because the two are often compared. And what we know about science is that it is wonderful for studying the natural world and providing the means to applying that knowledge.
But science absolutely sucks as a means of determining values or motivations behind applying knowledge. It simply cannot do that. There is not a single scientific experiment that can determine whether or not a human life has value and that murder is thus wrong. It can't determine that rape is wrong. It can determine that rape causes harm, it can determine that people want to avoid harm to themselves, but it can't determine that rape is WRONG.
Science can also provide the means for applying knowledge in a beneficial or lucrative manner, but again there is no experiment that can determine such things should be done.
For all of these things - morality, value, incentive, etc - one has to leave science behind. You say that is plainly false. It is plainly true.
Kevin,
Nice restating of your posting. I have no quarrel with what you are stating, other than you do not go far enough.
"Science" in and of itself not only cannot determine what is right or wrong, it tends to favor the "wrong" in actual practice. (There I go, anthropomorphing again!)
it tends to favor the "wrong" in actual practice
Which is tragically hilarious when certain anti-theistic sorts posture as if science is the moral salvation from the evil God belief.
Kevin, For all of these things - morality, value, incentive, etc - one has to leave science behind. Yes. While science might tell us something about the distribution of moral value (Haidt) or speculate about the evolution of moral sentiment (Ridley) it doesn't tell us what values and sentiments we ought to have. Russell's point is that no answer to this question can count as knowledge. As individuals we can know what values we in fact do have, and by observing others we can learn what values they have, and we can know what values we are expected to have in our society. Russell thinks that knowledge ends with science. Victor asks if Russell can know this scientifically. If he can't he would appear to refute himself. But it seems to me that Russell is entirely justified in his claim by intellectual history. The only way we have so far found of expanding our core of ordinary everyday knowledge is through the development of the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century. But this is far from the scientistic claim that the only genuine knowledge is scientific knowledge, or that all intellectual inquiry should follow the model of natural science, or any other way of characterising scientism.
Starhopper, "Science" in and of itself not only cannot determine what is right or wrong, it tends to favor the "wrong" in actual practice. Examples please! You may anthropomorphise! And why the (scare?) quotes?
Specific examples I was thinking of were such things as environmental destruction in the service of "progress" (again with the scare quotes), soulless consumerism, the vast inhumanism of the self described scientific ideologies of the 20th Century ("Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the entire country!" Stalin), eugenics, and the nuclear arms race.
Correction. The quote in my last posting ought to have been attributed to Lenin. Stalin merely popularized it in countless speeches.
That's quite a charge sheet. It seems that Galileo, Newton, and their intellectual descendants or their ideas, proofs, experiments, inventions, etc, are on trial for engendering some of the scourges of the twentieth century. Perhaps the defence could advance some of the good things to come from their work in mitigation. But it would be a pointless exercise given our situation. There is no road back to Eden. We must continue to solve our problems as we find them.
BTW, if we are to reject the Bolsheviks and all their works, then I think we should also reject their assessment of their ideology as scientific.
"[W]e should also reject their assessment of their ideology as scientific."
I think I did that with the use of the qualifier "self described". However, under the principle of "No True Scotsman", we ought to take them at their word. Otherwise, we end up saying things like "Well, no true scientist would ever design gas chambers for a death camp, or build an atomic bomb.
Well, I suppose the Bolsheviks did indeed perform an experiment :-)
More seriously, no discussion of the scientific status or otherwise of Marxism can omit Popper.
Don't worry.
Since "science" has become politicized, even science is not scientific.
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