Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy 

by Michael Polanyi

You have 860 highlighted passages

You have 165 notes

Last annotated on July 13, 2016

FOREWORD

Mary Jo Nye 

His philosophical targets included positivism, pragmatism, conventionalism, reductionism, mechanism, materialism, and determinism. In opposition to the mainstream in philosophy of science, Polanyi argued that objective empiricism and rule-bound logic do not successfully explain the essence of science. There is no codified scientific method that successfully captures the nature of science as it is actually practiced in everyday scientific life, because of what he called the tacit component of scientific learning and achievement. Nor, Polanyi argued, can philosophies of verification or falsification satisfactorily justify the truthfulness of scientific knowledge, because they fail to explain the logical gap between evidence and theory, a gap discussed by earlier philosophers such as David Hume.  Read more at location 123

the achievement of scientific knowledge relies on overcoming the gap between evidence and theory by a commitment of belief on the part of the individual scientist and of the community of experts in the field.  Read more at location 129

PERSONAL CONTEXT AND PREOCCUPATIONS OF MICHAEL POLANYI’S PHILOSOPHY 

He finished two degrees at the University of Budapest: a medical degree in 1913 and a PhD in physical chemistry in 1917.  Read more at location 152

He served in the Ministry of Health in 1919 in a short-lived Hungarian republican government, resigning his post when a communist regime came into power.  Read more at location 155

He is regarded as one of the founders of modern chemical kinetics based in thermodynamics and quantum theory.  Read more at location 160

After Adolf Hitler’s appointment as German Chancellor in late January 1933 and implementation of anti-Semitic laws in April 1933, Polanyi moved to Manchester where he headed the university’s physical chemistry laboratory.  Read more at location 166

In 1948 he exchanged his position in chemistry for a chair in social studies that was specifically created for him at the university.  Read more at location 169

In 1945 he published a book on employment and free trade in which he offered a positive brief for the efficacy of private enterprise as a system of spontaneous and mutually adjusting individual actions. Agreeing in part with the economic theories of John Maynard Keynes,  Read more at location 175

On a 1935 visit to the Soviet Union, Polanyi saw his niece Eva Striker, whose Viennese husband had accepted a research position in physics at the Kharkov Institute of Physics and Technology. Shortly after Polanyi’s visit, Eva was arrested on charges that she was part of a group aiming to kill Joseph Stalin. She spent a harrowing eighteen-month period in prison before she was freed and expelled from Russia. Arthur Koestler, who was a family friend, later said that Eva’s story was the inspiration for Darkness at Noon, his novel of Soviet terror and Stalinist purges.9  Read more at location 181

Polanyi’s loathing for centralized and repressive regimes, as he witnessed them in Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia, strongly influenced his economic and political writing,  Read more at location 185

he located his turn to philosophy of science in the specific case of Nikolai Vavilov, a Russian geneticist who became the target of Stalinist attacks in the mid-1930s on the ideological grounds that his plant research ignored Marxian principles. Western scientists learned in 1940 that Vavilov had been arrested, and they later discovered that he received a death sentence for espionage and died of malnutrition in 1943.  Read more at location 187

Polanyi suddenly realized, he later said, that Vavilov did not have a philosophy of science that satisfactorily explains what distinguishes true science from imposters and opponents. This is the demarcation problem. So Polanyi began posing questions about Western philosophy of science: “How was its general acceptance among us to be accounted for? Was this acceptance justified? On what grounds?”10 His conclusions surprised many philosophers of science.  Read more at location 194

PERSONAL KNOWLEDGE IN ITS PAST AND THE PRESENT

Biologists and philosophers of biology have largely found Polanyi’s discussion of evolutionary biology unsupported and unsound.  Read more at location 300

Polanyi’s antimechanistic views, however, and his emphasis on hierarchy and development in biology were in keeping with some work in contemporary biology,  Read more at location 306

Arguments of emergence and complexity became important, too, in organizational management and systems theory, in which Polanyi’s work found new applications by the 1990s.  Read more at location 310

Polanyi’s epistemology of science—notably his emphasis on tacit knowledge and on commitment of belief—was based in his experiences as a theoretical and laboratory scientist, as well as in his political and economic concerns. There have been few twentieth-century philosophers of science with his career scientific credentials, although many philosophers of science have had a mathematical or scientific education. As an accomplished scientist, Polanyi had special status in philosophy, but his status was also that of the outsider.  Read more at location 327

Philosophers asked what justifies belief in a theory, and Polanyi’s answer was quite different from the usual ones.  Read more at location 333

He argued that science is social in its very essence in the ways in which skills, standards, and tacit understandings are transmitted from person to person in an institutional system in which members act freely but work within mutual consensus. What counts as real science has to be learned within this system.  Read more at location 341

Thomas Kuhn, like Polanyi, judged Popper to be naive in his normative attitude that scientists should be eternally skeptical about their theories and that they should respond immediately to evidence of any anomaly that appears to falsify a theory.  Read more at location 356

Like Polanyi, Kuhn described science as a social community, and he highlighted the productive tension in science between tradition and innovation or between stability and change.  Read more at location 360

These four men occasionally saw each other during the 1950s, and they expressed criticism of each others’ views to varying degrees, with Popper especially vehement against Polanyi’s and Kuhn’s lines of argument.27 Among the four, Polanyi was the only one who took a realist position on the ontology of scientific explanation, comparing his conviction, as we have seen, to the worship of God.  Read more at location 363

Polanyi thought that he had successfully provided a philosophy that not only demarcated science from nonscience but also demonstrated how the scientific community provides a model for the political order by balancing individual liberty and collective authority, while not relinquishing the quest for transcendental truth.  Read more at location 381

Personal Knowledge reflects an identity of Polanyi as provocateur and polemicist. It challenges the reader to debate the tension between the rationalist ideal of value-free knowledge and the humanist ideal of ethically responsible knowledge.  Read more at location 388

PREFACE 

THIS is primarily an enquiry into the nature and justification of scientific knowledge. But my reconsideration of scientific knowledge leads on to a wide range of questions outside science. I start by rejecting the ideal of scientific detachment. In the exact sciences, this false ideal is perhaps harmless, for it is in fact disregarded there by scientists.  Read more at location 394

****  Personal Knowledge. The two words may seem to contradict each other: for true knowledge is deemed impersonal, universally established, objective. But the seeming contradiction is resolved by modifying the conception of knowing.  Read more at location 399

I regard knowing as an active comprehension of the things known, an action that requires skill. Skilful knowing and doing is performed by subordinating a set of particulars, as clues or tools, to the shaping of a skilful achievement, whether practical or theoretical. We may then be said to become ‘subsidiarily aware’ of these particulars within our ‘focal awareness’ of the coherent entity that we achieve.  Read more at location 402

****  (Note:   premise)  we cannot possess any fixed framework within which the re-shaping of our hitherto fixed framework could be critically tested. Such is the personal participation of the knower in all acts of understanding. But this does not make our understanding subjective. Comprehension is neither an arbitrary act nor a passive experience, but a responsible act claiming universal validity. Such knowing is indeed objective in the sense of establishing contact with a hidden reality; a contact that is defined as the condition for anticipating an indeterminate range of yet unknown (and perhaps yet inconceivable) true implications. It seems reasonable to describe this fusion of the personal and the objective as Personal Knowledge.  Read more at location 407

PART ONE

THE ART OF KNOWING 

CHAPTER 1.  OBJECTIVITY

1. THE LESSON OF THE COPERNICAN REVOLUTION 

as human beings, we must inevitably see the universe from a centre lying within ourselves and speak about it in terms of a human language shaped by the exigencies of human intercourse. Any attempt rigorously to eliminate our human perspective from our picture of the world must lead to absurdity.  Read more at location 473

Why did Copernicus exchange his actual terrestrial station for an imaginary solar standpoint? The only justification for this lay in the greater intellectual satisfaction he derived from the celestial panorama as seen from the sun instead of the earth. Copernicus gave preference to man’s delight in abstract theory, at the price of rejecting the evidence of our senses, which present us with the irresistible fact of the sun, the moon, and the stars rising daily in the east to travel across the sky towards their setting in the west. In a literal sense, therefore, the new Copernican system was as anthropocentric as the Ptolemaic view, the difference being merely that it preferred to satisfy a different human affection.  Read more at location 475

if we accept this very shift in the nature of intellectual satisfaction as the criterion of greater objectivity. This would imply that, of two forms of knowledge, we should consider as more objective that which relies to a greater measure on theory rather than on more immediate sensory experience.  Read more at location 481

It seems to me that we have sound reasons for thus considering theoretical knowledge as more objective than immediate experience.  Read more at location 486

(a) A theory is something other than myself. It may be set out on paper as a system of rules, and it is the more truly a theory the more completely it can be put down in such terms. Mathematical theory reaches the highest perfection in this respect.  Read more at location 487

Indeed, all theory may be regarded as a kind of map extended over space and time.  Read more at location 490

(b) A theory, moreover, cannot be led astray by my personal illusions. To find my way by a map I must perform the conscious act of map-reading and I may be deluded in the process, but the map cannot be deluded and remains right or wrong in itself, impersonally.  Read more at location 493

(c) Since the formal affirmations of a theory are unaffected by the state of the person accepting it, theories may be constructed without regard to one’s normal approach to experience. This is a third reason why the Copernican system, being more theoretical than the Ptolemaic, is also more objective.  Read more at location 496

Thus, when we claim greater objectivity for the Copernican theory, we do imply that its excellence is, not a matter of personal taste on our part, but an inherent quality deserving universal acceptance by rational creatures.  Read more at location 500

(Note: Faith in science)  The intellectual satisfaction which the heliocentric system originally provided, and which gained acceptance for it, proved to be the token of a deeper significance unknown to its originator. Unknown but not entirely unsuspected; for those who wholeheartedly embraced the Copernican system at an early stage committed themselves thereby to the expectation of an indefinite range of possible future confirmations of the theory, and this expectation was essential to their belief in the superior rationality and objective validity of the system.  Read more at location 508

of the greatest scientific discoveries of our age have been rightly described as the amazing confirmations of accepted scientific theories. In this wholly indeterminate scope of its true implications lies the deepest sense in which objectivity is attributed to a scientific theory.  Read more at location 514

2. THE GROWTH OF MECHANISM 

Pythagoras and his followers did not, like the Ionians, try to describe the universe in terms of certain material elements (fire, air, water, etc.) but interpreted it exclusively in terms of numbers. They took numbers to be the ultimate substance, as well as the form, of things and processes. When sounding an octave they believed they could hear the simple numerical ratio of 1:2 in the harmonious chiming of the sounds from two wires whose lengths had the ratio 1:2.  Read more at location 533

They turned their eyes towards the heavens and saw the perfect circle of the sun and moon; they watched the diurnal rotation of the firmament and, studying the planets, saw them governed by a complex system of steady circular motions; and they apprehended these celestial perfections in the way one listens to a pure musical interval. They listened to the music of the spheres in a state of mystic communion.  Read more at location 537

The revival of astronomical theory by Copernicus after two millennia was a conscious return to the Pythagorean tradition.  Read more at location 540

After Copernicus, Kepler continued wholeheartedly the Pythagorean quest for harmonious numbers and geometrical excellence.  Read more at location 544

Passing from Kepler to Galileo, we see the transition to a dynamics in which for the first time numbers enter as measured quantities into mathematical formulae. But with Galileo this usage applies only to terrestrial events, while in respect to heavenly motions he still holds the Pythagorean view that the book of nature is written in geometrical characters.3 In the Two Great Systems of the World (1632), he argues in the Pythagorean tradition from the principle that the parts of the world are perfectly ordered.4 He still believes that the motion of the heavenly bodies—in fact all natural motion as such—must be circular.  Read more at location 565

But a different line of approach was already advancing gradually, stemming from the other line of Greek thought which lacked the mysticism of Pythagoras, and which recorded observations of all kinds of things, however imperfect. This school, derived from the Ionian philosophers, culminated in Democritus, a contemporary of Socrates, who first taught men to think in materialistic terms. He laid down the principle: ‘By convention coloured, by convention sweet, by convention bitter; in reality only atoms and the void.’5 With this Galileo himself agreed; the mechanical properties of things alone were primary (to borrow Locke’s terminology), their other properties were derivative, or secondary.  Read more at location 577

Yet there is a definite change from the Pythagorean to the Ionian conception of theoretical knowledge. Numbers and geometrical forms are no longer assumed to be inherent as such in Nature. Theory no longer reveals perfection; it no longer contemplates the harmonies of Creation. In Newtonian mechanics the formulae governing the mechanical substratum of the universe were differential equations, containing no numerical rules and exhibiting no geometrical symmetry. Henceforth ‘pure’ mathematics, formerly the key to nature’s mysteries, became strictly separated from the application of mathematics to the formulation of empirical laws.  Read more at location 587

The separation of reason and experience was pressed further by the discovery of non-Euclidean geometry. Mathematics was thereafter denied the capacity of stating anything beyond sets of tautologies formulated within a conventional framework of notations. Physical theories were correspondingly also subjected to a further reduction of status.  Read more at location 594

In so far as a theory cannot be tested by experience—or appears not capable of being so tested—it ought to be revised so that its predictions are restricted to observable magnitudes. This view, which can be traced back to Locke and Hume, and which in its massive modern absurdity has almost entirely dominated twentieth-century thinking on science, seems to be the inevitable consequence of separating, in principle, mathematical knowledge from empirical knowledge.  Read more at location 604

3. RELATIVITY 

usual textbook account of relativity as a theoretical response to the Michelson-Morley experiment is an invention. It is the product of a philosophical prejudice.  Read more at location 640

The Michelson-Morley experiment of 1887, which Einstein mentions in support of his theory and which the textbooks have since falsely enshrined as the crucial evidence which compelled him to formulate it, actually did not give the result required by relativity!  Read more at location 664

(Note: Example of faith in scientific theory, despite conflicting evidence)  The layman, taught to revere scientists for their absolute respect for the observed facts, and for the judiciously detached and purely provisional manner in which they hold scientific theories (always ready to abandon a theory at the sight of any contradictory evidence), might well have thought that, at Miller’s announcement of this overwhelming evidence of a ‘positive effect’ in his presidential address to the American Physical Society on December 29th, 1925, his audience would have instantly abandoned the theory of relativity. Or, at the very least, that scientists—wont to look down from the pinnacle of their intellectual humility upon the rest of dogmatic mankind—might suspend judgment in this matter until Miller’s results could be accounted for without impairing the theory of relativity. But no: by that time they had so well closed their minds to any suggestion which threatened the new rationality achieved by Einstein’s world-picture, that it was almost impossible for them to think again in different terms. Little attention was paid to the experiments, the evidence being set aside in the hope that it would one day turn out to be wrong.12 The experience of D. C. Miller demonstrates quite plainly the hollow-ness of the assertion that science is simply based on experiments which anybody can repeat at will.  Read more at location 672

*********  (Note:  trust in scientific paradigm is key to conclusions)  any critical verification of a scientific statement requires the same powers for recognizing rationality in nature as does the process of scientific discovery, even though it exercises these at a lower level. When philosophers analyse the verification of scientific laws, they invariably choose as specimens such laws as are not in doubt, and thus inevitably overlook the intervention of these powers.  Read more at location 682

At the time that Miller announced his results, relativity had yet made few predictions that could be confirmed by experiment. Its empirical support lay mainly in a number of already known observations. The account which the new theory gave of these known phenomena was considered rational, since it derived them from one single convincingly rational principle. It was the same as when Newton’s comprehensive account of Kepler’s Three Laws, of the moon’s period and of terrestrial gravitation—in terms of a general theory of universal gravitation—was immediately given a position of surpassing authority, even before any predictions had been deduced from it.  Read more at location 688

Relativity, and subsequently quantum mechanics and modern physics generally, have moved back towards a mathematical conception of reality.  Read more at location 705

Thus relativity has restored, up to a point, the blend of geometry and physics which Pythagorean thought had first naively taken for granted.  Read more at location 712

The opportunity to expand geometry so as to include the laws of dynamics was offered by its generalization into many-dimensional and non-Euclidean space, and this was accomplished by work in pure mathematics, before any empirical investigation of these results could even be imagined.  Read more at location 715

The laws of physical dynamics now appeared as geometrical theorems of a four-dimensional non-Euclidean space. Subsequent investigation by Einstein led, by a further generalization of this type of geometry, to the general theory of relativity, its postulates being so chosen as to produce invariant expressions with regard to all frames of reference assumed to be physically equivalent.  Read more at location 718

4. OBJECTIVITY AND MODERN PHYSICS 

modern man has set up as the ideal of knowledge the conception of natural science as a set of statements which is ‘objective’ in the sense that its substance is entirely determined by observation, even while its presentation may be shaped by convention. This conception, stemming from a craving rooted in the very depths of our culture, would be shattered if the intuition of rationality in nature had to be acknowledged as a justifiable and indeed essential part of scientific theory.  Read more at location 728

What has just been said of ‘simplicity’ applies equally to ‘symmetry’ and ‘economy’. They are contributing elements in the excellence of a theory, but can account for its merit only if the meanings of these terms are stretched far beyond their usual scope, so as to include the much deeper qualities which make the scientists rejoice in a vision like that of relativity. They must stand for those peculiar intellectual harmonies which reveal, more profoundly and permanently than any sense-experience, the presence of objective truth. I shall call this practice a pseudo-substitution. It is used to play down man’s real and indispensable intellectual powers for the sake of maintaining an ‘objectivist’ framework which in fact cannot account for them.  Read more at location 746

We shall find Personal Knowledge manifested in the appreciation of probability and of order in the exact sciences, and see it at work even more extensively in the way the descriptive sciences rely on skills and connoisseurship. At all these points the act of knowing includes an appraisal; and this personal coefficient, which shapes all factual knowledge, bridges in doing so the disjunction between subjectivity and objectivity. It implies the claim that man can transcend his own subjectivity by striving passionately to fulfil his personal obligations to universal standards.  Read more at location 755

CHAPTER 2.  PROBABILITY 

1. PROGRAMME 

****  complete objectivity as usually attributed to the exact sciences is a delusion and is in fact a false ideal. But I shall not try to repudiate strict objectivity as an ideal without offering a substitute, which I believe to be more worthy of intelligent allegiance; this I have called ‘personal knowledge’.  Read more at location 761

2. UNAMBIGUOUS STATEMENTS  

The avowed purpose of the exact sciences is to establish complete intellectual control over experience in terms of precise rules which can be formally set out and empirically tested. Could that ideal be fully achieved, all truth and all error could henceforth be ascribed to an exact theory of the universe, while we who accept this theory would be relieved of any occasion for exercising our personal judgment: we should only have to follow the rules faithfully. Classical mechanics approaches this ideal so closely that it is often thought to have achieved it. But this leaves out of account the element of personal judgment involved in applying the formulae of mechanics to the facts of experience.  Read more at location 770

any correlation between a measured number introduced into an exact theory and the corresponding instrument readings, rests on an estimate of observational errors which cannot be definitively prescribed by rule.  Read more at location 784

Experimental psychology, of which Bessel thus laid the foundation, has since taught us universally to expect such individual variations in perceptive faculties. We must always assume, therefore, that some trace of a hidden personal bias may systematically affect the result of a series of readings.  Read more at location 794

(Note: Why faith is key to science)  even so, this process always sets aside conceivable doubts regarding the application of any definite set of rules, and without this no scientific work could ever be accomplished and no scientific statement could be asserted. We have here an essential personal participation of the scientist even in the most exact operations of science.  Read more at location 798

****  (Note:   again, faith in science)  Contrary to current opinion, it is not the case that a proven discrepancy between theoretical predictions and observed data suffices in itself to invalidate a theory. Such discrepancies may often be classed as anomalies. The perturbations of the planetary motions that were observed during 60 years preceding the discovery of Neptune, and which could not be explained by the mutual interaction of the planets, were rightly set aside at the time as anomalies by most astronomers,  Read more at location 801

(Note: Again, faith in science)  Speaking more generally, we may say that there are always some conceivable scruples which scientists customarily set aside in the process of verifying an exact theory. Such acts of personal judgment form an essential part of science.  Read more at location 805

3. PROBABILITY STATEMENTS 

Probability statements can never be strictly contradicted by experience, even if we assume that all external perturbations and all observational errors are entirely eliminated.  Read more at location 816

There is a story of a dog-owner who prided himself on the perfect training of his pet. Whenever he called: ‘Here! will you come or not!’ the dog invariably either came or not. That is exactly how electrons behave when controlled by probability.  Read more at location 823

****  (Note:  ironic paradox)  I ascribe universal validity to my appraisals of probability, in spite of the fact that they make no predictions which could be contradicted by any conceivable events.  Read more at location 837

it is clear that a probability statement cannot be strictly contradicted by any event, however improbable this event may appear in its light. The contradiction must be established by a personal act of appraisal which rejects certain possibilities as being too improbable to be entertained as true.  Read more at location 879

4. PROBABILITY OF PROPOSITIONS 

so far as we arrive at probability statements on the lines of the statistical method illustrated by Darwin’s or Rhine’s investigations, or as made every day about the toss of a coin, these are statements about probable events and not probable statements about events.  Read more at location 912

The expectations induced in group (1) appear similar to those affirmed by classical physics. Arising from a confrontation of the subject with an unambiguous correlation of sign and event, these expectations are sharply disappointed the moment the correlation is discontinued and they are quickly abandoned in consequence. By contrast, the expectations induced in group (2) appear similar to those of quantum mechanics or any other probability statement such as refers, e.g., to the spin of a coin. They are not easily disappointed by any turn of events, though they are gradually weakened and eventually extinguished altogether, when they can be upheld only by considering the events which have actually occurred as having been extremely improbable. We can relate these psychological observations to our logical analysis of empirical inference by endorsing the process which they describe as a rational mode of behaviour on the part of the subjects.  Read more at location 925

We note that the fiduciary element contained both in an unambiguous affirmation and in the affirmation of a probability may vary from a sense of unshakable certitude down to a mere lingering trace of suspicion. I shall acknowledge it as reasonable to make either kind of affirmation, and to entertain the corresponding expectations the more confidently, the more consistently they are borne out by experience. I shall acknowledge it as reasonable also to allow our confidence to ebb away and gradually to vanish altogether if experience continues to conflict with these affirmations, or if it can be reconciled with them only on the assumption that the events that have occurred were exceedingly improbable.  Read more at location 935

5. THE NATURE OF ASSERTIONS 

The Cambridge astronomer Challis who undertook to verify the hypothesis of Leverrier and Adams concerning the existence of a new planet, sighted the undiscovered planet four times during the summer of 1846, and once even noticed that it appeared to have a disc, but these facts made no impression on him, for he distrusted altogether the hypothesis which he was testing.9 Challis acted mistakenly; but the example of D. C. Miller has shown that it may be equally wrong to go on investigating facts that seem to contradict a theory which is sufficiently well established on different grounds. Indeed, no scientist can forgo selecting his evidence in the light of heuristic expectations. And besides, we shall see that he may well be unable to tell on what evidence E his belief in a hypothesis H is founded.  Read more at location 1021

6. MAXIMS 

The selection and testing of scientific hypotheses are personal acts, but like other such acts they are subject to rules and the probability scheme may be accepted as a set of such rules.  Read more at location 1032

I shall have more to say about the curious nature of rules of art, which I should like to call maxims. Maxims are rules, the correct application of which is part of the art which they govern.  Read more at location 1033

Maxims cannot be understood, still less applied by anyone not already possessing a good practical knowledge of the art. They derive their interest from our appreciation of the art and cannot themselves either replace or establish that appreciation. Another person may use my scientific maxims for the guidance of his inductive inference and yet come to quite different conclusions. It is owing to this manifest ambiguity that maxims can function only—as I have said—within a framework of personal judgment.  Read more at location 1036

7. GRADING OF CONFIDENCE

we may designate in the same terms a belief H—whether unambiguous or statistical—that is, or was, held on some specific evidence E by another person, or by ourselves at another time. Such a belief may again be considered then with varying grades of approval, and this establishes the bearing of the symbol P(H/E) on the whole range of beliefs, all the way from what are approved as rational beliefs to beliefs as compulsive conditions observed psychologically.13  Read more at location 1071

CHAPTER 3.  ORDER 

1. CHANCE AND ORDER 

When I say that an event is governed by chance, I deny that it is governed by order. Any numerical assessment of the probability that a certain event has occurred by chance can be made only with a view to the alternative possibility of its being governed by a particular pattern of orderliness.  Read more at location 1079

a fresh example of the kind of statistical judgment I have in mind here. At the border between England and Wales you pass a small town called Abergele. Its railway station has a beautifully kept garden in which, sprawling across the lawn, you are faced with the inscription, set out in small white pebbles: ‘Welcome to Wales by British Railways.’  Read more at location 1082

But suppose that some years later, the thoughtful station-master having died, the pebbles became scattered all over the station garden of Abergele, and that on returning to the place we were to seek out the previously eloquent stones and map out on a sheet of paper exactly their present position. Might we not get into serious difficulty if we were now asked once more: what is the chance of the pebbles having arranged themselves in this particular manner by mere accident? The previous computation—dividing by the number of all possible configurations of the pebbles within the garden the narrowly restricted number of configurations which represent their present arrangement shown by our map—would again yield a fantastically small value for the probability of this particular arrangement. Yet obviously we are not prepared to say that this arrangement has not come about by chance. Now why this sudden change in our methods of inference? Actually, there is no change: we have merely stumbled on a tacit assumption of our argument which we ought to make explicit now. We have assumed from the start that the arrangement of the pebbles which formed an intelligible set of words appropriate to the occasion represented a distinctive pattern. It was only in view of this orderliness that the question could be asked at all whether the orderliness was accidental or not. When the pebbles are scattered irregularly over the whole available area they possess no pattern and therefore the question whether the orderly pattern is accidental or not cannot arise.  Read more at location 1091

Natural selection tells us only why the unfit failed to survive and not why any living beings, either fit or unfit, ever came into existence. As a solution for our problem it is logically on a par with the method of catching a lion by catching two and letting one escape.  Read more at location 1123

I wish to suggest that the conception of events governed by chance implies a reference to orderly patterns which such events can simulate only by coincidence.  Read more at location 1130

I suggest, quite generally, that the appraisal of order is an act of personal knowledge, exactly as is the assessment of probability to which it is allied. This is, of course, quite evident when the ordered pattern is contrived by ourselves; such cases may help us therefore to recognize the principle asserted here and to see that it holds quite generally.  Read more at location 1132

If all knowledge can be shown to be personal, it may appear that this does no more than attach new labels to our customary concepts. This is avoided, however, by the fact that the degree of our personal participation varies greatly within our various acts of knowing. We can normally distinguish in everything we know some relatively objective facts supporting a supervening personal fact.  Read more at location 1135

I shall carry forward the conclusion that the distinctiveness of an orderly pattern—whether deliberately contrived or found inherent in nature—is revealed by its improbability, and that as such it cannot be strictly contradicted by experience. This, however, is not to say that orderly patterns are subjective. My recognition of a pattern may be subjective, but only in the sense that it is mistaken.  Read more at location 1157

2. RANDOMNESS AND SIGNIFICANT PATTERN 

we accredit our capacity for knowing randomness from order in nature and that this distinction cannot be based on considerations of numerical probabilities, since the calculus of probabilities presupposes, on the contrary, our capacity to understand and recognize randomness in nature.  Read more at location 1225

3. THE LAW OF CHEMICAL PROPORTIONS

It is indeed meaningless to speak of establishing a correspondence between measured quantities and integers unless the condition is included that the integers should be small and their fractions simple. In accepting as significant a law of nature like that of simple chemical proportions, we claim that we can evaluate observed magnitudes in terms of simple integer fractions. Note the word ‘simple’! To the extent to which the attribute of simplicity is vague, the demands which a law of simple proportions makes on experience are indeterminate.  Read more at location 1250

4. CRYSTALLOGRAPHY 

each individual crystal is taken to represent an ideal of regularity, all actual deviations from which are regarded as imperfections. This ideal shape is found by assuming that the approximately plane surfaces of crystals are geometrical planes which extend to the straight edges in which such planes must meet, thus bounding the crystal on all sides.  Read more at location 1293

Each class of symmetry is a distinctive standard of perfect order to which observed specimens approximate, but these standards themselves possess different degrees of their own form of perfection. The 32 classes of symmetry can be arranged roughly in a line of descending symmetries, from the highest cubic to the lowest triclinic class.  Read more at location 1319

The principle of atomic orderliness is an extension of the conception of symmetry. If an operation which brings one part of a figure into coincidence with another part of it is defined as constituting a symmetry, a repetitive pattern like that of a wall paper may be regarded as symmetrical,  Read more at location 1330

When experienced orderliness is taken to be an embodiment of geometry, it may become possible to test its correspondence to experience. The observation of relativistic phenomena has served as an experimental test for deciding whether the material universe was an instance of Riemann’s geometry formulated in space-time by Einstein’s rules, when combined with the assumption of trajectories being geodetics.  Read more at location 1352

A classification is significant if it tells us a great deal about an object once this is identified as belonging to one of its classes. Such a system may be said to classify objects according to their distinctive nature. The distinctiveness of the 230 space groups, like that of the 32 classes of crystal symmetry, rests purely on our appreciation of order; they embody in terms of specific symmetries the claim to universality which we necessarily attach to our personal conceptions of order.  Read more at location 1370

****  (Note:   paradigm where rules and grouping create closed case)  Here stands revealed a system of knowledge of immense value for the understanding of experience, to which the conception of falsifiability seems altogether inapplicable. Facts which are not described by the theory create no difficulty for the theory, for it regards them as irrelevant to itself. Such a theory functions as a comprehensive idiom which consolidates that experience to which it is apposite and leaves unheeded whatever is not comprehended by it.  Read more at location 1376

The theory of ideal gases cannot be disproved by observed deviations from it, so long as they are of the kind which we are supposed to disregard. Such idealizations do in fact express an element of the same contemplative appreciation of which the a priori construction and acceptance of a complete system of symmetries is a fully constituted example. We can be legitimately attracted by the concept of ideal gases only in as much as we believe in our capacity for appreciating a kind of fundamental orderliness in nature which underlies some of its less orderly appearances.  Read more at location 1383

the theory of crystal symmetries idealization goes beyond this. For the standards of excellence which are developed by this system possess a much higher degree of intrinsic significance than the formula pv = RT may claim for itself. It is not merely a scientific idealization but the formalization of an aesthetic ideal, closely akin to that deeper and never rigidly definable sensibility by which the domains of art and art-criticism are governed. That is why this theory teaches us to appreciate certain things, regardless of whether we may find any of their kind in nature, and allows us also to criticize these things when we find them, to the extent to which they fall short of the standards which the theory sets for nature.  Read more at location 1387

the aim of a skilful performance is achieved by the observance of a set of rules which are not known as such to the person following them.  Read more at location 1401

Rules of art can be useful, but they do not determine the practice of an art; they are maxims, which can serve as a guide to an art only if they can be integrated into the practical knowledge of the art. They cannot replace this knowledge.  Read more at location 1415

2. DESTRUCTIVE ANALYSIS 

Musicians regard it as a glaringly obvious fact that the sounding of a note on the piano can be done in different ways, depending on the ‘touch’ of the pianist. To acquire the right touch is the endeavour of every learner, and the mature artist counts its possession among his chief accomplishments. A pianist’s touch is prized alike by the public and by his pupils: it has a great value in money. Yet when the process of sounding a note on the piano is analysed, it appears difficult to account for the existence of ‘touch’.  Read more at location 1419

****  (Note:   paradoxical)  This example should stand for many others which teach the same lesson; namely that to deny the feasibility of something that is alleged to have been done or the possibility of an event that is supposed to have been observed, merely because we cannot understand in terms of our hitherto accepted framework how it could have been done or could have happened, may often result in explaining away quite genuine practices or experiences. Yet this method of criticism is indispensable, and without its constant exercise no scientist or technician could keep a steady course among the many spurious observations which he has to set aside unexplained every day.  Read more at location 1435

Great industries, like the tanneries, the potteries or steel mills, like the breweries and the whole range of textile manufactures, as well as agriculture in its numberless branches, have realized in these days that they were carrying on their activities in the manner of an art without any clear knowledge of the constituent detailed operations.  Read more at location 1459

The attempt to analyse scientifically the established industrial arts has everywhere led to similar results. Indeed even in the modern industries the indefinable knowledge is still an essential part of technology. I have myself watched in Hungary a new, imported machine for blowing electric lamp bulbs, the exact counterpart of which was operating successfully in Germany, failing for a whole year to produce a single flawless bulb.  Read more at location 1468

3. TRADITION 

*********  (Note:   tacit knowledge, subconscious)  An art which cannot be specified in detail cannot be transmitted by prescription, since no prescription for it exists. It can be passed on only by example from master to apprentice.  Read more at location 1472

while the articulate contents of science are successfully taught all over the world in hundreds of new universities, the unspecifiable art of scientific research has not yet penetrated to many of these.  Read more at location 1476

****  (Note:   fascinating)  It follows that an art which has fallen into disuse for the period of a generation is altogether lost. There are hundreds of examples of this to which the process of mechanization is continuously adding new ones. These losses are usually irretrievable. It is pathetic to watch the endless efforts—equipped with microscopy and chemistry, with mathematics and electronics—to reproduce a single violin of the kind the half-literate Stradi-varius turned out as a matter of routine more than 200 years ago.  Read more at location 1481

(Note: Mystical acquisition of knowledge, both explicit and tacit)  By watching the master and emulating his efforts in the presence of his example, the apprentice unconsciously picks up the rules of the art, including those which are not explicitly known to the master himself. These hidden rules can be assimilated only by a person who surrenders himself to that extent uncritically to the imitation of another. A society which wants to preserve a fund of personal knowledge must submit to tradition.  Read more at location 1485

They are to be found in the practice of the Common Law, which is the most important system of strictly reasoned traditional activities. Common Law is founded on precedent.  Read more at location 1493

4. CONNOISSEURSHIP 

Connoisseurship, like skill, can be communicated only by example, not by precept. To become an expert wine-taster, to acquire a knowledge of innumerable different blends of tea or to be trained as a medical diagnostician, you must go through a long course of experience under the guidance of a master.  Read more at location 1508

Wherever connoisseurship is found operating within science or technology we may assume that it persists only because it has not been possible to replace it by a measurable grading. For a measurement has the advantage of greater objectivity, as shown by the fact that measurements give consistent results in the hands of different observers all over the world, while such objectivity is rarely achieved in the case of physiognomic appreciations.7 The large amount of time spent by students of chemistry, biology and medicine in their practical courses shows how greatly these sciences rely on the transmission of skills and connoisseurship from master to apprentice.  Read more at location 1514

5. TWO KINDS OF AWARENESS 

the unspecifiability of skills is closely related to the findings of Gestalt psychology. Yet my evaluation of this material is so different from that of Gestalt theory, that I shall prefer not to refer here to this theory, even though I shall continue to draw on its domain  Read more at location 1521

When we use a hammer to drive in a nail, we attend to both nail and hammer, but in a different way. We watch the effect of our strokes on the nail and try to wield the hammer so as to hit the nail most effectively.  Read more at location 1525

I have a subsidiary awareness of the feeling in the palm of my hand which is merged into my focal awareness of my driving in the nail.  Read more at location 1531

****  We have here the transition from ‘knowing how’ to ‘knowing what’ and can see how closely similar is the structure of the two. Subsidiary awareness and focal awareness are mutually exclusive. If a pianist shifts his attention from the piece he is playing to the observation of what he is doing with his fingers while playing it, he gets confused and may have to stop.  Read more at location 1534

****  the particulars of a pattern or a tune must be apprehended jointly, for if you observe the particulars separately they form no pattern or tune. It may be argued that my attending to the pattern or tune as a whole implies its being appreciated as a pattern or a tune, and this would be contradicted by switching my focal attention to the single notes of the tune or the fragments of the pattern.  Read more at location 1556

This scheme can be easily reformulated and expanded in terms of meaning. If we discredit the usefulness of a tool, its meaning as a tool is gone. All particulars become meaningless if we lose sight of the pattern which they jointly constitute. The most pregnant carriers of meaning are of course the words of a language, and it is interesting to recall that when we use words in speech or writing we are aware of them only in a subsidiary manner. This fact, which is usually described as the transparency of language,  Read more at location 1561

6. WHOLES AND MEANINGS 

(Note: Paradigm by a different name)  the logical structure in which a person commits himself to certain beliefs and appreciations, and accepts certain meanings by deliberately merging his awareness of certain particulars into a focal awareness of a whole.  Read more at location 1573

the more sharply we scrutinize a physiognomy, the more keenly are we alert to its particulars. Also when something is seen as subsidiary to a whole, this implies that it participates in sustaining the whole, and we may now regard this function as its meaning, within the whole.  Read more at location 1577

The more clear-cut cases of meaning are those in which one thing (e.g. a word) means another thing (e.g. an object). In this case the corresponding wholes are perhaps not obvious, but we may legitimately follow Tolman in amalgamating sign and object into one whole.9 Other kinds of things, like a physiognomy, a tune or a pattern, are manifestly wholes but this time their meaning is somewhat problematic, for though they are clearly not meaningless, they mean something only in themselves. The distinction between two kinds of awareness allows us readily to acknowledge these two kinds of wholes and two kinds of meaning. Remembering  Read more at location 1580

We may describe the kind of meaning which a context possesses in itself as existential, to distinguish it especially from denotative or, more generally, representative meaning. In this sense pure mathematics has an existential meaning, while a mathematical theory in physics has a denotative meaning. The meaning of music is mainly existential, that of a portrait more or less representative, and so on.  Read more at location 1586

7. TOOLS AND FRAMEWORKS 

Our subsidiary awareness of tools and probes can be regarded now as the act of making them form a part of our own body. The way we use a hammer or a blind man uses his stick, shows in fact that in both cases we shift outwards the points at which we make contact with the things that we observe as objects outside ourselves.  Read more at location 1604

8. COMMITMENT 

****  (Note:   paradigm is basis of understanding)  I suggest now that the supposed pre-suppositions of science are so futile because the actual foundations of our scientific beliefs cannot be asserted at all. When we accept a certain set of pre-suppositions and use them as our interpretative framework, we may be said to dwell in them as we do in our own body. Their uncritical acceptance for the time being consists in a process of assimilation by which we identify ourselves with them. They are not asserted and cannot be asserted, for assertion can be made only within a framework with which we have identified ourselves for the time being; as they are themselves our ultimate framework, they are essentially inarticulable.11 It is by his assimilation of the framework of science that the scientist makes sense of experience.  Read more at location 1618

Like the tool, the sign or the symbol can be conceived as such only in the eyes of a person who relies on them to achieve or to signify something. This reliance is a personal commitment which is involved in all acts of intelligence by which we integrate some things subsidiarily to the centre of our focal attention.  Read more at location 1646

We may say, more generally, that by the effort by which I concentrate on my chosen plane of operation I succeed in absorbing all the elements of the situation of which I might otherwise be aware in themselves, so that I become aware of them now in terms of the operational results achieved through their use.  Read more at location 1657

9. UNSPECIFIABILITY 

(Note: Akin to mechanics of specialized skills, which once learned to a high skill level, can no longer be deconstructed)  If a set of particulars which have subsided into our subsidiary awareness lapses altogether from our consciousness, we may end up by forgetting about them altogether and may lose sight of them beyond recall. In this sense they may have become unspecifiable. However, this seems only a minor reason for unspecifiability, which is accounted for essentially by a somewhat different, if closely related process.  Read more at location 1666

*****  (Note:   transcending conceptual objective guides discrete motor functions below conscious awareness)  We may add that this will hold not only of objects which are made use of as tools, but also of the performer’s own muscular actions which may subserve his purpose. If these actions are experienced only subsidiarily, in terms of an achievement to which they contribute, its performance may select from them those which the performer finds helpful, without ever knowing these as they would appear to him when considered in themselves. This is the usual process of unconscious trial and error by which we feel our way to success and may continue to improve on our success without specifiably knowing how we do it—for we never meet the causes of our success as identifiable things  Read more at location 1672

This is how you invent a method of swimming without knowing that it consists in regulating your breath in a particular manner, or discover the principle of cycling without realizing that it consists in the adjustment of your momentary direction and velocity, so as to counteract continuously your momentary accidental unbalance. Hence the practical discovery of a wide range of not consciously known rules of skill and connoisseurship which comprise important technical processes that can rarely be completely specified,  Read more at location 1677

The unspecifiability of the process by which we thus feel our way forward accounts for the possession by humanity of an immense mental domain, not only of knowledge but of manners, of laws and of the many different arts which man knows how to use, comply with, enjoy or live by, without specifiably knowing their contents.  Read more at location 1681

*********   The act of personal knowing can sustain these relations only because the acting person believes that they are apposite: that he has not made them but discovered them. The effort of knowing is thus guided by a sense of obligation towards the truth: by an effort to submit to reality. Moreover, since every act of personal knowing appreciates the coherence of certain particulars, it implies also submission to certain standards of coherence.  Read more at location 1696

10. SUMMARY 

****  Yet personal knowledge in science is not made but discovered, and as such it claims to establish contact with reality beyond the clues on which it relies. It commits us, passionately and far beyond our comprehension, to a vision of reality. Of this responsibility we cannot divest ourselves by setting up objective criteria of verifiability—or falsifiability, or testability, or what you will. For we live in it as in the garment of our own skin. Like love, to which it is akin, this commitment is a ‘shirt of flame’, blazing with passion and, also like love, consumed by devotion to a universal demand. Such is the true sense of objectivity in science, which I illustrated in my first chapter. I called it the discovery of rationality in nature, a name which was meant to say that the kind of order which the discoverer claims to see in nature goes far beyond his understanding; so that his triumph lies precisely in his foreknowledge of a host of yet hidden implications which his discovery will reveal in later days to other eyes.  Read more at location 1711

****  The arts of doing and knowing, the valuation and the understanding of meanings, are thus seen to be only different aspects of the act of extending our person into the subsidiary awareness of particulars which compose a whole. The inherent structure of this fundamental act of personal knowing makes us both necessarily participate in its shaping and acknowledge its results with universal intent. This is the prototype of intellectual commitment. It is the act of commitment in its full structure that saves personal knowledge from being merely subjective. Intellectual commitment is a responsible decision, in submission to the compelling claims of what in good conscience I conceive to be true.  Read more at location 1730

PART TWO

THE TACIT COMPONENT 

CHAPTER 5.  ARTICULATION

1. INTRODUCTION 

At the age of 15 to 18 months the mental development of the chimpanzee is nearing completion; that of the child is only about to start. By responding to people who talk to it, the child soon begins to understand speech and to speak itself. By this one single trick in which it surpasses the animal, the child acquires the capacity for sustained thought and enters on the whole cultural heritage of its ancestors. The gap which separates the small feats of animal and infant intelligence from the achievements of scientific thought is enormous.  Read more at location 1747

The situation can be summed up in three points. (1) Man’s intellectual superiority is almost entirely due to the use of language. But (2) man’s gift of speech cannot itself be due to the use of language and must therefore be due to pre-linguistic advantages. Yet (3) if linguistic clues are excluded, men are found to be only slightly better at solving the kind of problems we set to animals. From which it follows that the inarticulate faculties—the potentialities—by which man surpasses the animals and which, by producing speech, account for the entire intellectual superiority of man, are in themselves almost imperceptible.  Read more at location 1752

****  The enormous increase of mental powers derived from the acquisition of formal instruments of thought stands also in a peculiar contrast with the facts collected in the first part of this book, which demonstrate the pervasive participation of the knowing person in the act of knowing by virtue of an art which is essentially inarticulate. The two conflicting aspects of formalized intelligence may be reconciled by assuming that articulation always remains incomplete; that our articulate utterances can never altogether supersede but must continue to rely on such mute acts of intelligence as we once had in common with chimpanzees of our own age.  Read more at location 1758

****  (Note:   truth as personal)  To affirm anything implies, then, to this extent an appraisal of our own art of knowing, and the establishment of truth becomes decisively dependent on a set of personal criteria of our own which cannot be formally defined. If everywhere it is the inarticulate which has the last word, unspoken and yet decisive, then a corresponding abridgement of the status of spoken truth itself is inevitable. The ideal of an impersonally detached truth would have to be reinterpreted, to allow for the inherently personal character of the act by which truth is declared.  Read more at location 1772

2. INARTICULATE INTELLIGENCE 

The various modes of learning fall readily into three classes, two of which are more primitive and are rooted respectively in the motility and the sentience of the animal, while the third handles both these functions of animal life in an implicit operation of intelligence.  Read more at location 1783

Type A. Trick Learning. The best demonstration of motoric learning is B. F. Skinner’s.5  Read more at location 1788

Type B. Sign-learning. A dog which is trained to expect an electric shock shortly after a red light is flashed on a screen, has recognized a sign foretelling an event.  Read more at location 1797

the dog does not jump and snap at the bell as if it were food, nor does a red light cause the kind of muscular contraction which results from an electric shock. In fact, the ‘conditioned response’ differs quite generally from the original ‘unconditioned response’, in the same way in which the anticipation of an event differs from the effect of the event itself.6 This entitles us to say, in contrast to Pavlov’s description of the process, that in sign-learning the animal is taught to expect an event by recognizing a sign foretelling the event.  Read more at location 1803

The whole process clearly shows the animal’s capacity to be intrigued by a situation, to pursue consistently the intimation of a hidden possibility for bringing it under control, and to discover in the pursuit of this aim an orderly context concealed behind its puzzling appearances. The essential features of problem-solving are thus apparent even at this primitive level.  Read more at location 1820

Type B learning consists therefore not primarily in the contriving of skilful actions, but in the observing of a sign-event relation on which these actions follow. Such learning is grafted primarily not on motility but on perception.  Read more at location 1825

Type C has been described as latent learning, to suggest that in such cases the animal learns something which it can intelligently manifest in more numerous and less predictable ways than the lessons of trick or sign learning.  Read more at location 1838

Thus a rat which has learned to run a maze will show a high degree of ingenuity in choosing the shortest alternative path when one of the paths has been closed to it.9  Read more at location 1839

Latent learning is transformed into pure problem-solving when the situation confronting the subject can be taken in by it from the start, at a glance. This reduces exploration to a minimum and shifts the task altogether to the subsequent process of inference. Learning becomes then an act of ‘insight’, preceded by a period of quiet deliberation;  Read more at location 1846

chimpanzee who piles up packing-cases in a grossly unstable manner (for example by placing them edgewise), shows that he has grasped the principle of gaining height by constructing a tower on which to climb up, without knowing the conditions for making the constructions stable. Its error is a ‘good error’, as Köhler calls it,11  Read more at location 1850

Thus the very rise of inferential power brings with it the conjoint capacity for inferential error.  Read more at location 1853

in the maturing child. Observations of this kind, carried out extensively by Piaget,  Read more at location 1856

with growing maturity, he learns that objects continue to exist even while not seen or felt, and learns to see them as having constant sizes and shapes though presented at different distances and from different angles.  Read more at location 1861

****  it might be more precise to call it an increased mental discipline, achieved by establishing a fixed interpretative framework of growing complexity. An inference guided by a fixed framework can always be traced back to its premisses,  Read more at location 1868

In each case of the three types (A) Trick learning, (B) Sign learning, (C) Latent learning, we may distinguish between the process of learning, which is irreversible, and the performances achieved by learning, which are comparatively reversible.  Read more at location 1872

the actual process of learning is covered by the first stage, while the second stage consists in displaying the knowledge acquired by learning. We may call the first a heuristic act by contrast to the second which is of a more or less routine character. For type A the heuristic act is a contriving; for B an observing; for C an understanding. The routine acts are: for A, the repeating of a trick, for B, the continued responding to a sign, and for C, the solving of a routine problem.  Read more at location 1881

we acknowledge already at this primitive level the existence of two kinds of intelligence: one achieving innovations, irreversibly, the other operating a fixed framework of knowledge, reversibly.  Read more at location 1886

three faculties more highly developed in man. Trick-learning may be regarded as an act of invention; sign-learning as an act of observation; latent learning as an act of interpretation.  Read more at location 1889

3. OPERATIONAL PRINCIPLES OF LANGUAGE 

There are three main kinds of utterances, namely: (1) expressions of feeling, (2) appeals to other persons, (3) statements of fact.  Read more at location 1909

it is precisely the ingredient of personal passion inherent in and necessary to even the least personal forms of speech which my argument seeks to exhibit.  Read more at location 1914

The operational principles of language which account for the entire intellectual superiority of men over animals seem to be twofold. The first controls the process of linguistic representation, the second the operation of symbols to assist the process of thought.  Read more at location 1920

the meaning of a word is formed and manifested by its repeated usage,  Read more at location 1929

****  (Note:  interesting)  It follows that a language must be poor enough to allow the same words to be used a sufficient number of times. We may call this the Law of Poverty.  Read more at location 1930

words are not words unless they are both identifiably repeated and consistently used. Thus, underlying the Laws of Poverty and Grammar, we have two further requirements: the Laws of Iteration and Consistency.  Read more at location 1937

Only when repeatable utterances are used consistently can they have a definite meaning, and utterances without definite meaning are not language. The poverty of language can fulfil its denotative functions only if utterances are both repeatable and consistent. ‘Consistency’ is a deliberately imprecise term designating an unspecifiable quality.  Read more at location 1949

****  (Note:   language implies metaphysics, metaphor)  the Laws of Poverty and Consistency imply that every time we use a word for denoting something, we perform and accredit our performance of an act of generalization and that, correspondingly, the use of such a word is taken to designate a class to which we attribute a substantial character. Moreover, by being prepared to speak in our language on future occasions, we anticipate its applicability to future experiences, which we expect to be identifiable in terms of the natural classes accredited by our language. These expectations form a theory of the universe,  Read more at location 1957

So long as we feel that our language classifies things well, we remain satisfied that it is right and we continue to accept the theory of the universe implied in our language as true.  Read more at location 1961

To talk about things, we have seen, is to apply the theory of the universe implied by our language to the particulars of which we speak.  Read more at location 1974

Thus the art of speaking precisely, by applying a rich vocabulary exactly, resembles the delicate discrimination practised by the expert taxonomist.  Read more at location 1978

A map is the more accurate the nearer its scale approaches unity, but if it were to reach unity and represent the features of a landscape in their natural size, it would become useless, since it would be about as difficult to find one’s way on the map as in the region represented by it. We may conclude that linguistic symbols must be of reasonable size, or more generally that they must consist of easily manageable objects.  Read more at location 1986

Language can assist thought only to the extent to which its symbols can be reproduced, stored up, transported, re-arranged, and thus more easily pondered, than the things which they denote.  Read more at location 1990

In the most general terms, the principle of manageability consists in devising a representation of experience which reveals new aspects of it.  Read more at location 1996

These services of manageability to thought can all be described as taking place in three stages: 1. Primary denotation. 2. Its reorganization. 3. The reading of the result.  Read more at location 2000

Furthermore, the process of reorganization may be taken to include the transposition of the primary denotation into another set of symbols, as when numerical observations are represented by graphs or verbal statements by equations, a process which may also require considerable ingenuity.  Read more at location 2005

It appears now that the intellectual superiority of man is due predominantly to an extension of this power by the representation of experience in terms of manageable symbols which he can reorganize, either formally or mentally, for the purpose of yielding new information. This enormously increased power of reinterpretation is of course ultimately based on that relatively slight superiority of the tacit powers which constitute our gift of speech. To speak is to contrive signs, to observe their fitness, and to interpret their alternative relations;  Read more at location 2008

4. THE POWERS OF ARTICULATE THOUGHT 

In all these instances of the enhancement of our intellectual powers by suitable symbolization, it is clear that the mere manipulation of symbols does not in itself supply any new information, but is effective only because it assists the inarticulate mental powers exercised by reading off their result.  Read more at location 2032

the invention of suitable symbols and their manipulation according to fixed rules can transcend altogether the task of dealing with matters of experience. Processes of inference, conducted by symbolic operations, can be carried out without reference to actually counted or measured entities, and such inferences may be interesting. Hence pure mathematics is possible.  Read more at location 2071

the symbols of pure mathematics stand not, or not necessarily, for anything denoted by them, but primarily for the use that can be made of them according to known rules. The mathematical symbol embodies the conception of its operability, just as a bishop or a knight in chess embodies the conception of the moves of which it is capable.  Read more at location 2073

****  (Note:   corresponding relationship between philosophical paradigm and how we conceive of, and hence live, life)  Laplace remarks how fortunate was Descartes’ notation of the exponent of a power in stimulating speculations about the possibility of other than positive integer powers.27 Some questions of number theory had long remained unapproachable On account of the forbidding labour of the computations required to explore them, until the construction of electronic computers speeded up these manipulations many thousand times. Thus the progress of mathematics depends greatly on the invention of expressive and easily manipulable symbols for the representation of mathematical conceptions.  Read more at location 2081

The rise of formal logic resembles the advances made in pure mathematics by the advent of happy symbolic innovations.  Read more at location 2086

We have now before us the following sequence of sciences relying decreasingly on the first and increasingly on the second operational principle of language: (1) the descriptive sciences, (2) the exact sciences, (3) the deductive sciences. It is a sequence of increasing formalization and symbolic manipulation, combined with decreasing contact with experience. Higher degrees of formalization make the statements of science more precise, its inferences more impersonal and correspondingly more ‘reversible’; but every step towards this ideal is achieved by a progressive sacrifice of content.  Read more at location 2098

(Note: Math as contentless explicit form, language as ambiguous but filled by tacit content)  sight as we pass on to pure mathematics. There is a corresponding variation in the tacit coefficient of speech. In order to describe experience more fully language must be less precise. But greater imprecision brings more effectively into play the powers of inarticulate judgment required to resolve the ensuing indeterminacy of speech.  Read more at location 2104

5. THOUGHT AND SPEECH.

I. TEXT AND MEANING 

These three areas are: (1) The area where the tacit predominates to the extent that articulation is virtually impossible; we may call this the ineffable domain. (2) The area where the tacit component is the information conveyed by easily intelligible speech, so that the tacit is co-extensive with the text of which it carries the meaning. (3) The area in which the tacit and the formal fall apart, since the speaker does not know, or quite know, what he is talking about. There are two extremely different cases of this, namely (a) an ineptitude of speech, owing to which articulation encumbers the tacit work of thought; (b) symbolic operations that outrun our understanding and thus anticipate novel modes of thought. Both (a) and (b) may be said to form part of the domain of sophistication.  Read more at location 2113

(1) When I speak of ineffable knowledge, this should be taken literally and not as a designation of mystic experience, to which I do not wish to refer at this stage.  Read more at location 2119

the early Wittgenstein transposed into terms of semantics in his aphorism: ‘Of what cannot be said’—i.e. said exactly, as a sentence in natural science—‘thereof one must be silent’.29  Read more at location 2122

(Note: Tacit knowledge)  Although the expert diagnostician, taxonomist and cotton-classer can indicate their clues and formulate their maxims, they know many more things than they can tell, knowing them only in practice, as instrumental particulars, and not explicitly, as objects. The knowledge of such particulars is therefore ineffable, and the pondering of a judgment in terms of such particulars is an ineffable process of thought.  Read more at location 2140

When arts of knowing are explained by maxims, these never disclose fully the subsidiarily known particulars of the art, so that the powers of articulation are already restricted at this stage. No such limitation is imposed on the articulation of a spatial topography, the particulars of which are fully accessible. The difficulty lies here entirely in the subsequent integration of the particulars, and the inadequacy of articulation consists altogether in the fact that the latter process is left without formal guidance.  Read more at location 2172

by acquiring a skill, whether muscular or intellectual, we achieve an understanding which we cannot put into words and which is continuous with the inarticulate faculties of animals. What I understand in this manner has a meaning for me, and it has this meaning in itself, and not as a sign has a meaning when denoting an object. I have called this earlier on an existential meaning.32 Since animals have no language which could denote anything, we may describe  Read more at location 2182

To assert that I have knowledge which is ineffable is not to deny that I can speak of it, but only that I can speak of it adequately, the assertion itself being an appraisal of this inadequacy.  Read more at location 2190

(2)  ... Even while listening to speech or reading a text, our focal attention is directed towards the meaning of the words, and not towards the words as sounds or as marks on paper. Indeed, to say that we read or listen to a text, and do not merely see it or hear it, is precisely to imply that we are attending focally to what is indicated by the words seen or heard and not to these words themselves. But words convey nothing except by a previously acquired meaning, which may be somewhat modified by their present use,  Read more at location 2210

(3) I have shown a domain in which both knowledge and thought are of necessity predominantly tacit, and then a second domain in which the tacit, on which our attention is focussed, is the meaning of speech to which we are listening or have just listened.39 The domain of sophistication, on which we now enter, is formed by not fully understood symbolic operations which can be (a) a fumbling, to be corrected later by our tacit understanding (b) a pioneering, to be followed up later by our tacit understanding. More precisely speaking, we should say that we are referring in both these cases to a state of mental uneasiness due to the feeling that our tacit thoughts do not agree with our symbolic operations, so that we have to decide on which of the two we should rely and which we should correct in the light of the other.  Read more at location 2229

(Note: Akin to varela mode of discourse)\  Piaget has observed how often children find verbal problems intractable, though they know, and have known for a long time, how to solve the practical problems corresponding to them. He concludes that all the operations of logic must be learned all over again on the verbal plane of thought.  Read more at location 2238

animals are exempt from the errors due to elaborate systems of false interpretation, which can be established only in verbal terms.  Read more at location 2244

********  (Note:  sophistry)  When superstition is superseded by philosophy and theology, or by mathematics and natural science, we become involved once more in new systems of fallacies from which our practice of mathematics, science, philosophy or theology can never be strictly free. The mind which entrusts itself to the operation of symbols acquires an intellectual tool of boundless power; but its use makes the mind liable to perils the range of which seems also unlimited. The gap between the tacit and the articulate tends to produce everywhere a cleavage between sound common sense and dubious sophistication, from which the animal is quite free.  Read more at location 2246

So far as this universal theory is true, it will be found to anticipate, like other true theories, much more knowledge than was possessed or even surmised by its originators.  Read more at location 2264

Verbal speculation may therefore reveal an inexhaustible fund of true knowledge and new substantial problems, just as it may also produce pieces of mere sophistry. How shall we distinguish between the two? The  Read more at location 2269

Three things will have to be borne in mind: the text, the conception suggested by it, and the experience on which this may bear. Our judgment operates by trying to adjust these three to each other.  Read more at location 2272

******************  just as, owing to the ultimately tacit character of all our knowledge, we remain ever unable to say all that we know, so also, in view of the tacit character of meaning, we can never quite know what is implied in what we say.  Read more at location 2278

6. FORMS OF TACIT ASSENT 

****  (Note:   premise)  (1) Nearly all knowledge by which man surpasses the animals is acquired by the use of language. (2) The operations of language rely ultimately on our tacit intellectual powers which are continuous with those of the animals. (3) These inarticulate acts of intelligence strive to satisfy self-set standards and reach their conclusions by accrediting their own success.  Read more at location 2283

we eventually constructed a universal interpretative framework that assumes the ubiquitous existence of objects, retaining their sizes and shapes when seen at different distances and from different angles, and their colour and brightness when seen under varying illuminations.  Read more at location 2308

****  (Note:   embodied cognition, perception to language)  This process, by which the meaning of sensory clues is established in terms of our perceptions, is closely analogous to that by which we shape the meaning of denotative words in the lifelong course of applying them to a long series of identifiable instances. These linguistic identifications are in fact based primarily on the sensory identification of objects at varying distances, under varying angles and varying illumination, and merely extend the theory of the universe implied in our sensory interpretations to the wider theory, implied in the vocabulary by which we talk about things.  Read more at location 2321

7. THOUGHT AND SPEECH. II. CONCEPTUAL DECISIONS 

(Note: Circularity referenced by Wittgenstein; recursive)  since the conceptions conveyed by speech, when speech is properly understood, make us aware both of the way our speech refers to certain things and of the way these things are constituted in themselves, we can never learn to speak except by learning to know what is meant by speech. So that even while our thoughts are of things and not of language, we are aware of language in all thinking (so far as our thinking surpasses that of the animals) and can neither have these thoughts without language, nor understand language without understanding the things to which we attend in such thoughts.  Read more at location 2395

this duality of speech and knowledge is asymmetrical, in a sense anticipated on the inarticulate level, in the distinction (apparent already in the learning of animals) between knowledge and the performances based on knowledge.  Read more at location 2413

knowledge, even when acquired verbally, has a ‘latent’ character; to express it in words is a performance based on our possession of such latent knowledge. Take the knowledge of medicine. While the correct use of medical terms cannot be achieved in itself, without the knowledge of medicine, a great deal of medicine can be remembered even after one has forgotten the use of medical terms. Having changed my profession and moved from Hungary to England, I have forgotten most of the medical terms I learned in Hungary and have acquired no others in place of them; yet I shall never again view—for example—a pulmonary radiogram in such a totally uncomprehending manner as I did before I was trained in radiology. The knowledge of medicine is retained, just as the message of a letter is remembered, even after the text which had conveyed either kind of knowledge has passed beyond recall.  Read more at location 2417

****  ‘The true artists of speech’, writes Vossler,50‘remain always conscious of the metaphorical character of language. They go on correcting and supplementing one metaphor by another, allowing their words to contradict each other and attending only to the unity and certainty of their thought.’  Read more at location 2426

8. THE EDUCATED MIND 

The power of our conceptions lies in identifying new instances of certain things that we know. This function of our conceptual framework is akin to that of our perceptive framework, which enables us to see ever new objects as such, and to that of our appetites, which enables us to recognize ever new things as satisfying to them. It appears likewise akin to the power of practical skills, ever keyed up to meet new situations. We may comprise this whole set of faculties—our conceptions and skills, our perceptual framework and our drives—in one comprehensive power of anticipation.  Read more at location 2445

The oddity of our thoughts in being much deeper than we know and in disclosing their major import unexpectedly to later minds, has been acknowledged in my first chapter as a token of objectivity. Copernicus anticipated in part the discoveries of Kepler and Newton, because the rationality of his system was an intimation of a reality incompletely revealed to his eyes. Similarly, John Dalton (and long before him the numerous precursors of his atomic theory) beheld and described the dim outline of a reality which modern atomic physics has since disclosed in precisely discernible particulars. We know also that mathematical conceptions often disclose their deeper significance only to later generations, by revealing yet unsuspected implications or undergoing a surprising generalization. Moreover, a mathematical formalism may be operated in ever new, uncovenanted ways, and force on our hesitant minds the expression of a novel conception. These major intellectual feats demonstrate on a large scale the powers which I have claimed for all our conceptions, namely of making sense beyond any specifiable expectations in respect to unprecedented situations.  Read more at location 2457

Why do we entrust the life and guidance of our thoughts to our conceptions? Because we believe that their manifest rationality is due to their being in contact with domains of reality, of which they have grasped one aspect.  Read more at location 2465

*********  We grant authority over ourselves to the conceptions which we have accepted, because we acknowledge them as intimations—derived from the contact we make through them with reality—of an indefinite sequence of novel future occasions, which we may hope to master by developing these conceptions further, relying on our own judgment in its continued contact with reality. The paradox of self-set standards is re-cast here into that of our subjective self-confidence in claiming to recognize an objective reality.  Read more at location 2469

9. THE RE-INTERPRETATION OF LANGUAGE 

The re-interpretation of language can take place at a number of different levels. (1) The child learning to speak practises it receptively. (2) Poets, scientists or scholars can propose linguistic innovations, and teach others to use them. (3) Re-interpretation takes place also at an intermediate level in the everyday use of language which modifies it imperceptibly, without any conscious effort at innovation.  Read more at location 2483

Piaget has described the subsumption of a new instance under a previously accepted conception as a process of assimilation; while he describes as adaptation the formation of new or modified conceptions for the purpose of dealing with novel experience.53 I shall use these terms to describe the two associated movements by which we both apply and re-shape our conceptions at the same time;  Read more at location 2487

Ideally, the first is strictly reversible, while the second is essentially irreversible. For to modify our idiom is to modify the frame of reference within which we shall henceforth interpret our experience; it is to modify ourselves.  Read more at location 2496

****  The modification of our intellectual identity is entered upon in the hope of achieving thereby closer contact with reality. We take a plunge only in order to gain a firmer foothold. The intimations of this prospective contact are conjectural and may prove false, but they are not therefore mere guesses like betting on a throw of dice. For the capacity for making discoveries is not a kind of gambler’s luck. It depends on natural ability, fostered by training and guided by intellectual effort. It is akin to artistic achievement and like it is unspecifiable, but far from accidental or arbitrary. This is the sense in which I called denotation an art. To learn a language or to modify its meaning is a tacit, irreversible, heuristic feat; it is a transformation of our intellectual life, originating in our own desire for greater clarity and coherence, and yet sustained by the hope of coming by it into closer touch with reality.  Read more at location 2503

We have a comparatively safe knowledge of the most frequently used words, but this assured vocabulary is surrounded by a swarm of half-understood expressions which we hardly ever venture to use at all. This hesitation reflects a sense of intellectual uneasiness, which induces us to grope for greater clarity and coherence.  Read more at location 2524

Dylan Thomas tells how he fused in childhood the two meanings of ‘front’, designating the entrance to the house and the battlefields in France,55 and wondered at the curious consequences flowing from this hybridization.  Read more at location 2531

(Note: Irreversible clarifications of language)  came as a revelation to scientists when in 1858 Cannizaro distinguished precisely the three closely related conceptions of atomic weight; molecular weight and equivalent weight (weight per valence), which had been used until then in an indeterminately interchangeable manner. The appositeness of Cannizaro’s interpretative framework brought new clarity and coherence into our understanding of chemistry. Such clarification is irreversible; it is as difficult tc reconstruct today the confused conceptions which chemists used during the previous half century  Read more at location 2539

I am attempting to resolve by conceptual reform the apparent self-contradiction entailed in believing what I might conceivably doubt.  Read more at location 2573

****  (Note:   definitions and paradigms)  when text and meaning fall apart we must choose whether to (1) (a) Correct the meaning of the text. (b) Re-interpret the text. (2) Re-interpret experience. (3) Dismiss the text as meaningless.  Read more at location 2574

Every one of these choices involves the shaping of meaning in the light of our standards of clarity and reason. Such a choice constitutes a heuristic act which may display the highest degree of originality.  Read more at location 2583

****  The paradox of the Liar was long regarded as a mere sophism, without importance in logic,62 in which it was later recognized as a fundamental problem. The interpretative act by which a question is dismissed as a pseudoproblem is inevitably fraught with all the risks of a heuristic decision.  Read more at location 2591

(Note: As nietzsche said, 'equating that which is not equal')  since every occasion on which a word is used is in some degree different from every previous occasion, we should expect that the meaning of a word will be modified in some degree on every such occasion.  Read more at location 2597

(Note: Interesting example of redefining terms in science )  When heavy hydrogen (deuterium) was discovered by Urey in 1932, it was described by him as a new isotope of hydrogen. At a discussion held by the Royal Society in 1934 the discoverer of isotopy, Frederic Soddy, objected to this on the grounds that he had originally defined the isotopes of an element as chemically inseparable from each other, and heavy hydrogen was chemically separable from light hydrogen.63 No attention was paid to this protest and a new meaning of the term ‘isotope’ was tacitly accepted instead. The new meaning allowed heavy hydrogen to be included among the isotopes of hydrogen, in spite of its unprecedented property of being chemically separable from its fellow isotopes. Thus the statement ‘There exists an element deuterium which is an isotope of hydrogen’ was accepted in a sense which re-defined the term isotope, so that this statement, which otherwise would be false, became true. The new conception abandoned a previously accepted criterion of isotopy as superficial, and relied instead only on the identity of nuclear charges in isotopes.  Read more at location 2606

The meaning of speech thus keeps changing in the act of groping for words without our being focally aware of the change, and our gropings invest words in this manner with a fund of unspecifiable connotations. Languages are the product of man’s groping for words in the process of making new conceptual decisions, to be conveyed by words.64  Read more at location 2634

****  (Note:  rely on and assume sensibility of linguistic framework)  In learning to speak, every child accepts a culture constructed on the premises of the traditional interpretation of the universe, rooted in the idiom of the group to which it was born, and every intellectual effort of the educated mind will be made within this frame of reference. Man’s whole intellectual life would be thrown away should this interpretative framework be wholly false; he is rational only to the extent to which the conceptions to which he is committed are true.  Read more at location 2641

(Note: Primary metaphors of Lakoff)  Different vocabularies for the interpretation of things divide men into groups which cannot understand each other’s way of seeing things and of acting upon them. For different idioms determine different patterns of possible emotions and actions.  Read more at location 2646

the study of linguistic rules is used as a pseudosubstitute for the study of the things referred to in its terms. For example, Wittgenstein says, ‘“I don’t know whether I am in pain or not” is not a significant proposition.68 But the experience of pediatricians shows that children are often in doubt whether they are in pain or are uncomfortable for other reasons. Thus the pseudo-character of the substitution becomes apparent here because the implied statement is mistaken. Had Wittgenstein said. ‘It is in the nature of pain that I can always tell whether I feel it or not’ he would have been mistaken in fact. By using the pseudo-substitute: Tt is contrary to accepted usage to speak of pain whether I feel it or not’, he said something true which was irrelevant to the nature of pain, about which he was actually mistaken.  Read more at location 2668

(Note: I disagree. I think there can be legitimate conflicting definitions of words. Examples like "God," "good," "true," so forth)  disagreements on the nature of things cannot be expressed as disagreements about the existing use of words.  Read more at location 2675

‘Grammar’ is precisely the total of linguistic rules which can be observed by using a language without attending to the things referred to. The purpose of the philosophic pretence of being merely concerned with grammar is to contemplate and analyse reality, while denying the act of doing so.  Read more at location 2680

definitions (like ‘causation is necessary succession’, ‘life is continuous adaptation’) are, if true and new, analytic discoveries. Such discoveries are among the most important tasks of philosophy.  Read more at location 2707

We must look, intently and discriminatingly, through the term ‘justice’ at justice itself, this being the proper use of the term ‘justice’, the use which we want to define. To look instead at the word ‘justice’ would only destroy its meaning. Besides, to study the recurrence of the word ‘justice’ as a mere noise in its repeated occurrence in appropriate situations is impossible, for only the meaningful use of the term can indicate to us what situations we are to look at. Speaking more generally: in order to analyse the use of a descriptive term we must use it for the purpose of contemplating its subject matter, and an analysis of this contemplation will inevitably extend to the contemplated object.  Read more at location 2721

these indeterminate anticipatory powers of an apposite vocabulary are due to its contacts with reality. We may extend the conception of reality implied here to account also for the capacity of formal speculations to raise new problems and lead on to new discoveries. A new mathematical conception may be said to have reality if its assumption leads to a wide range of new interesting ideas.  Read more at location 2733

10. UNDERSTANDING LOGICAL OPERATIONS 

The process of reorganizing a conception for drawing new inferences from it can be formalized, by accepting as inferential operations certain rules for manipulating the symbols representing a state of affairs. Although such manipulations are symbolic, they denote not a state of affairs, but the transformation of one conception of a state of affairs into another conception of it that is implied in the first. They evoke the conceptual transformation which they symbolize in the same way as a descriptive term like ‘cat’ evokes the conception for which it stands. The tacit component of a formalized process of reasoning is broadly analogous to that of a denotation. It conveys both our understanding of the formal manipulations, and our acceptance of them as right.  Read more at location 2756

****  (Note:   fascinating example of tacit grasp (or not) of meaning)  But a verbal sentence may be as difficult to understand as any mathematical formula. Take the sentence constructed by Professor Findlay71 to paraphrase verbally the result of Gödel’s (first) theorem. It runs: We cannot prove the statement which is arrived at by substituting for the variable in the statement form ‘We cannot prove the statement which is arrived at by substituting for the variable in the statement form Y the name of the statement form in question’ the name of the statement form in question. When you substitute for the variable Y the name of the statement form in question which is the text in quotes, you see that Findlay’s sentence says of itself that it cannot be demonstrated, and that hence the sentence is true, just as a Gödelian sentence is true if it cannot be demonstrated. Even with this explanation to aid them, most people may read Findlay’s sentence twenty times over without making head or tail of it; indeed, it may never convey any meaning to them, for they keep losing track of the process of comprehension by which it would make sense. Natural aptitude and training make all the difference in this matter. Lord Russell, to whom I showed Findlay’s text in the summer of 1949, took in its meaning at a glance.  Read more at location 2762

********  No one can be convinced by a proof which he does not understand, and to learn up a mathematical proof which has not convinced us adds nothing to our knowledge of mathematics.  Read more at location 2773

(Note: Conclusion assumes its premises)  Even among mathematicians an argument which seems entirely convincing to one person may not even be comprehensible to another.73 Hence the striving to remove any occasion for the exercise of personal judgment by a strict formalization of the deductive sciences; a striving which can now be seen to aim at defeating itself. For the meaning of a formalism lies in our subsidiary awareness of it within a conceptual focus sustained in terms of this formalism, and is necessarily absent therefore in operations carried out on symbols seen quite impersonally, as objects.  Read more at location 2786

11. INTRODUCTION TO PROBLEM-SOLVING 

Poincaré observed four stages of discovery: Preparation, Incubation, Illumination, Verification.  Read more at location 2834

****  nothing is a problem or discovery in itself; it can be a problem only if it puzzles and worries somebody, and a discovery only if it relieves somebody from the burden of a problem.  Read more at location 2843

Heuristic progress is irreversible. The irreversible character of discovery suggests that no solution of a problem can be accredited as a discovery if it is achieved by a procedure following definite rules.  Read more at location 2859

It follows that true discovery is not a strictly logical performance, and accordingly, we may describe the obstacle to be overcome in solving a problem as a ‘logical gap’, and speak of the width of the logical gap as the measure of the ingenuity required for solving the problem. ‘Illumination’ is then the leap by which the logical gap is crossed. It is the plunge by which we gain a foothold at another shore of reality.  Read more at location 2862

The pioneer mind which reaches its own distinctive conclusions by crossing a logical gap deviates from the commonly accepted process of reasoning, to achieve surprising results.  Read more at location 2872

genius makes contact with reality on an exceptionally wide range: seeing problems and reaching out to hidden possibilities for solving them, far beyond the anticipatory powers of current conceptions.  Read more at location 2882

12. MATHEMATICAL HEURISTICS 

(Note: I would say philosophy, theology, creative writing, art, also...)  three major fields of knowledge in which discoveries are possible: natural science, technology and mathematics.  Read more at location 2898

the efforts of philosophers have been almost wholly concentrated on the process of empirical discovery which underlies the natural sciences—i.e. on an attempt to define and justify the process of induction,  Read more at location 2900

The fact that the teaching of mathematics relies to a large extent on practice shows that even this most highly formalized branch of knowledge can be acquired only by developing an art. This is true not only of mathematics and formal logic, but equally also of all mathematical sciences, like mechanics, electrodynamics, thermodynamics and the mathematical branches of engineering; you cannot master any of these subjects without working out concrete problems in them.  Read more at location 2909

Mathematical problems are in the class of crossword puzzles, for to solve such a problem we must find (or construct) something that we have never seen before, with the given data serving us as clues to it.  Read more at location 2925

A problem is an intellectual desire (a ‘quasi-need’ in K. Lewin’s terminology) and like every desire it postulates the existence of something that can satisfy it; in the case of a problem its satisfier is its solution. As all desire stimulates the imagination to dwell on the means of satisfying it, and is stirred up in its turn by the play of the imagination it has fostered, so also by taking interest in a problem we start speculating about its possible solution and in doing so become further engrossed in the problem. Obsession with one’s problem is in fact the mainspring of all inventive power.  Read more at location 2944

****  the master answered in all seriousness: ‘Get up in the morning with your problem before you. Breakfast with it. Go to the laboratory with it. Eat your lunch with it. Keep it before you after dinner. Go to bed with it in your mind. Dream about it.’  Read more at location 2949

the intensity of our preoccupation with a problem generates also our power for reorganizing our thoughts successfully, both during the hours of search and afterwards, during a period of rest.86  Read more at location 2952

We must (1) set out the problem in suitable symbols and continuously reorganize its representation with a view to eliciting some new suggestive aspects of it, and concurrently (2) ransack our memory for any similar problem of which the solution is known.88 The scope of these two operations will usually be limited by the student’s technical facility for transforming the given data in different ways, and by the range of germane theorems with which he is acquainted. But his success will depend ultimately on his capacity for sensing the presence of yet unrevealed logical relations between the conditions of the problem, the theorems known to him, and the unknown solution he is looking for.  Read more at location 2970

For each step—whether spontaneous or contrived—that brings us nearer to the solution, increases our premonition of the solution’s proximity and brings a more concentrated effort to bear on a reduced logical gap. The last stage of the solution may therefore be frequently achieved in a self-accelerating manner and the final discovery may be upon us in a flash.  Read more at location 3003

(Note: Conclusion linked to premises (ie his 'reality'))  an intellectual striving entails its conviction of anticipating reality. It illustrates also how this conviction finds itself confirmed by the eventual solution, which ‘solves’ precisely because it successfully claims to reveal an aspect of reality. And we can see once more also, how the whole process of discovery and confirmation ultimately relies on our own accrediting of our own vision of reality.  Read more at location 3014

The manner in which the mathematician works his way towards discovery, by shifting his confidence from intuition to computation and back again from computation to intuition, while never releasing his hold on either of the two, represents in miniature the whole range of operations by which articulation disciplines and expands the reasoning powers of man. This alternation is asymmetrical, for a formal step can be valid only by virtue of our tacit confirmation of it.  Read more at location 3032

CHAPTER 6.  INTELLECTUAL PASSIONS

1. SIGN-POSTING 

As far down the scale of life as the worms and even perhaps the amoeba, we meet a general alertness of animals, not directed towards any specific satisfaction, but merely exploring what is there; an urge to achieve intellectual control over the situations confronting it. Here at last, in the logical structure of such exploring—and of visual perception—we found prefigured that combination of the active shaping of knowledge with its acceptance as a token of reality, which we recognize as a distinctive feature of all personal knowing.  Read more at location 3046

****  The affirmation of a great scientific theory is in part an expression of delight. The theory has an inarticulate component acclaiming its beauty, and this is essential to the belief that the theory is true.  Read more at location 3060

A scientific theory which calls attention to its own beauty, and partly relies on it for claiming to represent empirical reality, is akin to a work of art which calls attention to its own beauty as a token of artistic reality. It is akin also to the mystical contemplation of nature: a kinship shown historically in the Pythagorean origins of theoretical science. More generally, science, by virtue of its passionate note, finds its place among the great systems of utterances which try to evoke and impose correct modes of feeling. In teaching its own kinds of formal excellence science functions like art, religion, morality, law and other constituents of culture.  Read more at location 3072

2. SCIENTIFIC VALUE 

Science is regarded as objectively established in spite of its passionate origins. It should be clear by this time that I dissent from that belief; and I have now come to the point at which I want to deal explicitly with passions in science. I want to show that scientific passions are no mere psychological by-product, but have a logical function which contributes an indispensable element to science.  Read more at location 3092

****  (Note:   emotion needed by reason, Damasio)  What is this quality? Passions charge objects with emotions, making them repulsive or attractive; positive passions affirm that something is precious. The excitement of the scientist making a discovery is an intellectual passion, telling that something is intellectually precious and, more particularly, that it is precious to science. And this affirmation forms part of science.  Read more at location 3097

Scientific discovery reveals new knowledge, but the new vision which accompanies it is not knowledge. It is less than knowledge, for it is a guess; but it is more than knowledge, for it is a foreknowledge of things yet unknown and at present perhaps inconceivable. Our vision of the general nature of things is our guide for the interpretation of all future experience. Such guidance is indispensable.  Read more at location 3109

*********  (Note:  premise)  Theories of the scientific method which try to explain the establishment of scientific truth by any purely objective formal procedure are doomed to failure.  Read more at location 3111

An affirmation will be acceptable as part of science, and will be the more valuable to science, the more it possesses: (1) certainty (accuracy) (2) systematic relevance (profundity) (3) intrinsic interest.  Read more at location 3120

The three criteria apply jointly, so that deficiency in one is largely compensated for by excellence in the others. Take for example the evolution of species. Neo-Darwinism is firmly accredited and highly regarded by science, though there is little direct evidence for it, because it beautifully fits into a mechanistic system of the universe and bears on a subject—the origin of man—which is of the utmost intrinsic interest. In other cases we see great accuracy of facts compensating for comparative lack of systematic relevance or intrinsic interest. Manne Siegbahn was awarded the Nobel prize in physics for a greatly increased accuracy in measuring the wave length of certain X-ray spectra, though his results revealed little that is otherwise interesting. Yet there is a limit to the appreciation of accurate facts. Professor T. W. Richards was awarded the Nobel prize in 1914 for a very accurate determination of atomic weights, and his results have never been contested. Yet in 1932 Frederick Soddy could write of this kind of measurement that it appears now ‘of as little interest and significance  Read more at location 3123

Though factually correct it had proved deceptive, because—contrary to expectation—it did not correspond to anything substantial in nature. When the exact atomic weight of an element ceased to be of interest to science, what had seemed important turned out to be trivial.  Read more at location 3134

It is often said that science (unlike history) is concerned only with regularities and not with unique events. This is true only up to the point covered already by my two first criteria. An event is regular if it is either reproducible or predictably recurrent. The reproducibility of a fact makes its observation exceptionally reliable, while its recurrence reveals that it forms part of a natural system. Indeed, systematic interest can outweigh even complete absence of regularity. Tycho Brahe’s observation in 1572 of a new fixed star of exceptional brightness was of the greatest interest to science, for it tended to invalidate the Aristotelian system of an unchangeable empyrean.5 Similarly, Wöhler’s synthesis of urea in 1828 weakened the traditional belief in the uniqueness of living matter. Nor did the scientific interest in the discovery of a living coelacanth depend on the prospect of finding a recurrent supply of such animals, but lay in the great systematic interest of that species as a common ancestor of all the land vertebrates. Discoveries like these are valued for the breadth of their implications, even though they establish no new general laws. They offer something more vague and also more profound; namely, a truer understanding of a large domain of experience.  Read more at location 3147

only very few scientists consider it worth while to test the facts of extra-sensory perception or of psychokinesis, since most of them would regard this as a waste of time and an improper use of their professional facilities. It is the normal practice of scientists to ignore evidence which appears incompatible with the accepted system of scientific knowledge, in the hope that it will eventually prove false or irrelevant. The wise neglect of such evidence prevents scientific laboratories from being plunged forever into a turmoil of incoherent and futile efforts to verify false allegations. But there is, unfortunately, no rule by which to avoid the risk of occasionally disregarding thereby true evidence which conflicts (or seems to conflict) with the current teachings of science. During the eighteenth century the French Academy of Science stubbornly denied the evidence for the fall of meteorites, which seemed massively obvious to everybody else.  Read more at location 3165

****  As the two criteria of right perception—namely sharpness of contour and reasonableness of the image—combine in determining what the eye will see, so the claims of the two first criteria of scientific value, which I have called ‘certainty’ and ‘systematic relevance’, combine in determining the scientific value of a fact.  Read more at location 3173

*************  (Note:   importance of paradigm)  Just as the eye sees details that are not there if they fit in with the sense of the picture, or overlooks them if they make no sense, so also very little inherent certainty will suffice to secure the highest scientific value to an alleged fact, if only it fits in with a great scientific generalization, while the most stubborn facts will be set aside if there is no place for them in the established framework of science.  Read more at location 3175

In science, as in ordinary perception, our attention is attracted by things that are useful or dangerous to us, even though they present themselves less distinctly and coherently. This sets up a competition between practical and theoretical interests, with which I shall deal more fully when defining the relation of science to technology. But things are also interesting in themselves, and their intrinsic interest varies greatly. Living animals are more interesting than their dead bodies; a dog more interesting than a fly; a man more interesting than a dog. In man himself his moral life is more interesting than his digestion; and, again, in human society the most interesting subjects are politics and history, which are the theatres of great moral decisions—while, at the same time, closely interwoven with these human concerns, there is great intrinsic interest also in the subjects which affect man’s contemplation of the universe and his conception of himself, his origin and destiny. The subjects which are most interesting in themselves do not lend themselves best to accurate observation and systematic study.  Read more at location 3180

The supreme exactitude and scientific coherence of physics compensate for the comparative dullness of its inanimate subject matter, while the scientific value of biology is maintained at the same level as that of physics by the greater intrinsic interest of the living things studied, though the treatment is much less exact and coherent.  Read more at location 3189

The paradigm of a conception of science pursuing the ideal of absolute detachment by representing the world in terms of its exactly determined particulars was formulated by Laplace. An intelligence which knew at one moment of time—wrote Laplace—‘all the forces by which nature is animated and the respective positions of the entities which compose it, . . . would embrace in the same formula the movements of the largest bodies in the universe and those of the lightest atom: nothing would be uncertain for it, and the future, like the past, would be present to its eyes.’10 Such a mind would possess a complete scientific knowledge of the universe.11  Read more at location 3205

********  The tremendous intellectual feat conjured up by Laplace’s imagination has diverted attention (in a manner commonly practised by conjurers) from the decisive sleight of hand by which he substitutes a knowledge of all experience for a knowledge of all atomic data. Once you refuse this deceptive substitution, you immediately see that the Laplacean mind understands precisely nothing and that whatever it knows means precisely nothing.  Read more at location 3232

The ideal of strictly objective knowledge, paradigmatically formulated by Laplace, continues to sustain a universal tendency to enhance the observational accuracy and systematic precision of science, at the expense of its bearing on its subject matter.  Read more at location 3236

Scientific stringency, inflexibly resolved to denature the vital facts of our existence, continues to sustain this conflict, which may yet issue in a sweeping reaction against science as a perversion of truth. This happened before, with much less justification, in the fourth century, when St. Augustine denied the value of a natural science which contributed nothing to the pursuit of salvation. His ban destroyed interest in science all over Europe for a thousand years.  Read more at location 3243

however, the peril to the true values of science does not lie in any overt reaction against science. It lies in the very acceptance of a scientific outlook based on the Laplacean fallacy as a guide to human affairs.  Read more at location 3246

Applied to human affairs, the Laplacean universal mechanics induces the teaching that material welfare and the establishment of an unlimited power for imposing the conditions of material welfare are the supreme good.  Read more at location 3254

**********  (Note:  truth and reality as personal, perspectival)  This is how a philosophic movement guided by aspirations of scientific severity has come to threaten the position of science itself. This self-contradiction stems from a misguided intellectual passion—a passion for achieving absolutely impersonal knowledge which, being unable to recognize any persons, presents us with a picture of the universe in which we ourselves are absent. In such a universe there is no one capable of creating and upholding scientific values; hence there is no science.  Read more at location 3261

3. HEURISTIC PASSION 

*********  (Note:   scientific intuition as tacit, heuristic)  Intellectual passions do not merely affirm the existence of harmonies which foreshadow an indeterminate range of future discoveries, but can also evoke intimations of specific discoveries and sustain their persistent pursuit through years of labour. The appreciation of scientific value merges here into the capacity for discovering it; even as the artist’s sensibility merges into his creative powers. Such is the heuristic function of scientific passion.  Read more at location 3278

****  creative scientists—spend their lives in trying to guess right. They are sustained and guided therein by their heuristic passion. We call their work creative because it changes the world as we see it, by deepening our understanding of it. The change is irrevocable. A problem that I have once solved can no longer puzzle me; I cannot guess what I already know. Having made a discovery, I shall never see the world again as before. My eyes have become different; I have made myself into a person seeing and thinking differently.  Read more at location 3282

****  (Note:   paradigm changes as fundamentally creative insights)  Major discoveries change our interpretative framework. Hence it is logically impossible to arrive at these by the continued application of our previous interpretative framework.  Read more at location 3286

We have to cross the logical gap between a problem and its solution by relying on the unspecifiable impulse of our heuristic passion, and must undergo as we do so a change of our intellectual personality.  Read more at location 3290

We draw here a distinction between two kinds of error, namely, scientific guesses which have turned out to be mistaken, and unscientific guesses which are not only false, but incompetent. Intellectual passions, then, may be altogether misdirected, as were those of Laplace in formulating his objectivist ideal; and even those which lead aright, as in the case of Kepler, may be interwoven with others that are inherently erroneous. A  Read more at location 3301

4. ELEGANCE AND BEAUTY 

****  intellectual beauty as a token of reality.  Read more at location 3337

the history of science records only happy endings; far more frequent are formal speculations which lead nowhere. The innumerable papers of van Laar on the thermodynamic potential, published about the same time as de Donder’s papers, may be remembered among a vast multitude of such unfortunate cases. This dilution of the meritorious by floods of triviality makes the recognition of true scientific value particularly difficult.  Read more at location 3398

I believe that by now three things have been established beyond reasonable doubt: the power of intellectual beauty to reveal truth about nature; the vital importance of distinguishing this beauty from merely formal attractiveness; and the delicacy of the test between them, so difficult that it may baffle the most penetrating scientific minds.  Read more at location 3402

5. SCIENTIFIC CONTROVERSY 

Heuristic passion seeks no personal possession. It sets out not to conquer, but to enrich the world.  Read more at location 3420

Like the heuristic passion from which it flows, the persuasive passion too finds itself facing a logical gap. To the extent to which a discoverer has committed himself to a new vision of reality, he has separated himself from others who still think on the old lines.  Read more at location 3424

A hostile audience may in fact deliberately refuse to entertain novel conceptions such as those of Freud, Eddington, Rhine or Lysenko, precisely because its members fear that once they have accepted this framework they will be led to conclusions which they—rightly or wrongly—abhor. Proponents of a new system can convince their audience only by first winning their intellectual sympathy for a doctrine they have not yet grasped.  Read more at location 3440

We can now see, also, the great difficulty that may arise in the attempt to persuade others to accept a new idea in science. We have seen that to the extent to which it represents a new way of reasoning, we cannot convince others of it by formal argument, for so long as we argue within their framework, we can never induce them to abandon it.  Read more at location 3447

They do not appear as scientific arguments, but as conflicts between rival scientific visions, or else between scientific values and extraneous interests interfering illegitimately with the due process of scientific enquiry. I shall recall here four controversies to illustrate this.  Read more at location 3456

The Ptolemaic and Copernican theories opposed each other for a long time as two virtually complete systems separated by a logical gap. The facts known at any time during the 148 years from the publication of Copernicus’ De Revolutionibus to the appearance of Newton’s Principia could be accounted for by either theory. By 1619 the discovery of Kepler’s third law may have tipped the balance in favour of Copernicanism,23 but the non-appearance of any seasonal variation in the angle at which the fixed stars are seen continued to present a serious difficulty to this system.  Read more at location 3460

His opponents had on their side the common-sense view which sees the earth at rest, and, above all, a vivid consciousness of man’s uniqueness as the only particle of the universe that feels responsible to God. Their craving to retain for man a location which corresponds to his importance in the universe was the emotional force opposed to the intellectual appeal of Copernicanism.25 The victory of Copernicanism rejected and suppressed this demand as an illegitimate interference with the pursuit of science, and established the principle that scientific truth shall take no account of its religious or moral repercussions. But this principle is not incontestable. It is rejected today by the Soviet theory that all science is class science and must be guided by ‘partynost’, party-spirit.  Read more at location 3469

chemists still remain suspicious of this kind of work. Since they do not sufficiently trust themselves to distinguish true theoretical discoveries from empty speculations, they feel compelled to act on a presumption which may one day cause the rejection of a theoretical paper of supreme importance in favour of comparatively trivial experimental studies. So difficult is it even for the expert in his own field to distinguish, by the criteria of empiricism, scientific merit from incompetent chatter.  Read more at location 3541

We may conclude that empiricism, like the moral neutrality of science, is a principle laid down and interpreted for us by the outcome of past controversies about the scientific value of particular sets of ideas. Our appreciation of scientific value has developed historically from the outcome of such controversies, much as our sense of justice has taken shape from the outcome of judicial decisions through past centuries. Indeed, all our cultural values are the deposits of a similar historic succession of intellectual upheavals. But ultimately, all past mental strife can be interpreted today only in the light of what we ourselves decide to be the true outcome and lesson of this history.  Read more at location 3578

(Note: I agree (& think history has thus far approved) all three challenges, each of whuch remains a minority view.)  There are serious questions still open today concerning the nature of things. At least, I believe them to be open, though the great majority of scientists are convinced that the view they themselves hold is right and scorn any challenge to it. A notorious example is offered by extra-sensory perception. The evidence for it is ignored today by scientists in the hope that it will one day find some trivial explanation. In this they may be right, but I respect those too who think they may be wrong; and no profitable discussion is possible between the two sides at this stage. Another example. Neurologists today accept almost without exception the assumption that all conscious mental processes can be interpreted as epiphenomena of a chain of material events occurring in the nervous system. Some writers, like Dr. Mays,41 myself42 and Professor R. O. Kapp,43 have tried to show that this is logically untenable, but to my knowledge only one neurologist, namely Professor J. C. Eccles, has gone so far as to amend the neurological model of the brain, by introducing an influence by which the will intervenes to determine the choice between two possible alternative decisions.44 This suggestion is scornfully ignored by all other neurologists, and indeed, it is difficult to argue profitably about it from their point of view. A similar schism is present today between the ruling school of genetics, which explains evolution as a result of a haphazard sequence of mutations, and writers like Graham Cannon in England, Dalcq in Belgium, Vandel and others in France, who consider this explanation inadequate and support the assumption of a harmonious adaptive power controlling the most important innovations in the origin of higher forms of life.  Read more at location 3584

****  (Note:  paradigm shift)  The heuristic impulse links our appreciation of scientific value to a vision of reality, which serves as a guide to enquiry. Heuristic passion is also the mainspring of originality—the force which impels us to abandon an accepted framework of interpretation and commit ourselves, by the crossing of a logical gap, to the use of a new framework. Finally, heuristic passion will often turn (and have to turn) into persuasive passion, the mainspring of all fundamental controversy.  Read more at location 3605

6. THE PREMISES OF SCIENCE 

The general criteria of scientific value to be derived from the historic instances I have considered, may be tentatively regarded as a fair sample of the premisses of science. Copernicus and his opponents; Kepler and Einstein; Laplace and John Dalton; Hegel and Bode; de Broglie and Dirac; van’t Hoff and Kolbe; Liebig and Pasteur; Elliotson and Braid; Freud, Eddington, Rhine and Lysenko; all these and countless other scientists, or persons claiming to be scientists, have held certain allegedly ‘scientific’ beliefs about the nature of things and the proper method and purpose of scientific enquiry. These beliefs and valuations have indicated to their adherents the kind of questions which seem reasonable and interesting to explore. They have recommended the kind of conceptions and relations that should be upheld as plausible, even when some evidence seemed to contradict them; or which, on the contrary, should be rejected as unlikely, even though there was evidence which seemed to favour them and which could not be readily explained on other grounds.  Read more at location 3626

‘premiss’ is a logical category: it refers to an affirmation which is logically anterior to that of which it is the premiss. Accordingly, the general views and purposes implicit in the achievement and establishment of a scientific discovery are its premisses, even though these views and purposes may no longer be quite the same as those held before the investigation was first seriously thought of. This paradoxical sense seems to be the only one in which we can envisage any premisses of science.  Read more at location 3637

establishment of natural science. It gives us grounds for referring to facts and for thinking of the universe as an aggregate of facts. But factuality is not science. Only a comparatively few peculiar facts are scientific facts, while the enormous rest are without scientific interest. Hence principles like that of the Uniformity of Nature (J. S. Mill), or that of Limited Variety (J. M. Keynes), which may account for factuality, cannot account by themselves for natural science.  Read more at location 3647

The logical premisses of factuality are not known to us or believed by us before we start establishing facts, but are recognized on the contrary by reflecting on the way we establish facts. Our acceptance of facts which make sense of the clues offered by experience to our eyes and ears must be presupposed first, and the premisses underlying this process of making sense must be deduced from this afterwards.  Read more at location 3656

The same peculiar logical structure will be seen to apply to the more specific premisses of science and indeed, far beyond these, to the logical antecedents of all informal mental processes, some of which enter into every rational act of man. The simplest illustration of this structure is given in the practice of skills like swimming, cycling or playing the piano; to recall my analysis of them will strip the foregoing formulation of its paradoxical features. Swimming may be said to presuppose the principle of keeping afloat by retaining an excessive residue of air in the lungs; and we can state certain operational principles of cycling and piano playing which can likewise be regarded as the premisses underlying these performances. But we have seen that we achieve and practise these skills without any antecedent focal knowledge of their premisses. Indeed, the premisses of a skill cannot be discovered focally prior to its performance, nor even understood if explicitly stated by others, before we ourselves have experienced its performance,  Read more at location 3662

****  (Note:   science as communal)  Any attempt to define the body of science more closely comes up against the fact that the knowledge comprised by science is not known to any single person. Indeed, nobody knows more than a tiny fragment of science well enough to judge its validity and value at first hand. For the rest he has to rely on views accepted at second hand on the authority of a community of people accredited as scientists. But this accrediting depends in its turn on a complex organization. For each member of the community can judge at first hand only a small number of his fellow members, and yet eventually each is accredited by all.  Read more at location 3688

When I speak of science I acknowledge both its tradition and its organized authority, and I deny that anyone who wholly rejects these can be said to be a scientist, or have any proper understanding and appreciation of science.  Read more at location 3703

****  (Note:   premise re: scientific authority)  I accept the existing scientific opinion as a competent authority, but not as a supreme authority, for identifying the subject matter called ‘science’.  Read more at location 3707

****  A reasonable conception of science must include conflicting views within science and admit of changes in the fundamental beliefs and values of scientists.  Read more at location 3711

(Note: Paradigms of science)  the modern physical sciences went through three stages, each of which had its own scientific values and its corresponding vision of ultimate reality. Scientists of the first period believed in a system of numbers and geometrical figures, the next in one of mechanically constrained masses, the last in systems of mathematical invariances. In attaching themselves to the pursuit of these successive fundamental guesses about the nature of things, the intellectual passions of scientists underwent profound changes—changes similar in extent, and perhaps even not unrelated, to those which the appreciation of visual arts underwent from the Byzantine mosaics to the works of the Impressionists and from these to Surrealism.  Read more at location 3714

science embraces a consistent pursuit of gradually changing, and—I believe—on the whole, evermore enlightened and elevated intellectual aspirations. Such is the general framework within which the pursuit of science can be defined and the assumptions underlying its achievements identified. This perspective will have to be considerably widened—as I shall show in Part Four—to include the biological sciences; the inclusion of psychology and sociology would raise further, sharply controversial questions  Read more at location 3723

Perhaps it would have to examine above all the great discoveries made—particularly in this century—by scientists speculatively pursuing some specific guesses at a rational interpretation of nature; it would have to consider how obscure and controversial some of these speculations appeared at first; how many similar speculations were in fact empty or mistaken; and yet how astoundingly true and deeply prophetic some of them proved in several famous instances. Exceptional sensibility would be needed in order to discover what general ideas about the nature of things have guided these remarkable guesses. But even so, such an account would only reveal the premisses of past scientific achievements. The actual premisses of science, at the moment of writing, are present only in the yet unformed discoveries maturing in the minds of scientific investigators intent on their work.  Read more at location 3729

Take Mach’s principle of ‘mental economy’, according to which science is the simplest description or the most convenient summary of the facts. Imagine the puzzled examiners of de Broglie’s doctoral thesis having recourse to this criterion as to the scientific value of the work. How could they? Most of the facts which the theory eventually was found to describe were yet undiscovered. They would have had to limit themselves to the facts known to be described by the theory.  Read more at location 3743

apply the concept of ‘simplicity’ to the controversy about Rhine’s experiments on card guessing. Extra-sensory perception is of course the simplest explanation for them, if you are prepared to believe in extrasensory perception. Yet most scientists today would prefer some other explanation, however complicated, if only it lay within the scope of hitherto known physical interactions.  Read more at location 3751

the question of simplicity of description, in the ordinary sense of the word ‘simple’, plays, and can play, no part whatsoever in the controversy. On the contrary, in whatever way the issue is finally decided, this will determine what will be the simpler explanation in the scientific sense.  Read more at location 3756

********  (Note:   premise)  the premises of science determine the methods of its pursuit and vice versa.  Read more at location 3765

****  (Note:   nebulous nature of development & definition of science)  Specific rules of empirical inference claim (a) to proceed by a prescribed operation from clues to discovery or at least (b) to show how to verify, or at the very least (c) how to falsify, an empirical proposition according to some such rules. Claim (a) must be rejected in view of the demonstrable fact that discovery is separated by a logical gap from the grounds on which it is made. It is, as I said before, a travesty of the scientific method to conceive of it as an automatic process depending on the speed of piling up evidence for hypotheses chosen at random (Part One, ch. 2, p. 30). The history of the great scientific controversies teaches us now that claims (b) and (c) are equally unfounded. The reasons are similar to those I used for criticizing terms like ‘simple’ as a substitute for ‘true’. All formal rules of scientific procedure must prove ambiguous, for they will be interpreted quite differently, according to the particular conceptions about the nature of things by which the scientist is guided.  Read more at location 3771

De Broglie’s wave theory, the Copernican system and the theory of Relativity, were all found by pure speculation guided by criteria of internal rationality.  Read more at location 3781

The triumph of the Michelson-Morley experiment, despite its giving the wrong result, the tragic sacrifice of D. C. Miller’s professional life to the pursuit of purely empirical tests of a great theoretical vision, are sardonic comments on the supposed supremacy of experiment over theory.  Read more at location 3782

Admittedly, other controversies, like those of fermentation, hypnotism and extra-sensory perception, seem to centre altogether on questions of factual evidence. But looking at these disputes more closely it appears that the two sides do not accept the same ‘facts’ as facts, and still less the same ‘evidence’ as evidence. These terms are ambiguous precisely to the extent to which the two opposing opinions differ. For within two different conceptual frameworks the same range of experience takes the shape of different facts and different evidence.  Read more at location 3784

the rules of induction have lent their support throughout the ages to beliefs that are contrary to those of science. Astrology has been sustained for 3000 years by empirical evidence confirming the predictions of horoscopes.  Read more at location 3790

Lecky47 rightly points out that the destruction of belief in witchcraft during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was achieved in the face of an overwhelming, and still rapidly growing, body of evidence for its reality. Those who denied that witches existed did not attempt to explain this evidence at all, but successfully urged that it be disregarded.  Read more at location 3793

Some of the unexplained evidence for witchcraft was indeed buried for good, and only struggled painfully to light two centuries later when it was eventually recognized as the manifestation of hypnotic powers.  Read more at location 3798

Constant conjunction would lead to absurd predictions all over the enormous range of processes the course of which is determined by decay or the satiation of appetites. Our expectation of life does not increase with the number of days we have survived. On the contrary, the experience of living through the next 24 hours is much less likely to recur after it has happened 30,000 consecutive times than after only 1000 times. Attempts to train a horse to do without food will break down precisely after the longest series of successes; and the certainty of amusing an audience by one’s favourite joke does not increase indefinitely with the number of its successful repetitions.  Read more at location 3801

We can easily imagine a universe in which all recurrences would be limited in number, so that new recurrences would invariably become steadily less likely with the number of their previous occurrences.  Read more at location 3809

The decisive reason why such obviously inadequate formulations of the principles of science were accepted by men of great intellectual distinction lies in a desperate craving to represent scientific knowledge as impersonal. We have seen that this is achieved by two alternative recipes: (1) by describing science in terms of some secondary feature (simplicity, economy, practicality, fruitfulness, etc.), and (2) by setting up some formal model in terms of probabilities or constant conjunctions.  Read more at location 3810

I only wish to explain how the paramount desire for impersonal knowledge could succeed in rendering plausible such flagrantly inadequate formulations of science as given either by recipe 1 or 2. We owe this immense power for self-deception to the operation of the ubiquitous tacit coefficient by which alone we can apply any articulate terms to a subject matter described by them.  Read more at location 3819

A scientist can accept, therefore, the most inadequate and misleading formulation of his own scientific principles without ever realizing what is being said, because he automatically supplements it by his tacit knowledge of what science really is, and thus makes the formulation ring true.  Read more at location 3823

A most dramatic instance of self-deception, caused by the intervention of the inarticulate powers of the observer, occurred in the case of Clever Hans: the horse which could tap out with his hoofs the answer to all kinds of mathematical problems, written out on a blackboard in front of him.  Read more at location 3827

It turned out that all the severely sceptical experts had involuntarily and unknowingly signalled to the horse to stop tapping at the point where they—knowing the right answer—expected him to stop.50  Read more at location 3831

It is only when we are confronted with the anxious dilemma of a live scientific issue, that the ambiguity of the formal processes and of the various attenuated criteria of scientific truth becomes apparent, and leaves us without effective guidance.52 These formal criteria can of course function legitimately as maxims of scientific value and scientific procedure. To every change in scientific value, from Kepler to Laplace and from Laplace to Einstein, there has corresponded a change in scientific method, which can be formulated in changing maxims of procedure.  Read more at location 3841

******  Science is a system of beliefs to which we are committed. Such a system cannot be accounted for either from experience as seen within a different system, or by reason without any experience. Yet this does not signify that we are free to take it or leave it, but simply reflects the fact that it is a system of beliefs to which we are committed and which therefore cannot be represented in non-committal terms.  Read more at location 3863

7. PASSIONS, PRIVATE AND PUBLIC 

A theory like that of relativity continues to attract the interest of ever new students and laymen by intimations of its beauty yet hidden to their understanding: a beauty which is rediscovered every time a new mind apprehends the theory. And it is still for the sake of this remote and inaccessible beauty, and not for its few useful formulae (which could be memorized in a minute), that relativity continues to be valued as an intellectual triumph and accepted as a great truth. All true appreciation of science by the public continues to depend on the appreciation of such beauty—even though sensed only at second hand; it offers an indirect tribute to the values that the multitude have been taught to entrust to a group of men whose cultural guidance they have accepted.  Read more at location 3875

****  (Note: **** from radical paradigm shift to accepted unremarkable authority)  A transition takes place here from a heuristic act to the routine teaching and learning of its results, and eventually to the mere holding of these as known and true, in the course of which the personal participation of the knower is altogether transformed. The impulse which in the original heuristic act was a violent irreversible self-conversion of the investigator and may have been followed by an almost equally tempestuous process of converting others, is first repeated as a milder version of itself in the eventual acceptance of the discovery by the public, and will thus assume finally a form in which all dynamic quality is lost. Personal participation changes from an impetuous pouring out of oneself into channels of untried assumptions, into a confident holding of certain conclusions as part of one’s interpretative framework. The driving power of originality is reduced to a static personal polarization of knowledge; the intellectual effort which led to discovery and guided its verification is transformed into the force of a conviction which holds it to be true—in exactly the same way as the effort of acquiring a skill is transformed into a sense of its mastery.  Read more at location 3881

As the pursuit of our drives implies the supposition that there exist objects which we have reason to desire or to fear, so similarly, all passions animating and shaping discovery imply a belief in the possibility of a knowledge of which these passions declare the value; and again, in accrediting these passions with the power to recognize the truth, we do not assume their infallibility—since no rule of scientific procedure is certain of finding the truth and avoiding error—but we accept their competence.  Read more at location 3901

A scientist seeks to discover a satisfying theory, and when he has found it, he can enjoy its excellence permanently.  Read more at location 3909

By contrast to the satisfaction of appetites, the enjoyment of culture creates no scarcity in the objects of offering gratification, but secures and ever widens their availability to others.  Read more at location 3918

while appetites are guided by standards of private satisfaction, a passion for mental excellence believes itself to be fulfilling universal obligations. This distinction is vital to the existence of culture.  Read more at location 3928

8. SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY 

Technology always involves the application of some empirical knowledge and this knowledge may be part of natural science.  Read more at location 3935

The conceptual framework of applicable knowledge is different from that of pure knowledge. It is determined primarily in terms of the successful performances to which such knowledge is relevant.  Read more at location 3942

There are three kinds of observable things which can be defined by their participation in practical performances: (1) materials, (2) tools, including all manner of installations, and (3) processes.  Read more at location 3947

the individual objects or processes themselves are intelligible only within the framework of a useful performance which they successfully serve. Pure knowledge, lacking this framework, and pure science in particular, ignore these classes and cannot understand these contrivances.  Read more at location 3952

A gap is opening up here between two kinds of knowledge, both of which refer to material things: one derived from an acknowledged purpose, the other unrelated to any such purpose. The disparity of science and technology  Read more at location 3955

the foundation of modern man’s technical mastery lies in the explicit exposition of technology by textbooks, journals, patents, etc. Technology teaches action.  Read more at location 3964

The difference between scientific knowledge and an operational principle of technology is recognized by patent law, which draws a sharp distinction between a discovery, which makes an addition to our knowledge of nature, and an invention, which establishes a new operational principle serving some acknowledged advantage. New inventions rely as a rule on known facts of experience, but it may happen that a new invention involves a new discovery. Yet the distinction between the two will still hold: only the invention will be granted protection by a patent, and not the discovery as such.  Read more at location 3983

****  (Note:   Different motive: material advantage or search for truth)  The beauty of an invention differs accordingly from the beauty of a scientific discovery. Originality is appreciated in both, but in science originality lies in the power of seeing more deeply than others into the nature of things, while in technology it consists in the ingenuity of the artificer in turning known facts to a surprising advantage.  Read more at location 4005

To the extent to which a technical process is an application of scientific knowledge it contributes nothing to science, while empirical technology, which is itself unscientific, may well offer—for this very reason—important material for scientific study.  Read more at location 4020

Systematic technology and technically justified science are two fields of study lying between pure science and pure technology. But the two fields may overlap completely. The discovery of insulin as a cure for diabetes was an important contribution to science, owing to the intrinsic interest of its subject matter; it was also the invention of an operational principle serving to cure diabetes. The same quality applies over large parts of pharmacology.  Read more at location 4029

the distinction between science and technology, even where still upheld in practice by the continued operation of these institutions, is violently challenged in principle. This is part of the drive, described earlier on, for subordinating cultural values to a radically utilitarian conception of the public good: a materialistic outlook paradoxically imbued by inordinate moral aspirations.  Read more at location 4042

the official repudiation by Stalinist orthodoxy of science pursued for its own sake led to the persecution and death in 1942 of Russia’s most distinguished biologist, N. I. Vavilov, and had resulted by 1948 in the suppression or serious distortion of various branches of biology, it seems otherwise to have imposed on natural scientists little more restraint than the obligation falsely to declare their work to be guided by its practical usefulness.  Read more at location 4052

Except for the Morse telegraph, the great London Exhibition of 1851 contained no important industrial devices or products based on the scientific progress of the previous fifty years. The appreciation of science was still almost free from utilitarian motives.  Read more at location 4079

Encircled today between the crude utilitarianism of the philistine and the ideological utilitarianism of the modern revolutionary movement, the love of pure science may falter and die. And if this sentiment were lost, the cultivation of science would lose the only driving force which can guide it towards the achievement of true scientific value.  Read more at location 4091

9. MATHEMATICS 

Natural science is an expansion of observing; technology, of contriving; mathematics, of understanding.  Read more at location 4118

Both the affirmations of mathematical formulae and the recipes given in mathematical proofs deal with conceptions which may have no specific bearing on experience. Valid formulae acknowledge the identity of two alternative aspects of the same conception, while proofs induce the identification of two such alternatives. The first can be said to be true or false like the statements of natural science; the second to be successful or unsuccessful (right or wrong) like the operational principles of technology. But both are merely articulate means of reorganizing the conceptions of which they speak: one stating the result of the reorganization, the other prescribing the procedure for achieving it.  Read more at location 4126

No sharp distinction can be drawn between mathematical theories which apply to external objects, and mathematical inventions which are interesting only in themselves, for there is always a possibility that a mathematical theorem may prove applicable to experience some time. Yet the fact that this is not necessarily true, and indeed appears very unlikely for the far greater part of mathematics, is a distinctive feature of this science.70 Not being primarily concerned with foretelling what is going to happen, or with contriving what anyone wished to happen, but merely with understanding exactly how alternative aspects of a certain set of conceptions are logically connected, mathematics can extend its subject matter indefinitely by conceiving new problems of this sort, without any reference to experience.  Read more at location 4159

10. THE AFFIRMATION OF MATHEMATICS 

mathematics has been described as a set of tautologies. To this it must be objected in the first place that it is false. Tautologies are necessarily true, but mathematics is not. We cannot tell whether the axioms of arithmetic are consistent; and if they are not, any particular theorem of arithmetic may be false. Therefore these theorems are not tautologies. They are and must always remain tentative, while a tautology is an incontrovertible truism. But even supposing mathematics were wholly consistent, the criterion of consistency, which the ‘tautology’ doctrine is intended to support, would still be ludicrously inadequate for defining mathematics.  Read more at location 4183

only a tiny fraction of statements believed to be consistent constitute mathematics. Mathematics cannot be properly defined without appeal to the principle which distinguishes this tiny fraction from the overwhelmingly predominant aggregate of other non-self-contradictory statements.  Read more at location 4191

We may try to supply this criterion by defining mathematics as the totality of theorems derived from a certain set of axioms according to certain operations which will assure their self-consistency, provided the axioms themselves are mutually consistent. But this is still inadequate. First, because it leaves completely unaccounted for the choice of axioms, which hence must appear arbitrary—which it is not; second, because not all mathematics considered to be well established has ever been completely formalized according to strict procedure; and third, because—as K. R. Popper has pointed out—among the propositions that can be derived from some accepted set of axioms there are still, for every single one that represents a significant mathematical theorem, an infinite number that are trivial.  Read more at location 4193

mathematics cannot be defined without acknowledging its most obvious feature: namely, that it is interesting.  Read more at location 4200

The inarticulate coefficient by which we understand and assent to mathematics is an active principle of this kind; it is a passion for intellectual beauty.  Read more at location 4212

Modern mathematics has emerged from a long series of conceptual reforms tending towards greater generality and rigour, as well as from more radical conceptual inventions opening up altogether new perspectives. The acceptance of such conceptual innovations is a self-modifying mental act in search of a truer intellectual life.  Read more at location 4218

the acceptance of a new conception, even when it is specified by a definition, is ultimately an informal act: a transformation of the framework on which we rely in the process of formal reasoning.  Read more at location 4222

11. AXIOMATIZATION OF MATHEMATICS 

rigour in all deductive sciences. But it has not supplied a formalized organon for the process of future discovery. Nor has it become the supreme arbiter in deciding controversial issues in mathematics.  Read more at location 4261

A fully axiom-atized deductive system is like a carefully locked gate in the midst of an infinite empty area. If the acceptance of any proof requires the acceptance without proof of some presuppositions from which the proof is ultimately derived, it follows that the principle of rejecting any unproven statement in mathematics implies also the rejection of all proven statements and therefore of all mathematics. The solution lies in rejecting the rule which denies acceptance to unproven statements, by admitting that our belief in logically anterior maxims of mathematical procedure is based on our previous acceptance of this procedure as valid. And let us remember once more that logical antecedents derived from the prior acceptance of their consequents are necessarily less certain than the consequents.  Read more at location 4273

****  we dwell on mathematics and affirm its statements for the sake of its intellectual beauty, which betokens the reality of its conceptions and the truth of its assertions.  Read more at location 4280

In our own time Godel’s theorem of uncertainty might conceivably erode confidence, likewise, in our own mathematics.  Read more at location 4287

The transmission of mathematics has today been rendered more precarious than ever by the fact that no single mathematician can fully understand any longer more than a tiny fraction of mathematics. Modern mathematics can be kept alive only by a large number of mathematicians cultivating different parts of the same system of values: a community which can be kept coherent only by the passionate vigilance of universities, journals and meetings, fostering these values and imposing the same respect for them on all mathematicians.  Read more at location 4291

12. THE ABSTRACT ARTS

Like mathematics, music articulates a vast range of rational relationships for the mere pleasure of understanding them. Abstract painting creates pleasing visible relationships. That is why we not merely see a canvas, but look at it and try to understand it. Its design bears the same kinship to geometry as music does to arithmetic.  Read more at location 4308

Precise statements of fact or exact expressions of sentiment contained in a work of art tend to flatten it out to a map, a report or a personal communication.  Read more at location 4331

The practice of the visual and musical arts which releases, formulates and disciplines our faculties for harmonious experience, exerts to the utmost the artist’s powers of invention and discrimination merely for the purpose of satisfying the standards of appreciation which the artist has set for himself.  Read more at location 4334

13. DWELLING IN AND BREAKING OUT

the satisfaction of gaining intellectual control over the external world is linked to a satisfaction of gaining control over ourselves.  Read more at location 4354

The construction of a framework which will handle experience on our behalf begins in the infant and culminates in the scientist. This endeavour must occasionally operate by demolishing a hitherto accepted structure, or parts of it, in order to establish an even more rigorous and comprehensive one in its place.  Read more at location 4356

The most radical manifestation of this urge to break through all fixed conceptual frameworks is the act of ecstatic vision.  Read more at location 4370

****  (Note:   mysticism)  As observers or manipulators of experience we are guided by experience and pass through experience without experiencing it in itself. The conceptual framework by which we observe and manipulate things being present as a screen between ourselves and these things, their sights and sounds, and the smell and touch of them transpire but tenuously through this screen, which keeps us aloof from them. Contemplation dissolves the screen, stops our movement through experience and pours us straight into experience; we cease to handle things and become immersed in them. Contemplation has no ulterior intention or ulterior meaning; in it we cease to deal with things and become absorbed in the inherent quality of our experience, for its own sake. And as we lose ourselves in contemplation, we take on an impersonal life in the objects of our contemplation;  Read more at location 4375

(Note: Mysticism)  the impersonality of intense contemplation consists in a complete participation of the person in that which he contemplates and not in his complete detachment from it, as would be the case in an ideally objective observation. Since the impersonality of contemplation is a self-abandonment, it can be described either as egocentric or as selfless, depending on whether one refers to the contemplator’s visionary act or to the submergence of his person.  Read more at location 4384

The religious mystic achieves contemplative communion as a result of an elaborate effort of thought, supported by ritual. By concentrating on the presence of God, who is beyond all physical appearances, the mystic seeks to relax the intellectual control  Read more at location 4388

The whole framework of intelligent understanding, by which he normally appraises his impressions, sinks into abeyance and uncovers a world experienced uncomprehendingly as a divine miracle. The process is known in Christian mysticism as the via negativa and the tradition which prescribes it as the only perfect path to God stems from the Mystic Theology of the Pseudo-Dionysius.  Read more at location 4391

normal conceptual framework and ‘become like little children’. It is akin to the reliance on the ‘foolishness of God’, that short-cut to the understanding of Christianity, of which St. Augustine said enviously that it was free to the simple-minded but impassable to the learned. The Christian faith in everyday action is just such a sustained effort at breaking out, sustained by the love and desire for God, a God who can be loved but not observed.  Read more at location 4398

Music, poetry, painting: the arts—whether abstract or representative—are a dwelling in and a breaking out which lie somewhere between science and worship.  Read more at location 4422

Art, like mysticism, breaks through the screen of objectivity and draws on our pre-conceptual capacities of contemplative vision.  Read more at location 4427

The mechanism by which a negative theology opens access to the presence of God is applicable here to a process of artistic creation. But the negation of familiar meaning may go beyond this. It may usher us into the presence of nothingness.  Read more at location 4430

Artistic beauty is a token of artistic reality, in the same sense in which mathematical beauty is a token of mathematical reality. Its appreciation has universal intent, and bears witness beyond that to the presence of an inexhaustible fund of meaning in it which future centuries may yet elicit. Such is our commitment to indwelling.  Read more at location 4475

The process by which other systems than science are tested and finally accepted may be called, by contrast, a process of validation. Our personal participation is in general greater in a validation than in a verification. The emotional coefficient of assertion is intensified as we pass from the sciences to the neighbouring domains of thought. But both verification and validation are everywhere an acknowledgment of a commitment: they claim the presence of something real and external to the speaker. As distinct from both of these, subjective experiences can only be said to be authentic, and authenticity does not involve a commitment in the sense in which both verification and validation do.  Read more at location 4493

CHAPTER 7.

CONVIVIALITY

1. INTRODUCTION 

our adherence to the truth can be seen to imply our adherence to a society which respects the truth, and which we trust to respect it. Love of truth and of intellectual values in general will now reappear as the love of the kind of society which fosters these values, and submission to intellectual standards will be seen to imply participation in a society which accepts the cultural obligation to serve these standards.  Read more at location 4507

2. COMMUNICATION 

The interpersonal coincidence of tacit judgments is primordially continuous with the mute interaction of powerful emotions.  Read more at location 4541

experiences in the kind of physical sympathy which overcomes the onlooker at the sight of another’s sharp suffering. One has specially to train oneself in order to stand the sight of a surgical operation. Even experienced doctors may faint or get sick at the sight of a deep incision in the eye of a patient. Sadism is the transmutation of transmitted pangs into pleasurable excitement; it is a masochistic sharing of another man’s torment and is known to be associated with masochism in the subject. Even the most determined criminals are liable to be effected by physical compassion. It is on record that when the head of the Gestapo, Himmler, desiring to test the technique of extermination at first hand, ordered the killing of a hundred Jews in his presence, he came near to fainting at the sight. In spite of deliberate training to merciless cruelty, upheld by a firm conviction of its rightness, the horrible sight of their deeds proved a serious difficulty to the persons charged with mass exterminations and it was in order to reduce this ‘seelische Belastung’, that the gas chamber method was eventually adopted.  Read more at location 4549

****  All arts are learned by intelligently imitating the way they are practised by other persons in whom the learner places his confidence. To know a language is an art, carried on by tacit judgments and the practice of unspeciliable skills.  Read more at location 4567

Spoken communication is the successful application by two persons of the linguistic knowledge and skill acquired by such apprenticeship, one person wishing to transmit, the other to receive, information. Relying on what each has learnt, the speaker confidently utters words and the listener confidently interprets them, while they mutually rely on each other’s correct use and understanding of these words. A true communication will take place if, and only if, these combined assumptions of authority and trust are in fact justified.  Read more at location 4572

3. TRANSMISSION OF SOCIAL LORE 

The current transmission of this immense aggregate of intellectual artefacts from one generation to another takes place by a process of communication which flows from adults to young people. This kind of communication can be received only when one person places an exceptional degree of confidence in another, the apprentice in the master, the student in the teacher, and popular audiences in distinguished speakers or famous writers.  Read more at location 4590

This affiliation begins with the fact that a child submits to education within a community, and it is confirmed throughout life to the extent to which the adult continues to place exceptional confidence in the intellectual leaders of the same community.  Read more at location 4595

****  (Note:   faith in social authority)  The learner, like the discoverer, must believe before he can know. But while the problem-solver’s foreknowledge expresses confidence in himself, the intimations followed by the learner are based predominantly on his confidence in others; and this is an acceptance of authority. Such granting of one’s personal allegiance is—like an act of heuristic conjecture—a passionate pouring of oneself into untried forms of existence.  Read more at location 4601

Every acceptance of authority is qualified by some measure of reaction to it or even against it. Submission to a consensus is always accompanied to some extent by the imposition of one’s views on the consensus to which we submit.  Read more at location 4614

On the other hand, even the sharpest dissent still operates by partial submission to an existing consensus: for the revolutionary must speak in terms that people can understand. Moreover, every dissenter is a teacher.  Read more at location 4619

Antigone and of the Socrates of the Apology are monuments of the dissenter as lawgiver. So are also the prophets of the Old Testament—and so is a Luther, or a Calvin. All modern revolutionaries since the Jacobins demonstrate likewise that dissent does not seek to abolish public authority, but to claim it for itself.  Read more at location 4621

I cannot speak of a scientific fact, of a word, of a poem or a boxing champion; of last week’s murder or the Queen of England; of money or music or the fashion in hats, of what is just or unjust, trivial, amusing, boring or scandalous, without implying a reference to a consensus by which these matters are acknowledged—or denied to be—what I declare them to be. I must continually endorse the existing consensus or dissent from it to some degree, and in either case I express what I believe the consensus ought to be in respect to whatever I speak of.  Read more at location 4628

4. PURE CONVIVIALITY 

The sentiments of trust and the persuasive passions by which the transmission of our articulate heritage is kept flowing, bring us back once more to the primitive sentiments of fellowship that exist previous to articulation among all groups of men and even among animals. Evidence of the primordial character of such conviviality and of the lively emotions engendered and gratified by its interplay is supplied by the experience both of animals and men.  Read more at location 4636

It also forms a transition to a second kind of pure conviviality: from the sharing of experience to a participation in joint activities. Such cooperation is usually incidental to a purpose jointly aimed at, but it becomes purely convivial in the joint performance of a ritual.  Read more at location 4667

****  Every ritual act of a group is to this extent a reconciliation within the group and a re-establishment of continuity with its own history as a group. It affirms the convivial existence of the group as transcending the individual, both in the present and through times past.  Read more at location 4671

5. THE ORGANIZATION OF SOCIETY 

the framework of cultural and ritual fellowship reveals primordially the four coefficients of societal organization which jointly compose all specific systems of fixed social relations. Two of these coefficients recall the two ways of satisfying intellectual passions on an articulate level, namely by affirmation or indwelling: the first is the sharing of convictions, the second the sharing of a fellowship. The third coefficient is co-operation; the fourth the exercise of authority or coercion. These four titles refer to four aspects of society which must always be seen in conjunction with each other,  Read more at location 4695

we find certain institutions which predominantly embody each of these four coefficients in turn. (1) Universities, churches, theatres and picture galleries, serve the sharing of convictions, in the wide sense of the term which I am applying here. They are institutions of culture. (2) Social intercourse, group rituals, common defence, are predominantly convivial institutions. They foster and demand group loyalty. (3) Co-operation for a joint material advantage is the predominant feature of society as an economic system. (4) Authority and coercion supply the public power which shelters and controls the cultural, convivial and economic institutions of society.  Read more at location 4700

No static society ever denied the intrinsic power and worth of thought: religion, morality, law and all the arts were respected in their own right.  Read more at location 4720

The great movement for independent thought instilled in the modern mind a desperate refusal of all knowledge that is not absolutely impersonal, and this implied in its turn a mechanical conception of man which was bound to deny man’s capacity for independent thought. Such objectivism must represent the public good in terms of welfare and power and set in motion thereby the self-destruction of freedom. For when open professions of the great moral passions animating a free society are discredited as specious or utopian, its dynamism will tend to be transformed into the hidden driving force of a political machine, which is then proclaimed as inherently right and granted absolute dominion over thought.  Read more at location 4733

6. TWO KINDS OF CULTURE 

Moral judgments are appraisals and as such are akin to intellectual valuations. The thirst for righteousness has the same capacity for satisfying itself by enriching the world that is proper to intellectual passions. And like the artist and scientist, moral man strives to satisfy his own standards, to which he attributes universal validity.  Read more at location 4744

Moral rules are therefore an instrument of civic power in the hands of those who administer moral culture, and morality is allied to custom and law. Men form a society to the extent to which their lives are ordered by the same morality, custom and law, which jointly constitute the mores of their society.  Read more at location 4751

***********  All thought is valid by its own standards and its progress is everywhere prompted by its own passions. If thought is to be cultivated socially, these standards and passions must be shared by a group of people. To secure this sharing, society must establish appropriate sets of rights and duties which constitute its cultural institutions.  Read more at location 4757

The genuineness of moral standards will be rendered suspect when it is realized that they are upheld by force, based on property and imbued with local loyalty. Indeed, such conflicts may call in question altogether the intrinsic force of civic thought, and if in this conflict thought is the loser, thought will be denied here—and here in the first place—its essential autonomy. Morality will then be reduced to a mere ideology, and this depreciation of thought will tend to spread and to bring about eventually the subjection of all thought to local patriotism, economic interest and the power of the state.  Read more at location 4770

7. ADMINISTRATION OF INDIVIDUAL CULTURE  

****  Adding to this evidence my own experience in chemistry and physics, it seems to me that the situation may be similar for all major scientific provinces, so that any single scientist may be competent to judge at first hand only about one hundredth of the total current output of science. Yet this group of persons—the scientists—administer jointly the advancement and dissemination of science.  Read more at location 4783

The consensus which accepts as science what it declares to be science endorses the scientific value of it as graded on the threefold scale of reliability, systematic interest, and intrinsic interest. We see, therefore, that the consensus of scientific opinion goes far beyond an agreement concerning a common experience.  Read more at location 4800

By this consensus scientists form a continuous line—or rather a continuous network—of critics, whose scrutiny upholds the same minimum level of scientific value in all publications accredited by scientists. More than that: by a similar reliance of each on his immediate neighbour they even make sure that the distinction of scientific work above this minimum level, and right up to the highest degrees of excellence, is measured by equivalent standards throughout the various branches of science.  Read more at location 4812

We have here the assumptions of a cultural ideal: the ideal of a highly differentiated intellectual life pursued collectively; or more precisely, of a cultural élite actively conducting such an intellectual life within a society responsive to the intellectual passions of this élite. The acceptance of these assumptions seals a pact of mutual confidence within the community of scientists and seals the dedication of society as a whole to the support of their scientific pursuits.  Read more at location 4840

In the Western type of modern society the authority of science is firmly established through the educational system, but all other cultural authorities have to fight for public response and also contest their position against strong rivals. Members of the public may shift their allegiance from one leader to his opponent; they may change from the camp of an academician to that of some innovator, be converted to religion or abandon their faith, drop out of any particular movement and join another.  Read more at location 4891

8. ADMINISTRATION OF CIVIC CULTURE

The machinery of self-government equips civic opinion with coercive powers to enforce, if necessary, any reforms of the existing mores that it holds to be right. If, therefore, opinion concerning civic matters is allowed to take shape by the same principles which effectively sustain the freedom of individual thought, civic thought will also grow freely and the power wielded by it will be the power of free thought. This is what would happen in an ideal free society. The shaping and dissemination of moral convictions should take place in it under the guidance of intellectual leaders, spread out over thousands of special domains and competing at every point with their rivals for the assent of the public.  Read more at location 4910

Its government bows in advance to the moral consensus freely arrived at by its citizens, not because they so decide, but because they are deemed competent to decide rightly, as the authentic spokesman of the social conscience.  Read more at location 4929

9. NAKED POWER 

most men can be induced to bend their will and reluctantly to obey commands given under sufficiently serious threats: a yielding which may properly be said to be compelled by force.  Read more at location 4955

It is commonly assumed that power cannot be exercised without some voluntary support, as for example by a faithful praetorian guard.22 I do not think this is true, for it seems that some dictators were feared by everybody; for example, towards the end of his rule everyone feared Stalin. It is, in fact, easy to see that a single individual might well exercise command over a multitude of men without appreciable voluntary support on the part of any of them.  Read more at location 4960

A claim to legitimacy is a most formidable instrument of power. Even men like Hitler and Stalin, who had perfected to the utmost the machinery of naked power, have never ceased to supplement it by a flow of public self-justification.23 Attempts at self-justification will involve the acceptance of a measure of consistency in the wielding of power, according to rules and policies which might be regarded as reasonable by the governed.  Read more at location 4982

10. POWER POLITICS 

every new moral issue has evoked a clash of interests; how often moral progress had to be forced upon the privileged by the pressure of the oppressed; how the existing distribution of privilege has always granted its beneficiaries considerable powers to resist reforms that curtail their advantage, and how they have perpetuated injustice by force.  Read more at location 5002

11. THE MAGIC OF MARXISM 

it is not in spite of this contempt for justice, equality and liberty, but because of it that Soviet Russia is accepted by many as the true champion of these same ideals in the fight against the very nations openly professing them. As Hannah Arendt has rightly observed ‘Bolshevik assurances inside and outside Russia that they do not recognize ordinary moral standards, have become a mainstay of Communist propaganda. . . .’  Read more at location 5032

Why should so contradictory a doctrine carry such supreme convincing power? The answer is, I believe, that it enables the modern mind, tortured by moral self-doubt, to indulge its moral passions in terms which also satisfy its passion for ruthless objectivity. Marxism, through its philosophy of ‘dialectical materialism’, conjures away the contradiction between the high moral dynamism of our age and our stern critical passion which demands that we see human affairs objectively, i.e. as a mechanistic process in the Laplacean manner.  Read more at location 5036

****  In a class society it is material interests which are regarded as immanent in moral aspirations: while in a socialist state the opposite holds: morality is immanent in the material interests of the proletariat.  Read more at location 5053

Bourgeois ideals will appear, therefore, as a mere superstructure of capitalism, in its opposition both to a feudalism whose rule it has subverted and to the proletariat, whose enslavement it tries to perpetuate. Bourgeois interests will appear to be immanent in bourgeois moral ideals. This is the first kind of immanence, the negative branch of Marxism.  Read more at location 5060

you must convert Socialism from a Utopia into a Science. You do so by affirming that the appropriation of the means of production by ‘the proletariat’ will release a new flow of wealth now entrammelled by Capitalism. This affirmation satisfies the moral aspirations of Socialism, and is accepted therefore as a scientific truth by those filled with these aspirations. Moral passions are thereby cast in the form of a scientific affirmation. This is the second kind of immanence, the positive branch of Marxism. By covering them with a scientific disguise it protects moral sentiments against being deprecated as mere emotionalism and gives them at the same time a sense of scientific certainty; while on the other hand it impregnates material ends with the fervour of moral passions.  Read more at location 5065

Marxism is falsely accused of materialism: its materialism is a disguise for its moral purpose. It is true that by their materialistic disguise these aspirations are torn out of their moral context, and are harnessed to the service of material aggrandizement and political violence. But this does not transform the underlying Socialist dynamics into a desire for comfort.  Read more at location 5107

Hitler greatly profited from the Bolshevik example, but his movement was rooted primarily in German Romantic nihilism. This doctrine taught that an outstanding individual is a law unto himself and may, as a statesman, unscrupulously impose his will on the rest of the world, and that a nation has likewise the right and the duty to fulfil its ‘historic destiny’ irrespective of moral obligations. Such teachings contradict the universal claim of morality, just as the Marxist-mechanistic image of man does. They identify morality with the self-fulfilment of the individual or the nation, and this emotionally charged utilitarianism can unite with a fierce patriotism all the inordinate social hopes of our age.  Read more at location 5116

Whenever fanaticism combines with cynicism we must suspect a dynamo-objective coupling, and its presence is confirmed if we find that cynicism is making a moral appeal. Hitler’s frenzy was primarily evil, but its appeal to the German youth was moral: they accepted evil actions as a moral duty.  Read more at location 5124

They believed that such motives were mere rationalizations of power, and that power alone was real. Hence their disgust of moralizing, and their moral passion for unscrupulous violence.  Read more at location 5127

No regime, however fanatical, can act without accepting any overt moral restraints. I have referred to this already in describing the way naked power is bound to support—and at the same time to limit—itself by the exercise of persuasion. On the other hand, an element of moral inversion may be thought to be operating in every harsh exercise of power.  Read more at location 5130

12. SPURIOUS FORMS OF MORAL INVERSION 

Take for example the text of Freud, in which he interprets culture in the light of his psychology.32 Towards the end he writes emphatically: This alone I know with certainty, namely that man’s value judgments are guided absolutely by their desire for happiness, and are therefore merely an attempt to bolster up their illusions by arguments.’33 But at the opening of the same essay he had expressed his deep respect for Romain Rolland, for spurning the false standards commonly applied by men who seek power, success and wealth, and who admire these achievements in others, while they fail to appreciate the true values of life;34 and again at another point he had declared himself for the ideal of a generous society in which ‘all work together for the happiness of all’.35 We can see the dynamo-objective coupling operating here on the same lines as in Marxism. A utilitarian interpretation of morality accuses all moral sentiments of hypocrisy, while the moral indignation which the writer thus expresses is safely disguised as a scientific statement. And on other occasions, these concealed moral passions reassert themselves, affirming ethical ideals either backhandedly as a tight-lipped praise of social dissenters, or else disguised in utilitarian terms.  Read more at location 5139

****  The public, taught by the sociologist to distrust its traditional morality, is grateful to receive it back from him in a scientifically branded wrapping. Indeed, a writer who has proved his hard-headed perspicacity by denying the existence of morality will always be listened to with especial respect when he does moralize in spite of this.  Read more at location 5159

To recognize the existence of moral inversion is to acknowledge moral forces as primary motives of man; it is to deny that ‘sublimation’ underlies (as Freud thought) the creation of culture.  Read more at location 5163

13. THE TEMPTATION OF THE INTELLECTUALS 

The moral appeal of a declared contempt for moral scruples is explained here in terms of a moral inversion. An analogous explanation will resolve yet another paradox: the fact that Stalin’s regime was acclaimed by eminent Western writers and painters whose very works were condemned and suppressed by that regime. And indeed—as Czeslaw Milosz has shown—its appeal was actually due in part to its proclaimed disgust with modern art and literature, and to its determination to make all cultural pursuits subservient to the state.  Read more at location 5176

The joint effects of the romantic and scientific movements engendered a modern cultural nihilism which repudiated the existing society as comprehensively as Marxism did. This happened when the excessive moral aspirations of modern man were disappointed by the normal complacency, selfishness and hypocrisy of man, and these shortcomings were accounted for by interpreting morality as something which people obey only if they cannot evade it. Once more—as in Marxism—moral nihilism is the mark here of exceptionally strong moral passions.  Read more at location 5190

personal nihilism has served for a century as an inspiration to literature and philosophy, both by itself and by provoking a reaction to itself. A loathing of bourgeois society, a rebellious immoralism and despair, have been prevailing themes of great fiction, poetry and philosophy on the continent of Europe since the middle of the nineteenth century.  Read more at location 5198

But these triumphs left their authors mortified by self-doubt. Their hatred of the established culture had spread (as in Marxism) into an attack on the very status of man and of human thought.  Read more at location 5202

We can then no longer say anything in good faith, and all rational action becomes a lifeless banality; violence alone is still honest, but only gratuitous violence is authentic action. Having arrived at this stage, the modern intellectual will include himself in his nauseated contempt for the moral and cultural futility of his time. Having rendered the universe utterly meaningless, he himself dissolves in a universal wasteland. If the intellectual is now attacked from the flank by Marxist unmaskers, who will lump him together with the bourgeoisie, his position is very precarious.  Read more at location 5209

And here we reach the turning point. The philosophic nihilist’s hidden moral passions are always available for political action if this can be based on nihilistic assumptions. He can safely indulge his moral passions by accepting the intrinsic righteousness of an unscrupulous revolutionary power. Injected into the engines of violence, his humane aspirations can at last expand without danger of self-doubt and his whole person responds joyfully to a civic home of such acid-proof quality. At last, he is engaged, he is safe.  Read more at location 5218

These teachings, therefore, offer a firm framework to the intellectual’s yearning for objective standards safe against self-doubt.  Read more at location 5230

14. MARXIST-LENINIST EPISTEMOLOGY 

In spite of Hume’s scepticism and its antecedents, going back to ancient Pyrrhonism, there was no self-doubt among scientists in the modern free societies of the twentieth century. On the contrary, belief in science stood supreme as the only belief that remained practically unchallenged. Indeed, according to the positivist view widely disseminated since Comte, all human thought was seen engaged in a humble pilgrimage towards scientific perfection,  Read more at location 5238

15. MATTERS OF FACT 

Marxist-Stalinist critics, ...deny the whole set of standards which I took for granted when speaking of science, art, culture, law and morality, and reduce the intellectual and moral passions upholding these standards, which I have agreed to share, to the status of an illusory subjectivity. The instability of these standards in the light of critical reflection is to them no source of anxiety but of triumphant satisfaction. The consummation of this instability, which looms to me as the final self-destruction of the human mind, would be to them but the final unmasking of my idealistic deceptions.  Read more at location 5280

Antagonists on either side of a great scientific controversy do not accept the same facts as real and significant. A society believing in magic, witchcraft and oracles, will agree on a whole system of facts which modern men regard as fictitious. Similar logical gaps could be found between standards of factuality prevailing in different periods of European history.  Read more at location 5296

under totalitarianism we can see factuality reduced to the extent of allowing the State to fashion public facts almost at will, as it suits its own interests. These powers to spread falsehoods are due to some extent simply to the government’s monopoly of public utterances, backed by terror; but such coercive powers do not account for the currency gained by these falsehoods abroad.  Read more at location 5305

It is only when our sense of reality has already been gravely impaired by such a shift, that we become receptive to downright clumsy falsifications.  Read more at location 5310

16. POST-MARXIAN LIBERALISM 

*********  (Note:   liberalism requires a degree of conservatism, as pacifism requires some degree of protection)  Can the beliefs of liberalism, no longer believed to be self-evident, be upheld henceforth in the form of an orthodoxy? Can we face the fact that, no matter how liberal a free society may be, it is also profoundly conservative? For this is the fact. The recognition granted in a free society to the independent growth of science, art and morality, involves a dedication of society to the fostering of a specific tradition of thought, transmitted and cultivated by a particular group of authoritative specialists, perpetuating themselves by co-option. To uphold the independence of thought implemented by such a society is to subscribe to a kind of orthodoxy which, though it specifies no fixed articles of faith, is virtually unassailable within the limits imposed on the process of innovation by the cultural leadership of a free society.  Read more at location 5376

PART THREE

THE JUSTIFICATION OF PERSONAL KNOWLEDGE 

CHAPTER 8

THE LOGIC OF AFFIRMATION

1. INTRODUCTION 

This reappraisal demands that we credit ourselves with much wider cognitive powers than an objectivist conception of knowledge would allow, but at the same time it reduces the independence of human judgment far below that claimed traditionally for the free exercise of reason.  Read more at location 5402

2. THE CONFIDENT USE OF LANGUAGE 

An object alleged to be a tool is not a tool if our conception of its alleged use is altogether mistaken (in the way conceptions of a perpetuum mobile are mistaken) or if it otherwise fails to serve its alleged purpose; it is an error to rely on a tool in such a case. Similarly, it is an error to rely on a descriptive word if either the conception which it conveys is false, or the word does not properly cover the subject matter in question. One can use a tool tentatively, or merely show that it is useless. Similarly, we can use a descriptive word sceptically by putting it in quotation marks. Suppose a paper is published under the title: An Explanation of ‘Extra-sensory Perception’, and another in reply to it, entitled: An ‘Explanation’ of Extra-sensory Perception. Guided by the quotation marks we recognize immediately that the first paper regards extra-sensory perception as spurious, while the second accredits it as genuine and discredits, on the contrary, the explanation suggested for it in the first paper. Descriptive words written down as part of a sentence without quotation marks around them are confidently relied upon: they accredit the substantial character of the conception which they convey and its appositeness to the matter in hand. I shall call this the confident or direct use of a word. By contrast, a descriptive word used in quotation marks (as part of a sentence not concerning that word)1 is used in a sceptical or oblique fashion.  Read more at location 5408

3. THE QUESTIONING OF DESCRIPTIVE TERMS 

**********  (Note:   meaning in language)  The formalization of meaning relies therefore from the start on the practice of unformalized meaning. It necessarily does so also in the end, when we are using the undefined words of the definitions. Finally, the practical interpretation of a definition must rely all the time on its undefined understanding by the person relying on it. Definitions only shift the tacit coefficient of meaning; they reduce it but cannot eliminate it. The tacit coefficient is an act of confidence, and all confidence can be conceivably misplaced.  Read more at location 5429

****  (Note:   metaphor)  By contrasting the oblique use of words with their direct use, we can now show formally that these risks of confident utterance are unavoidable. We may place a word in quotation marks, while using language confidently through the rest of a sentence. But the questioning of each word in turn would never question all at the same time. Accordingly, it would never reveal a comprehensive error which underlies our entire descriptive idiom.  Read more at location 5438

4. PRECISION 

we must accept the risks of semantic indeterminacy, since only words of indeterminate meaning can have a bearing on reality and that for meeting this hazard we must credit ourselves with the ability to perceive such bearing.2 This decision would eliminate precision of meaning as an ideal, and raise the question in what sense (if any) we may apply the term ‘precise’ or ‘imprecise’ to the meaning of a descriptive term. I suggest that the term ‘precise’ is applicable to a descriptive word in the same way as to a measured quantity, a map, or any other description, in so far as the word appears to match experience.  Read more at location 5444

The precision of a word will ultimately always rely, therefore, on a test which is not precise in the same sense as the word is said to be. The indefinite and futile regress on which we enter when asking whether the application of the term ‘precise’ is itself precise, suggests that such a question should be avoided by denying to the word ‘precise’ the character of a descriptive term. When we say that a word is precise (or apt, or fitting, or clear, or expressive), we approve of an act of our own which we have found satisfying while carrying it out. We are satisfied by something we do in the same way as when we make sense of blurred sights or faint noises; or when we find our way or recover our balance. We properly declare the outcome of this personal comprehension of our own, by saying that a word which we are using is precise.  Read more at location 5456

***********  We shall avoid this fallacy by fully acknowledging that only a speaker or listener can mean something by a word, and a word in itself can mean nothing.  Read more at location 5464

5. THE PERSONAL MODE OF MEANING 

I cannot precisely say what these beliefs are. I can say nothing precisely. The words I have spoken and am yet to speak mean nothing: it is only I who mean something by them.  Read more at location 5475

It might seem that we have saved the concept of meaning from destruction by depersonalization, only to expose it to being reduced to the status of dogmatic subjectivity. Here I must leave my enquiry temporarily suspended.  Read more at location 5492

6. ASSERTIONS OF FACT

Every conceivable assertion of fact can be made in good faith or as a lie. The statement remains the same in both cases, but its tacit components are different. A truthful statement commits the speaker to a belief in what he has asserted: he embarks in it on an open sea of limitless implications. An untruthful statement withholds this belief, launching a leaking vessel for others to board and sink in it.  Read more at location 5498

****  Unless an assertion of fact is accompanied by some heuristic or persuasive feeling, it is a mere form of words saying nothing. Any attempt to eliminate this personal coefficient, by laying down precise rules for making or testing assertions of fact, is condemned to futility from the start.  Read more at location 5501

An articulate assertion is composed of two parts: a sentence conveying the content of what is asserted and a tacit act by which this sentence is asserted.  Read more at location 5508

the assertion of the sentence p has to be followed up by saying ‘p is true’ and ‘p is true’ is itself a sentence, then this sentence brings in its sequel ‘“p is true” is true’ and so on, indefinitely. This insatiable regress does not arise, if we realize that ‘p is true’ is not a sentence. The Paradox of the Liar is eliminated on similar grounds.  Read more at location 5523

The fact that we can eliminate an infinite regress and a notorious self-contradiction, by reinterpreting the expressions ‘p is true’ and ‘p is false’ as expressing an act of assertion or doubt, substantially strengthens this interpretation. By generalizing our distinction between the confident use of language for primary purposes, and the class of expressions which merely endorse our confidence in what we have said, a whole range of persistent philosophic problems can be eliminated.  Read more at location 5532

7. TOWARDS AN EPISTEMOLOGY OF PERSONAL KNOWLEDGE 

Nothing that I shall say should claim the kind of objectivity to which in my belief no reasoning should ever aspire; namely that it proceeds by a strict process, the acceptance of which by the expositor, and his recommendation of which for acceptance by others, include no passionate impulse of his own.  Read more at location 5567

8. INFERENCE

The operations of digital computers as machines of logical inference coincide with the operations of symbolic logic. We may therefore identify the formalization involved in the construction and the use of machines, operating in this particular way, with the procedure governing the construction of a deductive system. This procedure is threefold. (1) It designates undefined terms; (2) it specifies unproven asserted formulae (axioms); and (3) it prescribes the handling of such formulae for the purpose of writing down new asserted formulae (proofs). This result is achieved by a sustained effort to eliminate what are called ‘psychological’ elements—the factors which I call ‘tacit’.  Read more at location 5587

Thus, at a number of points, a formal system of symbols and operations can be said to function as a deductive system only by virtue of unformalized supplements, to which the operator of the system accedes: symbols must be identifiable and their meaning known, axioms must be understood to assert something, proofs must be acknowledged to demonstrate something, and this identifying, knowing, understanding, acknowledging, are unformalized operations on which the working of a formal system depends. We may call them the semantic functions of the formal system. These are performed by a person with the aid of the formal system, when the person relies on its use.  Read more at location 5604

The most important theorems limiting the formalization of logical thought are due to Godel. They are based on the fact that within any deductive system which includes arithmetic (such as for example the system of Principia Mathematica) it is possible to construct formulae—i.e. sentences—which are demonstrably undecidable within that system, and that such a sentence—the famous Godelian sentence—may say of itself that it is undecidable within the system. We can then go further by informally matching the sentence with the situation on which it bears, that is, with the demonstration of its own undecidability. We shall now find that what the sentence says is true and decide accordingly to assert it in that sense. Thus asserted, the sentence represents an additional axiom, which is independent of the axioms from which the unasserted sentence was derived.  Read more at location 5616

****  This process reveals both that any formal system (of sufficient richness) is necessarily incomplete and that our personal judgment can reliably add new axioms to it. It offers a model of conceptual innovation in the deductive sciences, which illustrates in principle the inexhaustibility of mathematical heuristics and also the personal and irreversible character of the acts which continue to draw upon these possibilities.  Read more at location 5623

we never know altogether what our axioms mean, since if we knew, we could avoid the possibility of asserting in one axiom what another axiom denies. This uncertainty can be eliminated for any particular deductive system by shifting it unto a wider system of axioms, within which we may be able to prove the consistency of the original system. But any such proof will still remain uncertain, in the sense that the consistency of the wider system will always remain undecidable.  Read more at location 5627

The construction of the Godelian sentence shows that a process of deductive inference can produce a situation which irresistibly suggests an assertion not formally implied in its premisses. Tarski’s theorem that the assertion of truth belongs to a logically richer (formal) language than the (formal) language of the sentences asserted to be true, shows that the question whether a previously asserted sentence is true evokes a similar expansion. It arises in both cases from a reflection on what has been said. In the Godelian process we add to a formally undecided statement of ours a tacit interpretation of our own.  Read more at location 5635

****  (Note:  godel incompleteness & tarski summary)   In both processes we establish something new by an inescapable act of our own, induced—but not performed—by formal operations.  Read more at location 5642

The matching of the Gödelian sentence with the facts to which it refers and the subsequent reassertion of the Godelian sentence, determine jointly a precise point at which tacit thought takes over control for the crossing of a logical gap.9 We find a similar alternation involved in the method of ‘mathematical induction’ which Poincare regarded as the prototype of all mathematical innovations.  Read more at location 5645

*********  The analogy between the Gödelian process of innovation and the grammar of discovery outlined by Poincaré lends support to the continuity between the informal act of assertion and the equally informal act of discovery. The difference between the two lies in the width of the logical gap that is being crossed. The gap to be crossed for the reassertion of the Godelian sentence is extremely narrow—almost imperceptible—while in true acts of discovery it may be as large as any human mind can hope to overcome. The act of assent proves once more to be logically akin to the act of discovery: they are both essentially unformalizable, intuitive mental decisions.  Read more at location 5653

9. AUTOMATION IN GENERAL 

the mind exceed those of a logical inference machine.  Read more at location 5660

no unspecifiable skill or connoisseurship can be fed into a machine.  Read more at location 5666

(Note: Tripart: 1. Mind 2. Machine 3. Functions, purposes, etc.)  This is the difference between machine and mind. A man’s mind can carry out feats of intelligence by aid of a machine and also without such aid, while a machine can function only as the extension of a person’s body under the control of his mind. Accordingly, the machine can exist as a machine only within a tripartite system  Read more at location 5671

10. NEUROLOGY AND PSYCHOLOGY

Neurology is based on the assumption that the nervous system—functioning automatically according to the known laws of physics and chemistry—determines all the workings which we normally attribute to the mind of an individual. The study of psychology shows a parallel tendency towards reducing its subject matter to explicit relationships between measurable variables;  Read more at location 5677

(Note: 1. Mind (of the neurologist) 2. Neurological model of subject 3. Intellectual purposes attributed to the subject by the neurologist)  the neurological model is not supposed to operate for purposes of the neurologist, but for purposes attributed to its operations by the neurologist on behalf of the subject whose mind it represents. The tripartite system accordingly becomes:  Read more at location 5683

Mind is not the aggregate of its focally known manifestations, but is that on which we focus our attention while being subsidiarily aware of its manifestations.  Read more at location 5701

***********  According to these definitions of ‘mind’ and ‘person’, neither a machine, nor a neurological model, nor an equivalent robot, can be said to think, feel, imagine, desire, mean, believe or judge something. They may conceivably simulate these propensities to such an extent as to deceive us altogether. But a deception, however compelling, does not qualify thereby as truth: no amount of subsequent experience can justify us in accepting as identical two things known from the start to be different in their nature.12 Our theory of knowledge is now seen to imply an ontology of the mind. Objectivism requires a specifiably functioning mindless knower. To accept the indeterminacy of knowledge requires, on the contrary, that we accredit a person entitled to shape his knowing according to his own judgment, unspecifiably.  Read more at location 5705

11. ON BEING CRITICAL 

Where there is criticism, what is being criticized is, every time, the assertion of an articulate form.  Read more at location 5716

12. THE FIDUCIARY PROGRAMME 

Seen in the round, man stands at the beginning and at the end, as begetter and child of his own thought. Is he speaking to himself in a language he alone can understand? In the beginning many words were held to be sacred. The law was respected as divine, and religious texts were revered as revealed by God. Christians worshipped the word made flesh. What the Church taught required no verification by man. When accepting its doctrine man was not speaking to himself, and in his prayers he could address the very source of the doctrine. Later, when the supernatural authority of laws, churches and sacred texts had waned or collapsed, man tried to avoid the emptiness of mere self-assertion by establishing over himself the authority of experience and reason. But it has now turned out that modern scientism fetters thought as cruelly as ever the churches had done. It offers no scope for our most vital beliefs and it forces us to disguise them in farcically inadequate terms. Ideologies framed in these terms have enlisted man’s highest aspirations in the service of soul-destroying tyrannies. What then can we do? I believe that to make this challenge is to answer it. For it voices our selfreliance in rejecting the credentials both of medieval dogmatism and modern positivism, and it asks our own intellectual powers, lacking any fixed external criteria, to say on what grounds truth can be asserted in the absence of such criteria.  Read more at location 5733

****  To the question, ‘Who convinces whom here?’ it answers simply, ‘I am trying to convince myself.’ I have insisted on this before on diverse occasions: pointing out repeatedly that we must accredit our own judgment as the paramount arbiter of all our intellectual performances, and claiming that we are competent to pursue intellectual excellence as a token of a hidden reality,  Read more at location 5743

Modern man is unprecedented; yet we must now go back to St. Augustine to restore the balance of our cognitive powers. In the fourth century A.D., St. Augustine brought the history of Greek philosophy to a close by inaugurating for the first time a post-critical philosophy. He taught that all knowledge was a gift of grace, for which we must strive under the guidance of antecedent belief: nisi credideritis, non intelligitis. 15 His doctrine ruled the minds of Christian scholars for a thousand years. Then faith declined and demonstrable knowledge gained superiority over it. By the end of the seventeenth century Locke distinguished as follows between knowledge and faith: How well-grounded and great soever the assurance of faith may be wherewith it is received; but faith it is still and not knowledge; persuasion and not certainty. This is the highest the nature of things will permit us to go in matters of revealed religion, which are therefore called matters of faith; a persuasion of our own minds, short of knowledge, is the result that determines us in such truths.16 Belief is here no longer a higher power that reveals to us knowledge lying beyond the range of observation and reason, but a mere personal acceptance which falls short of empirical and rational demonstrability. The mutual position of the two Augustinian levels is inverted.  Read more at location 5753

*********  (Note:   primacy of paradigm and heuristic inclination)  Here lies the break by which the critical mind repudiated one of its two cognitive faculties and tried completely to rely on the remainder. Belief was so thoroughly discredited that, apart from specially privileged opportunities, such as may be still granted to the holding and profession of religious beliefs, modern man lost his capacity to accept any explicit statement as his own belief. All belief was reduced to the status of subjectivity: to that of an imperfection by which knowledge fell short of universality. We must now recognize belief once more as the source of all knowledge. Tacit assent and intellectual passions, the sharing of an idiom and of a cultural heritage, affiliation to a like-minded community: such are the impulses which shape our vision of the nature of things on which we rely for our mastery of things. No intelligence, however critical or original, can operate outside such a fiduciary framework.  Read more at location 5766

******  Our mind lives in action, and any attempt to specify its presuppositions produces a set of axioms which cannot tell us why we should accept them. Science exists only to the extent to which there lives a passion for its beauty, a beauty believed to be universal and eternal. Yet we know also that our own sense of this beauty is uncertain, its full appreciation being limited to a handful of adepts, and its transmission to posterity insecure. Beliefs held by so few and so precariously are not indubitable in any empirical sense. Our basic beliefs are indubitable only in the sense that we believe them to be so.  Read more at location 5776

****  (Note:   self discovery)  This then is our liberation from objectivism: to realize that we can voice our ultimate convictions only from within our convictions—from within the whole system of acceptances that are logically prior to any particular assertion of our own, prior to the holding of any particular piece of knowledge. If an ultimate logical level is to be attained and made explicit, this must be a declaration of my personal beliefs. I believe that the function of philosophic reflection consists in bringing to light, and affirming as my own, the beliefs implied in such of my thoughts and practices as I believe to be valid; that I must aim at discovering what I truly believe in and at formulating the convictions which I find myself holding; that I must conquer my self-doubt, so as to retain a firm hold on this programme of self-identification.  Read more at location 5781

a logically consistent exposition of fundamental beliefs is St. Augustine’s Confessions.  Read more at location 5787

His maxim nisi credideritis non intelligitis expresses this logical requirement. It says, as I understand it, that the process of examining any topic is both an exploration of the topic, and an exegesis of our fundamental beliefs in the light of which we approach it; a dialectical combination of exploration and exegesis. Our fundamental beliefs are continuously reconsidered in the course of such a process, but only within the scope of their own basic premisses.  Read more at location 5790

We have plucked from the Tree a second apple which has for ever imperilled our knowledge of Good and Evil, and we must learn to know these qualities henceforth in the blinding light of our new analytical powers. Humanity has been deprived a second time of its innocence, and driven out of another garden which was, at any rate, a Fool’s Paradise. Innocently, we had trusted that we could be relieved of all personal responsibility for our beliefs by objective criteria of validity—and our own critical powers have shattered this hope. Struck by our sudden nakedness, we may try to brazen it out by flaunting it in a profession of nihilism. But modern man’s immorality is unstable. Presently his moral passions reassert themselves in objectivist disguise and the scientistic Minotaur is born. The alternative to this, which I am seeking to establish here, is to restore to us once more the power for the deliberate holding of unproven beliefs.  Read more at location 5799

9 THE CRITIQUE OF DOUBT

1. THE DOCTRINE OF DOUBT 

The method of doubt is a logical corollary of objectivism. It trusts that the uprooting of all voluntary components of belief will leave behind unassailed a residue of knowledge that is completely determined by the objective evidence. Critical thought trusted this method unconditionally for avoiding error and establishing truth.  Read more at location 5821

Hume was fairly frank in this respect; he openly chose to brush aside the conclusions of his own scepticism at those points where he did not think he could honestly follow them. Even so he failed to acknowledge that by so doing he was expressing his own personal beliefs; nor did he claim his right and accept his duty to declare such beliefs, when this amounted to the silencing of doubt and the abandonment of strict objectivity. His dissent from scepticism was strictly unofficial,  Read more at location 5826

Kant, however, took this contradiction seriously. He rallied to a superhuman effort to meet the situation exposed by Hume’s critique of knowledge, without admitting any relaxation of doubt. ‘The root of these disturbances’, he wrote in respect of such difficulties, which lies deep in the nature of human reason, must be removed. But how can we do so, unless we give it freedom, nay, nourishment, to send out shoots so that it may discover itself to our eyes, and that it may then be entirely destroyed? We must, therefore, bethink ourselves of objections which have never yet occurred to any opponent, and indeed lend him our weapons, and grant him the most favourable position which he could possibly desire. We have nothing to fear, but much to hope for; namely, that we may gain for ourselves a possession which can never again be contested.2 Kant’s hopes of an incontestable estate of reason has long since proved too high; but the fervour of doubting was transmitted up to our day.  Read more at location 5829

a distinguished example for a thousand lesser ones, take this eloquent declaration of the principle of doubt by J. S. Mill: The beliefs which we have most warrant for have no safeguard to rest on, but a standing invitation to the whole world to prove them unfounded. If the challenge is not accepted, or is accepted and the attempt fails, we are far enough from certainty still; but we have done the best that the existing state of human reason admits of;  Read more at location 5839

J. S. Mill and other writers standing in the Liberal tradition of philosophic doubt held—and hold today—a wide range of beliefs in science, ethics, politics, etc., which are by no means unquestioned. If they regard these as not having been ‘proved unfounded’, this merely reflects their decision to reject the arguments which are or were advanced against them.  Read more at location 5848

****  in this sense all fundamental beliefs are irrefutable as well as unprovable. The test of proof or disproof is in fact irrelevant for the acceptance or rejection of fundamental beliefs, and to claim that you strictly refrain from believing anything that could be disproved is merely to cloak your own will to believe your beliefs behind a false pretence of self-critical severity.  Read more at location 5852

2. EQUIVALENCE OF BELIEF AND DOUBT 

A marksman taking aim may be in doubt until he pulls the trigger. The renewed attempts of a poet to get a line right are filled with such hesitations.6 A measure of such tacit doubt is present in all articulate forms of intelligence within the act of assertion, throughout its many variants.  Read more at location 5879

It is immediately apparent that an expression of contradictory doubt ‘I believe not-p’ is of the same character as the affirmation ‘I believe p’ which it calls in question.  Read more at location 5891

The history of science offers many illustrations for the logical equivalence of affirmation and contradiction. In mathematics a problem may often be set for a time in the positive form and then turned round into its opposite, namely to prove the impossibility of finding a solution for it. The squaring of the circle and the trisection of an angle by aid of ruler and compass were both inverted after a time in that sense; these constructions have been proved to be impossible. In mechanics, centuries of misplaced ingenuity having been spent on solving the problem of perpetual motion, eventually the impossibility of constructing such a machine was established as a fundamental law of nature. The Second and Third Laws of Thermodynamics, the theory of Chemical Elements, the Principles of Relativity and of Indeterminacy, as well as the Pauli Principle, were all formulated in terms of negations. Eddington based his whole system of nature on the assumption of a series of impossibilities. In all these cases the difference between a positive statement and the denial of a positive statement is merely a matter of wording, and the acceptance and rejection of either form of allegation are both decided by similar tests.  Read more at location 5894

A temporary agnostic doubt (‘I believe p is not proven’) leaves open the possibility that p may yet be demonstrated in future; while in its final form (‘I believe p cannot be proven’) agnostic doubt denies that p can ever be demonstrated. But neither of these denials alleges, strictly speaking, anything concerning the credibility of p, and hence they represent only a first and so far inconclusive part of agnostic doubt.  Read more at location 5904

Kant’s demand that, in pure mathematics, unless we know, we must abstain from all acts of judgment, would therefore make agnostic doubt itself untenable. For this demand is based on affirming ‘I believe p is not proven’ or ‘not provable’, which implies the acceptance of some not strictly indubitable framework within which p can be said to be proven or not-proven, provable or not-provable. Kant would of course not have recognized this contradiction, since he held that the foundations of mathematics, including the axioms of Euclid, were indubitable a priori; but this view has proved to be mistaken.  Read more at location 5918

3. REASONABLE AND UNREASONABLE DOUBT 

To urge that doubt must be reasonable, is to rely on something that cannot reasonably be doubted—that is, in legal phrase, a ‘moral certainty’.  Read more at location 5925

We may regard this sceptical movement as altogether reasonable and be unaware of its fiduciary character until we are confronted with its blunders, for example in the scepticism of scientists concerning meteorites, of which I spoke before.8 Ordinary people were convinced of the fall of a meteorite, when an incandescent mass struck the earth with a crash of thunder a few yards away, and they tended to attach supernatural significance to it. The scientific committees of the French Academy disliked this interpretation so much that they managed, during the whole of the eighteenth century, to explain the facts away to their own satisfaction. It was again scientific scepticism which brushed aside all the instances of hypnotic phenomena occurring in the form of miraculous cures and spellbinding, and which—even in the face of the systematic demonstrations of hypnosis by Mesmer and his successors—denied for another century after Mesmer’s first appearance the reality of hypnotic phenomena. When the medical profession ignored such palpable facts as the painless amputation of human limbs, performed before their own eyes in hundreds of successive cases, they acted in a spirit of scepticism, convinced that they were defending science against imposture.9 We regard these acts of scepticism as unreasonable and indeed preposterous today, for we no longer consider the falling of meteorites or the practice of mesmerism to be incompatible with the scientific world view. But other doubts, which we now sustain as reasonable on the grounds of our own scientific world view, have once more only our beliefs in this view to warrant them.  Read more at location 5931

4. SCEPTICISM WITHIN THE NATURAL SCIENCES

We often refuse to accept an alleged scientific proof largely because on general grounds we are reluctant to believe what it tries to prove. It was the presumption of Wöhler and Liebig against the idea that fermentation was due to living cells which made them disregard the evidence in its favour. The kind of evidence produced by van’t Hoff for the asymmetrical carbon atom was condemned by Kolbe as worthless by the very nature of its argumentation. Pasteur’s evidence for the absence of spontaneous generation was rejected by his opponents by interpreting it in their own way, and even Pasteur admitted that this possibility could not be excluded.10 Inexplicable things continue to happen in a laboratory. For example, traces of helium or traces of gold may unaccountably turn up in sealed vessels and the effect may be reproducible.  Read more at location 5947

A scientist must commit himself in respect to any important claim put forward within his field of knowledge. If he ignores the claim he does in fact imply that he believes it to be unfounded. If he takes notice of it, the time and attention which he diverts to its examination and the extent to which he takes account of it in guiding his own investigations are a measure of the likelihood he ascribes to its validity.  Read more at location 5963

5. IS DOUBT A HEURISTIC PRINCIPLE? 

To be sure, every scientific discovery is conservative in the sense that it maintains and expands science as a whole, and to this extent confirms the scientific view of the world and strengthens its hold on our minds; but no major discovery can fail also to modify the outlook of science, and some have changed it profoundly. A number of revolutionary discoveries, like those of the heliocentric system, of genes, of quanta, of radioactivity or of relativity, come readily to mind.  Read more at location 5972

The power to expand hitherto accepted beliefs far beyond the scope of hitherto explored implications is itself a pre-eminent force of change in science. It is this kind of force which sent Columbus in search of the Indies across the Atlantic. His genius lay in taking it literally and as a guide to practical action that the earth was round, which his contemporaries held vaguely and as a mere matter for speculation. The ideas which Newton elaborated in his Principia were also widely current in his time; his work did not shock any strong beliefs held by scientists, at any rate in his own country. But again, his genius was manifested in his power of casting these vaguely held beliefs into a concrete and binding form. One of the greatest and most surprising discoveries of our own age, that of the diffraction of X-rays by crystals (in 1912) was made by a mathematician, Max von Laue, by the sheer power of believing more concretely than anyone else in the accepted theory of crystals and X-rays. These advances were no less bold and hazardous than were the innovations of Copernicus, Planck or Einstein.  Read more at location 5977

*********  There exists, accordingly, no valid heuristic maxim in natural science which would recommend either belief or doubt as a path to discovery. Some discoveries are prompted by the conviction that something is fundamentally lacking in the existing framework of science, others by the opposite feeling that there is far more implied in it than has yet been realized.  Read more at location 5985

Besides, as there is no rule to tell us at the moment of deciding on the next step in research what is truly bold and what merely reckless, there is none either for distinguishing between doubt which will curb recklessness and thus qualify as true caution, and doubt which cripples boldness and will stand condemned as unimaginative dogmatism.  Read more at location 5989

6. AGNOSTIC DOUBT IN COURTS OF LAW

The law which orders that a man be presumed innocent until he is found guilty, does not impose an open mind on the court, but tells it on the contrary what to believe at the start: namely that the man is innocent. Even the legal exclusion of normally relevant matter may be interpreted as the prescription of specific beliefs, namely that they are in fact irrelevant to the issue. In all these respects the supposedly open mind of an unbiassed court can be sustained only by a much stronger will to believe than the usual beliefs of a person discharging no judicial responsibility.  Read more at location 6019

The relation between observed facts and legal facts is similar in principle to that between factual experience and an art based on such experience, or between empirical facts and mathematical conceptions. In all these cases experience serves as a theme for an intellectual activity which develops one aspect of it into a system that is established and accepted on the grounds of its internal evidence.  Read more at location 6030

7. RELIGIOUS DOUBT 

**********  Religion, considered as an act of worship, is an indwelling rather than an affirmation. God cannot be observed, any more than truth or beauty can be observed. He exists in the sense that He is to be worshipped and obeyed, but not otherwise; not as a fact—any more than truth, beauty or justice exist as facts. All these, like God, are things which can be apprehended only in serving them.  Read more at location 6038

As a framework expressing its acceptance of itself as a dwelling place of the passionate search for God, religious worship can say nothing that is true or false. Words of prayer are addressed to God, and while other parts of the service speak of God, they are mostly declarations of interpersonal relations—such as the praise of God.  Read more at location 6070

Only a Christian who stands in the service of his faith can understand Christian theology and only he can enter into the religious meaning of the Bible.  Read more at location 6078

theology reveals, or tries to reveal, the implications of religious worship, and it can be said to be true or false, but only as regards its adequacy in formulating and purifying a pre-existing religious faith. While theological attempts to prove the existence of God are as absurd as philosophical attempts to prove the premisses of mathematics or the principles of empirical inference, theology pursued as an axiomatization of the Christian faith has an important analytic task. Though its results can be understood only by practising Christians, it can greatly help them to understand what they are practising.  Read more at location 6084

natural science, mathematics and technology mutually interpenetrate each other. All the arts are similarly interwoven; while the arts and the methods of science penetrate each other in the domain of the humanities. Religion has even more comprehensive affinities: it can transpose all intellectual experiences into its own universe, and has also served, in reverse, most other intellectual systems as their theme.  Read more at location 6125

The two kinds of findings, the religious and the natural, by-pass each other in the same way as the findings of law courts by-pass ordinary experience. The acceptance of the Christian faith does not express the assertion of observable facts and consequently you cannot prove or disprove Christianity by experiments or factual records.  Read more at location 6129

It is illogical to attempt the proof of the supernatural by natural tests, for these can only establish the natural aspects of an event and can never represent it as supernatural.  Read more at location 6138

the biblical cosmology continues to express—however inadequately—the significance of the fact that the world exists and that man has emerged from it, while the scientific picture denies any meaning to the world, and indeed ignores all our most vital experience of this world. The assumption that the world has some meaning which is linked to our own calling as the only morally responsible beings in the world, is an important example of the supernatural aspect of experience which Christian interpretations of the universe explore and develop.  Read more at location 6145

It is also part of the Christian faith that its striving is unfulfillable. It must always remain painfully conscious of its inherent dubiety. But since this is part of the faith, it does not derogate from it.  Read more at location 6163

Doubts directed against the clues as facts may thus shake the internal evidence of the system relying on them. Explicit doubts may intensify the intrinsic doubts of our acceptance to the point of converting it into a complete rejection.  Read more at location 6168

all truth is but the external pole of belief, and to destroy all belief would be to deny all truth. Though religious beliefs are often formulated more dogmatically than other beliefs, this is not essential.  Read more at location 6176

****  We owe our mental existence predominantly to works of art, morality, religious worship, scientific theory and other articulate systems which we accept as our dwelling place and as the soil of our mental development. Objectivism has totally falsified our conception of truth, by exalting what we can know and prove, while covering up with ambiguous utterances all that we know and cannot prove, even though the latter knowledge underlies, and must ultimately set its seal to, all that we can prove.  Read more at location 6182

8. IMPLICIT BELIEFS 

The limitations of doubting as a principle can be elaborated further by extending our enquiry to the beliefs held in the form of our conceptual framework, as expressed in our language. Our most deeply ingrained convictions are determined by the idiom in which we interpret our experience and in terms of which we erect our articulate systems.  Read more at location 6187

9. THREE ASPECTS OF STABILITY

This power of a system of implicit beliefs to defeat valid objections one by one is due to the circularity of such systems.  Read more at location 6233

****  (Note:   Language as recursive metaphorical system, dependant upon its own axioms)  The circularity of the theory of the universe embodied in any particular language is manifested in an elementary fashion by the existence of a dictionary of the language. If you doubt, for example, that a particular English noun, verb, adjective or adverb has any meaning in English, an English dictionary dispels this doubt by a definition using other nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs, the meaningfulness of which is not doubted for the moment. Enquiries of this kind will increasingly confirm us in the use of a language. Remember also what we have found about the axiomatization of mathematics; namely that it merely declares the beliefs implied in the practice of mathematical reasoning. The axiomatized system is therefore circular: our anterior acceptance of mathematics lends authority to its axioms, from which we then deduce in turn all mathematical demonstrations.  Read more at location 6243

Every assertion of a deductive system can be demonstrated by, or else shown to be implied as axioms of, the others. Therefore, if we doubt each assertion in its turn each is found confirmed by circularity, and the refutation of each consecutive doubt results in strengthening our belief in the system as a whole.  Read more at location 6251

A second aspect of stability arises from an automatic expansion of the circle in which an interpretative system operates. It readily supplies elaborations of the system which will cover almost any conceivable eventuality, however embarrassing this may appear at first sight.  Read more at location 6276

All major interpretative frameworks have an epicyclical structure which supplies a reserve of subsidiary explanations for difficult situations.  Read more at location 6279

(Note: Paradigm defense system)  This third defence mechanism of implicit beliefs may be called the principle of suppressed nucleation. It is complementary to the operations of circularity and self-expansion. While these protect an existing system of beliefs against doubts arising from any adverse piece of evidence, suppressed nucleation prevents the germination of any alternative concepts on the basis of any such evidence. Circularity, combined with a readily available reserve of epicyclical elaborations and the consequent suppression in the germ of any rival conceptual development, lends a degree of stability to a conceptual framework which we may describe as the measure of its completeness.  Read more at location 6293

10. THE STABILITY OF SCIENTIFIC BELIEFS 

****  Any contradiction between a particular scientific notion and the facts of experience will be explained by other scientific notions; there is a ready reserve of possible scientific hypotheses available to explain any conceivable event. Secured by its circularity and defended further by its epicyclical reserves, science may deny, or at least cast aside as of no scientific interest, whole ranges of experience which to the unscientific mind appear both massive and vital.  Read more at location 6303

Scientists were satisfied with speaking of the ‘anomalies of strong electrolytes’, without doubting for a moment that their behaviour was in fact governed by the law that they failed to obey. I can still remember my own amazement when, about 1919, I first heard the idea mooted that the anomalies were to be regarded as a refutation of the equilibrium postulated by Arrhenius and to be explained by a different theory.  Read more at location 6315

(Note: Provides examples)  Contradictions to current scientific conceptions are often disposed of by calling them ‘anomalies’; this is the handiest assumption in the epicyclical reserve of any theory.  Read more at location 6320

Towards the end of the last century numerous observations were reported by H. B. Baker29 on the power of intensive drying to stop some normally extremely rapid chemical reactions and to reduce the rate of evaporation of a number of commonly used chemicals. Baker went on publishing further instances of this drying effect for more than thirty years.  Read more at location 6326

Today these experiments, which aroused so much interest from 1900 to 1930, are almost forgotten. Textbooks of chemistry which thoughtlessly go on compiling published data still record Baker’s observations in detail, merely adding that their validity ‘is not yet certainly established’,33 or that ‘some (of his) findings are disputed by later workers, but the technique is difficult’.34 But active scientists no longer take any interest in these phenomena, for in view of their present understanding of chemical processes they are convinced that most of them must have been spurious, and that, if some were real, they were likely to have been due to trivial causes.  Read more at location 6335

11. UNIVERSAL DOUBT 

Though every element of our belief can conceivably be confronted in its turn with all the rest, it is inconceivable that all should be subject simultaneously to this operation. But this is not to say that a system of beliefs can never be doubted as a whole. Euclidean geometry was called in question as a whole and reduced to an optional status by the establishment of non-Euclidean geometry.  Read more at location 6354

a meaning of universal doubt which is free from self-contradiction. We may imagine an indefinite extension of the process of abandoning hitherto accepted systems of articulation, together with the theories formulated in these terms or implied in our use of them. This kind of doubt might eventually lead to the relinquishing, without compensation, of all existing means of articulation. It would make us forget all hitherto used idioms and dissolve all concepts which these idioms conveyed. Our articulate intellectual life, which operates by the handling of denotable concepts, would thus be reduced to abeyance for the time being.  Read more at location 6358

An entirely untutored maturing of the mind would, however, result in a state of imbecility. The emotional and appetitive impulses that are inherent in animal life will of course pour into such channels as are available to them. In the absence of a rational conceptual framework to guide them, their manifestation will not be sceptically restrained but frantic and inchoate.  Read more at location 6373

If, therefore, the ideal of a virgin mind is to be pursued to its logical limit, we have to face the fact that every perception of things, particularly by our eyes, involves implications about the nature of things which could be false.  Read more at location 6386

****  no philosophic sceptic would side with the Inquisition against the Copernican system or with Pope Pius XII against Darwinism, Lenin and his successors have elaborated a form of Marxism which doubts the reality of almost everything that Bertrand Russell and other rationalists teach us to respect, but these doubts, like those of the Inquisition, are not endorsed by Western rationalists, presumably because they are not ‘rational doubts’. Since the sceptic does not consider it rational to doubt what he himself believes, the advocacy of ‘rational doubt’ is merely the sceptic’s way of advocating his own beliefs.  Read more at location 6416

CHAPTER 10

COMMITMENT

1. FUNDAMENTAL BELIEFS 

‘I believe that in spite of the hazards involved, I am called upon to search for the truth and state my findings’ This sentence, summarizing my fiduciary programme, conveys an ultimate belief which I find myself holding.  Read more at location 6433

****  Any enquiry into our ultimate beliefs can be consistent only if it presupposes its own conclusions. It must be intentionally circular.  Read more at location 6436

my confident admission of circularity being justified only by my conviction, that in so far as I express my utmost understanding of my intellectual responsibilities as my own personal belief, I may rest assured of having fulfilled the ultimate requirements of self-criticism; that indeed I am obliged to form such personal beliefs and can hold them in a responsible manner, even though I recognize that such a claim can have no other justification than such as it derives from being declared in the very terms which it endorses. Logically, the whole of my argument is but an elaboration of this circle; it is a systematic course in teaching myself to hold my own beliefs.  Read more at location 6438

2. THE SUBJECTIVE, THE PERSONAL AND THE UNIVERSAL

The anguish suffered by animals puzzled by problems (of which I shall say more later) demonstrates the correlated capacity for enjoying intellectual success. These emotions express a belief: to be tormented by a problem is to believe that it has a solution and to rejoice at discovery is to accept it as true.  Read more at location 6458

****  (Note:   his definition of personal knowledge)  I think we may distinguish between the personal in us, which actively enters into our commitments, and our subjective states, in which we merely endure our feelings. This distinction establishes the conception of the personal, which is neither subjective nor objective. In so far as the personal submits to requirements acknowledged by itself as independent of itself, it is not subjective; but in so far as it is an action guided by individual passions, it is not objective either. It transcends the disjunction between subjective and objective.  Read more at location 6465

Though appetites and sensory impulses are clearly personal actions, they are those of a person within ourselves with which we may not always identify ourselves. We have often to restrain our primary desires and correct the judgment of our senses, which shows that such sub-intellectual performances do not wholly commit ourselves. At the upper end of the scale we find forms of intelligence in which our personal participation tends to be reduced for quite different reasons. Mathematical science is widely accepted as the most perfect of sciences, and science as the most perfect of all feats of intelligence. While these claims may be excessive or even altogether mistaken, they express the inescapable ideal of a completely formalized intelligence, which would eliminate from its manifestations every trace of personal commitment. A conscious and persistent striving for the solution of an articulate problem lies midway between these two extremes.  Read more at location 6476

****  From the first intimation of a hidden problem and throughout its pursuit to the point of its solution, the process of discovery is guided by a personal vision and sustained by a personal conviction. While originality conflicts sharply with the ideal of a completely formalized intelligence, it also differs altogether from drive-satisfaction.  Read more at location 6486

Columbus discovered America. This does not impair the measure of the discoverer’s originality; for though America was there for Columbus to discover, its discovery was still made by him. But the universal intention of a radical innovation can also be represented as a sense of its pre-existence. When a mathematician putting forward a daring new conception, like non-Euclidean geometry or the theory of sets, demands acceptance for them from his reluctant contemporaries, he shows that in his enquiries he had aimed at the satisfaction of pre-existing standards of intellectual merit and that he regards the product of his thought as the disclosure of a preexisting possibility for the satisfaction of these standards. Even in the natural sciences, radical innovations may have to rely for acceptance on yet undeveloped sensibilities. The purely mathematical framework of modern physics was not satisfying from the point of view of previous generations, who sought for explanations in terms of mechanical models. In order to prevail, modern physicists had to educate their public to use new standards of intellectual appreciation.  Read more at location 6492

The scientist pursuing an enquiry ascribes impersonal status to his standards and his claims, because he regards them as impersonally established by science. But his submission to scientific standards for the appraisal and guidance of his efforts is the only sense in which these standards can be said to pre-exist, or even to exist at all, for him. No one can know universal intellectual standards except by acknowledging their jurisdiction over himself as part of the terms on which he holds himself responsible for the pursuit of his mental efforts.  Read more at location 6513

You cannot speak without self-contradiction of knowledge you do not believe, or of a reality which does not exist.  Read more at location 6519

3. THE COHERENCE OF COMMITMENT 

its acceptance necessarily invalidates any impersonal justification of knowledge. This can be illustrated by writing down a symbolic representation of the elements joined together within a commitment and contrasting these with the same elements, when looked upon non-committally from outside the commitment situation. We may, for example, represent a factual statement  Read more at location 6524  (Note: From within: personal passion -> confident utterance -> accredited facts. From outside: subjective belief -> declaratory sentence -> alleged facts)

The fiduciary passions which induce a confident utterance about the facts are personal, because they submit to the facts as universally valid, but when we reflect on this act non-committally its passion is reduced to subjectivity.  Read more at location 6529

The reflecting person is then caught in an insoluble conflict between a demand for an impersonality which would discredit all commitment and an urge to make up his mind which drives him to recommit himself.  Read more at location 6540

This dilemma has long haunted philosophy in the guise of the ‘correspondence theory of truth’. Bertrand Russell, for example, defines truth as a coincidence between one’s subjective belief and the actual facts;2 yet it is impossible, in terms which Russell would allow, to say how the two could ever coincide. The answer is this. The ‘actual facts’ are accredited facts, as seen within the commitment situation, while subjective beliefs are the convictions accrediting these facts as seen non-committally, by someone not sharing them.  Read more at location 6544

we should avoid these anomalies by denying that the utterance ‘p is true’ is a sentence. We now see how the theory of knowledge is also thrown into confusion by the same objectivistic language habit. This habit transforms an assertion coupled to an asserted sentence into two asserted sentences: one about primary objects, the other about the truth of a sentence mentioning these objects.  Read more at location 6555

****  The word ‘true’ does not designate, then, a quality possessed by the sentence p, but merely serves to make the phrase ‘p is true’ convey that the person uttering it still believes  Read more at location 6561

The utterance ‘I believe p’ expresses more aptly a heuristic conviction or a religious belief, while ‘p is true’ will be preferred for affirming a statement taken from a textbook of science. But a greater fiduciary contribution does not necessarily correspond here to a greater uncertainty of that which is affirmed. The emphasis on the personal coefficient depends on the heuristic or persuasive passion that it conveys.  Read more at location 6564

**** truth is something that can be thought of only by believing it. It is then improper to speak of another person’s mental operation as leading to a true proposition in any other sense than that it leads him to something the speaker himself believes to be true.  Read more at location 6574

4. EVASION OF COMMITMENT 

Modern descriptions of scientific truths as mere working hypotheses or interpretative policies are generalizations of the Kantian regulative principles to the whole of science.4 For we would never use a hypothesis which we believe to be false, nor a policy which we believe to be wrong.5 The suggestion which usually accompanies these regulative formulations of science, that all scientific theories are merely tentative, since scientists are ready to modify their conclusions in the face of new evidence, is irrelevant, for it does not affect the fiduciary content of a hypothesis or policy.  Read more at location 6608

5. THE STRUCTURE OF COMMITMENT: I 

the thought of truth implies a desire for it, and is to that extent personal. But since such a desire is for something impersonal, this personal motive has an impersonal intention. We avoid these seeming contradictions by accepting the framework of commitment, in which the personal and the universal mutually require each other. Here the personal comes into existence by asserting universal intent, and the universal is constituted by being accepted as the impersonal term of this personal commitment. Such a commitment enacts the paradox of dedication. In it a person asserts his rational independence by obeying the dictates of his own conscience, that is, of obligations laid down for himself by himself.  Read more at location 6624

The freedom of the subjective person to do as he pleases is overruled by the freedom of the responsible person to act as he must.  Read more at location 6644

Scientific intuition is evoked by a strenuous groping towards an unknown achievement, believed to be hidden and yet accessible. Therefore, though every choice in a heuristic process is indeterminate in the sense of being an entirely personal judgment, in those who exercise such judgment competently it is completely determined by their responsibility in respect to the situation confronting them.  Read more at location 6656

An empirical statement is true to the extent to which it reveals an aspect of reality, a reality largely hidden to us, and existing therefore independently of our knowing it. By trying to say something that is true about a reality believed to be existing independently of our knowing it, all assertions of fact necessarily carry universal intent. Our claim to speak of reality serves thus as the external anchoring of our commitment in making a factual statement.  Read more at location 6680

The enquiring scientist’s intimations of a hidden reality are personal. They are his own beliefs, which—owing to his originality—as yet he alone holds. Yet they are not a subjective state of mind, but convictions held with universal intent, and heavy with arduous projects. It was he who decided what to believe, yet there is no arbitrariness in his decision. For he arrived at his conclusions by the utmost exercise of responsibility. He has reached responsible beliefs, born of necessity, and not changeable at will.  Read more at location 6684

**** In a heuristic commitment, affirmation, surrender and legislation are fused into a single thought, bearing on a hidden reality.  Read more at location 6687

6. THE STRUCTURE OF COMMITMENT; II 

I shall have to supplement now what I have said in the previous section about scientific discovery, by describing how knowledge is acquired at lower levels, namely by perception and inarticulate learning. This  Read more at location 6720

Every act of factual knowing has the structure of a commitment. Since the two poles of commitment, the personal and the universal, are correlative, we may expect them to arise simultaneously from an antecedent state of selfless subjectivity.  Read more at location 6726

The early behaviour of children suggests that they cannot distinguish between fact and fiction, or between their own person and another. They live in a world of their own making, which they believe to be shared by everybody else.  Read more at location 6728

****  (Note:   no self, duality)  the blurred distinction between self and non-self, which underlies the child’s state of mind here, might as well be described as ‘selfless’. So long, or in so far, as the external and internal worlds of a person do not interfere with each other, there can be no conflict between them and hence no attempt can be made to avoid such a conflict by discovering a correct interpretation of the world. Nor can any risk be taken in the pursuit of such a discovery. Only as we become divided from the world, can we achieve a personhood capable of committing itself consciously to beliefs concerning the world, and incurring thereby a fiduciary hazard.  Read more at location 6730

The person that emerges at this level of commitment is only the ego, exercising discrimination, though lacking as yet responsible judgment.  Read more at location 6736

even a primitive tacit act like perception may operate deliberately in search of the truth over an area of discretion, within which it overrules even more primitive, i.e. less discriminating, mental propensities. There is, indeed, complete continuity between a perceptive judgment and the process by which we establish responsible convictions in the course of scientific research.  Read more at location 6746

an agent exercising a mental act competently with a view to the existing circumstances cannot, at the moment of acting, correct it as to its timing any more than as to its content.10 To postpone mental decisions on account of their conceivable fallibility would necessarily block all decisions for ever, and pile up the hazards of hesitation to infinity. It would amount to voluntary mental stupor. Stupor alone can eliminate both belief and error. Strict scepticism should deny itself the possibility of advocating its own doctrine, since its consistent practice would preclude the use of language, the meaning of which is subject to all the notorious pitfalls of inductive reasoning.  Read more at location 6755

(Note: Towards premise of personal knowledge)  to repeat my fundamental belief that, in spite of the hazards involved, I am called upon to search for the truth and state my findings. To accept commitment as the framework within which we may believe something to be true, is to circumscribe the hazards of belief. It is to establish the conception of competence which authorizes a fiduciary choice made and timed, to the best of the acting person’s ability, as a deliberate and yet necessary choice. The paradox of self-set standards is eliminated, for in a competent mental act the agent does not do as he pleases, but compels himself forcibly to act as he believes he must.  Read more at location 6767

The outcome of a competent fiduciary act may, admittedly, vary from one person to another, but since the differences are not due to any arbitrariness on the part of the individuals, each retains justifiably his universal intent. As each hopes to capture an aspect of reality, they may all hope that their findings will eventually coincide or supplement each other.  Read more at location 6773

(Note: Disagree with this, but other parts seem to disagree too)  Therefore, though every person may believe something different to be true, there is only one truth.  Read more at location 6776

The only sense in which I can speak of the facts of the matter is by making up my own mind about them. In doing so I may rely on an existing consensus, as a clue to the truth, or else may dissent from it, for my own reasons. In either case my answer will be made with universal intent, saying what I believe to be the truth, and what the consensus ought therefore to be. This is the only sense in which I can speak of the truth, and though I am the only person who can speak of it in this sense, this is what I mean by the truth.  Read more at location 6781

This position is not solipsistic, since it is based on a belief in an external reality and implies the existence of other persons who can likewise approach the same reality.  Read more at location 6787

****  The concept of commitment postulates that there is no difference, except in emphasis, between saying ‘I believe p’ or ‘“p” is true’. Both utterances emphatically put into words that I am confidently asserting p, as a fact.  Read more at location 6789

7. INDETERMINACY AND SELF-RELIANCE 

the progress of scientific discovery depends on heuristic commitments which establish contacts with reality, and that the hazards incurred in entering on such a commitment are twofold: namely (1) that it may be mistaken and (2) that even if it is right, its future scope and significance is largely indeterminate.  Read more at location 6797

8. EXISTENTIAL ASPECTS OF COMMITMENT 

the range within which I acknowledge mental activity as competent and beyond which I reject it as superstition, fatuity, extravagance, madness, or mere twaddle, is determined by my own interpretative framework. And different systems of acknowledged competence are separated by a logical gap, across which they threaten each other by their persuasive passions. They are contesting each other’s mental existence.  Read more at location 6846

Such conflicts will take place within ourselves when we hesitate at the brink of being converted from one such system to another.  Read more at location 6849

However, in other instances the conflict may be decided in favour of our perceptive faculties, as when the impressionist painters decided to accept the testimony of the eye, which sees shadows coloured merely by contrast to their coloured neighbourhood. For some time the public refused to recognize this manner of representation and rejected their paintings as shocking and absurd; but after a while they agreed to see as the impressionists saw and accepted their colouring as correct. Or consider the change in musical sensibility resulting from the introduction of the equal-temperament scale. It is first known to have been used in Hamburg about 1690; and Bach used it in his compositions for the clavichord.  Read more at location 6853

Peter the Great had to force his courtiers on peril of their lives to smoke cigars, by which he hoped to Westernize their outlook; and many of us have to pass through a similar ordeal under compulsion by fashion, before we acquire some new taste to which we then become wholly addicted.  Read more at location 6863

****  Desire and emotion may educate our intelligence, as they do when we grow up to sexual maturity and parenthood; and the reverse may happen when we control and refashion our appetites in conformity to social custom. As we identify ourselves in turn with one level of our person or another, we feel passively subjected to the activities of the one which we do not acknowledge for the time being.  Read more at location 6866

9. VARIETIES OF COMMITMENT 

***********  (Note:   personal truth)  Within the framework of commitment, to say that a sentence is true is to authorize its assertion. Truth becomes the rightness of an action; and the verification of a statement is transposed into giving reasons for deciding to accept it, though these reasons will never be wholly specifiable. We must commit each moment of our lives irrevocably on grounds which, if time could be suspended, would invariably prove inadequate; but our total responsibility for disposing of ourselves makes these objectively inadequate grounds compelling.  Read more at location 6876

****  Our heuristic self-giving is invariably impassioned: its guide to reality is intellectual beauty.  Read more at location 6881

Mathematical physics assimilates experience to beautiful systems of indeterminate bearing. Its application to experience may be strictly predictive within certain not strictly definable conditions.  Read more at location 6881

********  Once truth is equated with the rightness of mental acceptance, the transition from science to the arts is gradual. Authentic feeling and authentic experience jointly guide all intellectual achievements; so that from observing scientific facts within a rigid theoretical framework we can move by degrees towards dwelling within a harmonious framework of colours, of sounds or imagery, which merely recall objects and echo emotions experienced before. As we pass thus from verification to validation and rely increasingly on internal rather than external evidence, the structure of commitment remains unchanged but its depth becomes greater.  Read more at location 6887

The laws and the morality of a society compel its members to live within their framework. A society which accepts this position in relation to thought is committed as a whole to the standards by which thought is currently accepted in it as valid.  Read more at location 6899

10. ACCEPTANCE OF CALLING

Every deliberate act of our own relies on the involuntary functions of our body. Our thoughts are limited by our innate capabilities. Our senses and emotions can be enhanced by education, but these ramifications remain dependent on their native roots.  Read more at location 6904

****  Our believing is conditioned at its source by our belonging. And this reliance on the cultural machinery of our society continues through life. We go on accepting the information given out by its leading centres of publicity and relying on its recognized authorities for most of our judgments of value.  Read more at location 6911

Believing as I do in the justification of deliberate intellectual commitments, I accept these accidents of personal existence as the concrete opportunities for exercising our personal responsibility. This acceptance is the sense of my calling.  Read more at location 6918

(Note: Embodied cognition)  I believe, therefore, that as I am called upon to live and die in this body, struggling to satisfy its desires, recording my impressions by aid of such sense organs as it is equipped with, and acting through the puny machinery of my brain, my nerves and my muscles, so I am called upon also to acquire the instruments of intelligence from my early surroundings and to use these particular instruments to fulfil the universal obligations to which I am subject. A sense of responsibility within situations requiring deliberate decisions demands as its logical complement a sense of calling with respect to the processes of intellectual growth which are its necessary logical antecedents.  Read more at location 6930

The most strictly universalized processes of inference are shown to rely ultimately on their inarticulate interpretation by a person accepting them, and life pursuing its self-centred primitive urges is shown to rely on universal technical principles; while between the two we meet man’s momentous acts of responsible commitment, made by accepting his own starting-point in space and time, as the condition of his own calling.  Read more at location 6943

****  Commitment offers to those who accept it legitimate grounds for the affirmation of personal convictions with universal intent. Standing on these grounds, we claim that our participation is personal, not subjective, except in so far as it is compulsive. While it then lies beyond our responsibility, it is yet transformed by our sense of responsibility into part of our calling. Our subjective condition may be taken to include the historical setting in which we have grown up. We accept these as the assignment of our particular problem. Our personhood is assured by our simultaneous contact with universal aspirations which place us in a transcendent perspective.  Read more at location 6959

The stage on which we thus resume our full intellectual powers is borrowed from the Christian scheme of Fall and Redemption. Fallen Man is equated to the historically given and subjective condition of our mind, from which we may be saved by the grace of the spirit. The technique of our redemption is to lose ourselves in the performance of an obligation which we accept, in spite of its appearing on reflection impossible of achievement. We undertake the task of attaining the universal in spite of our admitted infirmity, which should render the task hopeless, because we hope to be visited by powers for which we cannot account in terms of our specifiable capabilities. This hope is a clue to God,  Read more at location 6964

PART FOUR

KNOWING AND BEING 

CHAPTER 11

THE LOGIC OF ACHIEVEMENT 

1. INTRODUCTION 

****  (Note:   holism, against reductionism)  Our comprehension of a living individual entails a subsidiary awareness of its parts which is not wholly specifiable in more detached terms. This understanding acknowledges a particular comprehensive—i.e. ‘molar’—achievement of the individual itself. Since our knowledge of this molar function is not specifiable in ‘molecular’ terms, the function itself is not reducible to molecular particulars; it must be acknowledged therefore as a higher form of being, not determined by these particulars. We can reach this conclusion directly by recalling that the understanding of a whole appreciates the coherence of its subject matter and thus acknowledges the existence of a value that is absent from the constituent particulars.  Read more at location 6977

2. RULES OF RIGHTNESS 

animals can learn (1) to perform tricks, (2) to read signs, (3) to know their way about. These activities were taken to prefigure primordially the three faculties of contriving, observing and reasoning, which are elaborated on the articulate level to the three domains of engineering, natural sciences and mathematics.  Read more at location 6990

a machine or a technical process is characterized by an operational principle, which differs altogether from an observational statement. The former, if it is new, represents an invention and can be covered by a patent; the latter, if it is new, is a discovery, which cannot be patented.  Read more at location 6999

the class of things defined by a common operational principle cannot be even approximately specified in terms of physics and chemistry.  Read more at location 7012

Technology comprises all acknowledged operational principles and endorses the purposes which they serve. This endorsement also appreciates the value of the machine as a rational means of securing the advantage in question. The operational principle of the machine now functions as an ideal: the ideal of the machine in good working order. It sets a standard of perfection.  Read more at location 7014

The operational principles of machines are therefore rules of rightness, which account only for the successful working of machines but leave their failures entirely unexplained.  Read more at location 7023

A physical and chemical investigation cannot convey the understanding of a machine as expressed by its operational principles. In fact, it can say nothing at all about the way the machine works or ought to work. This point is fundamental for the general understanding of different levels of reality  Read more at location 7028

a knowledge of physics and chemistry would in itself not enable us to recognize a machine.  Read more at location 7032

****  rules of rightness account only for the success, never for the failure, of things constructed and operated in accordance with them. We now see, on the other hand, that physics and chemistry are blind both to success and failure, since they ignore the operational principles by which success and failure are defined. We identify a machine by understanding it technically; that is, by a participation in its purpose and an endorsement of its operational principles. We do not exercise such a participation within a physical or chemical investigation. Indeed, the understanding of the structure and operation of a machine require as a rule very little knowledge of physics and chemistry. Hence the two kinds of knowledge, the technical and the scientific, largely by-pass each other.  Read more at location 7049

no physical or chemical observations of clocks will be of any use to a clockmaker, unless such observations are related to the operational principles of a clock, as conditions for their success or causes of their breakdown. And we may conclude quite generally that in our knowledge of a comprehensive entity, embodying a rule of rightness, any information supplied by physics and chemistry can play only a subsidiary part.  Read more at location 7064

3. CAUSES AND REASONS 

Technology, embodied in rules of Rightness, teaches a rational way to achieve an acknowledged purpose.  Read more at location 7072

Since rules of rightness cannot account for failures, and reasons for doing something can only be given within the context of rules of rightness, it follows that there can be no reasons (in this sense) for a failure. It is best, therefore, to avoid the use of the word ‘reason’ in this context and to describe the origins of failures invariably as their causes.  Read more at location 7085

4. LOGIC AND PSYCHOLOGY 

(Note: Cognition as embodied)  In so far as the deductive sciences consist in formalized operations, they can be embodied in the operational principles of computing machines; and the body of an animal also functions to a certain extent as a machine. Our enquiry into the logic of machines is, therefore, capable of generalization over a domain extending from mathematics to physiology.  Read more at location 7092

The operation of these rules of rightness takes place within the flow of conscious and unconscious awareness which is the subject matter of psychology.  Read more at location 7115

****  in which the child was brought up. But no study of this medium of thought can reveal whether a particular deduction—for example a proof of the binomial theorem—is correct or not. The correctness of such a proof can be supported only by logical reasons, not by psychological observations. Psychology cannot distinguish by itself between true and false inferences, and hence is blind to logical principles;  Read more at location 7118

the validity of a theorem can only be justified by reasons, not accounted for by causes. The relation between the rules of logic and the subject matter of psychology which I have just described is the same as that between the operational principles of machines and the subject matters of physics and chemistry, except for one additional feature—I have introduced a second person striving to reason rightly, according to the rules of logic.  Read more at location 7124

************  whatever rules of rightness a person tries to fulfil and establish—be they moral, aesthetic or legal—he commits himself to an ideal; and again, he can do so only within a medium that is blind to this ideal. The ideal determines the standards to which a person holds himself responsible; but the ideal-blind medium both grants the possibility for striving for this ideal and limits this possibility. It determines his calling.  Read more at location 7128

5. ORIGINALITY IN ANIMALS 

****  I used Köhler’s examples, in which a chimpanzee achieves a set purpose by suitably reorganizing his field of vision. Next I identified in a rat the latent knowledge of a maze that it had learned to run, by its capacity for suitably reorganizing its knowledge to deal with the emergency of blocked paths.5 The Yerkes-Heck experiment showed how earthworms can reorganize latent knowledge indefinitely in the face of new circumstances.6 On a similarly inarticulate level, men grope their way towards a skilful performance, unconsciously readjusting the co-ordination of their muscles in the direction of success.7 The way we strain our eyes in order to ‘make out’ what it is that we see, gave us an example of a discovery pursued by conjointly reorganizing a set of unconscious muscular actions with our simultaneous interpretation of the impressions shaped by these actions.8 This urge to reorganize our experiences and capabilities in a manner more satisfying to ourselves was traced upwards through the entire range of human inventiveness. It defined man the innovator and explorer, passionately pouring himself into an existence closer to reality.  Read more at location 7137

(Note: Seems a question of monism vs dualism for him. He seems to be leaning toward latter as transcendent)  I must try to decide now, on such grounds, whether the originality of animals and men can be accounted for by some ingenious automatic machinery, or should be acknowledged as an independent force operating through the body in combination with the existing machinery of the body.  Read more at location 7149

(Note: Against reductive mechanistic consciousness)  It might not be inconceivable that a machine of sufficient complexity would develop conscious thinking, without losing its machine-like character. However, conceived in this sense, conscious thoughts would be the mere accompaniment of automatic operations, on the outcome of which they could exercise no influence. We should have to imagine, for example, that Shakespeare’s conscious thoughts had no effect on the writing of his plays; that the plays were subsequently performed by actors whose thoughts had no effect on their acting; while successive generations of audiences flocked to see the plays without being impelled by the fact that they enjoyed them. None of this is strictly inconceivable; it forms a closed interpretative system. Though nobody can believe in it in practice, one might regard this as a failing due to primitive habits of mind which a perfect scientific knowledge would eliminate. I am committed to a different belief. I accept the responsibility for drawing an ever indeterminate knowledge from unspecifiable clues, with an aim to universal validity; and this belief includes the acknowledgment of other persons as responsible centres of equally unspecifiable operations, aiming likewise at universal validity.  Read more at location 7159

****  This conceptual framework strongly suggests to me the presence of an active centre operating unspecifiably in all animals.  Read more at location 7172

****  There are then two principles at work in animals: namely, (1) the use of machine-like contrivances and (2) the inventive powers of animal life. Accordingly, while the animal’s machinery embodies fixed operational principles, this machinery would be impelled, guided and readapted by the animal’s unspecifiable inventive urge—even as rigid symbolic operations are accredited and steadily reinterpreted by the tacit powers that affirm them.  Read more at location 7176

****  (Note:   interesting example of animal brain plasticity, against physical reductionism)  Lashley12 has observed that mutilated rats which had learned a maze continued to find their way through it, though the neural paths used in learning had been cut. Naturally, the manner of their progression was completely altered: ‘One drags himself through with his forepaws (writes Lashley); another falls at every step but gets through by a series of lunges; a third rolls over completely in making each turn, yet manages to avoid rolling into a cul-de-sac and makes an errorless run. . . .’ He concludes that ‘If the customary sequence of movements employed in reaching the food is rendered impossible, another set, not previously used, and constituting an entirely different motor pattern, may be directly and efficiently reconstituted, without any random activity. . . .’ The operated rats retain a memory and a purpose that evokes in each of them a different set of operational principles for achieving the same persistent aim. These instantly improvised alternative combinations of organs may be said to be equipotential in achieving the same overall action. They offer a series of solutions for the same technical problems.  Read more at location 7181

With advancing age Renoir became crippled with arthritis. He lost the use both of his feet and hands; his fingers were immobilized in perpetual cramped rigidity. Yet Renoir went on painting for another twenty years until his death, with a brush fixed to his forearm. In this manner he produced a great number of pictures hardly distinguishable in quality or style from those he had painted before. The skill and the vision which he had developed and mastered by the use of his fingers, was no longer in his fingers.  Read more at location 7190

At the other extreme of the evolutionary scale Buddenbrock14 and Bethe15 have shown that insects, spiders, centipedes and water-beetles, instantly adapt their mode of locomotion to the amputation of a leg or indeed of any particular combination of legs. Bethe argued that these improvised equipotential co-ordinations are so varied that they cannot be due to the action of predetermined anatomic paths.  Read more at location 7196

(Note: 'As above, so below' instantiated. Platonic forms)  The fragments detached from embryos of certain lower animals have the capacity of regenerating the whole embryo and of producing normal individuals. This ontogenetic principle was first discovered by H. Driesch in the embryo of the sea urchin. Throughout its cleavage stage any cell or combination of cells detached from the embryo will develop into a normal sea urchin. Driesch characterized these regenerative powers of an embryo by describing it as an ‘harmonious equipotential’ system. The capacity of the germ to build up a normal embryo in spite of severe amputations is more widely referred to today as ‘morphogenetic regulation’.  Read more at location 7202

represent living men as insentient is empirically false, but to regard them as thoughtful automata is logical nonsense.  Read more at location 7215

The unconscious exercise of originality is usually still prompted by a conscious effort and a judgment of a high order, as in the case of the heuristic efforts which induce discovery during a subsequent period of latency.  Read more at location 7222

The morphogenetic principle discovered by Driesch thus reveals itself as the primordial member of an ascending series of homologous processes, which cannot be understood except as the resourceful achievement of a comprehensive rightness, and every one of which dissolves altogether in the light of any more impersonal examination.  Read more at location 7231

6. EXPLANATIONS OF EQUIPOTENTIALITY 

(1) Where science and technology overlap, operational principles overlap with certain laws of nature (see p. 331 above), and in the same sense a physiological function may conceivably coincide with certain laws of physics and chemistry. Yet both in the case of technology and physiology something is being achieved which neither physics nor chemistry can define.  Read more at location 7272

(2) The seeing of a pattern or a shape is such an achievement. A process of physico-chemical equilibration is indifferent to the success or failure of gestalt seeing and therefore cannot express the difference between illusion and knowledge, or represent the effort made by the subject to avoid error and achieve knowledge. Morphogenesis is the formation of right shapes, a process which may succeed or fail.  Read more at location 7275

(3) All questions raised by psychology and morphogenesis are rooted in our interest in mental activities and embryonic development. Studies of physical-chemical processes can never take the place of these interests; they can belong to psychology or embryology only to the extent to which they have a bearing on anterior interests arising within these sciences. Physical and chemical knowledge can form part of biology only in its bearing on previously established biological shapes and functions: a complete physical and chemical topography of a frog would tell us nothing about it as a frog, unless we knew it previously as a frog.  Read more at location 7279

Living beings function according to two always interwoven principles, namely as machines and by ‘regulation’. Machine-like functions operate ideally by fixed structures; the ideal case of regulation is an equipotential integration of all parts in a joint performance.  Read more at location 7286

7. LOGICAL LEVELS 

To the extent to which our personal participation in knowing a fact contributes to making it what it is, we may call it a personal fact.  Read more at location 7294

its major importance emerges only when we turn to living beings, where an important additional feature is added to it: this feature is our recognition of individuals.  Read more at location 7299

Individuality is, accordingly, a personal fact, and to that extent unspecifiable.  Read more at location 7310

a living individual is altogether different from any of the inanimate things, like tunes, words, poems, theories, cultures, to which we have ascribed meaning before this. Its meaning is different, perhaps richer, and above all, it has a centre. The focus of our comprehension is now something active, that grows, produces meaningful shapes, survives by the rational functioning of its organs; something that can behave and acquire knowledge, and at a human level, can even think and affirm its own convictions. The acknowledgment of such a centre is a logical novelty.  Read more at location 7317

When we know somebody who himself knows something, his knowledge is part of our subject matter. We must decide whether it is in fact knowledge. A man’s illusions are not the same as his knowledge. We must undertake therefore to discriminate between the two and to understand the ground on which knowledge was acquired. So presently we find ourselves examining knowledge or alleged knowledge, in the same way as when we reflect on what we ourselves know, or believe we know.  Read more at location 7322

We have then three logical levels: a first floor for the objects of science, a second for science itself and a third for meta-science, which includes the logic and epistemology of science.  Read more at location 7327

In contrast to the two-storied logical structure of inanimate science, biological science, or at least some parts of biology, seem to possess a three-storied structure, similar to that of logic and epistemology.  Read more at location 7334

The three-storied structure manifests itself at this stage only in the fact that any distinction between a physiological and pathological shape or process must necessarily be based on standards of rightness that are proper to the individual in question. These standards, which are common to the species to which the individual belongs, acknowledge our interest in the existence of normal specimens of the species and endorse their normal functions as proper to them.  Read more at location 7342

****  Biology is therefore three-storied in so far as the individual under observation is doing or knowing something, and two-storied when it observes an individual existing by himself, without bearing on things outside it. This reduction in the number of logical levels is similar to the transition from technology and the natural sciences, which both operate on two levels, to pure mathematics and music which—having no bearing on things outside themselves—are experienced by indwelling, on one level. Life lived for itself is equated here logically with artistic experience. Since passive existence awakens gradually to active performances, there is no discontinuity in the transition from the two-storied biology of plants and the lowest animals, to the three-storied biology of the more active and more knowledgeable animals. This resolves our paradox.  Read more at location 7352

This brings me to a second logical novelty arising from the acknowledgment of a centre of individuality. For it shows another way in which logical levels can be effaced, this time particularly on the human level. Another person can judge us as we can judge him, and his judgment may affect our judgment of ourselves.  Read more at location 7363

The I-It situation has been gradually transformed into an I-Thou relation. This suggests the possibility of a continuous transition from statements of fact to affirmations of moral and civic commands.  Read more at location 7370

CHAPTER 12

KNOWING LIFE

1. INTRODUCTION 

whether an organism operates more as a machine or more by a process of equipotential integration, our knowledge of its achievements must rely on a comprehensive appreciation of it which cannot be specified in terms of more impersonal facts, and the logical gap between our comprehension and the specification of our comprehension goes on deepening as we ascend the evolutionary ladder.  Read more at location 7376

2. TRUENESS TO TYPE 

There is a science—a descriptive science—which undertakes the classification of living beings according to shapes. This most ancient form of botany and zoology goes today by the technical name of taxonomy.2 The basic performance of the taxonomist is actually practised every day without any scientific aid, whenever we identify a cat, a primrose or a man. Even animals have this capacity, and can exercise it even in respect of a species which has normally no vital interest for them, whether as a menace or as a quarry. Lorenz found that young birds who fix their filial sentiments on a human being will show the same attitude towards all members of the human race.  Read more at location 7395

The hierarchy of the two kingdoms of plants and animals, with their subordinate Classes, Orders, Families, Genera and Species, was reinterpreted here as the branches of a family tree, the successive stages of which could be verified by paleontology. Some idea of the size and complexity of this system may be gleaned from the estimates of the number of species into which our contemporary fauna and flora are divided, and the number of classes formed by these species. A standard textbook published in 1953 estimates that there are 1,120,000 known species of animals,9 forming 30 phyla and 68 classes;10 while G. N. Jones estimated in 1951 the number of known plant species at 350,000.11 One might expect to find this grandiose achievement celebrated wherever biology—the science of animals and plants—is taught and cherished. But no; classical taxonomy has almost ceased to count as a science. The explanation seems to lie in a change in the valuation of knowledge.  Read more at location 7436

For taxonomy is based on connoisseurship. The nature of this faculty can be best recognized in a great naturalist who displayed it to a high degree.  Read more at location 7447

Once a species is established it is usually defined by the presence of certain distinctive key features. But these key features themselves are variable in shape, and hence reference to them represents once more a claim to the identification of a typical shape in its variable instances.  Read more at location 7459

No two of my colleagues draw the same form of lanceolate.’16 The knowledge of key features is invaluable as a maxim for the identification of specimens, but like all maxims it is useful only to those who possess the art of applying it.  Read more at location 7464

****  Just as plays written by good writers are, as a rule (though, of course, not always) good plays, so species described by good systematists are as a rule good species. In other words: owing to their acknowledged skill, good playwrights and good systematists alike enjoy considerable authority. This is conspicuous for both kinds of authors, because the rules by which they work and by which their work is judged are extremely delicate and altogether unspecifiable.  Read more at location 7477

Astronomy, which started in Babylonian times as part of astrology, eventually proved astrology to be illusory; and the study of chemistry, originally initiated within the framework of alchemy, finally discredited and replaced alchemy. If experimental biology could discredit the existence of animals and plants—or at least prove that their alleged typical shapes and their systematic classifications are illusory—in the sense in which the shapes of constellations are illusory—then experimental biology might indeed supersede Natural History and be studied for its own sake, without bearing on Natural History.  Read more at location 7514

3. MORPHOGENESIS 

Regeneration is the restoration of a mutilated organism. Some lower animals, like hydra or planaria, have exceptional powers of regeneration, so that tiny pieces of their body will regenerate to complete individuals.24 This is a manner of vegetative, a-sexual reproduction, commonly found in plants.  Read more at location 7530

I have distinguished two kinds of biological achievements, namely, (1) achievements performed by the rational concurrence of several parts with fixed functions and (2) achievements performed by the equipotential interplay of all parts of a system. In morphogenesis the first, machine-like, type is present in the stratagem of independent interlocking morphogenetic sequences, based on a mosaic of fixed potentialities; the second, integrative, type is found in the morphogenetic achievements induced by the field of an organizer, as well as in the autonomous morphogenetic responses of isolated tissues.  Read more at location 7573

The analysis of the process by which living beings are formed corresponds to the logic of achievement, as illustrated by the manner in which we find out how a machine works. We must start from some anterior knowledge of the system’s total performance and take the system apart with a view to discovering how each part functions in conjunction with the other parts. The framework of any such analysis is logically fixed by the problem which evoked it.  Read more at location 7578

The meaning of experimental embryology is thus doubly dependent on personal knowledge: both in respect of the unspecifiable knowledge of true shapes, and in respect of the appreciation of the process by which highly significant shapes and structures are brought into existence. This situation has caused uneasiness among scientists.  Read more at location 7583

(Note: Similar to idea of prototypes in metaphorical understanding suggested by Lakoff)  We may conclude that the insights by which we recognize life in individual plants and animals, and distinguish their several kinds—and by which we appraise them as normal or abnormal, establishing thereby the success or failure of the process by which they come into existence—that these insights reveal a reality to which we have access by no other channels, and that the mechanism of morphogenesis can therefore never amount to anything but the observation and understanding of patterns and processes  Read more at location 7611

4. LIVING MACHINERY

Thus in physiology, the twofold unspecifiability of organized shapes and of the processes occurring within them is added to the inherent unspecifiability attached to operational principles in general, and to this extent the logic of physiology differs from that of engineering.  Read more at location 7629

The study of an organ must begin with an attempt to guess what it is for and how it works.  Read more at location 7632

****  Any attempt to conduct physico-chemical investigations of a living being irrespective of physiological assumptions will lead as a rule to meaningless results; and any attempt to replace physiology altogether by a physico-chemical chart of the living organism would completely dissolve any understanding of the organism.  Read more at location 7634

Organs and their functions exist only in their bearing on the presumed interest of the living individual. All physiology is teleological, and in this sense we may speak here also of reasons and causes.  Read more at location 7638

****   Physiology is a system of rules of rightness, and as such can account only for health. Accordingly, we do not enquire into the causes of health—any more than into the causes of a mathematical proof; but we do enquire into the causes of disease, as we do into the causes of a mathematical error. Once more, as in morphology and morphogenesis, the existence of every living being is acknowledged as an aim in itself; however nasty a flea or liver fluke may be to us, we recognize the rational functioning of its organs in their own interest.  Read more at location 7641

(Note: Against reductive random evolution)  According to the current theory of evolution all living machinery has come into existence by accident and is found in existence only because it has conferred on the individual living beings, of which it forms part, competitive advantages which have secured the survival of their kind. This conception of evolution (to which I shall yet return in detail) would eliminate any true achievement from the phylogenesis of living beings; but even so this would not affect the teleological character of their machinelike equipment, which is logically inherent in the conception of jointly functioning organs.  Read more at location 7647

5. ACTION AND PERCEPTION 

At the level of being, of growing, or of functioning, an individual could fail through being abnormal, malformed or diseased. The active, perceiving person has two more possibilities for going wrong, namely, subjectivity and error; and again, it falls to the observer to appreciate the rightness which is impaired by these shortcomings. You cannot observe deliberate action or perception except by legislating for it in these respects.  Read more at location 7660

Take the feeding of a higher animal as an example of conscious action. This may be defined as the ingestion of food. But since we recognize as ‘food’ only materials which we believe to be nutritive, or at least not deleterious to the animal, it falls to us to this extent to determine what is right feeding. This is often far from obvious. When a sheep eats the wool off the back of another sheep, or cattle eat bones, the uninstructed may object to this as an aberration, but physiologists approve of it as a compensation for certain mineral deficiencies in the animal’s diet. Yet not everything that animals eat is nutritive or even wholesome.  Read more at location 7664

the rat’s enjoyment of a sweet taste is the only reason that can be found for its feeding on a solution of saccharine. In recognizing this we acknowledge the presence of a rational centre in the animal, to which we attribute both its correct and its mistaken decisions. In this sense we shall deprecate the drinking of a saccharine solution in a rat, as offering a purely subjective satisfaction, and class the swallowing of an angler’s fly by a fish as a reasonable error in an otherwise altogether rational way of feeding. On the other hand, we shall deny to a maniac devouring paper or sand any degree of rationality; this kind of false feeding will be classed as a meaningless act.  Read more at location 7672

****  biology has been revealed as an appreciation of commitment. To swallow something in the hope that it may be wholesome is clearly a commitment, and so is every act of seeing things in one particular way. I have suggested before that in a generalized sense commitment may be acknowledged even at the vegetative level, since it is of the essence of a living organism that each part relies for its function, and for its very meaning as part of the organism, on the presence and proper functioning of a number of other parts.  Read more at location 7692

Commitment may then be graded by steps of increasing consciousness; namely, from primordial, vegetative commitment of a centre of being, function and growth, to primitive commitment of the active-perceptive centre, and hence further again, to responsible commitments of the consciously deliberating person. The aphorism that biology is life reflecting on itself now acquires a fuller meaning.  Read more at location 7697

let me now sum up the new features that are added to these on the active-perceptive level. They are sentience of motive and knowledge; an effort to do right and know truly; a belief that there exists an independent reality which makes these endeavours meaningful, and a sense for the consequent hazards.  Read more at location 7705

On the morphological and vegetative level we had only two classes of appraisal: namely normality and abnormality: health or disease. The intervention of sentience enlarges our scale to four significant classes: (1) a correct satisfaction of normal standards, (2) a mistaken satisfaction of normal standards, (3) action or perception satisfying subjective, illusory standards, (4) mental derangement issuing in meaningless reactions.  Read more at location 7707

This classification shows that the presence in a living being of sentience, purposive action and the knowing of external things elevates our knowledge of the living being into a critical meeting of it. By including a critique of the handling and the knowing of things by its subjects, biology becomes three-storied. Our personal knowing becomes then the perceiving of an actively intended meaning, which we are trying both to understand and to judge with a view to the facts on which it bears.  Read more at location 7712

Behaviourists teach that in observing an animal we must refrain above all from trying to imagine what we would do if placed in the animal’s position. I suggest, on the contrary, that nothing at all could be known about an animal that would be of the slightest interest to physiology, and still less to psychology, except by following the opposite maxim of identifying ourselves with a centre of action in the animal  Read more at location 7724

6. LEARNING 

Take first experiments with the discrimination box. Here the psychologist places the animal in a situation which constitutes a problem for the satisfaction of some of its major drives, usually hunger. A process of learning will originate from this arrangement only if (1) the animal recognizes the problem and responds to it, and if (2) this problem demands an appreciable measure of ingenuity, but not more than the animal in fact possesses.  Read more at location 7732

The four grades according to which we classified reasonable action and perception reappear here in the classification of empirical inferences. We have (1) objectively reasonable inference, (2) reasonable error, (3) subjectively reasonable inference, and (4) unreason, i.e. no inference. And once more, each of these grades assesses the subject’s performances by standards set for it by the observer, from his own understanding of the problem he has set to it. But we notice also, proceeding from (4) to (1), a hardening of the claims to universality, combined with a quickening of the heuristic impulse, and as a joint result of these a more emphatic act of commitment.  Read more at location 7771

For a problem is the intimation of a hidden rational relationship which is felt to be accessible by an heuristic effort, and the discovery of which may be accompanied, even in animals, by the lively enjoyment of their own ingenuity.  Read more at location 7777

In Pavlov’s classical investigations a dog was first trained to accept a circle, or a nearly circular ellipse, as a sign for immediately forthcoming food and a flat ellipse as a sign for ‘no food just now’.48 The hungry animal watching the different signs was found committing itself—as the variations in the secretion of its saliva showed—to the two alternative expectations which these two signs justified. So long as the signs of opposite significance were widely different—the ellipse being either very flat or nearly circular—the dogs reacted to them without developing symptoms of nervous strain. But when the hungry animal was repeatedly shown intermediate shapes, its behaviour underwent a profound change. It turned wild and angrily strained and snapped to set itself free. At the same time it had lost all its powers of discrimination and was giving false reactions to signs to which it had been perfectly conditioned before. After a while the animal would fall into abnormal listlessness and refuse to react altogether to any of the formerly established signs. Previously I derived the presence of intellectual passions in animals from the way they rejoice in performing a new trick, regardless of its material result. We may now observe, similarly, that Pavlov’s dogs were affected by their incapacity to distinguish between the signs of Food or No Food, far more than their care for food would warrant. We may take this to prove that they were labouring under an effort to discriminate, and that, as the problem facing them was made increasingly difficult, this effort eventually exhausted, or temporarily overstrained and paralysed, their powers of rational control. The extent of this damage shows the depth to which the animal’s person is involved even in such an elementary heuristic effort. The animal disintegrates emotionally, as well as intellectually.  Read more at location 7785

The successful solution of these simple problems seems to restore an animal’s self-confidence, much as occupational therapy helps to restore the shattered personality of the neurotic.  Read more at location 7803

A manifest proof that an animal’s capacity for straining its powers of rational inference is linked to the very core of its emotional and intellectual personality, was discovered by Jacobsen in 1934.50 He found that chimpanzees who were liable to nervous breakdown when subjected to excessive mental strain, were rendered safe against such ill-effects if their frontal lobes were severed or eliminated. Though the animal’s ability to solve problems is noticeably impaired, its intellectual frustrations cease to worry it and no longer endanger its balance of mind.  Read more at location 7805

7. LEARNING AND INDUCTION

Any machine that is to represent learning presupposes a theory of acquiring knowledge and a theory of knowledge itself. The machine which I have just mentioned assumes that in spite of the incessant changes sweeping through the world, identifiable states of affairs keep recurring and can actually be recognized as such both by the animal and the observer; and that there are right responses to such identifiable occasions which can be reiterated, so that the responses too are identifiable. We have seen before (p. 81) that a belief in the existence of identifiable things, to which we can respond by identifiable actions, underlies the process of denotation and that it justifies the kind of induction which underlies the descriptive sciences.  Read more at location 7829

it may seem questionable whether, in the study of learning, the acknowledgment of rightness which accounts for the success of learning and accredits its achievements with universal intent, may be lumped together with the study of the conditions and shortcomings of learning. My answer is that the distinction in question is sharply pronounced only in the case of highly formalized logical operations. It becomes blurred and should be allowed to lapse altogether, when rightness is achieved according to vague maxims which are effective only when applied with exceptional skill and understanding. Such, I believe, is the case for inductive inferences.  Read more at location 7841

A psychology of learning which strives for objectivity by representing the process of learning in terms of a formalized inductive logic can likewise achieve, therefore, only a semblance of its aim. It will have (1) to curtail its subject matter to the crudest forms of learning and (2) to exploit at the same time the ambiguity of its supposedly impersonal terms, so that they will appear to apply to the performances of a living being which are covertly kept in mind.  Read more at location 7852

An objectivist theory of learning leads to the same absurdities as an objectivist theory of induction: since it has no place for heuristic powers it cannot account for their obvious limitations. And, of course, it likewise fails to account for such heuristic powers as even rats do manifest—as when Lashley’s mutilated rats produced entirely new motor patterns for running a maze which they had learned before as intact animals.  Read more at location 7871

********  even the most elaborate objectivist nomenclature cannot conceal the teleological character of learning and the normative intention of its study. Its supposedly objective terms still do not refer to purposeless facts but to well functioning things.  Read more at location 7875

8. HUMAN KNOWLEDGE

We can identify in these the four grades according to which we have classified reasonable action and perception, as well as animal inference. We have (1) Correct inferences reached within a true system. (2) Erroneous conclusions arrived at within a true system (like an error committed by a competent scientist). (3) Conclusions arrived at by the correct use of a fallacious system. This is an incompetent mode of reasoning, the results of which possess subjective validity.60 (4) Incoherence and obsessiveness as observed in the ideation of the insane, particularly in schizophrenia. The morbid reasoning of sufferers from systematic delusions should also be classed here, rather than under (3), since such delusions impair the very core of a person’s rationality.  Read more at location 7923

9. SUPERIOR KNOWLEDGE

Take two scientists discussing a problem of science on an equal footing. Each will rely on standards which he believes to be obligatory both for himself and the other. Every time either of them makes an assertion as to what is true and valuable in science, he relies blindly on a whole system of collateral facts and values accepted by science. And he relies also on it that his partner relies on the same system. Indeed, the bond of mutual trust thus formed between the two is but one link in the vast network of confidence between thousands of scientists of different specialities, through which—and through which alone—a consensus of science is established which may be said to accept certain facts and values as scientifically valid.  Read more at location 7942

This superior knowledge will be taken to include, therefore, beside the systems of science and other factual truths, all that is coherently believed to be right and excellent by men within their culture. My own appreciation of any ‘superior knowledge’ within a foreign culture is subject, of course, to my acknowledgment of the superior knowledge of my own culture,  Read more at location 7955

Mentally, we are called into being by accepting an idiom of thought. The child accepts it almost passively. Yet from the masters of a free society he learns a language which implicitly restricts the authority to which he is submitting—not because of its occasional admonitions to scepticism, but on the contrary, because it acknowledges the universality of truth and other forms of excellence. The language of these ideals, anchored in the works and lives of our masters, grants to each one of us the right to uphold these ideals against any particular utterance of these same masters.  Read more at location 7983

Remember how biology rises from the appraisal of primordial, vegetative, commitments, to the appraisal of primitive, active-perceptive, commitments and then, by the study of animal learning, to the appraisal of commitments entered on intelligently and with universal intent. We start by observing a living body with a primordial centre of individuality, and are led on by a continuous progression to a situation in which we face a subject committing himself deliberately to the solution of an external problem. And as we rise stage by stage from morphology to animal psychology, our convivial participation in the living organism becomes increasingly richer, more intimate and less unequal. So, arriving finally at the study of human thought, conviviality becomes mutual. A conscious, responsible person—the biologist—is now appraising the achievements of another person of the same rank, whose thoughts can claim respect on the same grounds as his own. It is the reference to these grounds that inevitably expands the dialogue of two responsible human beings into an acknowledgment of a knowledge that is superior to their own: the superior knowledge of their culture, as mediated by the great men who are the founders and exemplifiers of that culture. A dialogue can be sustained only if both participants belong to a community accepting on the whole the same teaching and tradition for judging their own affirmations. A responsible encounter presupposes a common firmament of superior knowledge.  Read more at location 8004

The riches of mental companionship between two equals can be released only if they share a convivial passion for others greater than themselves, within a like-minded community—the partners must belong to each other by participating in a reverence for a common superior knowledge.  Read more at location 8018

The decisive break occurs when we accept another person’s superior knowledge. By applying his thoughts or deeds as our standards for judging the rightness of our own thoughts and deeds, we surrender our person for the sake of becoming more satisfying to ourselves in the light of these standards.  Read more at location 8025

10. AT THE POINT OF CONFLUENCE 

The enquiry into the nature and justification of personal knowledge, which fills Parts One, Two and Three of this book, has led to the acceptance of our calling—for which we are not responsible—as a condition for the exercise of a responsible judgment with universal intent.  Read more at location 8037

****  Calling; personal judgment involving responsibility; self-compulsion and independence of conscience; universal standards; all these were shown to exist only in their relation to each other within a commitment. They dissolve if looked upon non-committally. We may call this the ontology of commitment. This ontology can be expanded by acknowledging the achievements of other living beings. This is biology.  Read more at location 8041

from these objects of our respect we can pass on continuously to purely cognitive targets, such as facts, knowledge, proof, reality, science—all of which can likewise be said to exist only as binding on ourselves. We can then work our way back from this point, by aid of reflection, to a recognition of ourselves as the persons deliberately entering on these commitments and can extend our recognition also to all the members of a society sharing similar beliefs and obligations.  Read more at location 8055

Thus, at the confluence of biology and philosophical self-accrediting, man stands rooted in his calling under a firmament of truth and greatness. Its teachings are the idiom of his thought: the voice by which he commands himself to satisfy his intellectual standards. Its commands harness his powers to the exercise of his responsibilities. It binds him to abiding purposes, and grants him power and freedom to defend them. And we can establish it now as a matter of logic that man has no other power than this. He is strong, noble and wonderful so long as he fears the voices of this firmament; but he dissolves their power over himself and his own powers gained through obeying them, if he turns back and examines what he respects in a detached manner. Then law is no more than what the courts will decide, art but an emollient of nerves, morality but a convention, tradition but an inertia, God but a psychological necessity. Then man dominates a world in which he himself does not exist.  Read more at location 8060

CHAPTER 13

THE RISE OF MAN

1. INTRODUCTION

This book tries to serve a different and in a sense perhaps more ambitious purpose. Its aim is to re-equip men with the faculties which centuries of critical thought have taught them to distrust.  Read more at location 8071

For once men have been made to realize the crippling mutilations imposed by an objectivist framework—once the veil of ambiguities covering up these mutilations has been definitively dissolved—many fresh minds will turn to the task of reinterpreting the world as it is, and as it then once more will be seen to be.  Read more at location 8074

(Note: Summary of heuristic imposition of rightness)  I have shown in the last two chapters what I mean by the achievements of living beings and have exhibited in these examples the logic of achievement. These were our results: (1) Living beings can be known only in terms of success or failure. They comprise ascending levels of successful existing and behaving. (2) We can know a successful system only by understanding it as a whole, while being subsidiarily aware of its particulars; and we cannot meaningfully study these particulars except with a bearing on the whole. Moreover, the higher the level of success we are contemplating, the more far-reaching must be our participation in our subject matter. (3) Therefore, to interpret systems that can succeed or fail in the more detached terms, by which we know systems to which no distinction of success or failure applies, is logically impossible. Systems that can succeed or fail are properly characterized by operational principles, or more generally, by certain rules of rightness; and our knowledge of any class of things that is characterized by a rule of rightness disappears when we attempt to define it in terms that are neutral to this rightness. (4) Accordingly, it is as meaningless to represent life in terms of physics and chemistry as it would be to interpret a grandfather clock or a Shakespeare sonnet in terms of physics and chemistry; and it is likewise meaningless to represent mind in terms of a machine or of a neural model.  Read more at location 8077

*******  Lower levels do not lack a bearing on higher levels; they define the conditions of their success and account for their failures, but they cannot account for their success, for they cannot even define it.  Read more at location 8087

We must face the fact that life has actually arisen from inanimate matter, and that human beings—including the teachers of mankind who first shaped our knowledge of rightness—have evolved from tiny creatures resembling the parental zygote in which each of us had his individual origin.  Read more at location 8090

2. IS EVOLUTION AN ACHIEVEMENT? 

I shall argue on two lines, marked A and B, both of which have already been indicated. In A, I shall try to establish an ordering principle of evolution, by distinguishing the actions of such a principle from the conditions which release and sustain its actions. This argument is too general to be carried out fully here, and I shall turn therefore to argument B by pointing out that the observed evolution of human consciousness plainly exemplified this kind of active emergence.  Read more at location 8100

A. The predominant modern theory, usually described as Neo-Darwinism, which I shall criticize here, regards evolution as the sum total of successive accidental hereditary changes which have offered reproductive advantages to their bearers.  Read more at location 8103

There is a fundamental vagueness inherent in this theory which tends to conceal its inadequacy. It consists in the fact that we lack any acceptable conception of the way in which genic changes modify ontogenesis—a deficiency which is due in its turn to the fact that we can have no clear conception of living beings, as long as we insist on defining life in terms of physics and chemistry.  Read more at location 8108

no types, no operational principles and no individualities can ever be defined in terms of physics and chemistry. From which it follows that the rise of new forms of life—as instances of new types and of new operational principles centred on new individualities—is likewise undefinable in terms of physics and chemistry.  Read more at location 8113

Owing to the slowness of evolution, no complete functional innovations can be seen to occur within any observable period.  Read more at location 8141

I deny that any entirely accidental advantages can ever add up to the evolution of a new set of operational principles, as it is not in their nature to do so.  Read more at location 8153

the consecutive steps of a longrange evolutionary progress—like the rise of human consciousness—cannot be determined merely by their adaptive advantage, since these advantages can form part of such progress only in so far as they prove adaptive in a peculiar way, namely on the lines of a continuous ascending evolutionary achievement. The action of the ordering principle underlying such a persistent creative trend is necessarily overlooked or denied by the theory of natural selection, since it cannot be accounted for in terms of accidental mutation plus natural selection. Its recognition would, indeed, reduce mutation and selection to their proper status of merely releasing and sustaining the action of evolutionary principles by which all major evolutionary achievements are defined.  Read more at location 8156

B. I shall now substantiate this general argument by focussing it more fully on the rise of man.  Read more at location 8162

man’s supreme position among all known creatures is safely established; but at the same time the study of man’s rise extends thereby far beyond biology, into our acceptance of what we believe to be man’s nature and destiny.  Read more at location 8168

man’s genealogical tree comprises an unambiguously determinate set of individuals. As the ancestral series recede in time they descend to ever more primitive forms of life, and where sexual reproduction is eventually replaced by asexual propagation they cease to branch out and continue instead along single lines. They penetrate here to the realm of unicellular organisms and beyond that to the realm of submicroscopic, viruslike specks of living protoplasm. I shall call this ancestral system an anthropogenesis.  Read more at location 8172

*******  (Note:  conclusion)  From a seed of submicroscopic living particles—and from inanimate beginnings lying beyond these—we see emerging a race of sentient, responsible and creative beings. The spontaneous rise of such incomparably higher forms of being testifies directly to the operations of an orderly innovating principle.  Read more at location 8188

I have surveyed a series of ascending biotic levels and exhibited in terms of these the logic of successively rising achievements. This progression made me realize that biology can be extended by continuous stages into epistemology, and more generally, into the justification of my own fundamental commitments.  Read more at location 8191

(Note: Interesting take on Genesis)  A further great step was achieved by the aggregation of protozoan-like creatures to multicellular organisms. This enabled animals to evolve a more complex physiology based on sexual reproduction, a manner of propagation which greatly strengthened their personhood. The story of the Fall presents a strangely apt symbol of this event. For as one part of the body took over procreation and the animal ceased to survive in its progeny, lust and death were jointly invented. And as the achievement of metazoic existence established the rudiments of this tragic combination, a finite personal destiny arose to challenge the surrounding deserts of deathless inanimate matter.  Read more at location 8205

as polycellular organisms grow in size, and as their complexity increases with their size, a nervous system is formed to carry out ever more extensive and elaborate operations of self-control. Already some 400 million years ago, at a stage represented today by worms, our ancestors had formed a major ganglion in the forward tip of their elongated body. The segment which first meets and tries out the unknown world, into which the animal is advancing, thus acquired a controlling position.  Read more at location 8211

A gradient is established thereby between the higher and lower functions within the organism. An animal pole is set up which uses the other parts of the body for its sustenance and as its tools. Within this active centre the animal’s personhood is intensified in relation to a subservient body. So we find prefigured the cranial dominance which gives rise to the characteristic position of the mind in the body of man.  Read more at location 8214

the capacity for learning was greatly expanded by the advent of perception, which developed the rudiments of generalization, contriving and understanding. A whole firmament of self-set standards was prefigured here and soon the first faint thrills of intellectual joy appeared in the emotional life of the animal. And it became also liable to puzzlement and frustration. But 500 million years of this growth and hardening of personhood still only lead up to the threshold of true mental life, which was to be achieved in little more than 500 centuries by man’s sudden rise from mute beasthood. Teilhard de Chardin has called this ultimate evolutionary step, by which human knowledge was born, noogenesis.7 It was achieved by men who, forming societies, invented language and created by it a lasting articulate framework of thought. Teilhard calls this framework the noosphere.  Read more at location 8224

(Note: Interesting but I disagree that it portends meaning)  While the first rise of living individuals overcame the meaninglessness of the universe by establishing in it centres of subjective interests, the rise of human thought in its turn overcame these subjective interests by its universal intent. The first revolution was incomplete, for a self-centred life ending in death has little meaning. The second revolution aspires to eternal meaning, but owing to the finitude of man’s condition it too remains blatantly incomplete. Yet the precarious foothold gained by man in the realm of ideas lends sufficient meaning to his brief existence; the inherent stability of man seems to me adequately supported and certified by his submission to ideals which I believe to be universal.  Read more at location 8240

*********  At each successive stage of this epic process we see arising some novel operations not specifiable in terms of the preceding level; and the whole range of them is unspecifiable in terms of their inanimate particulars. For no events occurring according to the known laws of physics and chemistry can be conscious.  Read more at location 8246

****  Some say that we merely speak in two different languages when referring to thoughts on the one hand and to neural processes on the other. But we speak in two languages because we are talking of two different things.  Read more at location 8252

****  the rise of man can be accounted for only by other principles than those known today to physics and chemistry. If this be vitalism, then vitalism is mere common sense, which can be ignored only by a truculently bigotted mechanistic outlook.8 And so long as we can form no idea of the way a material system may become a conscious, responsible person, it is an empty pretence to suggest that we have an explanation for the descent of man.  Read more at location 8254

3. RANDOMNESS, AN EXAMPLE OF EMERGENCE

we can know the randomness of a system, yet cannot know it in terms of a more detailed knowledge of the system. Our knowledge of this emergent quality, randomness, is in fact destroyed by observing the particulars which determine the system below the emergent level. Moreover, randomness, as an emergent quality, offers a possibility for a new system of manipulations. In the case of a wellshuffled pack of cards or an unbiassed dice, these consist in estimating the chances of alternative events and betting accordingly on their outcome.  Read more at location 8272

unspecifiability is not simply ignorance. It has been frequently pointed out that you cannot identify a random system if you know nothing about it;  Read more at location 8297

4. THE LOGIC OF EMERGENCE 

We cannot speak of emergence, therefore, except in conjunction with a corresponding progression from a lower to a higher conceptual level.  Read more at location 8321

A Laplacean knowledge which merely predicts what will happen under any given conditions cannot tell us what conditions should be given; these conditions are determined by the technical skill and peculiar interests of chemists and hence cannot be worked out on paper. Therefore, while quantum mechanics can explain in principle all chemical reactions, it cannot replace, even in principle, our knowledge of chemistry. We may acknowledge this as an incipient separation of two forms of existence.  Read more at location 8334

********  We experience intellectual growth in the process of education and, in more dramatic forms, in the creative acts of the mind. I may recall in particular the process of scientific discovery. This process is not specifiable in terms of strict rules, for it involves a modification of the existing interpretative framework. It crosses a heuristic gap and causes thereby a self-modification of the intelligence achieving discovery. In the absence of any formal procedure on which the discoverer could rely, he is guided by his intimations of a hidden knowledge.  Read more at location 8360

Yet all the time the creative mind is searching for something believed to be real; which, being real, will—when discovered—be entitled to claim universal validity—something the knowledge of which must indeed passionately insist on its own universal validity. Such are the acts by which man improves his own mind; such the steps by which our noosphere was brought into existence.  Read more at location 8367

The passionate urge to fulfil self-set standards will appear completely determinate if we too accept the same standards as real and valid; but it is also seen to be quite indeterminate, for it is achieved by a supreme intensification of uniquely personal intimations. Such is the logic of self-compulsion with universal intent. Action and submission are totally blended in a heuristic communion with reality; determinism and spontaneity mutually require each other when embodied in the universal and the personal poles of commitment. We have no difficulty in acknowledging this seemingly paradoxical situation every time we are confronted with human greatness.  Read more at location 8371

we instantly recognize both the power of impersonal truth and the greatness of a mind upholding it. We readily pay our respect to both poles of such a commitment.  Read more at location 8376

the ultimate Laplacean particulars turn out to be almost completely meaningless, and certainly cannot be said to determine any significant feature of a universe enriched by emergent strata of being.  Read more at location 8386

5. CONCEPTION OF A GENERALIZED FIELD 

Comprehension is an unformalizable process striving towards an unspecifiable achievement, and is accordingly attributed to the agency of a centre seeking satisfaction in the light of its own standards.  Read more at location 8409

(Note: This morphogenic field is akin to God)  Comprehension and the somatic process which accompanies comprehension, represent therefore a kind of equilibration that can be defined only in terms of intellectual rightness. Morphogenesis, operating under the direction of a morphogenetic field, is a somatic process of the same kind, but following morphological rightness as its standard of achievement.  Read more at location 8414

The morphogenetic field (or its organizer, if there is one) is then defined as the agency of this success and as that which has failed if success is not achieved. This situation can be described more precisely by a generalization of the field concept in a strictly biological sense, purified of any arrière-pensée of physico-chemical equilibration. All the operations of the ‘tacit component’ (whether self-centred or seeking universality, whether conscious or unconscious) will be subsumed under this field conception. All mental unease that seeks appeasement of itself will be regarded as a line of force in such a field.  Read more at location 8420

Our sense of approaching the unknown solution of a problem, and the urge to pursue it, are manifestly responses to a gradient of potential achievement; and when we identify a morphogenetic field, we see in it in fact a set of events co-ordinated by a common gradient of achievement.  Read more at location 8425

****  (Note:   conclusion)  biotic achievements cannot—logically cannot—be ever represented in terms of physics and chemistry; and very few do realize this.  Read more at location 8433

three stages of originality, of which phylogenetic emergence is the highest. (1) There is the originality of a resourcefulness manifested in achieving something clearly foreseeable. This kind of originality was illustrated in my last chapter, e.g. by the way mutilated rats run a maze known to them from their previous unmutilated condition. (2) The ontogenetic maturation by which infants develop the faculty of logical thinking may be classed in a higher category, as representing a series of achievements, each producing a new field by which the next higher achievement will be performed. Such emergence—defined as an ordering principle capable of producing operational principles which the system had not previously possessed—has been adequately illustrated by the process of ontogenetic maturation. (3) Phylogenetic emergence exceeds this degree of originality by producing operational principles that are altogether unprecedented, and this fully developed emergence we were able to approach so far only by forming a continuous transition from ontogenetic maturation to heuristic achievements.  Read more at location 8444

(Note: Interesting analogy)  We know clearly the approach of a recollection for which we have been racking our memory, and will tend to compare this with an ontogenetic maturation which re-produces things already achieved before; while we know also how the search for entirely novel achievements is guided by intimations of their growing proximity, even as the possibility of unprecedented achievements guides the maturation of the germ plasm to ever higher evolutionary stages.  Read more at location 8469

6. THE EMERGENCE OF MACHINE-LIKE OPERATIONS 

all attempts at explaining the evolution of complex organs by chance variations in certain chemical bonds of the germ plasm must fail. But I must admit once more that I would not feel so certain of this, had I not before me the rise of human personhood, which manifestly demands the assumption of finalistic principles of evolution.  Read more at location 8501

7. FIRST CAUSES AND ULTIMATE ENDS 

biotic achievements are those of an active centre. This completely transforms the picture at the upper levels where centres are called upon to exercise responsible choices—and continuity demands that we should take this active component into account likewise down to the lowest levels.  Read more at location 8514

Subjective knowing is classed as passive; only knowing that bears on reality is active, personal, and rightly to be called objective. It is for me, who use these terms confidently, to declare ultimately what knowing I believe to bear on objective reality, and this qualification is included in the foregoing definition of objective knowing.  Read more at location 8522

assumption of a heuristic field explains now how it is possible that we acquire knowledge and believe that we can hold it, though we can do this only on evidence which cannot justify these acts by any acceptable strict rules. It suggests that we may do so because an innate affinity for making contact with reality moves our thoughts—under the guidance of useful clues and plausible rules—to increase ever further our hold on reality.  Read more at location 8526

The lines of force in a heuristic field should stand for an access to an opportunity, and for the obligation and the resolve to make good this opportunity, in spite of its inherent uncertainties.  Read more at location 8530

knowing belongs to the class of achievements that are comprised by all forms of living, simply because every manifestation of life is a technical achievement, and is therefore—like the practice of technology—an applied knowledge of nature.  Read more at location 8533

the emergent noosphere is wholly determined as that which we believe to be true and right; it is the external pole of our commitments, the service of which is our freedom. It defines a free society as a fellowship fostering truth and respecting the right. It comprises everything in which we may be totally mistaken.  Read more at location 8548

the capacity of coming to life is due to the power of a field to consolidate centres of first causes. Each such centre bears a possibility of achievement which, however limited, uncertain, and unspecifiable in its outcome, characterizes this centre as an essentially new and autonomous prime mover.  Read more at location 8555

So far as we know, the tiny fragments of the universe embodied in man are the only centres of thought and responsibility in the visible world. If that be so, the appearance of the human mind has been so far the ultimate stage in the awakening of the world;  Read more at location 8562

*******  (Note:   end conclusion)  We may envisage then a cosmic field which called forth all these centres by offering them a short-lived, limited, hazardous opportunity for making some progress of their own towards an unthinkable consummation. And that is also, I believe, how a Christian is placed when worshipping God.  Read more at location 8566