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> As soon as you go down to an empirical level, you find that no mysticism is necessary There are plenty of things that cannot be observed. There are plenty of

> As soon as you go down to an empirical level, you find that no mysticism is necessary There are plenty of things that cannot be observed. There are plenty of things that should not be observed. There are plenty of things that can be observed but cannot be understood well enough to achieve the goals we want. I don't find it controversial to claim there are limits to empiricism. The fact that we expect juries and judges to rule on incomplete information is a concession to that reality. And because there are limits on empiricism, there are limits on science.

giggles_giggles 8y ago
An example of the limit of empiricism: how do you measure the moral of a story, when you read a good novel? Because you cannot measure it, does the moral not exist?
- tlb 8y ago
  You devise a test for obeying the moral, and administer the test to a bunch of subjects before and after reading the story. For example, if the story is Hamlet, you can give an opportunity to back-stab their boss in order to get yet another promotion. Are they less likely to do it after seeing how badly it went for the young thane? Not an easy test to do, but possible in principle. Joshua Greene's lab at Harvard (http://www.joshua-greene.net/ http://www.joshua-greene.net/) measured subjects making major moral decisions and found, for example, that people who'd received training in medical ethics made more utilitarian decisions about life and death. You could apply the same methods to morals of stories in a randomized trial by having some subjects read them and some not.
  - humanrebar 8y ago
    That's not measuring the existence of morality though. It's measuring whether certain things can influence behavior. And because it's a lab study, the behavior tends to be fairly trivial in practice. Besides studying whether people behave morally is begging the question if the question is "do morals exist?".
p1esk 8y ago
I'm confused, what about things that can be deduced based on other things that can be observed? If I see someone's shadow, and deduce that there's a person there, whom I can't see directly, casting that shadow, will my claim "there's a person, casting a shadow" be outside of the "limits of empiricism"?
- humanrebar 8y ago
  If all you've seen is a shadow, all you've seen is a shadow. How do you know it's not someone's twin? Or some sort of puppet facsimile? Now, that's a contrived example. More realistically, I doubt we'll ever be able to get enough detailed measurements to really understand how genetics, nutrition, exercise, and environment all play together to affect human health. Clearly each is complex enough on its own and to combine them together quickly magnifies the observation problem to be entirely intractable. We can imperfectly generalize and work with populations to come up with various guidelines that seem to work well with populations. We can break down the problems, measuring particular cells or organs. But to recompose all the experimentation and observation into a full system view is much more complex than solving chess or go. It's much more complex than predicting the earnings forecast of a single company. The complexity of the problem space is just ridiculous. So we try to push the boundaries of the complexity we can deal with, but there are diminishing returns over time. And clearly there are outer bounds we will never be able to approach.
  - lmm 8y ago
    True enough, but I don't see how any of that is specific to empiricism? This doesn't sound like a case where empiricism overcomplicates and a non-empirical approach could do better; rather it seems like reality is just that complex, and our only options are to deal with it or to simplify and accept a coarser picture (which is perfectly compatible with empiricism).
mannykannot 8y ago
> The fact that we expect juries and judges to rule on incomplete information is a concession to that reality. I think that arises from practical difficulties in finding all the relevant information, not from a certainty that it is, in principle, undiscoverable. I notice how you slip easily from a personal opinion in your penultimate paragraph to the pronouncement of a universal truth in the final one. This seems to be characteristic in philosophy, as displayed, for example, in Searle's 'Chinese Room' paper. Nevertheless, I agree with the general position that there are unobservable things (that's just my opinion, of course.) I also believe that there are limits to reason alone as a means for discerning truth, and consequently I believe there are limits to what philosophy can achieve (though I see no limits on how much discussion it can generate.)
- humanrebar 8y ago
  > ...not from a certainty that it is, in principle, undiscoverable. In principle if we have to violate rights to obtain all of the relevant information, then some information must be undiscoverable. In a more scientific bent, you have the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and the existence of intractable computers science problems to support the idea that there opinion-free realms where science cannot provide solutions. And I find labeling claims as opinion to dismiss them a bit facile. The underlying point is that there we conceded that there are practical considerations that make us act on incomplete information. Therefore we concede on a practical level that all things cannot be knowable. Conjecture and guesswork pervade everyday life.
  - mannykannot 8y ago
    It is interesting that you present the rights issue, as, while it is a valid response to the claim I made, it works just as well as the claim I made as a counter to your original claim about what the instructions to jurors tell us about the limits of knowledge. Similarly, your use of quantum uncertainty is valid, but its discovery did not put a stop to physics - on the contrary, the discovery of QM has led to vast new areas of knowledge, and has even had metaphysical and epistemological implications (such as the constraints on realism that follow from Bell's inequality) that were never imagined in millennia of navel-gazing. Therefore, if anything, quantum uncertainty tends to stand as a counter-example to the apparent premise behind your claim that incomplete knowledge sets limits on science (I weasel-worded that sentence because I do believe that it could ultimately become a problem, if humanity survives long enough.) I am not labeling a claim as opinion to dismiss it - in fact, if I cannot offer a definitive counter-argument, then my own position on the matter is an opinion - it is the transition from opinion to certainty that I find interesting. Searle's Chinese Room paper, for example, is an elaborate argument ultimately hung on the unexamined premise that syntax cannot give rise to semantics, and the non-sequitur that a model of a thing is not the thing itself, yet he declares that he has proven that a digital computer can never have a mind. This passing off of opinion as certainty may just be an issue of style within philosophy, but if so, it is an unfortunate one, as it makes it difficult to keep track of what has definitively been established and what remains as conjecture or premise. Certainly, there are many people who think Searle proved something in that paper, yet there is disagreement within that group as to what exactly that is. Conjecture and guesswork pervade everyday life, science, and even philosophy.

giggles_giggles 8y ago

An example of the limit of empiricism: how do you measure the moral of a story, when you read a good novel? Because you cannot measure it, does the moral not exist?

tlb 8y ago
You devise a test for obeying the moral, and administer the test to a bunch of subjects before and after reading the story. For example, if the story is Hamlet, you can give an opportunity to back-stab their boss in order to get yet another promotion. Are they less likely to do it after seeing how badly it went for the young thane? Not an easy test to do, but possible in principle. Joshua Greene's lab at Harvard (http://www.joshua-greene.net/ http://www.joshua-greene.net/) measured subjects making major moral decisions and found, for example, that people who'd received training in medical ethics made more utilitarian decisions about life and death. You could apply the same methods to morals of stories in a randomized trial by having some subjects read them and some not.
- humanrebar 8y ago
  That's not measuring the existence of morality though. It's measuring whether certain things can influence behavior. And because it's a lab study, the behavior tends to be fairly trivial in practice. Besides studying whether people behave morally is begging the question if the question is "do morals exist?".

p1esk 8y ago

I'm confused, what about things that can be deduced based on other things that can be observed? If I see someone's shadow, and deduce that there's a person there, whom I can't see directly, casting that shadow, will my claim "there's a person, casting a shadow" be outside of the "limits of empiricism"?

humanrebar 8y ago
If all you've seen is a shadow, all you've seen is a shadow. How do you know it's not someone's twin? Or some sort of puppet facsimile? Now, that's a contrived example. More realistically, I doubt we'll ever be able to get enough detailed measurements to really understand how genetics, nutrition, exercise, and environment all play together to affect human health. Clearly each is complex enough on its own and to combine them together quickly magnifies the observation problem to be entirely intractable. We can imperfectly generalize and work with populations to come up with various guidelines that seem to work well with populations. We can break down the problems, measuring particular cells or organs. But to recompose all the experimentation and observation into a full system view is much more complex than solving chess or go. It's much more complex than predicting the earnings forecast of a single company. The complexity of the problem space is just ridiculous. So we try to push the boundaries of the complexity we can deal with, but there are diminishing returns over time. And clearly there are outer bounds we will never be able to approach.
- lmm 8y ago
  True enough, but I don't see how any of that is specific to empiricism? This doesn't sound like a case where empiricism overcomplicates and a non-empirical approach could do better; rather it seems like reality is just that complex, and our only options are to deal with it or to simplify and accept a coarser picture (which is perfectly compatible with empiricism).

mannykannot 8y ago

> The fact that we expect juries and judges to rule on incomplete information is a concession to that reality. I think that arises from practical difficulties in finding all the relevant information, not from a certainty that it is, in principle, undiscoverable. I notice how you slip easily from a personal opinion in your penultimate paragraph to the pronouncement of a universal truth in the final one. This seems to be characteristic in philosophy, as displayed, for example, in Searle's 'Chinese Room' paper. Nevertheless, I agree with the general position that there are unobservable things (that's just my opinion, of course.) I also believe that there are limits to reason alone as a means for discerning truth, and consequently I believe there are limits to what philosophy can achieve (though I see no limits on how much discussion it can generate.)

humanrebar 8y ago
> ...not from a certainty that it is, in principle, undiscoverable. In principle if we have to violate rights to obtain all of the relevant information, then some information must be undiscoverable. In a more scientific bent, you have the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and the existence of intractable computers science problems to support the idea that there opinion-free realms where science cannot provide solutions. And I find labeling claims as opinion to dismiss them a bit facile. The underlying point is that there we conceded that there are practical considerations that make us act on incomplete information. Therefore we concede on a practical level that all things cannot be knowable. Conjecture and guesswork pervade everyday life.
- mannykannot 8y ago
  It is interesting that you present the rights issue, as, while it is a valid response to the claim I made, it works just as well as the claim I made as a counter to your original claim about what the instructions to jurors tell us about the limits of knowledge. Similarly, your use of quantum uncertainty is valid, but its discovery did not put a stop to physics - on the contrary, the discovery of QM has led to vast new areas of knowledge, and has even had metaphysical and epistemological implications (such as the constraints on realism that follow from Bell's inequality) that were never imagined in millennia of navel-gazing. Therefore, if anything, quantum uncertainty tends to stand as a counter-example to the apparent premise behind your claim that incomplete knowledge sets limits on science (I weasel-worded that sentence because I do believe that it could ultimately become a problem, if humanity survives long enough.) I am not labeling a claim as opinion to dismiss it - in fact, if I cannot offer a definitive counter-argument, then my own position on the matter is an opinion - it is the transition from opinion to certainty that I find interesting. Searle's Chinese Room paper, for example, is an elaborate argument ultimately hung on the unexamined premise that syntax cannot give rise to semantics, and the non-sequitur that a model of a thing is not the thing itself, yet he declares that he has proven that a digital computer can never have a mind. This passing off of opinion as certainty may just be an issue of style within philosophy, but if so, it is an unfortunate one, as it makes it difficult to keep track of what has definitively been established and what remains as conjecture or premise. Certainly, there are many people who think Searle proved something in that paper, yet there is disagreement within that group as to what exactly that is. Conjecture and guesswork pervade everyday life, science, and even philosophy.