Maths in Philosophy — Alexander Douglas

Alexander Douglas mounts a defense of rationalism against empiricism. 

Backgrounder to understanding the issues here. The Western intellectual tradition arose in ancient Greece with dissatisfaction with mythological explanation, the favorite form of explanation in the very ancient world — god and all that. The first "philosophers" in the sense of speculation based on reason attempted to provide a "rational" explanation of the world. The Greek terms are logikos and orthologikos (ortho signifies right, correct, straight), obviously the etymological root of "logic" in English. The corresponding Latin term is ratio, meaning "reason" as the faculty of understanding, or knowing in terms of universals rather than particulars. "Rational" in Latin is rationis ("of reason), rationalis, and rationalibus (akin to English "reasonable"). Thus, "rationalism" as an approach to gaining knowledge. 

Aristotle would extend this approach in his Metaphysics to causal explanation. This became the basis of the Western intellectual tradition. Aristotle also favored relying on observation with the senses where appropriate, e.g., the proto-science that was then developing. But Aristotle emphasized the rational over sense observation, and his approach would later be seen as an obstacle to the development and acceptance of scientific method owing to the influence of his philosophy in the Church after Aquinas. Plato was the other influence through Augustine and this was an even greater obstacle to the acceptance of science. Scientists have not forgotten this. 

The advantage of the rational approach at the outset was that it is not mythological, that is, explanation by story, i.e, allegory and analogy, but by reasoning based on principles that are, like the gods, immortal. But unlike the gods, these principles are unchanging. This was the great contribution of Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans in their emphasis on mathematics, as well as Plato's in the Academy. The Western intellectual tradition began as math-based. Aristotle extended this to logic in his Organon as a prerequisite to serious study.

The other end of the knowledge spectrum from the universal and unchanging is empiricism, which is based on observation and mediated by sense data, hence particular and subject to change. Sense data provide only secondary knowledge through phenomena (appearance) rather than being immediate (unmediated) knowledge of objects and events. Moreover, sense data are unreliable, unlike the objects of reason, numbers and concepts. So reason is preferable to sense observation.

Why is this relevant to economics? Because most conventional economists are rationalists that proceed on the basis of intuitive discovery for assumption identification and rely chiefly on formal argument using mathematical models. In other words, they are behaving like speculative philosophers instead of scientists that are guided by data in addition to mathematics, with observation having the final say.

As a philosopher I am a rationalist, and in matters where scientific method is applicable, I prefer to use it as most appropriate. The challenge is determining when those condition apply. Most of the enduring question are enduring because so far no way to apply scientific method to them has been devised in a way that compelling of acceptance.

The issue is fundamentally about criteria and how to identify and apply them. 

Returning to Alexander Douglas's post. I regard most of these issues as pseudo-problems. Philosophers have recognized for a long time that the chief procedural method of philosophy is logic and logic can be formalized. Not everything of interest philosophically is quantitive or can expressed quantitively, so mathematics is of limited use. That is not the issue. The is and has been the balance between rational and empirical in gaining true knowledge. Empiricism reduces the criteria to observational (sense data) and that excludes many if not most of the enduring issues.

Why is this significant? Because macroeconomics is policy science and policy presumes values, which are essentially qualitative rather than quantitate.

Alexander Douglas at Medium
Maths in Philosophy
Alexander Douglas | Lecturer in Philosophy, University of St. Andrews

Bill Storage — Science vs Philosophy Again

Interesting post and I get a shout out.

The Multidisciplinarian — Bill Storage on engineering, innovation, and interesting problems
Science vs Philosophy Again

Bill Storage | Visiting Scholar in Science, Technology, Medicine & Society, UCAL, Berkeley, and vice-president of LiveSky, Inc.

Jason Smith — Waiting for a philosophy of economics

More dialogue.

Information Transfer Economics
Waiting for a philosophy of economics
Jason Smith

Maria Alejandra Madi — The formal and the substantive meanings of ‘economics’

Conventional economics is formalistic and deal with homo economicus, whose sole reality is as a set of restrictive assumptions as the basis of a particular style of formal modeling.

Some heterodox economics, economic sociology, and economic anthropology are substantive and deal with homo socialis, whose reality is as a conceptual model based on empirics.When differences arise in conceptual models the appeal is not to intuition or definition, but rather to observation and data.

Real-World Economics Review Blog
The formal and the substantive meanings of ‘economics’

Maria Alejandra Madi

Lord Keynes — Are all Facts Theory-Laden?

Yes, facts are theory-laden. Ludwig Wittgenstein elucidated how this so through his investigation of logic, both scientific language in the Tractatus and ordinary language in the Investigations. Sociologists and anthropologists have also shown how reality is socially constructed.

Kant had suggested and cognitive science further suggests that humans project what they sense in addition to receiving it as data through the subliminal process of data organization of which the subject is unaware. This often accounts for why there are often disputes of fact even among experts. Individuals and groups organize the world differently, based on subjectivity and the process of social construction, including the logic of the language they employ in mentation and communication.

Lord Keynes presents a particular view of this in opposition to Mises apriorism. I am in general agreement with this criticism in that this is the dominant paradigm in the scientific community at present and it is based on the way the majority of people construct reality. 

But I am more agnostic from the philosophical point of view. 

The worldview that LK outlines is a relative worldview that characterizes a way of seeing the world at a particular historical moment for a particular vantage which falls under the general category of "realism" in philosophy. The way it is stated is known as "naïve realism" in that it assumes that "what you see is what you get" without epistemological explanation. 

There is a considerable controversy over epistemological explanation and simply asserting realism is considered to be an expression of the "commonsense" viewpoint that is socially dominant at this historical moment in this geographical location. The point of rigorous inquiry is that common sense has often proved wrong. It is a reason that science was developed along with the issues associated with supposedly self-evident principles of philosophy.

Social Democracy For The 21St Century: A Post Keynesian Perspective
Are all Facts Theory-Laden?
Lord Keynes

Philip Pilkington — The Great Unwinding: Some Thoughts on the Incoherence of Mainstream Economics

Today, I believe, mainstream economics is completely incoherent. What do I mean by that? Well, basically if you are in the mainstream you can pretty much believe in whatever you want these days. 

Mainstream economics today can be made to say anything. But in being able to do this it says nothing. All the new gimmicks that have been introduced into the mainstream — from asymmetric information to rational expectations — have rendered it a total free-for-all. So, some of the mainstream will tell you that fiscal stimulus will have zero effect on the economy (Ricardian equivalence) while others will tell you that it is the key to future prosperity. Many will fall somewhere in the middle, unable to articulate their actual beliefs in any concrete manner. 

In my experience the mainstream has become so incoherent that most of the time these economists will formulate their policy stance completely arbitrarily. Their opinions on the real economy are formed very much so the way the man in the street formulates his: either by assimilation of whatever is in vogue or by engaging in largely arbitrary construction (usually in line with the political predilections of the person in question). 

How did this occur? I would argue that there were two key moments in the history of mainstream economics that led to this Great Unwinding.…

Fixing the Economists
The Great Unwinding: Some Thoughts on the Incoherence of Mainstream Economics
Philip Pilkington

This is why I strongly support the pluralist movement among students. I believe that if all the options are put on the table the students will likely gravitate toward Post-Keynesian economics for the simple reason that it is the most comprehensive and coherent body of theory available. I am perfectly willing to let students make this decision on their own. It seems that it is the mainstream who insist that only their approach is taught. Their insistence on monopoly is, I believe, a sign of enormous insecurity.

Lord Keynes on Mises and epistemology

Lord Keynes put up two interesting philosophical posts recently. I did want to comment on the first post, which is a good summary of the issues, but haven't had time. However, I did just write up a response to the second about Mises, putting it in historical perspective.

Social Democracy For The 21St Century: A Post Keynesian Perspective
Epistemology and Kinds of Knowledge

What is the Epistemological Status of Praxeology and the Action Axiom?
Lord Keynes

Mises action principle is Aristotle's every agent acts for an end (telos). Aristotle's approach to biology is teleological. This principle of causality was reiterated by Aquinas and was fundamental to Medieval Scholasticism as rational explanation of articles faith, contra the credo quia absurdam est, misattributed to Tertullian. Long and venerable tradition deeply embedded the principle of causality in the Western psyche. 

Hume attacked causality as a principle based on his assumption that knowledge is either from sense data or logic and no sense data correspond to causality other than observation of constant conjunction. Kant attempted to counter this move by moving causality from intellectual intuition to the logical structure of the mind that imposes a necessary connection between cause and effect in structuring knowledge. Aristotle's intellectual intuition of cause (aitia) as a real principle known through intellectual intuition become instead a category inherent to reason that is imposed on knowledge of that which is given in experience.

Not a bad move in retrospect in that it is being borne out somewhat in cognitive research on brain function. But this says nothing about reality outside the mind, which is really Hume's skeptical argument. In Hume's view, humans believe in an external world but know only sense data, which is then structured in terms of logic.

Kant's solution was no escape. It is simply the claim that humans cannot think beyond the bounds of spacial and logical categories — space and time, and existence and causality. The question remains that, although humans are hardwired to think within and in terms of these boundaries, does knowledge correspond actually to reality and do we know this for sure. For Kant it is impossible to know the thing in itself since knowledge as for Hume occurs within the confines of experience, which is structured subjectively. In the attempt to escape Hume, Kant has landed in subjective idealism instead of Aristotle and Aquinas's subjective realism in trying to avoid Hume's skeptical conclusion.

Kant did not realize (and probably could not at the time) that his categories don't always match up with scientific theory and findings. De eloped over a century later, QM and relativity are counter-intuitive, for instance, and suggest that reality is much more complex than the classical world of ordinary thought and observation in which Kant's epistemic categories apply "necessarily". Moreover, there is increasing reason to think that so-called reason cannot be separated from feeling ("passion") categorically, or nature from nurture. There is no "pure reason," anymore than there is an "invisible hand".

In addition, the the Kantian categories function as epistemic substitutes for the metaphysical "essences" that the ancients asserted were intuited intellectually. Hegel realized this in setting forth logic as metaphysics. 

Now anthropologists and sociologists are finding that these categories are culturally determined to a far greater degree than previously realized. Philosophy is turing out to be much more anthropological and sociological that Western thinkers had suspected previously. Wittgenstein made use of these anthropological and sociological discoveries in his later work exploring the logic of ordinary language.

The upshot is that Mises generated yet another metaphysical system. Metaphysical systems assume or posit their own criteria, which leads to circular reasoning, or assume unspecified criteria that lead to an infinite regress. This is no ticket to avoiding skepticism, as the failure of metaphysical systems to be universally compelling goes to show.

Scientific method was devised to counter subjectivity, but even science cannot avoid the issue of skepticism since its appeal is to experience and science has not shown how to bridge the gap between the knowing subject and objects of knowledge in that science presumes that immediate knowledge of objects and events is dependent on the senses.

But science makes skepticism a virtue in that scientific theories are general descriptions and general descriptions can only be falsified but never confirmed indubitably if the description is of an open set not all of whose members is known. Nonetheless, the question about the relation of knowledge and reality remains without an answer that is able to overcome skepticism as the view that human knowledge is relational, hence, relative to the knower rather than immediate knowledge of reality independent of the knower. This knowledge is inferred from the inability of the knower to control the known, and this inference depends on the principle of causality, which itself is in question.

Hume was not the first to put forward an argument for skepticism, and his is not the strongest case owing to his flawed assumptions. But he did put the ball in the court of those who wish to claim that there are universally compelling criteria supporting an intrinsic connection between subjectivity and objectivity that yields true knowledge of reality such that it is not influenced by subjectivity, and it is possible to know this for sure, that is, based on adequate criteria.

Mises is stuck in his own mind, which he has confused with reality, and has ruled out empirical testing on the grounds that he matter is settled — he says. No wonder Hayek ran away from that dogmatic claim.

Lars P. Syll — How to understand science

My subsidiary aim is thus to show once-and-for-all why no return to positivism is possible. This of course depends upon my primary aim.For any adequate answer to the critical metaquestion ‘what are the conditions of the plausibility of an account of science ?’ presupposes an account which is capable of thinking of those conditions as special cases. That is to say, to adapt an image of Wittgenstein’s, one can only see the fly in the fly-bottle if one’s perspective is different from that of the fly. And the sting is only removed from a system of thought when the particular conditions under which it makes sense are described. In practice this task is simplified for us by the fact that the conditions under which positivism is plausible as an account of science are largely co-extensive with the conditions under which experience is significant in science. This is of course an important and substantive question which we could say, echoing Kant, no account of science can decline, but positivism cannot ask, because (it will be seen) the idea of insignificant experiences transcends the very bounds of its thought.

Lars P. Syll
How to understand science
quoting Roy Bhaskar

309. "What is your aim in philosophy?-To shew the fly the way out of the fly-bottle." — Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations 

Bhaskar apparently misunderstands Wittgenstein's fly bottle analogy, or uses it for his own purposes. In Wittgenstein's use the analogy serves to reinforce his fundamental "elucidation" in Philosophical Investigations (PI) that uncritical use of language runs up against the boundaries of language, e.g, by attempting to use logic to describe itself. The fly that continues to bang up against the sides of the bottle, unable to see the mouth as the only path to free itself, represents speculative thought attempting to do some that the logic of the language prevents it from doing — and doing this over and over again obsessive-compulsively.

Wittgenstein regarded his logical investigation of the logic of language as therapy rather than theory (PI 133, 254). The correct approach to speculative questions that are inherently undecidable based on the way they are cast is to show the fly the way out of the bottle through logical elucidation rather than explanation, which is impossible owing to the limitations of language. PI is a logical work rather than a metaphysical or epistemological one.

LW's objective in the later works was showing how "philosophical" problems are pseudo-problems resulting from failure to grasp the logic of the language being used to solve them, rather than being theoretical or empirical issues subject to argumentation.

A reason that questions are undecidable is for lack of criteria. Criteria do not exist independently, as many suppose, but within an information system. The norms and boundaries, testing inclusion and exclusion, for instance, provide the fundamental criteria in that information system and other information systems with the same assumptions.

Overarching information systems dealing with the same data are different possible ways of viewing of the data. These delineate different points of view having the scope of worldviews that determine a way of seeing in the sense of organizing information, evaluating it, and acting in terms of it.

The history of philosophy and speculative thought in general, much of which is also expressed in terms of literature and mythology, can be interpreted as the history of the articulation and rationalizing of different worldviews, often in terms of the conflicts among them. Scientism that materialistic and reductionist is also a POV, for example, and extreme positivism can be viewed in this light.

The question then becomes, Is there an overarching information system based on a universal POV to provide final decision criteria? If there is, what would guarantee it's criteria. Are we faced with either circular reasoning or infinite regress in the search for absolute criteria, as skeptics assert. Isn't this the abyss of nihilism and relativism that risks moral relativism as well? Was Protagoras correct  that man is the measure of all things?

As a grad student in a philosophy program that emphasized the historical approach, I soon came to realize that one had to be able to see from the perspective of the various worldviews being elaborated instead of trying to decide how to rank them, which, of course, is necessarily in terms of one's own preferred worldview.

It was not until I studied Wittgenstein that I comprehended what philosophy was about from the logical vantage, and that lacking absolute criteria no position can be justified as certainly true and others certainly false. That would have to take place in an absolute information system, which would require absolute consciousness.

Absolute consciousness is a possible "information system," and some assert it with respect to the universal ground, which is called by different names in the different religions and wisdom traditions. Some claim that this is realized as human perfection.

Those that reputedly have realized this state have claimed that the absolute ground is the only reality and all relative states are "illusory," "imaginative," "contingent," or "dependent" manifestations of this unchanging reality that appear for a time in finite and changing states of awareness. What one takes to be reality is a resultant of the relationship of subject and object in which the nature and state of subjects is contributive and cannot be entirely isolated or eliminated.

Realization should not, however, be confused with Western philosophical idealism, which is speculative rather than the realization that is reported. Realization is sometimes set forth in terms of a model for understanding, but it is made clear that a model is not the reality, just as the map is not the territory.

This is somewhat analogous to the difference between understanding theoretically that the earth orbits the sun or hearing reports of astronauts and actually going into space oneself. That experience is rare at this stage of scaling up technology, just as are reports of realization are rare historically.

Absolute knowledge is not available to most people, even if they assume it is possible. So for all practical purposes, there is no absolute context to provide publicly available criteria. Humans are part of nature and cannot stand outside it to observe it, any more than they can stand outside themselves to view themselves. As Wittgenstein sought to show, humans cannot stand outside of their language either, language being the tool of thought. We use mirrors in which to see ourselves. So too, elucidation enables us to clarify the logical dynamics of language.

In LW's terms, seeing is seeing as, which he elucidates using a Gestalt figure that can be seen as a duck or rabbit. Speculative argument can be thought of as arguing over whether the figure is a duck or a rabbit. The way out is through realizing that the figure can be seen as both depending on the perspective taken.

We can be aware of multiple perspectives, and even use multiples perspectives within wider perspective, but just as we cannot see without perspective, so too we cannot communicate with ourselves (think) or with others outside the perspective of an information system. In this sense, what we call "reality" is ambiguous, in that different information systems exist that are applicable to the same data.

The difference between the duck-rabbit analogy and POVs is that it is much more difficult to shift between worldviews than perspectives on Gestalt figures, if it is even possible in many cases. For example, Western people often say they find Asians to be inscrutable. Studies have shown that a reason for this is likely that Westerners emphasize the foreground more than the background and elements over relationship, where Asians see in terms of the background, which calls attention to relationship and connectedness. Westerners tend to be more attentive to structure and Asians to function. Consequently, the Western POV is more analytic and the Asian perspective is more synthetic. An interesting contrast is presented by those raised bi-culturally and speak a Western and Asians language natively.

Another distinction in ways of seeing is reflected in William Blake's "The Everlasting Gospel."

"Both read the Bible day and night, But thou read'st black where I read white" (13-14) 

"This life’s five windows of the soul Distorts the Heavens from pole to pole, 

And leads you to believe a lie, 

When you see with, not thro’, the eye 

That [which] was born in a night, to perish in a night, 

When the soul slept in the beams of light" (172-175).

What Blake is asserting is that not only are there different perspectives on the same thing but some are more comprehensive than others. This is the assertion of a criterion that those holding the other point of view reject. It has been the bone of contention between mystics and normative religions, for instance, which Blake is addressing.

Blake is attacking the POV of normative religions that holds the bible is a literal narrative (black letters) albeit "inspired." Blake is contending that mystics see things differently.

Mystics see the white background against which the black letters show up, that is, unity underlying diversity, eternity underlying time, and infinity underlying space. The white background is what Blake calls elsewhere "infinity" as in, "If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite." (Marriage of Heaven and Hell), and, "To see a World in a grain of sand/And a Heaven in a wild flower/Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand/And Eternity in an hour.… (Auguries of Innocence). So the "other POV" here is that of the priests and pulpit, which views mysticism as heresy. Blake was a "dangerous" poet in his day.

This insight about POV is especially important in light of the pragmatic use of language, e.g., in persuasion. Different views may have different normative and performative consequences following from assumptions such as norms and criteria that are particular to the structure of the information system, for example. Philosophers often begin with ontology and epistemology, and then an ethical system follows from that, and from the ethical system a social and political system, as well. Most rationales can be quite convincing if one accepts the assumptions, norms and criteria that build the framework.

Everyone operates from an individual perspective, usually culturally and institutionally organized but also influenced by the person's disposition and habit structure. These are naive worldviews that those who hold them take "intuitively" as reality. Philosophers attempt to construct sophisticated worldviews that avoid the issues that riddle naive perspectives. Propagandists attempt to shape worldviews, or to convert people from one to another.

There are obvious comparisons between economic approaches and philosophical approaches, too, based on different POVs. I'll leave that for another time.