Philosophy vs. Sophistry

In the entire history of mankind, there have only been about two dozen philosophers, counting me. Jesus, Buddha, Confucius, Lao-Tse, and Mohammed are creators of guru-disciple traditions, not philosophers in the western sense. A philosopher is someone who founds a new science.

So what are all these thousands of people who teach philosophy in the universities? I shall make the same complaint about them that Socrates (a stonecutter) made about the professional teachers of philosophy in his day, who called themselves "sophists." Thus, "sophist" just means "professional philosopher."

Our sophists (like those Socrates attacked) are only interested in "raising questions." When is a question not a question? When one has neither the ability nor the desire to attempt a solution. The sophists transform real problems into abstract "puzzles," incapable of solution when taken out of the rich loam of human experience. The sophists don't want to solve them. That ends the game and puts them out of business. This is my definition of sophistry: "mind-games, where it matters not which side you take, but only the wit shown in the word-play." Perhaps this is why I despise "mathematical recreations," chess, bridge or any sort of mind game, since I automatically suspect the players of a tendency towards sophistry.

How did philosophy become sophistry? Philosophy was certainly a serious business in the 17th Century, when the natural philosophers Galileo and Newton were struggling to figure out the motions of the heavens and the earth, and the "moral" philosophers Hobbes and Locke were earnestly working out the basis for a sound community. These efforts by Hobbes and Locke guided the social revolutions of the 17th and 18th Centuries. Their work was not wasted. Yet, philosophy had taken a wrong turn by the time of Hume. For 300 years, philosophy has been an irrelevant backwater in the university, where no one expects breakthroughs, or progress of any kind.

The only knowledge-discipline known to philosophers before Galileo and Newton was mathematics, put in its rigorous modern form by a Greek philosopher working in the great library of Alexandria, a man named Euclid, building on a long tradition of mathematical philosophy. In mathematics, justification is proof.

However, Galileo and Newton invented a new kind of justification which we call scientific method, logically rigorous, but not based on an inference from facts to theories. In scientific method, justification is not proof. Hume never grasped the nature and significance of scientific method. He, and all the sophists who follow, remain in the Euclidean framework. They think justification is and must be proof, a logical inference from fact to theory. They call this inductive logic.

So how did Hume go so wrong? Perhaps he went wrong because science is "paradigmatic," as T. S. Kuhn pointed out in his famous book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Galileo and Newton never stated the essence of scientific method in abstract terms, and neither has any scientist since. Scientists learn their craft by example, master to pupil, Nobel prize winner to postdoc.

Or Hume may have been fooled by the form of Newton's Principia, where Newton sets forth his revolutionary new physics. The Principia is cast in the form of a Euclidean proof from three axioms and one force function. This makes the Principia virtually unreadable today. But that may be why the philosophers never made the turn, and remain in the Euclidean framework.

This farce has continued down to the present day. Sophists still put the Euclidean deductive logic in the first half of their logic texts, and then contradict it with the totally invalid inductive logic of the second half. Think on this. If scientific reasoning were really inductive, how is it possible to refute one long established theory and raise another with a single decisive observation, as Eddington did early in this century?

Newton's theory predicted that star light grazing the sun should be deflected by a certain amount, and Einstein's General Theory of Relativity predicted a deflection of twice as much. Eddington measured the deflection of a grazing star during a total eclipse. The result was closer to Einstein's prediction than it was to Newton's, so down went Newton and up came Einstein. If one test can refute a theory which has had millions of confirmations over centuries of time, then inductive logic is hogwash. Perhaps sophists have confused inductive confirmation with the utterly different notion of reproducibility.

We require results to be reproducible, since this is the chief means of weeding out hallucination, bad experiments and outright fraud. We want to see what results different scientists get, with different apparatus and perhaps a different approach. In most cases, the irreproducible result is quickly found out, and sometimes the source of the error is explained. In other cases, it may take decades to weed out an error, as in the case with the fraudulent Piltdown man.

We must totally reject Hume's rule that extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, such as proof that fraud could not possibly occur. Such a demand is itself impossible to fulfill. As I have pointed out before, if Hume's rule had been applied in the 17th Century, we would still be burning witches and heretics at the stake. So you see, Hume is almost an anti-philosopher, since his ideas spawned the continental nonsense of Kant and Hegel, as well as the obstructionist views of the Psi-cops today, who use Hume's rule rather than scientific method. Indeed, even scientists are apt to think scientifically only in their own specialties, and are often just as irrational as everyone else on other subjects.

Scientific method can be briefly described as the search for a solution to a widely interconnected nexus of problems, both practical and theoretical. Science is a discipline, because its scholars enforce certain rules on their fellow scholars. That is why Transpersonal Psychology is not a discipline. There are no rules. One epistemology is not to be preferred over another.

First, the results must be reproducible, which proved to be the downfall of cold fusion and parapsychology. Second, the details must be veridical (meaning we did not know these details in advance, and it is possible to check them), so we can decisively rule out all but one interpretation of the facts. Third, the main tool of genuine science is theory, which provides a practical guide in the careers of contemporary scientists, and provides a way of applying past experience to present problems. In the explanatory sciences, a result is never fully accepted until it can be explained.

A well-established theory is the only alternative solution to survive rigorous testing, the only solution known. A scientific theory must be useful, which means it must have testable consequences. "Creationist Science" is ignored not out of religious prejudice, but simply because it is useless. It provides no help in deciding where to look for what.

An example of the practical importance of theory is provided by the careers of Louis and Mary Leakey. If you want to find Pleistocene hominid fossils, where should you look? Darwin's theory of evolution suggests tropical climates. So Africa is one possible place to look. Secondly, we want to find places where there was a good chance of bones being fossilized by volcanic ash or shallow lake sediments. Thirdly, we want places where sediments of this type are being exposed by rifting and erosion in the present day. Presto! The rift valley of Africa! So that is where the Leakeys looked. Even at that, it was thirty years before Mary Leakey found their first hominid fossil. Until then, they were unable to get much research money.

The revolutionary thing about Newton's method is that it provides a way of justifying general conclusions without proof, without logical inference from the particular to the general.

So why do we believe the result? Why do generations of scientists base their careers on the well-established theory, if it has not been proven? Because it is the only known solution to the problems, both practical and theoretical. Newtonian physics straightened out the calendar, explained the tides, the trade winds, the precession of the Equinox, the operation of clocks and other machinery, and indeed, the motion of everything in heaven and earth, including Kepler's three laws of planetary motion.

There is a kind of magic in resolving the force vectors and writing down the appropriate form of the F=mA differential equation, and then using calculus and boundary conditions (or initial conditions) to solve it for functions (perhaps completely new functions, never seen before) which allow one to predict the motion of an object backwards and forwards in time. The natural philosophers of Newton's time were suitably impressed, and in his old age, Newton was treated almost like a god. And for centuries, Newtonian physics continued to be successful. But it was not proven true, as Hume and Kant thought. Indeed, when pushed to the limit of the very small or the very massive, it has turned out to be false, superseded in the 20th Century by relativity and quantum mechanics, although Newtonian physics will never become useless. It will always remain the foundation of mechanical and civil engineering.

Hume and the sophists were convinced that Newtonian physics was justified, yet they never understood the concept of a well-established theory. Neither has Sir Karl Popper, a contemporary academic philosopher-of-science of some repute. There is nothing difficult about the concept of well-establishment. As Sherlock Holmes described it, "When you have eliminated the possibilities, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth." This is often quoted by scientists. Science is logically rigorous in setting up decisive tests among alternatives. All this is true of well-established ideals as well.

Because they are stuck in the Euclidean framework, sophists believe any empirical study of values must involve some kind of inference between fact and value, which they know to be invalid. The effect has been a halt to any further development of the "moral" sciences of Hobbes and Locke, thus allowing the dangerous sophistry of Karl Marx.

A fact-to-value inference is called the "naturalistic fallacy," and it really is a logical fallacy, just like inductive logic.

Utopian Analysis does not commit the naturalistic fallacy because ideals are never proven. They are tested. And if they survive their tests, and all known alternatives are refuted by the failure of social experiments, then the remaining ideal is well-established, because it is the only known solution to that problem. The failure of a social experiment is a matter of value rather than a matter of fact. Our experience includes matters of value as well as matters of fact. An example is the observed failure of the socialist experiment in the Soviet Union. Communism did not just collapse; Communism failed. Collapsing is a historical fact; failing is a normative particular.

The existing sciences solve only a single kind of problem (finding explanations), with a single kind of experience (visible and tangible matters of fact). If the problem is not like figuring out how a watch works by taking it apart and seeing how the components move one another, then it lies outside the reach of the physical sciences.

Elsewhere, I have shown that it is possible to extend scientific method to problems other than explanation, and to realms of experience other than matters of fact. This is the way we solve philosophical problems, by creating knowledge-disciplines. Elsewhere, I have solved a philosophical problem thought to be impossible since the time of Hume, namely, "how do we determine the good, the right, and the beautiful from experience?" I have solved the classical theological problem of evil. I have given empirical content to the concept of free will, (animacy), which distinguishes living things from machines. Yes, that's controversial, I know. AI is the most popular wrong idea of the 20th Century. It is belief in magic, belief that with the proper magical incantation (computer program), we can bring the inanimate object to life, as in some Disney movie.

My claim is bold, for I claim to be the last, the greatest, and the only living philosopher. After me, there is no more. There is no need.

For each philosophical question, there is some relevant realm of experience that can provide an answer, whether it is a question about immortality or divinity or free will or the nature of mind. It is not necessary to invent a new method for each problem. The method invented by Galileo and Newton suffices. It is only necessary to find the equivalent of a theory, a fact, and a test in this new realm of inquiry. Questions that had been matters of ideology and religious dogma can now be answered scientifically. Knowledge replaces faith. Science replaces philosophy. Religion becomes irrelevant. The eternal questions are neither meaningless nor unanswerable, even if our answers must be forever tentative, and subject to refinement by future scholars.