Thinking: Keeping It Real

The philosophy and epistemology you hold is important. They have fundamental practical significance. They can help or harm you; help if it’s good, harm if it’s wrong (of course).

As Stephen Jay Gould says in his classic essay “The Median Isn’t the Message:”

“The problem may be briefly stated: What does ‘median mortality of eight months’ signify in our vernacular? I suspect that most people without training in statistics would read such a statement as ‘I will probably be dead in eight months’ — the very conclusion that must be avoided since it isn’t so and since attitude matters so much.

“I was not of course overjoyed but I didn’t read the statement in this vernacular way either. My technical training enjoined a different perspective on ‘eight months median mortality.’ The point is a subtle one but profound — for it embodies the distinctive way of thinking in my own field of evolutionary biology and natural history.

“We still carry the historical baggage of a Platonic heritage that seeks sharp essences and definite boundaries. … This Platonic heritage with its emphasis in clear distinctions and separated immutable entities leads us to view statistical measures of central tendency wrongly indeed opposite to the appropriate interpretation in our actual world of variation, shadings, and continua. In short we view means and medians as the hard ‘realities,’ and the variation that permits their calculation as a set of transient and imperfect measurements of this hidden essence. If the median is the reality and variation around the median just a device for its calculation the ‘I will probably be dead in eight months’ may pass as a reasonable interpretation.

“But all evolutionary biologists know that variation itself is nature’s only irreducible essence. Variation is the hard reality not a set of imperfect measures for a central tendency. Means and medians are the abstractions. Therefore I looked at the mesothelioma statistics quite differently — and not only because I am an optimist who tends to see the doughnut instead of the hole but primarily because I know that variation itself is the reality. I had to place myself amidst the variation.”

To add some context to that:

For Plato, the universal was real, the individual (aka the “variation”) was “less” real, was a “shadow,” was irrelevant. He was wrong.

Aristotle got it right: the individual was real, the abstraction was derivative. (But he made the mistake of thinking that the universal/essence was in things; as genius as he was, it was later geniuses who figured out that “essence” was an epistemological concept (a concept about how reason worked), not a metaphysical concept.) So Gould is correctly taking a more Aristotelian view of things.

Plato was also wrong in the belief that everything that came from perception and experience did not count as knowledge and did not give us truth. He thought that experience was misleading and full of lies.

Aristotle was right in identifying that all knowledge comes from perception and experience. As St. Thomas Aquinas said: “Nothing is in the intellect that is not first in the senses.” He grasped that perception is the standard of knowledge.

And, when people developed that idea, they finally figured out how to do science right.

As Galileo said: “I should even think that in making the celestial material alterable, I contradict the doctrine of Aristotle much less than do those people who still want to keep the sky inalterable; for I am sure that he never took its inalterability to be as certain as the fact that all human reasoning must be placed second to direct experience.” (From the Second Letter of Galileo Galilei to Mark Welser on Sunspots, p. 118 of Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo, translated by Stillman Drake, © 1957 by Stillman Drake, published by Doubleday Anchor Books, Doubleday & Co., Garden City, New York.)

And as Atle Naess said In his book Galileo Galilei — When the World Stood Still: “Galileo’s radical renewal sprang, nevertheless, from the Aristotelian mind set, as it was taught at the Jesuits’ Collegio Romano: human reason has a basic ability to recognize and understand the objects registered by the senses. The objects are real. They have properties that can be perceived, and then ‘further processed’ according to logical rules. These logical concepts are also real (if not in exactly the same way as the physical objects).”

Newton, too, said in Rule #4 of his Rules of Reasoning in his classic Principia: “Rule 4. In experimental philosophy we are to look upon propositions inferred by general induction from phenomena as accurately or very nearly true, not withstanding any contrary hypothesis that may be imagined, till such time as other phenomena occur, by which they may either be made more accurate, or liable to exceptions.” That is, science works via induction: generalizations from what we find in experience. Experience comes first. The “any contrary hypothesis that may be imagined” is a statement, basically, that Plato’s epistemology was wrong and is to be dismissed.

In the camp of ideas wrong and to be dismissed are also the Descartes-like “I think it, therefore it is” or “I feel it, therefore it is,” ideas which few people go around explicitly stating but which some people do go around trying to practice. They do not know the difference between some idea or feeling that pops randomly into their head and some idea validated by a chain of reasoning logically connected to and verified by the evidence of the senses.

Karl Popper’s ideas on science and scientific method, the hypothetico-deductive method, and related ideas, are also in the camp of fundamentally wrong.

But please be careful to not think that anyone who offers some example(s) of an idea is Aristotelian. Someone who thinks in a Platonic fashion might offer some examples to some ideas, but the examples are regarded as “extra” or “superflouus” or “hinting.” A Platonist-type regards examples with some degree of contempt, and offers them to those who are “feeble minded,” those who “cannot” think in “pure abstractions.”

To be Aristotelian, in this context, is to be committed to the concrete, the individual, the example. They are the fundamental objects of conceptual thought. They are what keeps us connected to reality and truth.

To address another point in Gould’s essay — there are some “sharp boundaries” to concepts, but they need to be kept in our thinking and our classifying, not imputed into the real world. The “sharp boundaries” are just tools to help us think about what we experience. We need to not get lost in them, and need to maintain our agility in our thinking and our focus on perception/experience. As Galileo said, “all human reasoning must be placed second to direct experience.”

And there are “sharp boundaries” to things in perception. It’s obvious. All we have to do is look.

We just have to remember to not think that things in the world are defined by what we know and how we know them. Everything is interconnected, although sometimes it’s via a long chain of causality. Things interact. Things ebb and flow into each other. There is more to the world than what we know. As Galileo wrote in The Assayer: “I could illustrate with many more examples Nature’s bounty in producing her effects, as she employs means we could never think of without our senses and our experiences to teach them to us-and sometimes even these are insufficient to remedy our lack of understanding.”

What we each need to do is dismiss neither ideas nor experience, neither the conceptual nor the perceptual, but immerse ourselves in experience and actively conceptualize it (actively and agilely).

To better do so, we should study how — based on a good philosophy and epistemology — we form concepts, we form generalizations, we classify, we define, we form chains of reasoning, etc. — i.e., how we so richly, efficiently, and powerfully process experience, when we reason right.

Another good thing about the essay: it has some nice literary allusions and quotes, including “if a little learning could ever be a dangerous thing,” “the reports of my death are greatly exaggerated,” “there is a time to love and a time to die,” and more. Beautiful.

Michael helps students, teachers, and business professionals in academic subjects and professional fields, and in critical thinking, logic, and root-cause analysis. He has a B.S. in Mathematics, a B.A. in Philosophy, and a Texas Teacher Certificate (Secondary Mathematics), and is a MovNat Certified Level 2 Fitness Trainer. He studies the history and philosophy of physics, tracing out its logical development step by step from ancient times to modern, and has studied some history and philosophy of chemistry and mathematics. He has decades of experience with students in public schools, homeschools, elite private schools; decades of experience studying philosophy and logic; and decades of successful experience teaching logic and thinking skills. He teaches and tutors physics, chemistry, math, SAT/ACT prep, sentence diagramming, philosophy, fitness, logic, critical thinking, root-cause analysis, and epistemology. You may find him at Gold Academy, Total Human Fitness, LinkedIn, and Outschool, and on YouTube @GoldAcademy and @TotalHumanFitness. He also posts nature videos @TrueToNature and nature pictures on Flickr.

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