Saving Hume?

A response to Nathan Oseroff

I’m a fan of Edward Feser, and suffice it to say, I’m not a big fan of David Hume. But that doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy reading a good defense of his work — after all, the sign of an influential philosopher is the inspired defenses of his work. I had recently read one such defense provided by Nathan Oseroff, whose impressive credentials can be found here. So, here I’ll do my best to respond to his article, while accepting the possibility I’m a bit over my head.

Edward Feser first begins attacking the problem of induction by attacking Hume’s fork. To quickly summerize Hume’s fork, as Edward Feser understands it (Oseroff argues that such a reading is false, and it would be better to go with that of Georges Dicker’s). In a prior article from Feser, responding to Massiomo Pigliucci, Feser sums up the self-refutation objection as follows,

David Hume’s famous doctrine that any proposition that concerns neither “relations of ideas” nor “matters of fact” can contain only “sophistry and illusion” and might as well be “commit[ed] to the flames.” Naturally, the suspect propositions included, in Hume’s view, those of traditional metaphysics, and Pigliucci tells us that on first encountering it he found Hume’s position “a neat and no nonsense kind of view.” The trouble, though, is that Hume’s Fork is an anticipation of the positivists’ verification principle, and has similar problems. In particular, it appears to be no less self-refuting, for Hume’s Fork is not itself either true by virtue of the relations of the ideas that enter into its formulation, or true by virtue of empirically discernible matters of fact. Hence it is no less “metaphysical” than the propositions it was used to criticize. And as with the verification principle, while one can attempt to reformulate Hume’s Fork in such a way as to keep it from being self-undermining, doing so also strips it of its anti-metaphysical bite.

Dicker’s Objection

What does Dicker bring to the table that gets around such an objection? Oseroff writes the self refutation objection argument fails because,

Dicker disagrees…since Hume’s definition of ‘matters of fact’ is strictly weaker than syntheticity

The contention is that matters of fact to not strictly refer to non-abstract principles. Consider for example the following two propositions,

1. Cigarettes act as a laxative

2. Of two events, A and B, we say that A causes B when the two always occur together, that is, are constantly conjoined [1]

While 1 refers to a concrete referent (namely cigarettes), one you can interact with, while 2 refers to an abstract referent (causality). While causality would not in the domain of synthetic objects, it does make it on Hume’s account. The problem of induction also still holds up because induction, if treated as causality, would remain question begging, despite its abstract nature. Thus, Hume’s Fork can still hold up as a matter of fact.

The problem is that accepting Hume’s Fork as a true matter of fact, relies on induction to justify it. If that is the case, then the Fork would first need to first assume the truth of induction. The person who accepts this line of reasoning would then be engaging in a performative contradiction. It would be the equivalent of saying out loud “I am not speaking”. While the proposition ‘I am not speaking’ can be true, it becomes false when speaking it out loud.

Likewise, while Hume’s Fork could be true, if it were, we’d only know it through induction, and if the principle of induction were unknown (qua Hume’s objection), we would not know the truth of Hume’s Fork. Thus, Hume would be in no better place than the inductivist. In fact, the inductivist is still on better grounds because there is more inductive evidence for induction, then there is Hume’s fork (given we’ve seen the power of induction in all branches of empirical inquiry, whereas Hume’s Fork is only a specific theory about propositions). This would be empirical grounds for rejecting the fork, and accepting another theory about the nature of propositions. Hume falls from the self-refutation frying pan, and into the performative-contradictory fire.

Breaking the Trilemma

Feser claims,

‘Nor can the Humean plausibly salvage the argument by softening Hume’s fork so as to avoid the self-refutation problem. For the softening can take one of three forms. The Humean could liberalize the principle by admitting that there is after all a third category in addition to “relations of ideas” and “matters of fact”; or he could maintain this dichotomy while liberalizing the “relations of ideas” in such a way that Hume’s Fork itself will come out true by virtue of the relations of ideas; or he could maintain the dichotomy while liberalizing the notion of “matters of fact” in such a way that Hume’s Fork will come out true by virtue of matters of fact’.

In response, Oseroff writes,

Feser neglects a fourth option, and this neglect can be shown in a (slightly) roundabout way by addressing the following question: does Feser’s argument prove too much? It may apply equally to any demarcation criteria that do not fall squarely into any domain circumscribed by the criteria, viz. the same argument may be run against distinctions between more modernised post-Kantian taxonomy: the necessary and contingent, a priori and a posteriori and analytic and synthetic.

So, what if it does? I doubt Feser would mind (as a Thomist, Feser isn’t exactly married to post-Kantian philosophy). I fail to see why is this such a bullet to bite. But let’s grant that it is, I don’t think they are necessarily self-refuting. Couldn’t those facts be necessary a priori synthetic facts? These are facts we just know given an intuitive grasp on the world, similar to Descartes’ “light of pure reason”. For a better detailed defense of such an approach, see Epistemology: Classic Problems and Contemporary Responses (Elements of Philosophy) by Laurence Bonjour.

Defending Logical Empiricism

In treating us to a defense of logical empiricism, Oseroff seems, unknowingly, to provide a justification for this move. I’ll explain how after giving a detailed explanation of his position. Orseoff provides two different justifications of his positions. The first defense is an inductive appeal to authority,

One reason to defend Carnap’s criterion from the charge of self-refutation (and, by extension, defend Hume’s Fork from the same charge), is as follows: this form of reasoning is simply too easy to be get at. Any potential bugbear is killed off from a distance — it is trivial to refute Carnap without having to read anything in Carnap’s writings other than his criterion. It is so easy a child could refute Carnap.

Any argument that appears so easy as to dismiss Carnap without having read Carnap must, I believe, have been anticipated in some form by Carnap, and would not have escaped the attention of Carnap’s critics. However, this self-refuting argument is not thought within philosophical orthodoxy to have been the knockdown argument for Carnap’s criterion. Therefore we have prima facie grounds to believe this form of argument just isn’t strong enough on its own to do away with Carnap’s criterion (and, by extension, do away with Hume’s Fork).

While this is a fair enough criticism, I would say that if Orseoff is giving us a proper reading and defense of Carnap, then refuting such a defense is sufficient to rule out Carnap given that we’re assuming Orseoff is giving an accurate representation for those of us who might have a child-like understanding to Carnap.

The next objection is a little more substantial. It begins by making a distinction between internal questions and external questions. According to Orseoff,

First, we must make the distinction between internal questions and external questions for L, for questions about linguistic frameworks have both internal and external questions. Internal questions must be raised within and answered within a linguistic framework; external questions are addressed from outside the framework.

The internal/external distinction can be understood as analogous to a toy example: consider a microbiologist examining different cells on a slide under a microscope. The microbiologist notes that different cells fall into distinct two types, with readily identifiable attributes and behaviours: red blood cells and white blood cells. Questions about the behaviour of the red and white blood cells refer to what occurs on the slide, not what occurs outside the slide; questions about the microbiologist (such as, for example, their criteria for when a blood cell is red or white) refers to what occurs outside the slide, not occurs within the slide.

Questions external to a linguistic framework can be about the consequences of adopting the framework, but to Carnap it would not make sense to speak of whether answers outside the framework are true or false, or can be judged from within the framework. It would be, as Carnap called it in the Aufbau (1929), ‘mixing of spheres’ (‘Sphärenvermengung’), not unlike asking whether the microbiologist’s criterion for red and white blood cells is a red blood cell or a white blood cell.

Similarly, these sorts of questions that inquire as to whether criteria that demarcate between different linguistic frameworks are true or false (or, in our case, itself subject to its own criteria) ‘mix the spheres’, or engage in, as Gilbert Ryle calls it, a category-mistake.

The problem with such a move is that such a distinction is itself self-refuting, as we can ask whether the distinction between internal questions and external question is itself true by way of being external or internal to Carnap’s linguistic framework. If it is external, then what it it based on? If it is internal, than isn’t this question begging for those who don’t accept the linguistic frame work?

Fortunately this objection is anticipated, but rejected along the same lines as done with Hume’s Fork.

Consider the following question: is the sentence, ‘All meaningful sentences are either analytic (true in virtue of a sentence’s linguistic meaning) or synthetic (true in virtue of some correspondence between the linguistic meaning of the sentence and some external fact)’ itself analytic or synthetic?

The sentence isn’t analytic, but is it synthetic? This is a bizarre question to ask, since it seems that we must first assume some sort of analytic/synthetic distinction in order to categorise sentences, for any instance of a purported correspondence relation would presuppose the analytic/synthetic distinction. That is, naturally, question-begging. Therefore, it is not synthetic. If it is neither analytic nor synthetic, is the sentence, ‘All meaningful sentences are analytic or synthetic’, self-refuting on the grounds that by its own lights it is meaningless (but also obviously meaningful)?

I don’t see why accepting the dichotomy of analytic-synthetic isn’t possible by grounding it as an a priori, necessary synthetic fact. The problem seems to come in by neglecting possible combinations of analytic, synthetic, contingent, necessity, a priori, a postitiori propositions.

Does Feser Burden Shift?

I think this is a fairer criticism of Feser, but I don’t think this holds up either given the context. Oseroff maintains that,

Feser may object to the premises in Hume’s argument for inductive scepticism. That is uncontested. This is true, naturally, of many arguments: premises are contested. If the premises are contested, all this gets is that there exists philosophical disagreement. An appropriate conclusion to be drawn would be to refrain from belief either way, either for the denial or affirmation of an inductive principle until the dispute has been resolved. But this is tantamount to inductive scepticism. I hasten to note that inductive scepticism is not the denial of the possibility of an inductive principle; rather, it is the strictly weaker claim that no inductive principle has yet been provided that surmounts well-known objections, such as Hume’s Fork.

This disagreement does not get us to the desired conclusion that a principle of inductive inference is on par with necessary truths, pace Feser’s claim, ‘Perhaps if we had a complete grasp of the nature of bread and the nature of the human body, we would see that it is not in fact possible for bread to fail to be nourishing to us’. Perhaps, but the consequences are not dire for the inductive sceptic, as Dicker notes (1998, 77–80).

The fact that we may be mistaken about analytic sentences, such as ‘the sum of the angles a Euclidean triangle add up to 180 degrees’, does not make it obvious that we are similarly mistaken about having failed to identify some presently unknown essential nature of bread, such as the sentence, ‘bread is essentially nourishing to us’. Is the sentence similar to an analytic sentence? It isn’t obviously so, especially given the troubles Goodman-like predicates present.

To throw Feser’s claim of ‘Perhaps…’ back at him, perhaps if we had a complete grasp of the essential nature of bread and the essential nature of the human body, we would see that bread behaves differently after a certain date, or in a different spatio-temporal region. It is, as far as we know, not impossible.

I think the fault with this response is that it betrays the standard of evidence Feser is being held to earlier with Carnap. While there are definitely positions where such a practice is a clear case of burden shifting, I don’t think such is the case for certain forms of skepticism. A skeptic is usually challenging beliefs we hold as foundational to have any beliefs (even those which ground skepticism) in the first place.

If we should give Carnap the benefit of the doubt because of the apparent ease of dismissing the argument not anticipated by a professional philosopher, then a foritiori, we should give an even greater benefit to induction itself, an integral aspect to human reason, so easy that a non-philosopher (Hume was a historian at his time) could come up with.

A Pragmatic Solution

To use William James’ term, we can easily talk about the cash-value of these categories, and their cash-value is shown by the fact that they help explain the apparent general dissimilarity between types of sentences; Carnap, similarly, would note that these conceptual categories provide an explication of our intuitive concepts.

But, why would Hume or Carnap want to do such a thing? Appealing to intuition would remove them from the bounds of empiricism, as it is not a sensory based form of justification (which is a requisite for non-trivial forms of knowledge). However, it could be that such an appeal is purely pragmatic, that we need these categories to function in our daily lives. The problem is that we can only determine “cash-value” because that itself determined by induction, and if those categories entail the problem of induction, then it’s no solution at all.

Conclusion

While I thank Oseroff for the his defense, and I fully appreciate this read, I hope I have conveyed either my unbeknownced ignorance, or why I don’t accept the arguments presented.

End Notes

[1] C. M. Lorkowski, ‘David Hume: Causation’, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Link