Philosophic Musings

Empiricism: the view that knowledge of the world is a construct from the raw materials provided by the senses. Vision gives me "red here now." Touch tells me that what is in front of me is in a roughly spherical shape. Taking a bite adds taste to the impressions that this is an apple.

Voila! we've just constructing a datum, a bit of knowledge, "I am holding an apple," from the various senses. Empiricism says that (a) all knowledge is like that, although usually more complicated, and (b) knowledge obtained in this way is reliable, so we don't need any other source.

External-world skepticism undercuts this theory directly. It says, "My senses have been wrong about a lot of things. I see railroad tracks converging in the distance, for example, but they don't really converge at all -- they remain parallel. Maybe, then, my senses are wrong about everything, or at least about so much so often that nothing I think I know about the world outside my body -- about apples or pears, planets or stars, sound waves or ocean tides -- is at all reliable."

Hume's problem of induction undercuts empiricism somewhat more subtly. Induction is the form of reasoning that says, "every X that I've ever seen has attribute Y. I've seen enough of X to consider this a fair sample. Thus, I conclude that all Xs have Y." Every human in recorded history has proven mortal -- few have lived beyond 100 years, none that we can be sure of have ever lived beyond 150. So ... all men are mortal!

If classical empiricism is right, then induction is very important. Recognizing a single fruit's attributes, as in my apple example above, is one thing. But one might argue that impressive knowledge only comes about once we start talking about large classes of things. If we can't reliably make inductions, perhaps empiricism can't account for the more impressive sorts of knowledge at all.

So Hume's challenge: show, within the confines of empiricism, why induction is reliable!

Do you, dear reader, think empiricism can be defended from those two types of criticism? Can it best be defended by transforming itself into ... pragmatism?

"Gotcha!" says NYTBR

Brian Doherty, a senior editor at Reason magazine, has written what he calls a "freewheeling history" of the modern libertarian movement, centered on five figures of enormous importance: von Mises, Hayek, Rand, Rothbard, and Milton Friedman.

The New York Times has run a rather mean-spirited review of the book, in which critic Leonhardt plays trivia games of "gotcha."

Here's a sample from the review, "In a single chapter, Milton Friedman is described both as an active writer at Stanford University and, accurately, as deceased."

Well, yes. That kind of thing can happen when one of the crucial figures upon whom a book is based happens to die while the book is in page proofs. Leonhardt doesn't seem very lion-hearted here, more like a jackal.

Another example of this critic's oh-so-substantive contribution to the conversation about serious ideas, about liberty and sovereignty and such, is this gem: "And almost everything about 'Radicals for Capitalism' is too long: the terms ('Popperian falsificationist'), the sentences that sometimes run more than 100 words, and the book itself, at more than 700 pages."

That seems a remarkable expression of anti-intellectual bias. "Why shucks, I can't handle dem big words, Brian. That's why I write book reviews for this down-home cornpone type publicashun." If you aren't interested in the intellectual history of recent political and economic ideas, you won't read the Doherty book at all. If you are interested enough to read the book, you'll probably already know that there's been a lot of debate over whether such ideas can be considered "scientific," what is the demarcation of science, and so forth. You'll be ready for the term "falsificationism," modified by the name of its best known advocate.

The whole Leonhardt review reads like a sad failed effort at a fisking.