Many years ago - four of five decades in fact - I thought of writing an essay titled ‘On theories that don’t matter’. The basic idea was that there are three kinds of scientific theory. Some are true (as far as we can tell), and so matter. Others are demonstrably false, and so don’t matter scientifically, although they may be fruitful in other ways – for example, they may be historically interesting. And then there is a third kind of theory, which claims that it is true that there is – and can be – no specific category of knowledge we can call ‘truth’ (or indeed ‘falsehood’).
Members of this third group don’t generally make this claim explicitly. But it is often discernible somewhere beneath the surface. The implications are dramatic. If such a theory is false, then it goes the same way as any other false theory. But if even one of these theories is true, and succeeds in proving that there is no such thing as truth - or, therefore, falsehood - then there is still no reason to think that they matter.
After all, such theories deny the reality of the one criterion by which something can be thought to matter from a scientific point of view – its truth. If they are true then there is no such thing as truth, so they are not true. Of course, they aren’t false either, but that only means that, all in all and epistemologically speaking, they aren’t anything.
Much worse, however, if a theory that undermines the very notion of truth and falsehood is found to be true (whatever that might mean) then there is no such thing as truth in general, so no possibility of scientific knowledge at all.
So it is a serious problem for scientists everywhere. And yet many of the most important (or at least most prominent) theories of the last two centuries have been of this third, epistemologically nihilistic kind. Behaviourism, evolutionary psychology, meme theory[1] – all of them render the very idea of truth meaningless. If they are false, they are taking up a lot of intellectual bandwidth; but if they are true, then we are all up the creek.
Nor is this just about science. Philosophically speaking too, many – I suspect most – of the major schools of western thought have implicitly taken a similarly self-contradictory perspective. Empiricism is obviously incapable of delivering anything like truth, since there is no reason to believe that any accumulation of particular experiences, no matter how assembled, could be true. On the contrary, it directly implies that experience is little more than an accumulation of one-sided glimpses and prejudices. But rationalism is equally self-contradictory. Although it argues that we don’t enter into experience naked, it never seems to explain why we should think that the structures we bring to experience represent anything better than systematic prejudice.
Philosophy has differed from most of science in that it generally admits to these problems. Kant and Hume were entirely explicit about the fact that their arguments made it impossible to arrive at unconditional truth. Science, on the other hand, has seldom been so modest. Indeed, some of its most authoritative practitioners have adopted a positively Olympian position. As though they were above the consequences of their own arguments, they proclaim the truth of theories that, if applied to themselves, would cause them to dissolve in their own unintelligibility.
For example, had behaviourism been true, it would also be true that the only reason I believed behaviourism to be true was that it was ‘reinforcing’ to believe it. Indeed, it could not even be said that I ‘believe’ behaviourism; I simply say that I believe it. And I say that I believe it for the same reason (or rather, the same cause) that I say I like strawberries or that I am afraid of giant spiders – because it is reinforcing to do so. At no point does any actual belief take place, and in no sense can any of my statements be thought of in terms of truth or falsehood.
Likewise for B.F. Skinner and his supporters – whenever they made a statement in favour of behaviourism or offered evidence for their hypotheses, they did this solely because it was reinforcing to do so. Truth and falsehood never came into it. Or rather, I say that truth and falsehood never come into it, exactly as though that were a meaningful proposition, but in fact I’m just saying this particular string of words because my personal reinforcement history induces me to do it. Under different circumstances I might have said that truth and falsehood were absolutely essential. For all I know, that is just what people did say when behaviourism was still in vogue. Or rather, I say ‘for all I know’, but…
And so on, down the rabbit hole of infinite regression. In the end, if behaviourism is true then, as a scientific theory, behaviourism – and literally everything else you or I or any other human being has ever said – is utterly empty.
Likewise for evolutionary psychology. We ‘know’ about the world as we do because evolution has found it adaptive to look at it one way rather than another – for the same reason as, for example, a crocodile looks at the world in a particular way. This offers us absolutely no meaningful access to the truth or falsehood of our worldview. What is more, according to evolutionary psychology itself, it is utterly improbable that we could ever evolve any way of looking at the world that was any closer than the demands of reproductive fitness required. And even if our evolved worldview were by chance absolutely spot-on, there is no way we could know that it was, and no way we could keep it that way if evolution decides to head off in some other direction.
It is surprising just how many supposedly scientific theories of human knowledge deny any strictly epistemic grounds (including the possibility of objectivity, evidence, argument, logic, mathematics, scientific method, and so on) for believing things. Of course, if they are true then it is not a self-contradiction, because then nothing is a self-contradiction, because there are no criteria of logical coherence that make any sense any more. Even so, I find it quite worrying. Well, I say I find it worrying, but…
All these theories – and many more - are undermined by the same problem, namely that they deny either the reality of, or the relationship between, a knowing structure (which we usually call the subject) and the world of objects we may or may not be capable of knowing. An organism is not a subject, and neither is a concatenation of reinforcements or an assemblage of memes. So none of these theories is capable of supporting a scientifically defensible notion of knowledge. For a theory to matter, this doesn’t demand that we support any particular view about what subject and object are or exactly how they are linked together, but it does demand that we have some idea that knowledge is a relationship of this general kind. Eliminate either side and knowledge dissolves into dust.
Which is of course just what happens with the theories referred to above. They either deny that one side (usually the subjective side) exists or undermine the possibility of its independent reality. Like a viral infection (a metaphor frequently employed by meme theorists), a pattern of reinforcement or an advantageous adaptation invades your brain, takes command of its resources to replicate itself, and there’s nothing you can do about it. A meme or an adaptation or a reinforcement can only be displaced from our apparently quite brainless brains through another equally brainless process of contagion or selection or reinforcement. There’s nothing you can do about it.
But then, there’s not much ‘you’ left over to do anything. ‘You’ are little (and in some versions nothing) more than the sum of the adaptations or memes or reinforcements in your head – which is to say, the sum of your current habits, prejudices and experiences. Can you simply criticise and reject a prejudice on the grounds that it violates your goals or values or that it simply doesn’t make sense? Richard Dawkins seems to think so. But even if this otherwise unexplained layer of rationality exists, why aren’t both your values and the criteria and mechanisms by which you make sense of things just more prejudices you have been infected by? So even if you could evict them, what difference would it make? Such theories seldom allow for the possibility that such prejudices play any special role in the workings of your mind, such as providing the higher order integrative function that is usually assigned to logic or mathematics or regulating activity and experience through scientific method or values of one kind or another. So there is no possibility of either a decisive verification or falsification. On the contrary, all of these theories are inherently trivialising. Nothing rises above the level of a catchy tune, a good feeling or a neat reproductive trick.
Rather oddly, these theories share a comprehensive disregard for what is already known about how our intelligence operates, which is anything but by the method of trial and error, to which reinforcement, memes and natural selection all appeal. Intelligence proceeds by a process of abstracting higher level principles, values and goals, from action in the world, which in turn provide it with a capacity for insight and criticism. By such means, intelligence studies the empirical surfaces and functional utility of things for the underlying structure and the existential qualities that can only be reached through a process of systematic, active construction. Since contagion, reinforcement and selection and all the rest are completely anathema to any such process, plainly they cannot offer us any explanation of intelligent activity and experience.
So all these supposedly scientific theories fall into a fundamental contradiction. Once one lapses into the view that an idea or value or method colonises my mind through some process of exogenous variation and selection, over which I exercise no subjective control, then it is hard to see why one should not apply the same logic to every aspect of science, especially the notion of objectivity, or indeed scientific method. But of course, once the idea of objectivity is treated as possessing no more intrinsic value than a nasty infection, then that is the end of science. As with any other form of reductionism, such theories make science unthinkable, for they argue that what counts as ‘science’ depends solely on what notion of science is currently especially infectious - and that what counts as ‘thinking’ or ‘rationality’ is whatever happens to be in my head right now.
Or perhaps one should simply privilege certain players in this particular game (e.g., scientists – or perhaps particularly effective demagogues, or religious revelations). But that still leaves the problem of exactly why one should privilege any particular discipline, concept or value in this way, and where the line should be drawn between the privileged and the non-privileged. There seems to be no compelling answer to the former, and in the absence of such an answer, there can be no hope of an answer to the latter. And even if there were compelling reasons for privileging certain critical components of human experience, that would not explain how such privileged areas could have come into existence.
If, on the other hand, ‘subjective control’ and ‘good reasons’ are taken to include at least the objectively testable coherence, consistency, completeness and correctness of ideas, values, arguments and so on, not to mention an internal mastery of logic, mathematics and a self-correcting scientific method, then plainly the dual reduction of intelligence to biology and culture that underlies so much contemporary thinking cannot be completed. There are no doubt very many still-undigested aspects of our biology and culture that prejudice and compromise our ability to do science, but it is doubtful whether any such failing of reason could not be overcome by science’s further development.
[1] These were all prominent and well-regarded ideas when I first thought of writing this essay - the reader can provide their own contemporary alternatives.