Ockham's Shaver

In Politics and Vision (an excellent read), Sheldon Wolin writes that “Philosophy can be distinguished from other methods of eliciting truths, such as the mystic vision, the secret rite, truths of conscience or of private feelings. Philosophy claims to deal with truths publicly arrived at and publicly demonstrable.” When I first read that sentence, I couldn’t have agreed with it more. In light of Rorty’s analysis, however, I can’t help but think that this is just a bit too rosy of a picture to paint on philosophy’s behalf. However, as a distinction from inquiry that could be called “revelation,” Wolin’s description (or metaphor if you will) serves well.

When Wolin says that philosophy deals with publicly demonstrable propositions, he means that these propositions are capable of being subjected to independent verification (a form of the scientific method). Philosophical independent verification can be analogized to a peer review process. The strength of a proposition depends on the individual attempts to assimilate the metaphor based on data that they themselves (or anyone else for that matter) would have access to, either by virtue of countervailing personal and historical experience or an internal inconsistency within the very language employed by the metaphor. Any such inconsistency can be used in an argument to point out potential disutility of the proposition, which, as I have previously observed, is the basis for assessing the truth-value of a proposition. Insofar as an idea is easily and usefully assimilated by the public (or even by a few individuals), the idea has a degree of truth to it. However, an idea needs to only implicate data that is publicly available in order to be considered philosophic.

This description explicitly precludes the possibility that philosophy could produce a unitary, objective truth for any given inquiry. Philosophical propositions are metaphors used to describe life, which are contingent and affected by language, historical context, and psychology. As such, philosophy can and does produce wildly differing approaches to solving the multi-faceted and intricate problems that will be subject to the same assimilation process for each potential believer. Even stating the problem implies a multiplicity of responses because of the different, contingent reactions every individual experiences in the very act of hearing a particular question posed.

Conversely, propositions based on revelation require subjective faith in the authority that legitimates an individual’s assertion. The crux of the issue lies in the process of verification that the propositions allow. Revelation relies on a chain of trust whereby one is required to believe testaments about an individual who claims to have knowledge of an omnipotent authority’s desires or commands, which forms the basis of authority for the propositions communicated by that individual. Believing that such an individual received such commands from this authority implicitly demands that the individual believer also trust the individuals throughout history who observed and related the details of the interaction.

In a sense, all of history relies on the same sort of trust. Again, the difference is in the verification process. Most historians require verification from alternative sources that not only they themselves find trustworthy, but from sources that their peers find trustworthy. As such, most academia is subject to some kind of verification process that requires its ideas to be based in some evidence that is at least minimally agreed to by others capable of verifying their assertions. Where there is no access to the underlying logic of the basis for accepting a proposition, other than an assertion of authority, the idea is more accurately described as “revelation” or perhaps, in a more incendiary form, “intellectual fascism.”

Popper’s scientific method view of philosophy I have outlined acknowledges that we may contingently and arbitrarily start with our null hypotheses about reality, but that through peer-review (which is essentially just experience and repetition) these hypotheses becomes more difficult to reject and more commonly assimilated in a fashion that could be analogized to the Darwinian concept of natural selection. However, unlike Darwinian selection, the force that weeds out bad ideas in philosophy is not scarcity, but Ockham’s Razor. Ockham’s Razor guides us to reduce redundant and piecemeal explanations for phenomena, preferring the simplest and the most comprehensive theory. Ockham’s Razor puts a necessary brake on our relativistic impulses to accept every idea as plausibly valid or even true, and proves especially useful when our ideas rely on conflicting premises or modes of inquiry. Consequently, the need for Ockham’s Razor becomes even greater as one attempts to fashion propositions that can be assimilated by the entire public at large for political purposes, and not just some individuals for their own benefit. Of course, the best way to arrive at good hypotheses is to generate lots of raw material (experience) to analyze, pare down, and refine.