The 19th Century Rise of the Earth-Giants

Through out the 19th Century, scientific knowledge and technological innovation finally began to merge into more or less unified whole which popular culture sees them as today. This unification began to transform society as the avalanche of wealth which the new technologies spilled forth onto the western world in a manner which has only accelerated since then. The transformation which modern science wrought upon everyday life only served to strengthen the intuition that scientific theories were about the natural world as it really was. Nevertheless, as this intuition built up strength in the public’s mind, during this very same time a number of intellectual revolution would take place which would seriously undermine the notion that science could provide knowledge of the world which was necessary, certain and universal.

It should be noted here that we have created a set of two distinct dichotomies which may or may describe the nature of science. First, what are scientific theories about? We have seen that the Enlightenment can be seen as the abandonment of knowledge of the world as it is, as Bacon, Descartes and Locke had all hoped for, in favor of knowledge of the world as we experience it as Kant asserted. Nevertheless, it is difficult to resist the temptation to go beyond mere appearances. Indeed, beginning in the 18th and continuing on into the 19th century science had come to overrule what experience of the world told us. Despite what things may seem like, the earth is moving, there are germs being fought in my body and my experience of color is simply the process of various particles in motion. To claim that science is “merely” about the world as we experience it is to sell science seriously short of its full due.

While science may be about reality or merely how it appears to us, another question is what can science tell us about its subject? Does it give us knowledge of nature, or does it simply give us probable beliefs? Are scientific theories true or do they merely work? Of course the main question which fuels all wars both about as well as within science is the question of whether any amount of a theories working in predicting and describing reality as it appears to us can ever make that theory a true account of reality as it really is?

We simply must acknowledge that a set of phenomena or data can be explained by many competing theories. How can we know which if any is the true theory? Francis Bacon’s method of experimental elimination is still at the heart of the scientific method as practiced today. Bacon found many of the ideas which he would later take to heart in the theology of Calvin. Calvinism, it will be remembered, was a purely deterministic system in which the predestined elect of God could be known by their fruits. So too in Bacon’s method for knowledge of nature by a theories fruits it shall be known to be true or false. Unfortunately, however, it is not only difficult to contrive the crucial experiments necessary for deciding between theories, there is no reason to assume that some experiment will not disconfirm all theories eventually.

In other words, just because a theory has worked so far as near as we can tell is no reason to assume 1) that it will always work in future experiments, and consequently 2) that it is true. Nevertheless, Bacon’s claim that a true theory of reality as it is will at least “work” as an explanation/prediction of the world as it appears seems like a safe one. If a theory doesn’t even appear to work, then it cannot be really true.

Nevertheless, as Kuhn has famously argued, disconfirmation is not so simple of a process, especially, as Hobbes noted, when scientific instrumentation was being heavily relied upon as it came to be in the 19th century. Consider how Benjamin Thompson’s crucial experiment “settled the issue” as to the nature of heat. Even though his experiment had clearly disconfirmed the theory of caloric, the theory continued to be defended by the brightest minds of the day. It was simply too easy to assume that something was wrong with the experiment rather than the caloric theory.

In the midst of such ambivalence with regard to the nature of heat, Joseph Fourier struck out of a different path. He constructed a mathematical model of how heat behaved without taking one position or another regarding the nature of what heat was. This, it will be remembered, was the position which Newton was forced into later on in life. Fourier was a pioneer in that he was one of the first to refuse to feign a hypothesis of what their work was describing prior to their actually describing it. Notice, however, how a behavioral model of nature is a model which only claims to “work” without making much of a claim at all to truth. The refusal to feign hypotheses is a strategy of the earth-giants, not the gods.

Another 19th century victory for the earth-giants came with the invention of non-Euclidean geometries. With the invention of these alternative geometries came the complete deterioration of the connection between deductive reasoning in mathematics and knowledge of nature. Each of these geometries produced logically deductive theorems which contradicted with those of the other geometries. But which system was the true one? How could one tell? The obvious answer was to look at the self-evident axioms upon which each system was built and compare them to the world as it appears to us, but this approach is not deductive!

While a mathematical system might be able to produce necessary, certain and universal knowledge within its own framework, the applicability of the system to the natural world can only be as certain to the extent that its assumptions are confirmed to match the world by way of empirical investigations. We are left with the conclusion that knowledge of the natural world cannot be deductive in nature. Additionally, induction, as Hume had convincingly shown, cannot give certain knowledge of anything. A greater victory for the earth-giants could hardly be imagined.

Let us recall the position of the earth-giants. Whereas Plato’s gods viewed knowledge as the impossibility of being wrong about something, the earth-giants defined knowledge as our simply being unwilling, for one reason or another, to call something into question. With this in mind, let us consider what it means for something to be self-evident as the assumptions in science and axioms of mathematics are said to be. What makes something self-evident to us?

The first answer would certainly have to be language/culture. As much as Bacon would like to speak of the idols of the marketplace, I don’t think even he could have recognized how our linguistic and cultural interactions and upbringings determine so much of what is “normal” and what is “obvious.” The second and more basic source of self-evident assumptions would have to be our biological natures. Nature builds certain assumptions, according to evolutionary psychology, into our natures. These assumptions are those which will increase our genetic fitness, not come to any knowledge of reality as it really is. It should come as no surprise that it is those things which are most close to us which we notice least, and nothing is closer to us than the fundamental assumptions which we make about the world around us as we interact with it.

This is not to say that assumptions are necessarily wrong or even bad. Indeed, nothing could be further from the truth. If our biological nature and our linguistic cultures did not endow us with many of our fundamental assumptions we simply would not be able to interact with the world at all. With regard to the present case at hand, the gap between induction and deduction cannot be bridged logically. It is only by making assumptions about the natural world that we can claim to know anything about it, something which we frequently do.

The problem, however is that assumptions cannot be logically deduced from experience. They can only be put in place by some other means. Furthermore, any theory whatsoever regarding the natural world can only claim to be true relative to a set of assumptions, which is necessarily in place. While it is possible to partially justify these assumptions by pointing to a theories “working”, it can never be known with certainty that the theory as well as its underpinning assumptions will not cease to work at some point in the future.