After viewing a recent Meat and Potatoes, Epistemology – How Do We Know, I thought through my ideas and have come upon a few that seemed to me to be incomplete: what did I mean by “data” and was I using “empirical as Professor Sankaran was using it? I realized I also use argument from authority subliminally while ostensively rejecting it. So, I decided to re-read Tom Kuhn’s “Structure of Scientific Revolutions,” after almost 40 years. I’d read and used it in my teaching epistemology and scientific methods classes I taught in the philosophy, humanities and psychology. Basically, Kuhn says that a system of thought and explanation will gather many unexplained and seemingly unexplainable questions, and their weight will eventually cause some users inside or outside the system to come up with a different system of explanation. For instance, the orthodox Christian system tends to see Jesus as the perfect and only son of God. From this comes eventually the idea that he is a substitutionary sacrifice, removing the stain of original sin from mankind — the paschal lamb of God belief. Or the idea that creation is in a steady state, with little change. Or the idea that we are progressing according to a set plan with each individual event leading us cumulatively toward a perfect end. Several paradigms are involved here: the good God idea, the dualistic view of reality (platonic), the idea that sacrifice moves God to cancel guilt. All these ideas can be changed by adopting new paradigms, such as rejecting dualism and adopting a unified, monistic, one substance idea of reality, or the idea that change and newness does not add up and bring us closer to one end, but is just movement, causing a new mixture of ideas. And one major paradigm is the old justification by authority, which has been replaced by many with a paradigm that appeals to objectifiable perceptions.
Taking this latter change, it is interesting how each system of thought uses the term “data.” Professor Sankaran seems to use it to mean the ideas that are used to support a statement. Thus if one holds to the use of authority, any person or work that is regarded as authoritative (undefined by Professor Sankaran) may provide statements of data. But a scientist has much different definitions for “data” and “authority.” Data is in science a perception of a physical phenomenon that is objectively described (i.e., size, color, weight, specific gravity, velocity, etc.). The objective descriptives become the data. A scientist would limit “empirical” to the basic perceptions and their objective descriptives. The professor expands that holding to include the perceiver’s interpretation of the basic perceptions. For the scientist a rainbow is a set of refractions of light caused by the light passing through drops of water suspended in the air that are a certain distance and angle from the observer. For Professor Sankaran it is evidence for the existence of God. It is hard to call the scientist’s data interpretations. Now the scientist may agree that the rainbow is beautiful, but scientifically it remains a set of data. Poetically it may assume other meanings: God, beautiful nature, God’s covenant, or the promise of a pot of gold and a happy ending. For me, since I saw with my beloved wife, Dawn, a four layered rainbow once while driving up the gorge, it has some very deep meanings. But these poetic interpretations do not prove anything other than their base perceptions have coalesced to suggest certain individualistic mental images. There is no proof about the reality of these images. I regard it as accidental that there may be a similarity between the full, beautiful and unusual rainbow and our full, beautiful and unusual relationship. In fact, I must exclude much of the relationship to apply it to the correspondence it had with the rainbow.
To counter Professor Sankaran’s idea that the beauty of nature points empirically to the existence of God, one may ask what do the sights of war torn Gaza point to, and why not God? Why assume that only beauty points to God?
His view uses the common terms with poetic and individualistic meanings, the scientist uses these common terms with concise scientific definitions and limits. Now both the mystical poet and the strict scientist often step out of their roles, but to do so responsibly, they must also be aware and willing to declare that they are also changing language systems. Thus scientific description and poetic descriptions can carry their own weights and not be confused for the other. This is basic Wittgenstein: there is logical and mathematical truth and there is artistic truth. Same terms, different meanings, and let us be aware of that.
Corollaries: The adoption of one paradigm does not disprove the other. Both have their validity. The same individual can resort to both as explanations, but not at the same time, and only then by keeping true to the meanings of the system being used. These corollaries become obvious when we consider that both systems may use in their arguments the appeal to authority. The orthodox appeals to the giants who formulated that religious system and the scientist often appeals to the giants and schools and organizations who formulated the scientific system. But each set of giants, and their schools, still used different criteria of proof, or explanation, to support and make believable their system. Again, same word, different meaning.
The upshot of all this cogitating is the strong belief that I have in the need for myself, and I hold often the other, to be very clear about our definitions of the terms we are using. Since the definition of “truth” resides in the criteria that one uses to support the veracity of their statements or their beliefs, I ask about what criteria they are using to support what they say. Thus, when one states that Jesus is the way, and the only way, as the writer of the Gospel of John reports, I would ask what criteria they use to believe that Jesus said anything so exclusive and self-serving and contrary to many of his other inclusive statements. It seems that the disciplined historians are very doubtful that Jesus would have said such a thing, given their well defined criteria for determining that a reported event (Jesus’s saying) probably happened. I started to use the term “scientific” instead of “disciplined” until I realized I’d be using an ancient paradigm of science which used not empirical perceptions, but systematic interpretations as the basis for data. Along with most scholars, I don’t regard history as a science, for it uses reportage as its basic evidence, assigning systematically a probability to the reports veracity. History is a subject of humanities, not science, and depends on interpretation, more like theology than logic or empirical data.
It seems that we are stuck with two different and exclusive systems of explanation, both with their veracity, beauty, and usefulness. They do not have to conflict as long as we remain clear and responsible about our criteria and definitions of terms.
