Later that evening, Bill started to think that the swami’s “miracle” was a put-up job by his friend, who could have written the note and left it outside the cave himself. So Bill decided to get back at his friend. He mixed together some tap water, a yard sample from his dog, and urine samples from his wife and son. To top it off, he included another bodily fluid of his own, and left the concoction outside the cave with ten dollars. He then called his friend and told him that he was having some other health problems and that he had left another sample for the swami.
The next day he returned to the cave and found another note that said, “Your tap water is too hard. Get a water softener. Your dog has worms. Get him vitamins. Your son is hooked on cocaine. Get him into rehab. Your wife is pregnant with twin girls. They aren’t yours. Get a lawyer. And if you don’t stop playing with yourself, your tennis elbow will never get better.”
But usually in jokes, as in philosophy, the skeptical interpretation prevails.
Old “Doc” Bloom, the local hardware store owner, who was known for his miraculous cures for arthritis, had a long line of “patients” waiting outside his door, when a little old lady, completely bent over, shuffled in slowly, leaning on her cane.
When her turn came, she went into the back room of the store and, amazingly, emerged within half an hour, walking completely erect with her head held high.
A woman waiting in the line said, “It’s a miracle! You walked in bent in half and now you’re walking erect. What did Doc do?”
She answered, “He gave me a longer cane.”
A blind man can obviously be as much of an empiricist as the next guy, though visual data will not figure in his experience:
It’s Passover and a Jewish guy is eating his lunch in the park. A blind man sits down next to him, so the Jewish guy offers him some of his lunch—a piece of matzoh. The blind man takes it, fingers it a moment, and says, “Who writes this crap?”
The man in the following story makes the absurd mistake of assuming that a blind man would have no other means of sensory verification:
A man goes into a bar with his dog and asks for a drink. The bartender says, “You can’t bring that dog in here!” The guy, without missing a beat, says, “This is my seeing-eye dog.”
“Oh, I’m sorry, man,” says the bartender. “Here, the first one’s on me.” The man takes his drink and goes to a table near the door.
Another guy walks into the bar with a dog. The first guy stops him and says, “You can’t bring that dog in here unless you tell him it’s a seeing-eye dog.” The second man graciously thanks him, continues to the bar, and asks for a drink. The bartender says, “Hey, you can’t bring that dog in here!”
The man replies, “This is my seeing-eye dog.”
The bartender says, “No, I don’t think so. They don’t use Chihuahuas as seeing-eye dogs.”
The man pauses for a half-second and replies, “What?!?! They gave me a Chihuahua?!?”
GERMAN IDEALISM
Oh, come on! There’s gotta be more to an object than just sense data. Like behind it somewhere.
The eighteenth-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant thought so. He read the British empiricists, and as he put it, they awakened him from his dogmatic slumber. Kant had assumed that our minds can provide us with certainty of what the world is really like. But the empiricists demonstrated that, because our knowledge of the external world comes to us through our senses, it is always, in a certain sense, uncertain. A strawberry is only red or sweet when it is observed through certain equipment—our eyes and our taste buds. We know that some people with different taste buds may not experience it as sweet at all. So, Kant asked, what is a strawberry “in itself” that makes it appear red and sweet—or otherwise—when run through our sensory equipment?
We may think that science can tell us what a thing really is in itself, even if our senses can’t. But, when you think about it, science doesn’t really get us any closer to the strawberry-in-itself. It doesn’t actually help to say that a certain chemical makeup of the strawberry and a certain neurological makeup of a person combine to determine whether the strawberry appears sweet or tart—and that this chemical makeup is what the strawberry is “really” like in itself. What we mean by “a certain chemical makeup” is merely “the effect we observe when we run the strawberry through certain gizmos.” Running the strawberry through the gizmos merely tells us how a strawberry appears when it’s run through those gizmos, just as biting into one tells how us how one appears when it’s run past our taste buds.
Kant concluded that we can know nothing about things as they are in themselves. The ding an sich, the thing-in-itself, he said, is “equal to x.” We can only know the phenomenal world, the world of appearances; we can know nothing of the transcendent, noumenal world behind the appearances.
In so saying, Kant laid down the gauntlet for a paradigm shift in philosophy. Reason cannot tell us about the world beyond our senses. Neither Berkeley’s God-as-data-entry-clerk or any metaphysical explanation of the world can be arrived at by pure reason. Philosophy was never the same again.
Secretary: Doctor, there’s an invisible man in the waiting room.
Doctor: Tell him I can’t see him.
You may not have found this joke completely helpful in explaining Kant’s distinction between the phenomenal and the noumenal. That’s because it loses something in translation. Here’s how we originally heard the joke in a rathskeller at the U. of Königsberg:
Secretary: Herr Doktor, there’s a ding an sich in the waiting room.
Urologist: Another ding an sich! If I see one more today, I think I’m screaming! Who is it?
Secretary: How would I know?
Urologist: Describe him.
Secretary: You must be kidding!
There you have it: the original sich joke.
There’s more going on in this joke than meets the eye. The secretary has chosen, for reasons best known to herself, not to share with the doctor her evidence that there’s a ding an sich in the waiting room. Whatever that evidence was, it must have been phenomenal! (If you follow our drift.) What tipped her off? Must have been something in the realm of the senses. Maybe it was a sixth sense, maybe it was just senses one through five, but it was certainly a sense in some sense. The back story here is that the secretary had done her doctoral dissertation on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason prior to discovering that she had thereby limited her career options to secretary and Fryolator operator. She therefore interpreted the doctor’s demand, “Describe him,” to mean not “What sensory phenomena are you experiencing?” but rather “Describe him as he is in himself, behind the appearances.” She was understandably vexed by this demand, though she later recovered and went on to wed the doctor’s cousin, Helmut, and raise three lovely children.
For Kant, and for much of epistemology that followed after him, the questions of what we can know and how we can know it can be analyzed in terms of what we can say meaningfully about what we know and how we know it. What kinds of statements about the world contain knowledge of the world?
Kant went about the task of answering this question by dividing statements into two categories: analytic and synthetic. Analytic statements are those that are true by definition. The statement, “All platypuses are mammals” is analytic. It tells us nothing new about any actual platypus beyond what we could find out by simply looking up “platypus” in a dictionary. “Some platypuses are cross-eyed,” on the other hand, is synthetic. It does give us new information about the world, because “cross-eyed” is not part of the definition of “platypus.” “Some platypuses are cross-eyed” tells us something about platypuses that we couldn’t find out by looking up “platypus” in a dictionary.
Next, Kant distinguished between a priori and a posteriori statements. A priori statements are those we are able to make on the basis of reason alone, without recourse to sensory experience. Our earlier statement, “All platypuses are mammals,” is known a priori. We don’t n
eed to go look at a bunch of platypuses to see that it is true. We simply need to look in the dictionary. A posteriori judgments, on the other hand, are based on sensory experience of the world. “Some platypuses are cross-eyed” can be known only by checking out a number of platypuses—either checking them out ourselves or taking the word of someone who says he has.
So far we’ve seen examples of analytic a priori statements (“All platypuses are mammals”) and synthetic a posteriori statements (“Some platypuses are cross-eyed”). Kant asked, “Is there a third type of statement, synthetic a priori?” These would be statements that give us new knowledge about the external world, but that can be known by reason alone. The empiricists had implied that there is no synthetic a priori knowledge, since our source for knowledge of the external world is our sensory experience. But Kant said, “Hold the phone! How about statements like, ‘Every event has a cause’?” It’s synthetic: it tells us something new about the world beyond what is contained in the definitions of “cause” and “event.” But it is also a priori, known by reason alone, not by experience. How so? “Because,” said Kant, “it has to be assumed to be true if we are even to have intelligible experience.” If we didn’t assume that the present situation is caused by a chain of preceding events, we couldn’t make sense out of anything. It would be like living in the film Mulholland Drive, where events occur in no coherent order. We’d have to forget about making any kind of statement or judgment about the world because we couldn’t count on the world to be consistent from one minute to the next.
Hundreds of jokes hinge on confusing analytic a priori statements with synthetic a posteriori statements:
There’s a surefire way to live to a ripe old age—eat a meatball a day for a hundred years.
The joke lies in giving an analytic, a priori “solution” to a problem that asks for a synthetic, a posteriori solution. The question of a surefire way to longevity clearly asks for some information about the world. “What are the things that experience has shown lead to longevity?” We expect the answer to be something like “Give up smoking” or “Take 400 milligrams of Co-Enzyme Q-10 at bedtime.” But here the answer is analytic, with a little irrelevancy about meatballs thrown in to fog your mind. “To live to an old age, live a hundred years, because a hundred years is, by common definition, an old age. Eat some meatballs too. They can’t hurt you.” (Well, maybe all those trans-fats in the meatballs could hurt, but not, of course, if you eat them for a hundred years.)
Here’s another:
Joe: What a fabulous singer, huh?
Blow: Ha! If I had his voice, I’d be just as good.
Same deal. What we mean by “fabulous singer” is one who possesses a terrific voice—the kind the performer in question obviously must have. So Blow’s statement “If I had his voice, I’d be just as good” doesn’t tell us anything new about Blow’s singing abilities. All he is really saying is, “If I were a fabulous singer, I’d be a fabulous singer.” And if that’s not true by definition, nothing is.
Here’s a more complicated demonstration of what happens when you confuse synthetic a posteriori and analytic a priori statements:
A man tries on a made-to-order suit and says to the tailor, “I need this sleeve taken in! It’s two inches too long!”
The tailor says, “No, just bend your elbow like this. See, it pulls up the sleeve.”
The man says, “Well, okay, but now look at the collar! When I bend my elbow, the collar goes halfway up the back of my head.”
The tailor says, “So? Raise your head up and back. Perfect.”
The man says, “But now the left shoulder is three inches lower than the right one!”
The tailor says, “No problem. Bend at the waist way over to the left and it evens out.”
The man leaves the store wearing the suit, his right elbow crooked and sticking out, his head up and back, all the while leaning down to the left. The only way he can walk is with a herky-jerky, spastic gait.
Just then, two passersby notice him.
Says the first: “Look at that poor crippled guy. My heart goes out to him.”
Says the second: “Yeah, but his tailor must be a genius! That suit fits him perfectly!”
Synthetic versus analytic, right? (And we’re not talking fabric here.) The stranger thinks, “This man’s tailor fit him perfectly with a suit” is a synthetic a posteriori statement purporting to provide information, based on observation, about the tailor and his apparent skill in making the suit. But for the tailor, “This suit I made is a perfect-fitting suit” is really an analytic statement. It is the same as saying, “This suit I made is a suit I made.” That’s because any suit the man tries on will be a perfect fit, as the tailor fits the man to the suit.
KANT’S CLOCK
Kant gave primacy to pure reason, so much so that he saw little need for personal experience in solving the problems of knowledge. Accordingly, he never ventured outside his hometown of Königsberg and lived a solitary life of extremely regular habits, like his daily, post-dinner walk. It is said that the citizens of Königsberg set their clocks according to the position of Professor Kant on this daily walk down and back the same street (which later became known as the Philosophengang, or “The Philosopher’s Walk”).
Less well known (possibly because it may not be true) is that the sexton of Königsberg Cathedral also confirmed the time on the church tower clock by observing when Kant took his daily promenade, and Kant in turn scheduled his walk by the church tower clock.
Talk about a confusion between analytic and synthetic! Both Kant and the sexton think they are gaining new information by observing the other’s behavior. Kant thinks that by observing the tower clock he is learning the official German standard time which, in turn, was established by observing the earth’s rotation. The sexton thinks that by observing Kant’s daily walk he is learning standard German time because of the sexton’s belief in Kant’s inherent punctuality. In fact, each was simply arriving at an analytic conclusion, true by definition. Kant’s conclusion, “I take my walk at 3:30,” really boils down to an analytic statement “I take my walk when I take my walk”—because how Kant determines it is 3:30 is by a clock that has been calibrated to his walk. The sexton’s conclusion, “My clock is correct,” boils down to “My clock says what my clock says”—because his criterion for the accuracy of his clock is Kant’s walk, which was in turn based on what his clock says.
PHILOSOPHY OF MATHEMATICS
What about Dimitri’s acute insight that 2 + 2 = 4? Is that an analytic statement, true by definition? Is part of what we mean by “4” that it is the sum of 2 and 2? Or is it synthetic? Does it provide us with new knowledge about the world? Did we come to it by counting two things and then counting two more things and then counting the whole pile? The latter is the approach taken by the Voohoona tribe in the Australian outback.
A western anthropologist is told by a Voohooni that
2 + 2 = 5. The anthropologist asks him how he knows this. The tribesman says, “By counting, of course. First I tie two knots in a cord. Then I tie two knots in another cord. When I join the two cords together, I have five knots.”
Much of the philosophy of mathematics is quite technical and difficult. The only thing you really need to know is that, when it comes to mathematics, there are three kinds of people: those who can count and those who can’t.
PRAGMATISM
For an epistemological pragmatist like the late-nineteenth-century American philosopher William James, the truth of a statement lies in its practical consequences. According to James, we choose our truth by what difference it will make in practice. We say Newton’s law of gravity is true, not because it corresponds to the way things “really are,” but because it has proven useful in predicting the behavior of two objects relative to each other under many different sorts of circumstances: “Hey, I bet apples would fall down even in New Jersey.” The day a theory stops being useful is the day we will replace it with some other one.
A woman reports her husband’s disappearance to the police. They ask her for a description, and she says, “He’s six feet, three inches tall, well-built, with thick, curly hair.”
Her friend says, “What are you talking about? Your husband is five-feet-four, bald, and has a huge belly.”
And she says, “Who wants that one back?”
This much of the story is well known. You may have heard it yourself. What is not so well known is the dialogue that followed:
The police say, “Lady, we are asking you for a description of your husband that corresponds to your actual husband.”
The woman responds, “Correspondence, shmorrespondence! Truth cannot be determined solely by epistemological criteria, because the adequacy of those criteria cannot be determined apart from the goals sought and values held. That is to say, in the end, truth is what satisfies, and, God knows, my husband didn’t do that.”
PHENOMENOLOGY
After flights to the height of abstraction, philosophy has a way of coming in for a soft landing in ordinary everyday experience. This happened in epistemology in the early twentieth century when the phenomenologists weighed in on what it really means to know something. More a methodology than a set of philosophical principles, phenomenology attempts to understand human experience as it is lived rather than as objective data. This approach is more like a novelist’s than an abstraction-prone philosopher’s.
The German word einfühlung, meaning “feeling into” or “empathy,” was used by phenomenologists such as Edmund Husserl to refer to a mode of knowing that attempts to get inside the experience of another human being and to know and to feel the world in the same way he or she does; in other words, to put yourself in another person’s shoes—or possibly panties.
Plato and a Platypus Walk Into a Bar Page 5