Sophistry and the Naturalistic Fallacy

The Naturalistic Fallacy

The naturalistic fallacy is the logical inference of value from fact, for instance the inference of value from a policy which as a matter of fact does or might provide the greatest pleasure for the greatest number of people. This may sound plausible, but it really is a logical fallacy, and I do not commit it anywhere in Utopian Analysis. Ideals are tested by pursuing them long enough in a political experiment. In this way, the Soviet Empire gave the socialist ideal ("from each according to ability; to each according to need") a pretty thorough test, which it failed. Therefore, we know the socialist ideal is false. The failure of the Soviet Empire is what I call a normative particular, which is a particular matter of value discovered by experience. "Failure" is a normative term. It is a matter of history that the Soviet Empire collapsed; a normative particular that it failed. I shall not analyze a normative particular more than this. We learn things from political experiments, both matters of value and matters of fact. Let's leave it at that.

But notice, the failure of socialism does not imply the truth of the ideal of reciprocity and its corollary, the ideal of free enterprise. It is just that free enterprise is left as the only surviving alternative. That is always the way of it in science. As Sherlock Holmes said, "When you have eliminated the alternatives, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth." When there is only one known alternative, all others having refuted, we call it well-established. That is the rule in physics, and it is the rule in utopian analysis. Ideals play the role of theories. Scientific theories are never proven. They are merely well-established. Why then should we believe in them? Well, it is up to you whether you believe in them. But if you wish to make any progress in your field you had better make use of them, since they are the only known solution to a set of problems.

In the creation of utopian analysis, the avoidance of the naturalistic fallacy was the least of my problems. But why were my professors and colleagues so adamant that it was unavoidable? I believe it is because academic philosophers after the time of Newton and Locke no longer understand the epistemology of our time, which is scientific method. They are stuck in the epistemology of ancient time, which was mathematical method.

The only knowledge-discipline known to philosophers before Galileo and Newton was mathematics, put in its rigorous modern form by a Greek philosopher working in the great library of Alexandria, a man named Euclid, building on a long tradition of mathematical philosophy. In mathematics, justification is proof.

However, Galileo and Newton invented a new kind of justification which we call scientific method, logically rigorous, but not based on an inference from facts to theories. In scientific method, justification is not proof. Hume never grasped the nature and significance of scientific method. He, and all the sophists who follow, remain in the Euclidean framework. They think justification is and must be proof, a logical inference from fact to theory. They call this inductive logic.

So how did Hume go so wrong? Perhaps he went wrong because science is "paradigmatic," as T. S. Kuhn pointed out in his famous book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Galileo and Newton never stated the essence of scientific method in abstract terms, and neither has any scientist since. Scientists learn their craft by example, master to pupil, Nobel prize winner to postdoc.

Or Hume may have been fooled by the form of Newton's Principia, where Newton sets forth his revolutionary new physics. The Principia is cast in the form of a Euclidean proof from three axioms and one force function. This makes the Principia virtually unreadable today. But that may be why the philosophers never made the turn, and remain in the Euclidean framework.

In the entire history of mankind, there have been very few philosophers. Jesus, Buddha, Confucius, Lao-Tse, and Mohammed are creators of guru-disciple traditions, not philosophers in the western sense. If the function of philosophy is the founding of sciences, then only those who have contributed to that task are philosophers: Thales, Pythagoras, Aristotle, Euclid, Galileo, Kepler, Newton, Hobbes, Locke, Harvey, Adam Smith, Hutton, Darwin, William James, C.G. Jung, Toynbee and me. Fewer than two dozen.

So what are all these thousands of people who teach philosophy in the universities? I shall make the same complaint about them that Socrates (a stonecutter) made about the professional teachers of philosophy in his day, who called themselves "sophists." Thus, "sophist" just means "professional philosopher."

Our sophists (like those Socrates attacked) are only interested in "raising questions." When is a question not a question? When one has neither the ability nor the desire to attempt a solution. The sophists transform real problems into abstract "puzzles," incapable of solution when taken out of the rich loam of human experience. The sophists don't want to solve them. That ends the game and puts them out of business. This is my definition of sophistry: "mind-games, where it matters not which side you take, but only the wit shown in the word-play." Perhaps this is why I despise "mathematical recreations," chess, bridge or any sort of mind game, since I automatically suspect the players of a tendency towards sophistry.

How did philosophy become sophistry? Philosophy was certainly a serious business in the 17th Century, when the natural philosophers Galileo and Newton were struggling to figure out the motions of the heavens and the earth, and the "moral" philosophers Hobbes and Locke were earnestly working out the basis for a sound community. These efforts by Hobbes and Locke guided the social revolutions of the 17th and 18th Centuries. Their work was not wasted. Yet, philosophy had taken a wrong turn by the time of Hume. For 300 years, philosophy has been an irrelevant backwater in the university, where no one expects breakthroughs, or progress of any kind.

This farce has continued down to the present day. Sophists still put the Euclidean deductive logic in the first half of their logic texts, and then contradict it with the totally invalid inductive logic of the second half. Think on this. If scientific reasoning were really inductive, how is it possible to refute one long established theory and raise another with a single decisive observation, as Eddington did early in this century?

Newton's theory predicted that star light grazing the sun should be deflected by a certain amount, and Einstein's General Theory of Relativity predicted a deflection of twice as much. Eddington measured the deflection of a grazing star during a total eclipse. The result was closer to Einstein's prediction than it was to Newton's, so down went Newton and up came Einstein. If one test can refute a theory which has had millions of confirmations over centuries of time, then inductive logic is hogwash.

Perhaps sophists have confused inductive confirmation with the utterly different notion of reproducibility. We require results to be reproducible, since this is the chief means of weeding out hallucination, bad experiments and outright fraud. We want to see what results different scientists get, with different apparatus and perhaps a different approach. In most cases, the irreproducible result is quickly found out, and sometimes the source of the error is explained. In other cases, it may take decades to weed out an error, as in the case with the fraudulent Piltdown man.

We must totally reject Hume's rule that extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, such as proof that fraud could not possibly occur. Such a demand is itself impossible to fulfill. If Hume's rule had been applied in the 17th Century, we would still be burning witches and heretics at the stake. So you see, Hume is almost an anti-philosopher, since his ideas spawned the metaphysical nonsense of Kant and Hegel, as well as the obstructionist views of the Psi-cops today, who use Hume's rule rather than scientific method. Indeed, even scientists are apt to think scientifically only in their own specialties, and are often just as irrational as everyone else on other subjects.

Hume and the sophists were convinced that Newtonian physics was justified, yet they never understood the concept of a well-established theory. Neither has Sir Karl Popper, a contemporary academic philosopher-of-science of some repute. There is nothing difficult about scientific method. It is the normal problem-solving technique of Western civilization, used by gardeners, backyard mechanics, and mothers with a crying baby.

Because they are stuck in the Euclidean framework, sophists believe any empirical study of values must involve some kind of inference between fact and value, which they know to be invalid. The effect has been a halt to any further development of the "moral" sciences of Hobbes and Locke, thus allowing the dangerous sophistry of Karl Marx.

The existing sciences solve only a single kind of problem (finding explanations), with a single kind of experience (visible and tangible matters of fact). If the problem is not like figuring out how a watch works by taking it apart and seeing how the components move one another, then it lies outside the reach of the physical sciences.

In this online book, I have shown that it is possible to extend scientific method to problems other than explanation, and to realms of experience other than matters of fact. This is the way we solve philosophical problems, by creating knowledge-disciplines. I have solved a philosophical problem thought to be impossible since the time of Hume, namely, "how do we determine the good, the right, and the beautiful from experience?" Elsewhere I have solved the classical theological problem of evil. Elsewhere, I have given empirical content to the concept of free will. See my online book, Evidence of Mind and Soul.

For each philosophical question, there is some relevant realm of experience that can provide an answer, whether it is a question about immortality or divinity or free will or the nature of mind. It is not necessary to invent a new method for each problem. The method invented by Galileo and Newton suffices. It is only necessary to find the equivalent of a theory, a fact, and a test in this new realm of inquiry. Questions that had been matters of ideology and religious dogma can now be answered scientifically. Knowledge replaces faith. Science replaces philosophy. Religion becomes irrelevant. The eternal questions are neither meaningless nor unanswerable, even if our answers must be forever tentative, and subject to refinement by future scholars.

Home