What is harmful ?

Now Doc, let us go down the "emotional" or "political" route for some distance, and answer your other Sunday post (1:37 pm).

My aim is also to find out why LP was eventually rejected because I feel that it may hold some wider lesson. However, I think it is misleading to compare metaphysics and creationism. Creationism is a clearly defined ideology with a definite set of beliefs, invented as a reaction to evolutionary biology. The very fact that it is clearly defined allows us to see that it is bogus in many ways and not worthy of much interest. Understanding why so many people still feel the need to cling to it might be interesting though. By constrast, metaphysics is a notion (not an ideology) and a very broad one. There are many strands of metaphysics : Christian, Platonist, Hegelian,... Metaphysics cannot even be said to be a discipline, like physics. It is more a way of saying, a shortcut to designate what one does when discussing general and abstract ideas.

Particular metaphysical systems and metaphysics in general is often so irritatingly vague and contradictory that LP's desire to get rid of it is understandable. However, as recent history shows, it is foolish to follow one's desire to get rid of something deemed unsatisfactory, unless one has something demonstrably better to replace it. Metaphysics has been pronounced dead countless times. Its repeated resurrection seems to show that it answers some deeply-felt need. Saying that we should refrain from talking about our beliefs in abstract terms just because our conceptual tools are imperfect does not solve the problem. I think it can even actually do harm.

To explain why, we must look at everyday life. There is a long tradition in our culture that opposes knowledge to mere beliefs held on trust. However, the examination of one's own behaviour shows that we rely on trust far more often than on knowledge. Take the case of boarding a plane. Do you know that it is airworthy ? that it has been properly maintained ? Do you go to Boeing's design center beforehand, to check that all their aerodynamics calculations were correct ? No, you trust they are, or you do not board the plane. And there are countless other such situations. It is a commonplace, for example, to say that business relies on trust and could not exist without it. Its role even in the exact sciences is now being realized, as shows the recent trend in epistemology to focus on the role of testimony in knowledge formation.

Why do we need trust ? because knowledge is too expensive. As a species, we have developed social mechanisms, based on our psychological primitives, that allows the many to benefit from the information gathered by a few, just by relying on hearsay. This is one part of what we call trust. The other part stems from our need to coordinate our behaviour among ourselves so that when one of us plans something, the others will not come and mess everything up out of greed or negligence. This second aspect is what we call ethics.

Why might LP be harmful. First because, as other forms of empiricism, it treats trust as something bad, inferior to knowledge. Hume famously said that we cannot count the report of other people as knowledge unless we have checked ourselves. LP's verification principle is nothing but a more formal elaboration of this basic idea. This is very fine advice. If only we could always do that ! Another reason is that by lumping all of metaphysics together and bashing it has hard as it can, it attacks the few concrete means we have at our disposal to actually build trust. We are far from understanding how societies work and how, within them, we come to trust each other. However, everyone agrees that shared beliefs play a crucial part. As we said, metaphysics is a broad and vague container. It includes beliefs and a lot of talk about them. Some, or maybe a lot, of that talk is of little value. But the beliefs are precious. Eradicating them means jumping into the void.

There is a risk of misunderstanding here. Just because you talk about beliefs, people may start to think that you are trying to support religious beliefs. From there, it is but a small step to start thinking that you are covertly supporting established religions. It is not my case. I am not a Christian, nor an adherent of any established spiritual group. What I am trying to say is that beliefs play an important role in a very wide area of human life, of which religion is but a small, but very visible, part.

The task that remain is to show how, by underminig trust, LP can actually and directly do harm. I will try, in a future post, to provide some arguments toward that goal by reviewing four cases : Hans Nelböck (Moritz Schlick's assasin), Kurt Gödel, Ludwig Wittgenstein and The Unabomber.