PULLING STRINGS

I nose around in philosophy because to answer the question "What should I do?", it is helpful to know the answers to "What is true?" and "How do I know that?"  It's no coincidence that the three great branches of philosophy -- ethics, metaphysics, and epistemology -- address these three questions.  So philosophy is important and is more than an avocation for me.

But it's not a vocation.  By trade I'm a machinist, not a philosopher, and so constraints upon my time limit what I can read about the science of wisdom.  So when I put two and two together and gain an insight by dint of my own reason, I don't doubt that others already know what I figured out.  I know there is plenty of writing on philosophy that I have not gotten to.  Nevertheless, I am pleasantly surprised, once I get around to reading some philosophy here or there, to learn of a similar perspective on what I had been pondering.

For instance, I have persuaded myself that there are basically two methods of objective knowledge:  Scientific and aesthetic.  Scientific knowledge is that gained through measurement.  By counting, specifying, and delimiting -- i.e., quantification -- we can say this is true, because if it weren't our yardstick would immediately and plainly tell us so.  In other words, scientific knowledge is that which is reducible to a verifiable or falsifiable statement.  For example, the mean diameter of the Earth is 7,918 miles.  That is a scientific fact.  So are the statements that dogs have four legs and France is in Europe.  By counting miles, specifying anatomy, and delimiting continents these scientific facts are subject to verification or falsification, and so we can have great confidence in them because our measures show they are true.

Yet, all that is true is not knowable scientifically.  I know that all of you who are reading this are conscious beings.  But there is no objective measure by which I can establish that any human being possesses consciousness.  I know that I am, because I experience it.  However, no one else can experience my consciousness and I can experience no one else's.  Yet the fact that all human beings are conscious is as true as the sky is blue on a clear day.  This truth is aesthetic knowledge.  Though it cannot be quantified, and so reduced to a scientifically verifiable or falsifiable statement, its explanatory power is in its qualities that are in harmony with all else we know to be true.  Its truth lies in its beauty.

Because beauty is objectively identifiable, aesthetic knowledge is as objective as scientific knowledge.  The identity of beauty is the proper form and purpose of a thing, and nothing exists without the qualities of form and purpose (or formal and final causes as the Aristotelian might put it).  In the case of consciousness, or the soul, it is the form of the matter that composes the human body.  Form and matter together are the substance that is a human being.  Without consciousness that substance cannot be, hence no human being.  Thus we know through the qualities of form and purpose, without any manner of measurement, all human beings are conscious.  That is an aesthetic fact.

But here's the rub about aesthetic knowledge.  It is as objective as scientific knowledge, because an aesthetic fact is true without regard to anyone's awareness of it.  But it is not necessarily as certain as scientific knowledge, because no attempt to quantify it will subject it to verification or falsification.  It's just not possible.  Thus our comprehension of an aesthetic fact will be restricted.  Indeed, we may at best only apprehend its truth, relying upon its harmony with all other knowledge to have sound reason to believe it is true.  Yet doubt, also for sound reason, may well persist.  (And so the need for the virtue of tolerance, another topic for another day.  In the meantime, I recommend this short essay by Bill Vallicella.)

Because doubt of an aesthetic fact is not just possible, but often reasonable, great controversy can arise over it.  The commonest example is the existence of God.  Another example, currently in hot debate, is string theory (well, the "string conjecture" would be more accurate), which is the idea that the basic constituents of matter and energy are not points but one-dimensional strings.  And here is where I finally get to my pleasant surprise of discovering that others have been propounding with eloquence what I recently stumbled over on my own.  What is beautiful leads us to what is true, as John Rose of First Things discusses today in regard to the great divide among physicists over the epistemological standing of string theory.  Rose's commentary gives a glimpse as to how the aesthetic method is gaining prominence with the practitioners of the scientific method.

I only hope that the scientists don't make as much a hash of it as they have science.

Comments

[Honoratus]

Your post very interesting, on it is what is not present on other sites.

[Bill]

Thanks, Honoratus.