Knowing is central to the practice of philosophy in everyday life. For me these days it’s the question I most often run up against. I like for things to have a one, true and for-all-time answer. That kind of knowing makes me feel secure and unassailable in my decisions or opinions.
However, very little in life is actually knowable in that way. This is distressing to analytic philosophers of a certain bent – we would prefer to fit the world to our theories, even going so far as to lop off limbs as necessary. We like to stick numbers onto things. So, in making a decision, I will customarily assign P-values (assessments of probability) to possible outcomes, rate my preferences on a scale of ten and make a daisy chain of conditionals and biconditionals (if . . . then . . . and if-and-only-if statements) in order to determine a decision. It lies somewhere between objective assessment and witchcraft. On some days my lunch decision looks like this:
Givens:
1. Assume no real time for a full lunch hour.
2. Desire to leave office for lunch = 8.5/10
3. It may rain P=6.5 or greater.
4. Desire for warm food = 9.5/10
5. Desire to spend less money = 6/10
Conditions:
1. If there is no real time for lunch, then I will eat at my desk.
2. There is no real time for lunch.
3. I will eat at my desk.
4. If I must eat at my desk, then I prefer to have better food to make up for eating at my desk.
5. I ought not to spend too much money on lunch.
6. If I ought not to spend too much money on lunch, then I ought to buy a sandwich at the Tesco.
7. If I have to eat at my desk, then I ought to buy a proper sandwich and not just have one from the Tesco.
8. My preference for a decent lunch is stronger than my preference to save money.
9. 3 (I must eat at my desk) and 8 (my preference for a decent lunch is stronger)
10. Therefore I will buy a proper sandwich to eat at my desk.
This is a nonsense, of course[1]. There is no knowable necessity in my having a more expensive sandwich at my desk – all that this is is the fanciful expression of a preference I already felt, and the apparatus of deductive logic does nothing to strengthen or weaken the preference. And so it can go with many an experience based theory; the theoretical apparatus, the scientific language, is used to make a preference or opinion sound like true-for-all-time fact.
The difficulty is, how to know which is which in the wild? Where is the field guide to epistemological red herring varieties?
[1] Those among you with overly sharpened eyes may notice the amphibole-ish way that statement 7 works – The ‘if’ part of the condition (P; the antecedent) is true in a fact way while the ‘then’ (Q; consequent) part is true in a preference way. It is questionable at best to say a fact can produce a necessary preference – P could well be true and Q false and yet I’m still going to run off and spend £2 more than I might.
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