The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of
everyday thinking.
Albert Einstein
Excerpts from:
Hofstadter, D. (1985).
Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern
(Chapter 5, pp. 93-96). New York: Basic Books.
How come Truth is such a slippery beast?
Well, consider the very roots of our ability to discern truth. Above all (or perhaps I should say "underneath all"), common sense is what we depend on -- that crazily elusive, ubiquitous faculty we all have, to some degree or other. But not to a degree such as "Bachelor's" or "Ph.D". No, unfortunately, universities do not offer degrees in Common Sense. There are not even any Departments of Common Sense! This is, in a way, a pity.
At first, the notion of a Department of Common Sense sounds
ludicrous. Given that common sense is common, why have
a department devoted to it?
My answer would be quite simple: In our lives we are continually
encountering strange new situations in which we have to figure out
how to apply what we already know. It is not enough to have common
sense about known situations; we need also to develop the art of
extending common sense to apply to situations that are unfamiliar
and beyond our previous experience. This can be very tricky, and
often what is called for is common sense in knowing how
to apply common sense: a sort of "meta-level" common sense.
And this kind of higher-level common sense also requires its own
meta-level common sense. Common sense, once it starts to roll,
gathers more common sense, like a rolling snowball gathering ever
more snow.
[AAP note: The snowball can grow only when there is plenty of
snow around; this show is provided by interaction and
experimentation with the world.]
Or, to switch metaphors, if we apply common sense to itself over and over again, we wind up building a skyscraper. The ground floor of this structure is the ordinary common sense we all have, and the rules for building new floors are implicit in the ground floor itself. However, working it all out is a gigantic task, and the result is a structure that transcends mere common sense.
Pretty soon, even though it has all been built up from common ingredients, the structure of this extended common sense is quite arcane and elusive. We might call the quality represented by the upper floors of this skyscraper "rare sense"; but it is usually called "science". And some of the ideas and discoveries that have come out of this originally simple and everyday ability defy the ground floor totally. The ideas of relativity and quantum mechanics are anything but commonsensical, in the ground-floor sense of the term! There are outcomes of common sense self-applied, a process that has many unexpected twists and gives rise to some unexpected paradoxes. In short, it sometimes seems that common sense, recursively self-applied, almost undermines itself.
Well, truth being this elusive, no wonder people are continually besieged with competing voices in print. When I was younger, I used to believe that once something has been discovered, verified, and published, it was then part of Knowledge: definitive, accepted, and irrevocable. Only in unusual cases, I thought, would opposing claims then continue to be published. To my surprise, however, I found that the truth has to fight constantly for its life! That an idea has been discovered and printed in a "reputable journal" does not ensure that it will become well known and accepted. In fact, usually it will have to be rephrased and reprinted many different times, often by many different people, before it has any chance of taking hold. This is upsetting to an idealist like me, someone more disposed to believe in the notion of a monolithic and absolute truth than in the notion of a pluralistic and relative truth (a notion championed by a certain school of anthropologists and sociologists, who un-self-consciously insist "all systems of belief are equally valid", seemingly without realizing that this dogma of relativism not only is just as narrow-minded as any other dogma, but moreover is unbelievably wishy-washy!). The idea that the truth has to fight for its life is a sad discovery. The idea that the truth will not out, unless it is given a lot of help, is pretty upsetting.
[...] There is no easy answer here! There is no recourse but to common sense, that rock-bottom basis of all rationality. And unfortunately, we have no foolproof algorithm to uniquely characterize that deepest layer of rationality, nor are we likely to come up with one soon. The ability to use common sense -- no matter how much light is shed on it by psychologists or philosophers -- will probably forever remain a subjective art more than an objective science. Even when experimental epistemologists, in their centuries-long quest for artificial intelligence, have at last made a machine that thinks, its common sense will probably be just as instinctive and fallible and stubborn as ours. Thus at its core, rationality will always depend on inscrutables: the simple, the elegant, the intuitive. This weird paradox has existed throughout intellectual history, but in our information-rich times it seems particularly troublesome.
[...] This all goes to emphasize the claim at the beginning of this chapter about the trickiness of trying to pin down what truth is, and how deeply circular all belief systems are, no matter how much they try to be objective. In the end, rate of survival is the only difference between belief systems. This is a worrisome statement. It certainly worries me, at least. Still, I believe it. But scientists, I find, are not usually willing to see science itself as being rooted in an impenetrably murky swamp of beliefs and attitudes and perceptions. Most of them have never considered how it is that human perception and categorization underlie all that we take for granted in terms of common sense, and in more primordial ways that are so deeply embedded that we even find them hard to talk about. Such things as: how we break the world into parts, how we form mental categories, how we refine them certain times while blurring them other times, how experiences and categories are clustered associatively, how analogies guide our intuitions, how imagery works, how valid logic is and where it comes from, how we tend to favor simple statements over complex ones, and so on -- all these are, for most scientists, nearly un-grappable-with issues, and so they pay them no heed and continue with their work.
The idea of "simplicity" is a real can of worms, for what is simple in one vocabulary can be enormously complex in another vocabulary -- and vice versa. Does the sun rise in the mornings? Ninety-nine to one you use that geocentric phrase in your ordinary conversations, and geocentric imagery in your private thoughts. Yet we all "know" that the truth is different: the earth is really rotating on its axis and so the sun's motion is only apparent. Well, it may be news to you that general relativity says that all coordinate systems are equally valid -- and that includes one from whose point of view all motion takes place with respect to a fixed, nonrotating earth. Thus Einstein tells us that Copernicus and Galileo were, after all, not any righter than Ptolemy and the Pope (score ten points for infallibility!). There is even, for each of us, a physically valid "egocentric" system of coordinates in which I am still and everything moves relative to me! I point this out to show that the truth is much shiftier and subtler than any simple picture can ever say. Scientists who oversimplify science distort reality as much as religious fanatics or pseudo-scientists do. The troubling truth is that there is no simple boundary between nonsense and sense. It is a lot hazier and messier than even thoughtful people generally wish to admit.
[...] In a way, therefore, to try to pursue the nature of ultimate truth is to enter a bottomless pit, filled with circular vipers of self-reference.
A related page with excerpts from The Feynman Lectures on Physics nicely illustrates the relativity of simplicity and the common-sense grounding of scientific constructs.
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