What is a philosophical problem? The irrefutable metahypothesis

By Matthew Blakeway

If we ban speculation about metahypotheses, does philosophical debate simply evaporate? 



Karl Popper explained how scientific knowledge grows in his book Conjectures and Refutations. A conjecture is a guess as to an explanation of a phenomenon. And an experiment is an attempt to refute a conjecture. Experiments can never prove a conjecture correct, but if successive experiments fail to refute it, then gradually it becomes accepted by scientists that the conjecture is the best available explanation. It is then a scientific theory. Scientists don’t like the word “conjecture” because it implies that it is merely a guess. They prefer the word “hypothesis”. Popper’s rule is that, for a hypothesis to be considered scientific, it must be empirically falsifiable.

When scientists consider a phenomenon that is truly mystifying, it seems reasonable to ask “what might a hypothesis for this look like?” At this point, scientists are hypothesising about hypotheses. Metahypothetical thinking is the first step in any scientific journey. When this produces no results, frustration gets the upper hand and they pursue the following line of reasoning: “the phenomenon is an effect, and must have a cause. But since we don’t know what that cause is, let’s give it a name ‘X’ and then speculate about its properties.” A metahypothesis is now presumed to be 'A Thing', rather than merely an idea about an idea.

The problem is the irrefutability of its existence.
X is a metahypothetical idea, and until we have a hypothesis, we don’t actually know what we are supposed to be refuting. Popper would say that it wasn’t scientific, yet it sprang from a scientific speculation. There is a false impression of truth that actually derives from a misrepresentation of axiom. “X is a thing” actually means “’X’ is a name we have given to an idea where we don’t even know what the idea represents” and the confusion between idea and thing is born. A false logical conclusion arises, not from truth, but because incoherent statements are irrefutable by their nature.

We can trace this through the history of philosophy. Most of it can be reduced to the following two questions:

• “What is X?” and
• “Does X exist?”

- where “X” is a metahypothetical idea that sprang from a scientist speculating about a cause of an unexplained phenomenon. The “X” could represent: God, evil, freewill, the soul, knowledge, etc. Each of these is a metahypothesis that originated with a scientist seeking to explain respectively: the existence of the universe, destructive actions by humans, seemingly random actions by humans, human actions that no one else can understand, human understanding.

The question “what is knowledge?” led to thousands of years of debate that ended when everybody lost interest in it. And I'm sure that the questions “what is freewill?” and “do humans have it?” are currently going through their death throes – again after a thousand years of debate. Or take the statement: “Evil people perform evil actions because they are evil.” If you are reading this blog, you will recognise that as so incoherent that it is barely a sentence, yet the individual components of it frequently pass as explanation for human actions that we don’t like. The idea of “evil” being some sort of thing is irrefutable despite being meaningless. What is there here to refute?

The sheer persistence of any proposition concerning a metahypothesis represented as 'A Thing' is illustrated by a real debate recently. The British actor, Stephen Fry,  gave an interview with Irish television in which he argued that if God exists, then he is a maniacal bastard. [To paraphrase!]

Yes, the world is very splendid but it also has in it insects whose whole lifecycle is to burrow into the eyes of children and make them blind. They eat outwards from the eyes. Why? Why did you do that to us? You could easily have made a creation in which that didn’t exist.

Giles Fraser, a Christian, responded with an article “I don’t believe in the God that Stephen Fry doesn’t believe in either.”

If we are imagining a God whose only power, indeed whose only existence, is love itself – and yes, this means we will have to think metaphorically about a lot of the Bible – then God cannot stand accused as the cause of humanity’s suffering.

I expect that you are positively itching to take a side in this debate. But resist the urge! Instead imagine that you are a Martian gazing down at the tragic poverty of the debates of Earth people. Fry is taking a literal interpretation of God and thereby is converting a metahypothesis into a hypothesis, but he is doing this purely with the intention of refuting it. Deliberately establishing a false hypothesis is a good debating tactic, but a dishonest one.

Fraser responds by taking the literal interpretation and passing it back into the metahypothetical – an equally dishonest tactic of making a debate unwinnable by undefining its terms. It’s like stopping the other team winning at football by hiding the ball. The effect of debates like this is to create an equilibrium stasis where the word “God” is suspended between meaning and incoherence. If it is given a robust definition, it becomes a hypothesis and is empirically refutable. And since its origins were in our inability to explain phenomena (the origin of the universe, life, etc.) for which we now have decent scientific explanations then it is pretty certain that it will indeed be refuted. But if the idea is completely incoherent, then it isn’t possible to talk about it at all. So the word exists – fluidly semi-defined – in the mid-zone between these two states. The concept “God” is an idea about an idea about a cause of unexplained phenomena. It is therefore itself unexplainable.

We can examine the birth of a metahypothesis in real time. Richard Dawkins asked in The Selfish Gene what caused cultural elements to replicate. He speculated that it needed a replicator like a gene:

But do we have to go to distant worlds to find other kinds of replicator and other, consequent, kinds of evolution? I think that a new kind of replicator has recently emerged on this very planet. It is staring us in the face. It is still in its infancy, still drifting clumsily about in its primeval soup, but already it is achieving evolutionary change at a rate that leaves the old gene panting far behind.

The new soup is the soup of human culture. We need a name for the new replicator, a noun that conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation. ‘Mimeme’ comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like ‘gene’. I hope my classicist friends will forgive me if I abbreviate mimeme to meme.

An effect needs a cause. And since we don’t know what that cause is, let us give it a name and then speculate as to what its properties must be. It is beyond funny that the world’s most famous atheist is here caught employing the same method of reasoning that gave birth to the idea of “God”. We will now debate for a thousand years whether memes exist or not. However, the idea is incoherent despite sounding convincingly sciencey. The idea of the “soul” sounded pretty sciencey in Aristotle’s day. Dawkins speculates that the idea of God is a meme, but he fails to notice that the idea of a meme is a meme, and therefore he is trying to lift himself off the floor by his bootstraps.

So... if we ban speculation about metahypotheses, does philosophical debate simply evaporate? Maybe! But it would probably also stop scientific progress in its tracks. If you are in the mood for a brain spin, you might consider whether the idea of a “metahypothesis” is itself a metahypothesis.

Taking this further, if we cannot hypothesise about hypotheses, then does science evaporate too?

A Philosophy of Gestures

By Thomas Scarborough

 

A weighty philosophical tome it may not have been, nor a seminal paper, nor a famous meeting which made the greatest contribution to modern philosophy, but a single gesture. Unusually, for a gesture – since gestures are so quickly lost in the tumult of our daily life – it was one of the best recorded gestures of time. 

Piero Sraffa – otherwise known for his lectures on economics at Cambridge – impulsively brushed his chin with his fingers. So important was Sraffa to Ludwig Wittgenstein – above all, it would seem, through that single gesture – that Wittgenstein acknowledged Sraffa in his Philosophical Investigations. The same Wittgenstein, that is, who wrote to his professor G.E. Moore: “Dear Moore,... the whole business [of acknowledgement] is too stupid and too beastly.” For such sentiments, Wittgenstein was denied his BA degree. Citations, at Cambridge, were required by the regulations.

Wittgenstein finally wrote acknowledgements in his Philosophical Investigations, but not to his mentors Gottlob Frege, or Bertrand Russell, nor to any of the luminaries he there refers to merely as “other people” – only to Frank Ramsey and Piero Sraffa. The acknowledgement to Ramsey seems somewhat cursory: through him, he “was helped”. But his acknowledgement to Sraffa is profound: "I am indebted to this stimulus for the most consequential ideas in this book". And “this book”, in turn, arguably had the most consequential effects of the century, in philosophy. While it is not known which stimulus it was that Wittgenstein refers to in his book, it is generally assumed that the gesture encapsulates it all – followed by Sraffa's interrogation of Wittgenstein:   

“What is the logical form of that?”  

Sraffa need not have brushed his chin with his fingers. It might as easily have been a punch. “What is the logical form of that?” Or a hug. Even a jig. Or, for that matter, a legacy, or a rampage. President Kennedy's visit to West Berlin, we may suppose, was a gesture. The Bomb under Mururoa. The independence of East Timor. The destruction of the Twin Towers. In their broadest sense, these are gestures all. They are actions, that is, performed to convey a feeling or intention.

Let us now turn our attention to another gesture – in another place, another time. It is a gesture which holds much in common with that of Sraffa. The details of this gesture, unlike Sraffa's, are lost in time – yet we may assume that it was the one gesture which raised all other gestures to prominence in a certain young man's mind.

In his introductory observations in Of Morals, David Hume wrote simply: “I see the effects of passion in the voice and gesture.” Hume, that is, observed not merely that the voice reveals the effects of passion, but gesture. Or to put it more broadly, it was not merely Hume's mastery of words and ideas which informed his moral philosophy, but his witness of gesture.

Hume, in this way, may be said to foreshadow Wittgenstein. Like Wittgenstein, gesture caused him to look beyond a world of mere words and logical structures. Wittgenstein merely saw what Hume had seen before. Hume had had his Sraffa moment, two hundred years before – although, to be sure, he had not made much of it.

Hume, further, appeared to assume a logic of gesture. We do not need to look far to find it. We find it in that fleeting comment in Of Morals: “I see the effects of passion...” Gestures, for Hume, were “effects”. Further, these effects were “seen” – and presumably therefore, interpreted. Effects, of course, have causes. And both causes and effects, in turn, are what systems are made of. Whatever one may say about Hume's ethics, he believed in some kind of gestural trade.

We give gestures and we take them. We balance gestures. We contemplate them. We arrange gestures within our world. This is the stuff of which our moral life is made. While on the surface of it, such gestures may appear to have no logical form – being intangible, mysterious, and as Hume considered, “perfectly inexplicable by human reason”, yet we know what they are. We have a repertoire of gestures. This repertoire has definition, of a kind. And further, it forms a vast network – personal, social, global. 

Piero Sraffa might cast some further light on this. Usually it is assumed that Sraffa gave Wittgenstein the impulse for abandoning ethics as a rational quest. We imagine that Sraffa, brushing his chin, would have answered his own question thus: 

“There is no logical form of that, of course. Ethics and logic do not mix.”

Yet Sraffa himself was an ethicist, and a systematic one at that. He was a Ricardian – which is, he sought a balance of human and material value. Let us for a moment suppose that there may be a variant reading of Sraffa. Supposing that Sraffa's internal dialogue would have read something like this:  

“What is the logical form of a gesture, Wittgenstein? Speak, Wittgenstein, for I see it before us so clear. I recognise a gestural trade.” 

Supposing that gestures are logical forms. Supposing that there exists a system of gestures – where we understand gestures in their broadest sense. Gestures, then, might be organised structurally, as a kind of gestural ethics. This raises a number of questions which are beyond the bounds of one short essay – yet one may suggest that chief among them are these:

Firstly, may a system of gestures be so ordered as to be more pleasing than other systems of gestures? How, then? and on what basis? And secondly, would such a system of gestures be unique and autonomous, as G.E. Moore suggests? Or is the way in which we trade in gestures in some way fundamentally the same as the way in which we dialogue in history, law, geography, and theology – in fact chemistry and physics, too?

It would seem too daring to take on both questions at once – yet with a leap of the imagination, Sraffa might help us further with the first. Supposing that the emphasis of Sraffa's question was this:   

“Logic, Wittgenstein, is little pieces of thought. Think, Wittgenstein – think more expansively! Look at the meaning of this gesture, socially and globally!”

Sraffa's gesture clearly combined action with meaning. Not only that, but in that moment in which he brushed his chin, he used the expression of an entire culture – not merely of a man. His gesture combined history and society, heritage and cultivation. It exploded the bounds of logic. Good morals, Sraffa might have suggested, do not lie in the study of logical pieces.
 
Sraffa, after all, was a globalist. Supposing this interpretation to be true, the lesson might not have been lost on Wittgenstein. On the surface of it, while he abandoned any logic of ethics, his mature philosophy embraced forms of life – namely, the notion that our language is embedded in the entire matrix of our lives: sociological, historical, linguistic, physiological, behavioural.

David Hume, apparently, moved in much the same direction. In his later thinking, his ethics came to encompass not merely individual morals, but “the happiness of mankind”. A raft of moral gestures, he thought, rested “solely” on considerations which took the whole of society into account: justice, fidelity, honour, veracity, allegiance, and chastity.
 
Both of these conclusions, of Wittgenstein and of Hume, the first located in the 20th century, the second in the 18th, may originally have been motivated by gestures – so opening up to these key philosophers a more apposite and expansive thinking, an ethics in the context of the whole world, in all its varied manifestations.

There remains one more gesture which we find in the annals of philosophy, without which this essay would not seem to be complete. It was the final, touching gesture of Immanuel Kant. Rather than signalling a philosophy that was yet to come, this was a retrospective gesture.

When Kant's doctor called on him in his final days, the ailing Kant, with some difficulty, stood up to receive him, and would not allow himself to be seated again until the doctor had taken his place.

One might wonder what it was all about – if Kant had not, reportedly, explained it himself. It was, said Kant, the sign of a life that had connected the personal with the universal. That is, it was a gesture which revealed the categorical imperative – a gesture as wide as the world, and not merely for his own sake – in fact, even at his own expense. For Kant, too, gestures embodied an ethic which transcended narrower, personal, parochial interests.