Knowing Before Being: Part 2: Appearances & Predictions

On the power of pragmatic phenomenology

Last week, we saw how the scientific method both leads to the development, but also then the overturning, of scientific ontologies: although scientists do develop theories of how things really are, of what really exists, the scientific method itself is tied to and based on no ontology at all. Instead, the method continually tests any given theory against the data of experience—and ends up nearly always finding them wanting:

Knowing Before Being: Part 1: What is Science?

What this means in practice is that science itself is not a given ontological picture of reality, but rather a method of testing any picture of reality. Indeed, any given theory of reality really functions, scientifically, as nothing more than a hypothesis, which the scientific method then tests. This is obvious, and yet it is easy to forget. After all, many people—both inside and outside the “hard” sciences—tend to assume that the current scientific model(s) of reality are simply and plainly true, and that all previous views of reality should be thrown away as irrelevant. But genuine science requires both more humility and more skepticism than that.

Even so, what exactly are we supposed to do with this realization? If the scientific method is built upon and requires no specific ontology, does this mean that humans must live in a constant state of flux, never believing in any particular ontology, but always simply waiting for the next experimental shoe to drop? What does it mean to believe in Truth, for example, if we think our current picture of the true could be case aside at any moment? Is science at risk of descending into the dreaded embrace of postmodernism?

These were questions that C.S. Peirce took very seriously. Peirce worked primarily as a chemist and geodesist, but his first love was the study of logic. So he was both a scientist and a philosopher, and much of his work focused on developing a genuine and complete philosophy of science.

Peirce was certain of only one thing: the scientific method was the best way to achieve knowledge of how the world worked. But he was also well-read in philosophy, and so understood the challenges to science developing any fixed and final view of things. In particular, he took Emmanuel Kant’s idea of the noumenon seriously: what science really wanted was complete and true knowledge of reality independent of any mind; however, any attempt to learn about the world obviously involved the mind—it engaged with how things appear to us (phenomena), not how things really are unto themselves (noumena). Thus, genuine scientific study was always practiced against a firm epistemological horizon; our knowledge of reality is always mediated to us through the realm of appearances.

While such a realization could (and does!) cause plenty of consternation among both philosophers and scientists, for Peirce it was no problem at all; it simply gave clarity to what the scientific project really is: a tool for making better predictions about future phenomena—that is, of predicting our own future experiences. Hence, Peirce developed a philosophy that he initially called pragmatism, but would later dub pragmaticism (to distinguish it from the work of thinkers like John Dewey and William James). For Peirce, any theory of anything was always wholly pragmatic: one developed an idea of how things supposedly are, and then one acts upon that idea and see what happens. Experimentally, of course, this was an intentional process of discovering if one’s idea was correct. But in day-to-day life, one does this all the time without really thinking about it. When I wake up in the morning, I want coffee—so I walk downstairs because that’s where the kitchen, and my coffee grinder, are. When I get out of bed, I can’t be utterly certain that my coffee grinder actually is in the kitchen. Perhaps my wife moved it last night. Perhaps someone (presumably with an insatiable caffeine addiction) came in and stole it in the dead of night. Maybe Captain Kirk beamed it up to the Enterprise. But I don’t really consider any of these possibilities—I assume the coffee grinder is where I left it unless and until this assumption is proven wrong.

For Peirce, this wasn’t just a practical way to go about life, it revealed a central truth of the reality we live in: to believe in something is simply to operate as if that belief is true. If experience reveals the belief to not be true, then one formulates a new belief. But this means that any belief is completely provisional—anything could change in the future. Yes, I could wake up and my coffee grinder could be missing, but Peirce understood that his pragmatic approach to belief had much more radical implications: perhaps I could wake up and my kitchen could be missing. Perhaps I could wake up and the laws of physics would be different. Why not? Science had been built upon the assumption that the world was, at its core, a static place of fixed laws and absolute space—the doctrine of the homogeneity of space, time, and natural laws. But even before the revolutions in science that would overturn the Newtonian system came along, Peirce saw that science simply didn’t need to assume any fixed ontological system. It could work much more flexibly, critically, and humbly, by simply attending to the task of predicting future phenomena.¹

Crucially, Peirce recognized that the entirety of science did indeed occur within the realm of qualitative experience: I have a theory about why reality appears the way it does to me, so I test my theory by taking a bunch of measurements, which are just a series of specific phenomena within my own experience. I then evaluate my theory based on whether it helped me to predict which qualitative states I myself would experience under certain conditions. Rinse and repeat, until I have a theory which allows me to best predict what experiences I will undergo. The whole process happens within my qualitative experience. For Peirce, this was crucial, because it meant not only that all science ultimately reduced to phenomenology, but also that every phenomenon was a sign—every phenomenon pointed to another phenomenon.

Signs are crucial to human thought, but they are so essential that we often don’t even realize we are using them. If, for example, I see smoke, I know there must be fire. The smoke here functions as a sign of the fire: if I see smoke, I am confident that there is a fire somewhere, even if I don’t see the fire itself. But why am I so confident of this relationship? How is that smoke signifies fire to me? For Peirce, every relationship between a sign and what it signifies is mediated by what he called an interpretant, that by which the sign points to its signified. In the case of smoke and fire, this relationship is one I develop empirically: when I have noticed smoke in the past, if I investigate it, it always ends up leading me to a fire. After I have gone through this process enough times, I decide that this must be a strong causal relationship, and thereafter am confident that smoke must indicate fire. In this case, the sign is linked to its signified through the scientific method.²

But this empirical, experimental, method does not always provide the interpretant of a given sign. Consider words. Words are signs; they point to something other than themselves. This is most obvious with nouns: the word “dog” indicates that class of generally furry, generally four-footed mammals who (generally!) bark and have a great sense of smell. Obviously, there is no necessary reason that we needed to use the word “dog” to indicate this class of animals. We could have chosen any sequence of sounds we wanted to. We could have used “cat” or “ice cream” to indicate dogs. And indeed we know that in other languages, the word for dog is not “dog” at all, but chien, perro, hund, etc.

It is the rules of the English language themselves that function as the interpretant here: “dog” indicates dogs because that’s the rule we’ve established in English. In Spanish, of course, this is not true. In that case, we need to use “perro”. There is obviously nothing scientific about this; the assignment of “dog” to dogs is arbitrary. But this doesn’t mean an individual user of a language can simply ignore the rule—at least not if they actually want to be understood by other users of the language. If I am looking for my lost dog, but keep asking people to help me find my lost ice cream, I probably won’t make any progress.

Peirce saw, though, that this basic structure of signs—a sign linked to its signified through the framework of an interpretant—completely constituted our phenomenal experience. And since Peirce also recognized that our only contact with reality was through this very phenomenal experience, semiotics³—the study of signs—was really the fundamental study of everything—or at least everything we could possibly know. Every phenomenon that we can isolate only makes any sense nested in a larger group of phenomena, and each phenomenon itself always points to other phenomena. So my experience of the quality of redness only makes sense in the context of other colors, and non-color qualitative experience—I know what red is in large part by knowing all the things it is not—but that experience of redness can also itself point me to other phenomena, such as the broader empirical experience of a picture, or the idea of fire, or even to the idea of a specific wavelength of electromagnetic radiation, etc.

For Peirce, in this semiotic phenomenology, the entirety of human experience and knowledge is contained. Any question about what a given experience points to beyond itself always ends up being answered by some other phenomenon; there was no way to use phenomenal knowledge to arrive at some kind of trans-phenomenal noumenon. Our knowledge of the world is always limited to our qualitative, phenomenal experience within consciousness.⁴

Now, for the kind of scientist who was confident that all of qualitative reality could be reduced to (or transformed into) purely quantitative description—i.e. for those scientists committed to a thoroughgoing materialism or physicalism—Peirce’s position was a serious threat, an untenably idealist philosophy. And indeed, the history of much scientific thought over the least 2 centuries has been a history of many scientists and philosophers trying to show that we can actually refer to mind-independent reality with confidence and certainty, that science can deliver a fixed and final ontology which can then be the basis of explaining everything—very much including consciousness. But Peirce’s basic epistemological and methodological refutation of this illusory belief remains just as strong as it ever did.

Indeed, there is reason to think that the march of 20th and now 21st century science has only strengthened Peirce’s position; as we saw last week, the theories of relativity and quantum mechanics not only destabilized the Newtonian ontological picture, but also called into question whether there even could be a stable picture of what reality really is, independent of an observer and limited by the observational apparatus of that observer. Instead, many scientific developments have suggested that reality will look different from different perspectives, even when maximal scientific precision and rigor is brought to bear on those perspectives.⁵

In other words, science works very well when it is used to make predictions about what future phenomena we may experience as conscious beings: if I touch the hot stove, my hand will hurt. But when science tries to formulate a fixed and final ontological theory explaining the detailed mechanics of how this is so, the ontological picture gets fuzzier and fuzzier the more detailed the theory gets. And, in any event, that theory itself is always an idea within the mind of the theorizer, it depends on the very qualitative phenomenal lifeworld that it is meant to operate independently from—any theory is a set of signs constituted by phenomena. It turns out, just as we discussed in part 1, that science can deliver excellent tools for predicting future phenomena—but it is not able to provide any real knowledge of reality apart from or even beneath phenomenality as such.

Again, for many scientifically-minded folks, this is a scandal and a catastrophe, an unbearable state of affairs that science and/or philosophy must fix post haste. But for Peirce, there was nothing to be worried about—instead, scientists needed to accept the reality of what science is—and what it isn’t—and get on with the work of the scientific method.

This phenomenological pragmaticism provides an excellent way, I think, for us to both appreciate the obvious power of science even as we critique and seek to correct the overzealous ontological ambitions of much of science.⁶ This approach to science and the philosophy of science has many applications, to be sure, but I think perhaps the most crucial one is in the philosophy of mind—how to develop a philosophy of mind that is both in accord with scientific findings while also avoiding the pitfalls of science’s long history of massive blind spots when it comes to the role and reality of consciousness. It is to this question that we will turn next week, in part 3.

1. Interestingly, this meant that for Peirce, reality was revealed as thoroughly evolutionary, in both Hegelian and Darwinian terms.

2. Though it’s worth noting that if, one day, I experienced smoke and couldn’t find any fire, I might have to update my belief about this relationship. For Peirce, like any other belief, this belief is wholly pragmatic, predictive, and provisional.

3. Although Peirce dubbed his approach “semeiotics” to distinguish it from other systems.

4. Of course, this does not mean that Peirce denied the possibility of the noumenon’s reality, simply that we, as conscious subjects, could not access any knowledge of the noumenon itself, but only knowledge of it as signified by, and mediated though, phenomena.

5. A reader interested in this topic may be interested in the comment that my friend Nicholas Smith left on part 1 of this series. Interestingly, he also addressed the intersection of spirituality and science in a recent post as well.

6. One of the great tragedies of philosophy, to my mind, is that Peirce’s pragmaticism never gained a lot of traction, even in the U.S. Instead, analytic philosophy, which has tended to assume we could easily refer to ontologically stable substances, became dominant. This has mean that a mode of philosophy that has been both largely blind to serious phenomenology but also insufficiently critical of scientific ontologies has inflected most philosophical thinking on these topics among English-language philosophers, leading, in my opinion, to a mass of error and confusion. It is my hope that, among others, Peirce’s thought might help lead us out of this morass.