Aporia

Leszek Kołakowski, quoted by Cornel West. This is not to say, of course, that all arguments have equal validity: only that arguments of some coherence -which I tend to call internal coherence- can be adduced for any position. An argument is internally coherent when it unfolds logically within a system of rules and axioms. It is common for arguments to seem quite absurd from outside of such a system, and it is just as common for interlocutors to question an argument’s validity without understanding its systematic context. As an example: if you believe axiomatically that there exists some deity exempt from all ordinary physical and historical laws, the mind of which is revealed in immutable texts, it is logical enough to believe that evidence to the contrary is fraudulent, planted by enemies of the deity described in those texts, and that physical evidence cannot be more persuasive than textual evidence.

That does not mean it is true! But it is hardly a question of logic. The logical relation between each step of the argument -from its systematic axioms, which establish epistemological rules about sacred texts and physical laws, to any individual datum, like a fossil or a sedimentary deposit- is often valid. The problem is in the axioms of the system.

This is all fairly straightforward. The trouble is that competing systematic worldviews have their own arbitrarily posited axioms. For example: there is no defensible argument for why we should consider scientific conclusions “true” in any logically-compulsory way. They are predictive; they are internally coherent; the correlate, in some cases, to our unreliable perceptions of the world and explain those perceptions, but so have previous paradigms. As to “truth”, however, there seems to be no sound connection to it at all. The most common argument, and the one that implicitly persuades our civilization, is that the efficacy of science demonstrates its validity. But, Kołakowski notes, 

“…when we invoke the efficacy of science in order to legitimize its more or less codified criteria of validity, our appeal has no epistemological relevance and leaves intact all the skeptical arguments about the fundamental unreliability of all criteria of truth, even if we set aside the well-known difficulties of properly defining the principle of verifiability and are satisfied with the general guidelines of scientific empiricism. There are no transcendental or logically compelling grounds to take the efficacy of knowledge (its predictive power and practical applicability) as a mark of truth in the sense just mentioned. We may certainly define truth by reference to the criteria of efficacy; such a definition is not self-contradictory and does not lead into an infinite regress; nevertheless, it is arbitrary; to accept it requires an act of faith and therefore the principle credo ut intelligam operates over the entire field of knowledge; this is hardly more than to say that we are incapable of producing an epistemological absolute or that our intelligence is finite: not exactly a world-shaking discovery.”

But if all systems, all epistemologies rest on essentially arbitrary definitions, the Law of the Infinite Cornucopia brings us into significant trouble: arguments can be made for anything, and it is likely that past a certain point persuasion simply isn’t possible. The systems within which arguments are made are as arbitrary as the arguments themselves, and there is nothing transcendental, nothing beyond those systems, with which we might evaluate the validity or truth of any one of them.

One solution: to admit that this, and similar discussions of relativism in both moral and epistemological senses, are simply reflective of the perhaps painful fact that the expected isomorphism between logic and science does not appear to exist. As such, to discuss one in terms of the other is, as the man says, like “dancing about architecture.” We might go so far as to disambiguate “truth” as a logically-compulsory superordinate concept from “true,” the latter meaning only that something is “the case,” that it happened, or that the proposed logical operation is valid. This strategy would accord well with Karl Popper’s epistemology, which asserts that knowledge need only be considered tentative and improving.

We should be honest about what such an admission means, however, particularly with respect to moral philosophy and the possibility of proposing meaningful, arbitrary axioms about it. Kolakowski asserts: “Dostoyevski’s famous dictum, ‘If there is no God, everything is permissible,’ is valid [both] as a moral rule [and] an epistemological principle.” Perhaps epistemology is, along with “truth”, soon to be deprecated, and we will simply await results from the laboratory of the real: scientists watching an experiment rather than authors of meaning.