Intuition in Halacha – Lesson 2
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Table of Contents
- Intuition, generalization, and the limits of observation and logic
- From rationalism to empiricism and the internal skepticism of empiricism
- David Hume: causality, induction, and the collapse of the justification for laws of nature
- Karl Popper and the continuation of the Humean move in the philosophy of science
- Hugo Bergmann: “the rationality of the world” and a religious solution without a philosophical solution
- Kant: a priori/a posteriori and analytic/synthetic as the key to Hume’s problem
- The Kantian solution: phenomena, noumena, and the claim that science deals with the world as it appears
- Critique of Kant: ad hoc, fantasy, and the gap that remains unclosed
- The opposite move: generalization as non-sensory observation and intuition as a faculty of cognition
- The eyes of the intellect, auditory logic, and undermining the thought/observation dichotomy
- One truth, different translations, and a polemic against postmodernism
Summary
General overview
Intuition underlies the human ability to know something general about the world, because observation provides only particular data, and logic alone does not supply laws of nature or generalizations. The historical move from rationalism to empiricism leads, among empiricists, to an ever-tightening reduction that ends in skepticism, reaching its peak in David Hume’s formulation of the problems of causality and induction, and in Popper-like conclusions about theories as “working hypotheses” that can only be refuted. Kant sharpens the problem through the distinctions a priori/a posteriori and analytic/synthetic, and formulates the difficulty of science as the problem of the possibility of synthetic a priori judgments, but his solution through phenomena and noumena is presented as a fantasy that does not really solve anything. An opposite move is proposed: to see generalization not as arbitrary thinking but as a cognitive faculty—intuition—which is a kind of non-sensory observation, allowing one to see the general law through the particular cases without demanding certainty, only rational plausibility.
Intuition, generalization, and the limits of observation and logic
Intuition is needed because general assumptions do not arise from observation, since observation provides only particular events and one cannot observe a general law. Generalization from observations is possible in infinitely many directions, and real progress points to an additional instrument that is neither logic nor simple sensory observation. Intuition guides us as to which direction it is right to generalize in and which direction it is not, and it is described as the foundation that makes general knowledge possible.
From rationalism to empiricism and the internal skepticism of empiricism
Rationalism claims that one can know about the world through thought alone, whereas empiricism grows out of doubt that logic compels the world’s behavior. Aristotle is brought as an example of thinking that relied on what seemed reasonable without requiring direct observation, and the example of falling bodies according to mass is presented as a mistake that can be refuted by simple observation. Aristotelian thinking also ruled through the Middle Ages and even became religious dogma in Christianity, Islam, and Judaism through scholasticism, until criticism of rationalism began toward the end of the Middle Ages.
Descartes is presented as a heroic attempt to save rationalism by means of the cogito, whose purpose was to establish an a priori anchor from which one could derive knowledge about the world without observation, but the attempt is described as a failure. After that, empiricism takes over, and modern science is born in the sixteenth century accompanied by empiricist philosophy. Empiricism, when it is consistent, becomes more skeptical the more closely it sticks to observation alone, to the point of reducing what one is permitted to say about the world to only what is directly seen, and that skepticism is described as an inherent feature of strict empiricism.
David Hume: causality, induction, and the collapse of the justification for laws of nature
David Hume presents the problem of the basis for the principle of causality and the problem of the basis for induction, because one cannot justify a generalization beyond what has actually been observed. The causal relation is described as a relation that cannot be directly seen, because one can see events but not the relation between them, and therefore one cannot see that event A is the cause of event B. Hume determines that one cannot know that generalizations are true, and in the absence of justification for generalizations and causality, all science remains under the wings of doubt, because science deals with general laws that are not observed.
Hume tries to reduce the causal claim to the “regularity” of a sequence of events, but even the formulation of “always” is itself a generalization and therefore is not justified. This difficulty is presented as the starting point for a historical movement that ends with Karl Popper.
Karl Popper and the continuation of the Humean move in the philosophy of science
Karl Popper is presented as a continuation of Hume’s move through the claim that one cannot prove a scientific theory, only subject it to a test of refutation. The examples of “all ravens are black” and “all swans are white” illustrate the asymmetry between proof and refutation, so that a successful experiment adds no justification but only leaves the theory as a working hypothesis that has not been refuted. An attempt to claim that the accumulation of successful experiments “confirms” a theory is described as mere words that do not solve Hume’s problem, because the number of observations does not change the principled difficulty of generalization.
The history of the philosophy of science is described as an attempt to cope with the gap between the success of science and the empiricist inability to justify general laws. It is argued that even the very assumption that what appears in observation is “certainly true” is unfounded, and Berkeley is presented as an empiricist who extends skepticism to the point of undermining the existence of a world outside consciousness.
Hugo Bergmann: “the rationality of the world” and a religious solution without a philosophical solution
Hugo Bergmann is presented as someone who formulates the riddle of the fit between the world and the forms of human thought, in a way that presents skepticism as a question mark in the face of the fact that science and technology actually work. In his book Introduction to Epistemology, in the ninth chapter, “The Rationality of the World,” he surveys a long series of historical answers and refutes them all. In the book A Thinker of the Generation, he returns to the question and offers a religious solution in which the Holy One, blessed be He, helps a person know the world, as part of his rapprochement with religion at the end of his life. It is argued that there is no philosophical solution to the problem, and if Bergmann says there is no solution, then apparently there really is none.
Kant: a priori/a posteriori and analytic/synthetic as the key to Hume’s problem
Kant divides claims according to two distinctions: a priori versus a posteriori as an epistemological distinction about the way something is known, and analytic versus synthetic as a distinction about the structure of the proposition. Analytic propositions are presented as those that follow from analysis of the concepts, such as “a triangle has three angles,” and synthetic propositions require additional information beyond conceptual analysis, such as “this triangle has one angle of seventy-two degrees.”
The thought before Kant is identified with equating the distinctions, so that every analytic proposition is a priori and every synthetic one is a posteriori, as though there were no room for other combinations. Kant argues that Hume’s problems stem from that identification, and he formulates all the difficulties of induction and causality as one question: are synthetic a priori propositions possible—that is, claims with content about the world that do not derive from observation?
The Kantian solution: phenomena, noumena, and the claim that science deals with the world as it appears
Kant distinguishes between the thing in itself and the thing as it is perceived, between phenomena and noumena. It is argued that science deals with the world as it appears to consciousness and not with the world as it is in itself, because there is no access to the noumenon. Examples of color and sound emphasize the distinction between subjective experience and physical causes such as an electromagnetic wave or an acoustic wave, and the claim “if a tree falls in the forest and no one is there, does it make a sound?” receives a negative answer, because there are air vibrations but no experience of sound without an ear and consciousness.
Psychophysics is brought as a case showing that it is difficult to measure inner experience, such as the intensity of sound as it is heard, even if one can measure the intensity of the acoustic wave with instruments. It is argued that science always passes through the senses and human conceptualization, and therefore even the description of waves and their mathematics is a human description of reality and not direct access to noumena.
The Kantian “punch line” is presented as saying that synthetic a priori propositions are possible because they are really claims about the structure of human perception and not about the world as it is in itself. Newton’s second law is described as an example of a law of nature that derives from the way we perceive the world, and therefore it is no surprise that the intellect succeeds in producing general laws.
Critique of Kant: ad hoc, fantasy, and the gap that remains unclosed
It is argued that Kant’s solution does not hold water because it replaces one problem with a principle that is no less fantastic and supposedly requires a kind of conscious “censorship” that guarantees an ongoing fit between perception and laws. It is argued that there is no indication that when reality “deviates” from the laws, observation will simply fail to notice it, and the image is presented as close to talk about demons arranging a perfect fraud.
It is argued that even if science deals with phenomena, the question still remains why one is allowed to rely on the laws of nature beyond what has been observed, and why the airplane is supposed to take off tomorrow and not only yesterday. A criticism is presented according to which the very distinction between phenomena and noumena is itself located within phenomena, and a question such as “how do you know there are noumena at all?” undermines the basis.
The opposite move: generalization as non-sensory observation and intuition as a faculty of cognition
An opposite path to Kant is proposed: to see generalization not as an arbitrary process of thought but as a cognitive ability, so that the general law is “seen” through the particular cases. It is argued that when generalization is understood as cognition, the synthetic a priori proposition turns out to be a kind of a posteriori in the broad sense, because it relies on observation that is not sensory observation but another means of observation. This ability is identified as intuition, and it is described as “cognitive thinking” or “thinking cognition” that connects thought and observation.
Edmund Husserl is brought as a precedent through the claim that one sees ideas through their concrete appearances, such as seeing “horseness” through horses, without the idea being the result of abstraction. Intuition is described as a tool that is not univocal and one can make mistakes with it, but sensory sight can also mislead, and therefore the goal is not certainty but plausibility and rationality. It is argued that a Humean-Popperian approach sees generalization as an arbitrary working hypothesis, whereas here generalization is presented as a non-arbitrary process that allows one to say something about the world without turning it into absolute certainty.
The eyes of the intellect, auditory logic, and undermining the thought/observation dichotomy
Maimonides is brought with the phrase “the eyes of the intellect” at the beginning of Guide of the Perplexed, and Rabbi HaNazir with “auditory logic,” as expressions that connect a sensory term with an intellectual term. It is argued that this linguistic combination expresses the fact that the distinction between cognition and thought is not sharp, and that there is an intermediate faculty that enables general perception that is neither deductive logic nor sensory observation alone. Intuition is positioned as that faculty which explains how one can generalize in a way that remains connected to reality.
One truth, different translations, and a polemic against postmodernism
It is argued that there is one truth in the world, but it has different translations in different systems of concepts, so that the diversity of languages and paradigms does not cancel truth but changes the way it is formulated. The case of “harmonized philosophers” is brought regarding the possibility that different people experience colors differently with no way to decide, alongside the claim that even a different description can still be committed to the same reality. The example of Gadi Taub and the critique of radical feminists who challenge physics is presented together with the counterclaim that “female physics” might look different in its concepts and still produce a working airplane, because the test is fit to reality and not identity of language.
A possibility is presented of very different descriptive systems, like the theory of the four elements, as a kind of rotation of a coordinate system in which properties are described differently, and it is argued that the problem is not the mere multiplicity of paradigms but the postmodern conclusion that there is no truth. Thomas Kuhn is brought as someone who presents paradigm shifts as a sociological process that says nothing about the world, and the view presented rejects that and argues that the paradigms differ yet remain committed to the same reality. Intuition is presented as the mechanism that brings the objective dimension into human language, so that the subjectivity of description does not negate the objectivity of truth.
Full Transcript
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] We spoke a bit, we started the topic of intuition, and I talked about the fact that basically, at the foundation of everything we can know about the world, it’s really not logic and not observation, in certain senses, but some kind of—or not only logic and observation. Logic not at all, and observation only partially. And intuition really has to be involved in this, because our general assumptions certainly can’t come out of observation; observation gives us only particular data, meaning about a specific event, and you can’t observe a general law—it just doesn’t happen. So we make some kind of generalization on the basis of observations in particular cases, and the generalization itself is based on some kind of intuition; you need to know in which direction you can generalize, in which direction you can’t generalize, and intuition hints to us, guides us, as to which generalizations to make. In principle, you can make a great many generalizations on the basis of any set of data, and in general, if we manage to make progress in some way, that means we have another tool. Meaning, it’s not logic and it’s not observation. What is the nature of this tool? That’s what I want to talk about a bit today, and I’ll do it through an analysis of Kant. We did this a few years ago, I think, when I spoke about non-deductive logic. And Kant, basically—I think last time I talked about the problem raised by David Hume. At the beginning of the modern era, the empiricist view came to the fore in place of the rationalist view. What does that mean? A rationalist view understands that one can make claims about the world through thought alone, and you don’t need to observe things in order to know them. By contrast, at a certain stage people began to doubt: the fact that I think in a certain way doesn’t obligate the world actually to behave that way as well. Aristotle’s determinations—he did do some observations, but he didn’t think it was necessary. Meaning, if something seemed logical to him, then for him it was true. There are a few famous examples; one of them is that a stone falls to the ground, or an object falls to the ground, at a speed proportional to its mass. That’s what Aristotle claimed. And to see that this isn’t true you don’t need a particle accelerator—you just need to throw two stones off a roof, one heavy and one light, and see that they arrive together, more or less. So that means that because the thing seemed logical to him, he saw no need—or didn’t think there was a need—for direct observation. And as I said, in the Middle Ages Aristotelian thought ruled the roost; his principles even became religious dogmas, in Christianity, in Islam, and in Judaism. Basically all religious scholasticism was almost entirely Aristotelian. And toward the end of the Middle Ages, some challenge to this rationalist view began, to Aristotle and really to rationalism in general. I think I mentioned that Descartes, in the sixteenth century, the end of the sixteenth century, was still a kind of heroic attempt to preserve rationalism against the attacks on it. The principle of “I think, therefore I am,” Descartes’ cogito. Its purpose really was—the meta-purpose, really—was not to prove that he exists or anything like that, but to try to save rationalism. That was Descartes’ project. And how do you save rationalism? You try to show that I can arrive at an insight about the world without any observation, just from logical reasoning, a priori logical reasoning without observation. And that’s basically what the cogito did. It tried to offer some kind of anchor for information about the world: first of all, let us know that I exist—that’s already something. Meaning, that’s already a claim about the world, and from there continue and derive the rest of our knowledge. And really, Descartes’ goal, for someone who understands the historical move, was to save rationalism. That’s the point. He tried to show that one can arrive at information about the world without observation. And that’s what the cogito tried to do. As I said, in my opinion it ultimately failed, although it was a very interesting attempt, but that’s another issue, I won’t go into an analysis of the cogito now. In any case, from then on there began… there began to rise to the stage, or take over the stage, an empiricist view. Meaning that instead of thought, we’re supposed to move to observation, to cognition. Empiricism also went through some process, at the end of which, when people looked at their own empiricist view—Berkeley, Locke, Hume—they discovered that it was becoming more and more constricted. Meaning, the more tightly empiricist you are, the more skeptical you are too. That sounds a bit surprising; usually empiricists, scientific people, yes, people who believe in observation, aren’t perceived by us as skeptics. But yes—the empiricist philosophers were all skeptics, almost all of them, in one way or another. Berkeley was a crazy skeptic altogether; Berkeley didn’t think there was anything besides himself. He was an idealist. Why? Because they suddenly began to understand that empiricism also doesn’t bring salvation. Because empiricism—if you believe only what you see, if observation is the only reliable tool for gathering insights about the world—you get nowhere. Everything you know at most, if you don’t doubt your very observation, as Berkeley did even that, but let’s say the more conventional people didn’t doubt that if I see the clock here, then it’s there—so that I don’t doubt. But as I said before, all the general laws, all the general knowledge we have about the world—not specific facts, particular facts—I can’t get that out of observation. And the more empiricists began to understand that, the more they began to narrow what they were willing to say about the world. They became skeptical about everything else. So I know there’s a clock here, but I don’t know that it will be here in a moment or that it was here a moment ago. That already I doubt; I don’t know. I know that all the bodies with mass that I’ve seen fell toward the earth, but who said that’s true of all bodies with mass? About that I already have doubts. Meaning, the more closely I cling to observation, the more skeptical I actually become. Today that sounds almost like an oxymoron—a skeptical scientist, or a skeptical empiricist—but that’s not so. Strict empiricism, empiricism that follows its path to the end, consistently, is skeptical. It is always skeptical. It is skeptical about everything it has not seen directly with its own eyes. All right? And then empiricism began to constrict; meaning this is really a kind of pendulum movement. We began with full-blown rationalism, all the earth full of its glory. Very strong criticism, the cogito fails to save it, empiricism comes to the fore, observation replaces thought. Then modern science is born. In the sixteenth century modern science is born, advancing together with the empiricist philosophy that accompanies it. All right? But at a certain point science gives us all kinds of results that cannot be philosophically justified, because observation, or empiricism, will not succeed in grounding the general laws of science. And really, the one who began this move in a systematic way was David Hume, who was a great skeptic and a strict empiricist. And he basically began to remove from the stage everything that is not seen by direct observation. Now when you really look at what you don’t see by direct observation, it’s almost everything. Basically all of science remains under the wings of doubt, because science deals with general laws. You never see a general law, as I said before. And then he asks himself his two famous questions—but they’re really the basis for an infinity of questions. The two better-known ones are: what is the basis for the principle of causality, and what is the basis for induction? On what basis do we ground our generalizations? Generalization is not an observational procedure; a strict empiricist can’t accept generalization. I saw several bodies falling toward the earth—who said they all do? That’s a generalization. My thought is built that way; I have some kind of tendency like that. What does the world owe me? That’s how I’m built—what does that have to do with the question of how the world behaves? All right? So because of that, basically I’m not supposed to know it, but if I’m not supposed to know it, then there is no science. Now if empiricism can’t ground science, then we’re in trouble. All right? So we can’t ground the justification—or offer a justification—for generalizations. By the same token, we also can’t offer a justification for the principle of causality, that everything has a cause, because that too cannot be seen. No one has ever seen that event A was the cause of event B. You can’t see relations. We can see events; we can’t see relations. I can’t see that someone is someone else’s brother. I can infer it, I can hear about it, I can’t see it. How do you see relations between objects? So causality, the causal relation, is also a kind of relation. I see one event and after it I see another event. How do I know that event A was the cause of event B? I don’t see the causal connection between them. All right? Someone kicks a ball and the ball flies, or someone puts a finger into fire and the finger gets burned. So I know the wood went into the fire and I know that afterwards it also burned. How do I know that its being in the fire is the reason it burned? True, I’ve also seen that several times. So what? If you can’t generalize, then you also can’t do causality. Fine—if you can’t do causality, then you also can’t generalize. There’s a connection between those two questions. So Hume says: you can’t know. Then he tries to offer a thinner conception, but it doesn’t really work. Because he tries to argue that indeed we cannot determine that one thing is the cause of something else. All that we can… Hume says—I’m talking now about Hume—he determines that all we can determine is that whenever this happens, that happens afterward. But first of all, even that it’s always, you can’t determine. Because that’s a generalization. So the causal relation you can’t determine even about this event itself. That’s the problem of causality. But also the problem of generalization—so what? So it became some kind of working hypothesis: the working hypothesis that this always happens, and we’ll put it to an empirical test, and in the end this ends up with Karl Popper, who basically says that you can’t prove any scientific theory, you can only put it to a test of refutation. Right—you can’t… this is already in the twentieth century, yes, the middle of the twentieth century. We cannot prove the theory that all ravens are black; we can refute it. If we find one raven that isn’t black, that will refute it. There is an asymmetry between proving and refuting scientific theories. All right? That is basically the conclusion of David Hume’s move. Because basically what Popper says is that we can never really know that all ravens are black. You can never know that general theory. What?
[Speaker B] Or that all swans are white.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But after all—
[Speaker B] In the end they found black swans.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, fine. That’s one of the indications that you have to be careful with generalizations. But from his point of view, it’s not a matter of being careful. There are no generalizations. The generalization is not true. The generalization is a working hypothesis. It’s a working hypothesis. I assume—all the ravens I’ve seen until now are black—my working hypothesis is that all ravens are black. But I’m in doubt about that; I don’t know. Let’s see, let’s test more and see. If we find a white raven, it collapses. A raven that isn’t black, it collapses. If we don’t find one, we can remain with that working hypothesis. But Popper’s view is still that every theory is a working hypothesis. And in that sense he is stuck with Hume. Meaning, he is basically the conclusion of the Humean move. And the whole history of the philosophy of science is an attempt to deal with this problem. How can one ground—just a second—how can one ground science on an empiricist philosophy? It sounds absurd. After all, the whole point of empiricist philosophy was to ground science—that’s exactly it. We threw out rationalism and started moving forward. And indeed science advanced with empiricist philosophy. But in the end you see that on the philosophical level there’s a very large gap here, yes, a very large gap—you cannot ground it on empiricism.
[Speaker D] Why is the basic assumption that what I see is certainly true?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I said—Berkeley didn’t assume even that. He too was considered an empiricist.
[Speaker D] What we as human beings, with flesh-and-blood eyes…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, see—so that’s clear. That’s the accepted assumption among empiricists. I’m saying, there were those who cast doubt even on that. Let everyone decide for himself how far he wants to take his doubt. Yes, you can cast doubt even on that. So basically, let me get back—I just jumped ahead for a moment to Popper only to sharpen the meaning of David Hume’s problems. Namely, that basically you can’t determine anything general, you can’t scientifically adopt anything general; you can propose hypotheses that stand to a test of refutation. That’s all. Alternatives that philosophy of science offers against this Popperian approach are that an experiment—say, basically what Popper says is that a successful experiment doesn’t help at all, it has no meaning. Only a failed experiment has meaning. Because a failed experiment actually refutes the theory or the hypothesis we assumed. But a successful experiment leaves us with the same doubt we had before. Others want to claim that the more and more specific experiments succeed, the more that corroborates the theory. It doesn’t prove it—Popper is right that you can’t prove it—but it corroborates it. Yes, all of us feel that a theory is stronger the more it fits more facts that we have observed. Or in other words, if we do induction on the basis of two observations, that is weaker than doing it on the basis of 100 observations. Okay? The more cases we’ve seen it in, the more grounded the generalization seems to us. But that’s just words. It’s words. It has no meaning. How do you know? David Hume’s problem of generalization remains even when you’ve seen 100 examples, even when you’ve seen 2,000 examples. It makes no difference at all. On the principled level, if you don’t accept this procedure of generalization, then you can’t accept generalization on the basis of two examples, one, 100, or 1,000. It doesn’t matter. No one solves the philosophical problem. Everybody talks and waggles their lips. There’s no solution to it. This problem has no solution. In two places Hugo Bergmann talks about it in his books. One of them is in Introduction to Epistemology, chapter nine, which is called “The Rationality of the World.” Somewhat old Hebrew. The rationality, or the fit of the world to the intellect. Which is really the great riddle. Maybe you can ask it this way too, though that’s already a somewhat different question: how can it be that the world really behaves according to the forms in which I think? After all, that’s really the question, yes, regarding empiricism. The fact that I think in a certain way and that causes me to act and so on—in the end somehow it works. So how can that be? There is some fit between how we think and how the world behaves. Yes, the empiricist skepticism is basically formulated here as a question mark, not an exclamation mark. Basically, that it works—I assume that’s obvious—it works as a fact. We get on airplanes, the thing works. But we don’t understand the justification for it. So what if we’re built in a certain way? Why should the world owe anything to the way we’re built? And then he offers a whole series of many, many answers to this. He surveys there all the answers that were given to this throughout the history of philosophy and refutes all of them. He says none of them answers the issue. He really goes through them one by one. There are some twenty answers there—I don’t know exactly how many. In my opinion many of them are equivalent to one another, but in the end he rejects them all. And there’s another place where he relates to this. For some reason I think it’s an earlier book, although there’s some view there that seems more mature to me—I don’t know, I haven’t studied Bergmann’s thought. There’s a book called A Thinker of the Generation. It’s basically a book about other philosophers; each chapter deals with a different philosopher. In the introduction to that book he again returns to this question, and there he proposes some kind of religious solution to the problem—how the Holy One, blessed be He, is supposed to help us know the world. As is well known, Hugo Bergmann also drew closer to religion toward the end of his life, and that is probably somehow described there. In any case, there is no philosophical solution to this. I’m bringing him only because my philosophical knowledge is limited, but he really was a great scholar; if he says there’s no solution, then apparently there really isn’t—unless he’s mistaken, but there wasn’t anything he didn’t know. In any case, so that’s the problem. I’m going back to Hume. The main solution proposed in the history of philosophy to Hume’s problems was Kant’s solution. And I already said beforehand that I think it’s not a solution, but I do want to formulate it because at least it sharpens the problem very nicely. Meaning, he makes a brilliant philosophical move that eventually leads him to propose a solution. In my view the solution is not correct, but the move that leads him there sharpens the problem beautifully. In the formulations I’ve given until now I’ve already used a bit of the Kantian sharpening. He basically says this: you can divide the claims we make according to two different divisions, each division into two types. There is a distinction between an a priori proposition and an a posteriori proposition. Meaning, a proposition that I know in a way that does not require observation, that is prior to observation, is called an a priori proposition, and an a posteriori proposition is a proposition based on observation. All right, that’s the first distinction. If I have to classify what category that belongs to, what kind of philosophical discussion it belongs to, it belongs to epistemology. How do I know things? Do I know them by observation or by thought alone? You can already see that this is exactly the question of rationalism versus empiricism, right? But at the moment he’s classifying propositions; he’s not talking about philosophical theses. It’s the same thing, but he’s classifying propositions. There are a priori propositions and there are a posteriori propositions. But this is not a characterization of the proposition; it’s a characterization of how I know the proposition. All right? This belongs to epistemology, to the theory of knowledge. How do I know the fact described by this proposition? I can know it from experience, and that is a posteriori. I can know it without experience, and that is a priori. That’s rationalist, yes—to know something just from thought is to know something a priori, and a posteriori is to know something following observation; that is basically empiricism. Of course rationalism also accepts results of observation as legitimate, yes, that’s clear. It only says they aren’t necessary. Meaning, processes of thought can also teach me about the world. There is an asymmetry between empiricism and rationalism.
[Speaker E] Can there be a case of empiricism that contradicts logic?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Logic itself? I don’t think so. There are those who wanted to argue that way; I really don’t accept it. I think it has no meaning even on the semantic level. Semantically it has no meaning. But I don’t know—hypothetically the world doesn’t owe me anything, as if, if that’s the principle—
[Speaker D] That too—after all, he thought it was logical that…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, so I said not logic, no. Our intuitions, certainly, our ordinary reasoning—we know many things from quantum theory that contradict our simple common sense. So that’s the distinction between a priori and a posteriori. Okay? That’s a distinction that belongs to epistemology. There’s another distinction that belongs to the syntax of the sentence, or the structure of the sentence, and that’s the distinction between analytic and synthetic. An analytic sentence—analysis means breaking down, right?—an analytic sentence is an analyzing sentence. It’s a sentence whose content is the result of analyzing the concepts that appear in it. For example, a ball is round, or a triangle has three angles. Okay? That’s an analytic sentence. Why is it analytic? Because if you understand well the concept triangle, or the concept ball, and you analyze it, you can derive the sentence from the analysis of the concept. Analysis of the concept alone is enough to derive the sentence; you don’t need observation. I’m already jumping a little ahead. In other words, conceptual analysis will give you that insight. Okay? That’s an a priori sentence—an analytic sentence, sorry. A synthetic sentence is a sentence where analyzing the concept is not enough in order to say it. For example: this triangle has one angle of seventy-two degrees. That’s a synthetic sentence. Why? Because you can’t derive that sentence from analyzing the concept triangle. There are triangles that don’t have a seventy-two-degree angle. Okay? So how do I know it? I have to make a synthesis with additional information. Meaning, not just information that unfolds from the concept itself, but I have to bring in extra information from outside—not only analyze and extract information embedded in the concept, but import more information from outside. Okay. This second distinction, this distinction between analytic and synthetic, as I said before, concerns the structure of the sentence, unlike the distinction between a priori and a posteriori, which concerns epistemology—how I know the sentence. Okay? Good. So those are the two distinctions Kant proposed, or pointed to. Now, what Kant is really asking, or saying, is that all of Hume’s problems stem from the fact that we identify these two distinctions with each other. And if you think about it carefully, you’ll see it’s almost self-evident that these distinctions are really identical, even though one belongs to epistemology and the other belongs to sentence structure—how I know the sentence versus the structure of the sentence itself. Okay? Of course there’s a connection: how I know something and the structure of the sentence. The nature of the claim made by the sentence can project onto how I know it. So let’s try to look at this a bit. On the principled level, I’d expect there to be four types of combinations. If there’s no connection between the two distinctions, then there should be four types, right? There should be analytic a priori, analytic a posteriori, synthetic a priori, and synthetic a posteriori. There ought to be four kinds of sentences. But when we try to examine things a little, we see that we only know two. Everything analytic is a priori, and vice versa, and everything synthetic is a posteriori, and vice versa. Why? The logic is simple. If there’s a sentence that’s a priori, meaning I know it without observation, then where do I know it from? Presumably only from analysis of the concepts—where else from? I can’t import additional information except from observation, so where else could it come from? So an a priori sentence is apparently analytic, and vice versa. An analytic sentence—if I derive it from analyzing the concepts—then clearly I don’t need observation to know it. Analyze the concepts and that’s it. So an analytic sentence is a priori. And that’s enough, of course, because if I prove that this is bidirectional, then I don’t need to talk about the synthetic anymore. It’s obvious. So every analytic sentence is a priori and vice versa; every synthetic sentence is a posteriori and vice versa. And then it turns out that these two distinctions, where one supposedly belongs to epistemology and the other to the structure or character of the sentence, are really two sides of the same coin. That’s how people generally thought until Kant. Okay? And Kant basically claims that all the problems David Hume raised stem from this mistake, the mistake of identifying these two distinctions. That’s a mistake, Kant says. So let’s think for a moment about all the questions David Hume raised, and now formulate them in the language we’ve just developed. Okay? What is a general law of nature—that all bodies with mass attract one another, or that all bodies with mass fall toward the earth? What is that? After all, the problem Hume raised is: how do you know that’s true for all of them? It’s a generalization. What I saw was only certain facts. The general statement is the product of generalization, right? So what is Kant basically saying? Let’s translate it into our language. What Hume is really claiming is that synthetic a priori sentences cannot exist. Because this is a synthetic a priori sentence. Let’s see. It’s not an analytic sentence, right? Because when you analyze the concept of having mass, it doesn’t follow from that that you are attracted to another body with mass—at least from what we understand by the concept of mass, that doesn’t follow from conceptual analysis. It’s an empirical fact, yes? It’s not just the result of analyzing the concept of mass. So it’s not an analytic sentence; it’s a synthetic sentence. On the other hand, it’s not the product of observation, as Hume says, because observation only told us about certain bodies that we saw, but the general law is not the product of observation. A bit of observation, a rationalist component, an element of thought and not only observation. The process of generalization is a thinking process. So in the end this is synthetic on the one hand, and a priori on the other. But that’s a category that doesn’t exist. The synthetic is always a posteriori, and the a priori is always analytic. So suddenly we discover that Kant reformulated the whole collection of Hume’s problems—he has several of them; induction and causality are the most prominent—he reformulated the whole set of Hume’s problems into one problem after this conceptual analysis: are synthetic a priori sentences possible? Translation: can there be sentences that make a claim about the world, and I know them not through observation? Synthetic means it makes some claim beyond conceptual analysis; it says something. Something that merely analyzes concepts doesn’t say anything; it only analyzes the concept. A sentence that claims something, that says something—that’s a synthetic sentence. But on the other hand it is also a priori. Is it possible that a sentence which makes a claim about the world can be known by me a priori, without observation? And that is exactly the question of empiricism versus rationalism, right? Overall, Kant translates that question in a sharper way; he performs a beautiful analysis of it, and basically says that the whole collection of Hume’s problems is one problem. They are private examples of one problem: the problem of the synthetic a priori. The question is whether synthetic a priori sentences are possible.
[Speaker F] Wait, wait—maybe my memory is starting to fail me. A synthetic a priori sentence?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Why? A sentence… a synthetic sentence but not a priori. Why not? Because you observe—you observe yourself in this case. Observing yourself is also a kind of observation. So it turns out that here at least we have a very well-defined problem. That’s the advantage of Kant’s formulation of the problem: we can put our finger on the exact point. Is it possible to accumulate information about the world, or make claims about the world, in a way that is a priori? Yes? By means of—I don’t know what—conceptual analysis or generalization, because generalization is not conceptual analysis, and it’s a synthetic sentence, not an analytic sentence. Meaning, not by conceptual analysis, but it is a priori. You see again the distinction between the analytic and the a priori. Conceptual analysis—no. But a priori—yes. So once again we’ve broken that identity between the analytic and the a priori. Here is something a priori that is not analytic. But if it isn’t analytic—if it isn’t just the result of analyzing concepts—then how on earth do you know it? Not from observation, since it’s a priori. So how do you know it? I generalize. Who said the generalization is correct? That’s Hume’s problem. It’s the same question. In other words, the whole set of Hume’s problems—which until Kant’s time were seen as independent problems, a collection of many problems—basically became one archetypal problem that unfolds into many examples. Now, I’ll briefly describe the solution Kant proposed to the problem. And up to this point I’m completely with him. In other words, the formulation of the problem really is brilliant. I think it sharpens things very well; it directs us where to look, if at all—or it directs people to despair and say, okay, once it’s formulated this well, obviously no solution can be found. But his solution, in my opinion, doesn’t hold water. Meaning, it’s not a solution either; the solution he proposed is also not a solution. First I’ll briefly present his solution. What he basically claims is this: when I distinguish between the thing in itself and the thing as I perceive it, the world as it is in itself and the world as it is perceived by me—the phenomenon and the noumenon, in Kant’s language. The noumenon is the world itself, and the phenomenon—yes, phenomenon means the appearance—it’s how it appears to my eyes. Okay? Now he says this. Scientific claims are claims about the world as it appears to my eyes. After all, I cannot grasp the world itself. I can’t. I have no access to what a table is in itself. I can tell you what appears to my eyes when I turn to the table. I know that it looks rectangular and has a white color and these kinds of legs. Fine; all these are descriptions that arise from the image that exists within me. And maybe to sharpen it further I’ll bring in… we already talked about this in the last year or two, I think, about Bertrand Russell and his arguments about color and appearances. Because what is the color yellow? I think that was his example. What is the color yellow? People think that yellow is an electromagnetic wave of such-and-such a wavelength. Nonsense, of course. An electromagnetic wave of a certain wavelength is the cause of my feeling the sensation of yellowness, yes, of the color yellow. But the color yellow is that phenomenon that exists in my consciousness, which I know as the color yellow. You don’t have to be a physicist for that—but you do need to have heard about wavelengths for that. You know exactly what the color yellow is even בלי being a physicist. Physicists claim that an electromagnetic wave of a certain wavelength, when it hits our retina, creates in us this awareness or this image of the color yellow. Okay, fine, that’s a claim about us. But in the world itself there is an electromagnetic wave with a certain wavelength; in our consciousness there is color.
[Speaker G] Not necessarily in all of us. It could be that each person experiences…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, that’s the philosophers’ torment—the question whether we all really… whether we all see the same appearance. There’s no way to check that. But let’s say, for each of us, whatever he sees as yellow. It could be that what one of you calls yellow is what I call blue, but that’s what he really sees. There’s no way to test it because our language is completely synchronized. So—but never mind—if we all say that yellow is yellow… it could be that what you see—say his shirt, his shirt, say—I
[Speaker H] see it
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] as yellow. You also see it as yellow because that’s the color you call yellow. But what exists inside your head could be blue, and you consistently, every time I see yellow, you see blue—except you know that this thing is called yellow. That’s what’s called blue for me. You’re no less right than I am if that’s what’s called blue for me. There’s no way to test that, at least no way anyone has thought of so far. The subjective is not accessible to scientific measurement or comparison; we have no way to make such measurements. There’s a very interesting book, by the way, in this context by someone named Daniel Algom from Bar-Ilan University—at least he was there.
[Speaker C] But why think it’s different?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I don’t know—maybe it’s different, maybe not. Why think it isn’t? Why should it be the same?
[Speaker C] Fine, right now we’re talking about… I’m not talking right now about… each person feeling it differently… call it subjectivity, but the very fact that generally we can say about everything that there’s no generalization…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right. We’re talking now about the validity of generalizations, so certainly in this context we need to give ourselves some account of that. But fine, for the sake of the argument let’s say for now that we all see the same thing. It doesn’t matter to the main point. So I want to make here a distinction, the distinction between…
[Speaker B] What’s the name of Daniel’s book?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Ah yes, Daniel Algom—it’s called, I think, Perception and Psychophysics, in the University Broadcast series. Very interesting; worth reading. He talks there about the question of how you measure the intensity of sound. So sound intensity—we’re used to it, there are measuring devices—but that measures the intensity of the acoustic wave. The intensity of the sound—how loud it is inside your head—all you can do is ask the person: tell me, how many times stronger is this than that? That a device should measure… yes, what?
[Speaker D] That a device should measure and you just see what the device…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So it measures the acoustic wave in the world; it can’t measure what I hear. The question is what the relation is between what I hear and what happens in the world. Say if there’s a wave that’s twice as strong in the world—does the sound I hear when it hits my eardrum… after all, just as with a visual appearance, an electromagnetic wave hits my retina and a sensation of color arises, or of appearance in general. Same thing: an acoustic wave hits my eardrum and a sensation of sound arises. The question is: what is the relation between the subjective sensation and the physical event? Okay, if the physical event doubles, do I hear a sound whose intensity is doubled?
[Speaker D] What is a sound of twice the intensity?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right, maybe one could think about that, but I don’t know how to measure it. No, I think such a thing could be defined—I just don’t see how to measure it. But yes, when I hear twice as much, if I had some subjective meter independent of you, I could say to myself, inwardly…
[Speaker D] How would you ever… they’d play you the same noise twice; one time you’d say it’s twice as much, another time you’d say two and a half times as much.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Fine, because I can’t do it precisely, since I have no internal measuring device. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t defined; it means I don’t know how to measure it. You’re right, I don’t know how to answer that question.
[Speaker I] What people do is measure at what point a person is able to distinguish between two levels of stimulus.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, I think you said that last time when we talked about this—you made that point. Yes, fine, but that’s still an arbitrary decision, and then from that it turns out apparently that the relation is logarithmic. No, no—the logarithmic relation is under major dispute; today people don’t believe in the logarithmic relation. They used to think there was a logarithmic relation. But again, one has to understand—even what does it mean, they thought there was a logarithmic relation? We interview people, a large group of people, and ask them: tell us, do you hear it as twice as strong, three times as strong, four times as strong? We try to… after all, each person answers a bit differently, so we average it. Okay? We average it. And then we compare that average to the factor by which we increased the physical event. Let’s say we increased the physical event by a factor of two; we ask various people by what factor the sound they hear is stronger, and say it comes out to three. So that means that when we doubled the physical event, the relation is three; we put a point on the graph. Then we do it for an increase by four, six, ten, a hundred, and so on; we draw a graph and see whether it’s logarithmic, polynomial, or something else, and make some kind of fit to that graph. There’s been a major and long-standing dispute about this for over a hundred years, by the way. Some people… some think this; some claimed it was logarithmic. You can already see for yourselves how scientifically well-defined these things are, how one can argue in that way. These say it’s logarithmic; those say it’s a power relation, where the exponent is one, two, three—there are several proposals for the exponent too, which exponent it is. Fine, in short, there’s some dispute. Today, I think, it’s generally accepted that it isn’t logarithmic.
[Speaker D] So now it’s probably exponential.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I don’t know—that I don’t know. But look, of course you also have to increase it… after all, every relation… you have to increase it to very high levels of hearing; maybe in the end it becomes exponential, while at first you only see the moderate part of the exponential. But then people go deaf, so you can’t do the experiment. In any case, this psychophysical relation, this psychophysical problem—not in the philosophical sense, this is a scientific problem—how do you measure psychophysics, meaning how do you measure subjective phenomena, how we perceive the world, not the world itself. Which is basically an expression of the Kantian distinction between the world as it is in itself and the world as I perceive it.
[Speaker F] If there’s the same sound, and a child hears it and an old person doesn’t hear it, you can know that this one hears it and that one doesn’t. Obviously.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] If they hear the sound, then obviously there is sound and you hear it. If you don’t hear it, then there’s no sound, so you don’t hear it.
[Speaker F] No—if there’s a frequency and one person doesn’t hear it.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Well, then he says he’s deaf to that frequency. Now don’t increase the frequency; increase the intensity by a factor of two. And ask the old man and the child by what factor the sound is stronger. I’m talking only about relations, not about whether you hear the sound or not. By what factor is it stronger—you’ll get different answers. People average them and somehow try to see what the relation is between a doubling in the physical world, as measured by instruments, and people’s reports. The relation is not simply linear, although some people want to claim it is linear, but apparently it isn’t simply linear. Okay? There’s even, in Rabbi Shem Tov Gafni—I think I mentioned him, right? I don’t know if this year or maybe last year—Dimensions, Prophecy, and Earthliness. And there he talks about this dilemma, already in his time—we’re talking about a hundred years ago. He discusses the question whether it’s logarithmic or a power relation. In any event, I bring this up only to sharpen the point that Kant’s distinction is one that is very important to be aware of; it remains correct to this day, there is no dispute about it. Anyone who disputes it doesn’t know what he’s talking about. It’s obvious. Even though it seemed like a huge innovation of Kant’s, it’s actually simple. The question whether a tree falls in the forest and no one is there—does it make a sound? The answer is of course no. Everyone thinks the answer is obviously yes. The answer is obviously no. There is no sound there. There is an acoustic wave, there are vibrations in the air, which, if we put an eardrum there and it struck the eardrum, then we’d have a sensation of sound in our head. But as long as there is no eardrum there, the acoustic wave is not translated into a sensation of sound. The sensation of sound exists only within us; there is no sound in the world. In the world there is an acoustic wave. Just as there is no light, no color in the world. In the world there is an electromagnetic wave. The acoustic wave is not… the acoustic wave is the cause of the sensation.
[Speaker D] It’s an event in the world independent of us.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Obviously, it’s an event in the world. Again, unless you’re a skeptic—you can be skeptical about that too and say, forget it, there isn’t any acoustic wave at all; who says that the…
[Speaker D] You can sense an acoustic wave not through the ear.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] You can, yes. Put an oscilloscope there, and then you’ll see the acoustic wave in a…
[Speaker D] The intensity of sound can be measured with an oscilloscope.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The intensity of the sound wave, but not the intensity of the sensation of sound. Obviously. Sound waves are measured all the time. That certainly can be measured. If it’s double, it’s double. But now I’m asking how that translates into my sensation. Do I hear it in the inner voice, in my consciousness, as twice the intensity?
[Speaker I] There’s a medical problem called tinnitus, where you hear sounds without there being noise, without there being an acoustic wave. Okay? Something happens in the brain, some problem is created, and you hear sounds, you hear some kind of…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Ringing.
[Speaker I] It’s like… like a phantom limb.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right. But in a certain sense every memory is like that. When you remember something, you bring up an image in your head without the object standing in front of you. You try to remember a person; he’s not standing in front of you now, but you remember him. By the way, in neuroscience today they discovered that it’s in the same place as seeing. Meaning, memory activates the same neurons that direct vision activates. In that sense, memory too is a kind of phantom—a deliberate phantom.
[Speaker I] But a memory of a musical piece doesn’t interfere with hearing us speak? I mean, I understand that tinnitus interferes with a person’s hearing.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Fine, okay, I’m not getting into the nuances. But I’m saying at the principled level, when you remember a melody—maybe it even interferes a little with hearing, I don’t know, or at least with concentrating, I don’t know exactly. But when you really remember a melody, meaning you hear it within yourself—that’s what I mean to say—or when you see an image within yourself, that activates the same neurons. Meaning, it’s the same phenomenon as experiencing the observation. Okay.
[Speaker F] But the quality is different. Meaning, when I hear a sound it feels different from something I remember.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, we distinguish between those two things, so obviously something is still different. Yes, there is something—some parts are similar, and there’s another wing that tells me: yes, but this isn’t the real thing. By the way, you can induce by electrodes a sensation as if it is also the real thing, which neutralizes that sensor that tells you: wait a second, here it’s imagination. Or maybe because here you didn’t initiate it—so therefore… here you do initiate it, so maybe because of that you simply know it isn’t the real thing because you initiated the recollection of the memory. And when they induce it in you from outside with an electrode, then you don’t know. One would have to ask neuroscientists.
[Speaker F] There’s a disorder where someone thinks people are really speaking to him when he hears voices.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, exactly. Wonders of the mind. In any case, this distinction of Kant’s between the world as it is in itself and the world as I perceive it is a distinction that is very important to be aware of. It is correct, there is no dispute—meaning, it’s obvious that this is how it is. That’s one assumption Kant puts on the table. Now I ask: what does science deal with? Does science deal with the world as it is in itself, or does science deal with the world as I perceive it? Now, that’s a somewhat confusing question in light of the presentation I gave earlier, because I connected it to Bertrand Russell and so on, and Kant didn’t get that far. Kant wants to claim that science deals with the world as we perceive it and not with the world as it is in itself. And that’s the second step on the way to the solution—we’re on the way to the solution of the synthetic a priori sentence. Okay: first step, the distinction between the world as it is in itself and the world as we perceive it. All right? Second step: science deals with the world as we perceive it, because the world as it is in itself is inaccessible to us; we cannot know it. And that’s true even when we measure the acoustic wave itself and not the sound as we hear it. We measure certain indicators that give us an indication of the strength of the sound wave. So it passes through various physical measures, but in the end it always passes through my senses and gets translated in me. Therefore in the end I’m always dealing with myself and not with the world itself. Kant gives this a funny expression in that book. So therefore, Kant says, science deals with the world as I perceive it and not with the world as it is in itself. Now, this is a point that has to be distinguished from the distinction I made earlier—just a second—because earlier I distinguished between the color yellow and the electromagnetic wave, or between sound and the acoustic wave. That is not the distinction Kant makes. It’s similar, it’s the same logic, but clearly Kant is not claiming that science deals with the yellow color that I experience. Science deals with the electromagnetic wave, and not with sounds but with the acoustic wave. Okay, it’s not on that level. But even on the external level, Kant says—here I did it only to sharpen the distinction so that we can see that there is no escape from the world in itself.
[Speaker D] Exactly.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Even the acoustic wave that we call the physical phenomenon is how we perceive the physical phenomenon. We cannot speak about physics detached from us, but only as we perceive it through our instruments, through our forms of thought. Even when we speak about an electromagnetic wave and an acoustic wave, these are entities that we defined and conceptualized; their mathematics we formulated. All of that is human descriptions of objective physics. That is different from descriptions of subjective phenomena, which are also descriptions—yellow, this kind of sound, a symphony, things like that—which are descriptions of the subjective plane. So it turns out that the distinction—and this, by the way, is one of the claims against Kant—that the distinction between phenomenon and noumenon is itself entirely within the phenomenon, because how do you know there is a noumenon at all? That too you assume, or really that too is phenomenon. Zeitlin talks about this in one of his books under the name Lev Shestov. There’s a Russian philosopher named Lev Shestov. Only recently I heard a lecture that spoke about a point I’d been thinking about for a long time. I think I mentioned it at the beginning of one of the previous classes. There they said that Lev Shestov is one of the terribly famous Russian philosophers in the world—well, he’s not actually known. Zeitlin brings him. I think they once asked Lev Shestov why there are no important Russian philosophers. We talked about this once, I think, right? Why is it that the Russians have first-rate poets and novelists, but no philosophers? None of the important philosophers is Russian. I once asked a friend I worked with, a physicist who immigrated from Russia, how he explains that. He was also that kind of person, with an intellectual bent. He said, I never thought about it, and we have many important philosophers. He gave a few names I didn’t know. But again, maybe that’s just my ignorance. But still, the world doesn’t know them either; it’s not just me personally, I think. Though there are differences between cultures; sometimes things aren’t exposed. Could be. But I think that overall in world philosophy there are no famous Russian philosophers. In the major philosophical milestones—you won’t find one. There are Germans, there are British, there are Americans, yes. Russians—none. It’s amazing compared to the number of writers and poets. Fine. So where did I hear this? Somebody sent me some lecture on the internet recently. Ah—by Haim Shapira. He’s also from Russia. Somebody sent me one of his lectures, and he mentioned that Lev Shestov, when asked why there is no Russian philosophy, said: what are you talking about? Of course there is. Leo Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and people like that—they were philosophical writers. Fine, but they’re not philosophers. A philosopher is someone…
[Speaker D] Haim Shapira makes a good living from all those philosophers.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, exactly. I’m saying, the philosophers… maybe you sent it to me? Listen, I don’t remember anymore.
[Speaker D] I just heard him. Ah, okay.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So the Russians treat those writers as philosophers, because obviously they do have a philosophical orientation and so on. But they’re not philosophers. A philosopher is someone… They’re writers; they’re not philosophers, categorically, no. They can have philosophical thought, they can express philosophy in story form, but you become a philosopher when you write a book that conceptualizes and defines and speaks in arguments—not when you tell stories. Okay? Because we talked about this once—I’m free-associating now, I’m counting now not… We once talked about the problem in the history of ideas. There’s a problem in the history of ideas: who gave birth to an idea, who has the copyright on an idea? After all, whenever someone raises a new idea, they’ll find it in earlier books. But they only find it after he raised the new idea. No, no—and it really is there; I’m not joking. Many times people say this as a joke. It really is there, but people weren’t really fully aware of it—you know, they said it casually. The idea is yours when you put your finger on it and focus it and define it. Then the idea arrived, appeared in the world, and that’s called the owner of the idea. Like Brisker learning. The one who put it on the table and owns it is Rabbi Chaim, even though I don’t think there’s a single mode of Rabbi Chaim’s thought that I can’t find in earlier later authorities (Acharonim). Maybe in the Talmud? Okay, maybe even in the Talmud—best of all. Fine. I once gave a lecture about the Pnei Yehoshua showing that there is Brisker thinking in the Pnei Yehoshua. But obviously he didn’t really invent these tools. Each of us thinks a little that way. And is it in the Talmud? Yes. But still, not exactly in Rabbi Chaim’s sense. Rabbi Chaim was the one who brought it into the halakhic toolbox—meaning he formalized those tools, conceptualized them, and made them available to us. Now we can use them. Same thing—I told you about this—that after I wrote Two Wagons, everyone came to me from his own study hall and said: well, this is all in Rav Kook, one person told me; another said it’s all in Rabbi Tzadok; a third said it’s all in the Maharal, and all in Rabbi Nachman. Those are more or less the four musketeers. So I totally believe that this may really be true. Again, it can be true, at least. Many times it’s just loose or imprecise interpretation, but many times it’s really true too; I don’t dismiss that. But as long as it isn’t defined and conceptualized and someone doesn’t say: okay, this is the distinction—then it isn’t. Kant’s distinctions are all found in Hume too. Yes, except that Kant was the one who formulated them and understood what they meant. Afterwards you can show that this is really what stood behind Hume’s problem, but until you formulate them in Kantian language, it isn’t that.
[Speaker F] You said rightly about postmodern philosophy that of course nobody could have said such a thing before people knew post-…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, it’s also like Bible codes. Very often they find the murderer of Sadat in a minimal skip next to Sadat. So people always mock them and say, fine, but you always find it after Sadat was murdered. Find me who will murder Rabin before Rabin is murdered, in minimal skips. That’s always the scientific test. But that’s actually not correct. It’s not correct—that claim is mistaken, or at least not necessarily justified. Not mistaken, but not necessarily justified; it’s weaker than people think. Because before Rabin was murdered, nobody knew who Yigal Amir was. Even if I found Yigal Amir there, I wouldn’t know what it means. I need to know that such a person exists, and only then can I try to search. So I don’t take those claims all that seriously. I mean, afterwards you have to go back and see whether there is statistical significance and so on, and there are hard problems there with the codes. But I’m saying that this claim—that they always find things after they happened—they do in fact try to make forward predictions. Somebody once swore to me that he went into bomb shelters in the First Gulf War because he found in the codes that on that date there would be missiles. He had a doctorate in mathematics from Bar-Ilan, by the way—he did.
[Speaker J] Did you just meet him at home?
[Speaker K] Ah, yes.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, no, I didn’t meet him at his house, but he claimed there really was a forward prediction here.
[Speaker K] Well, I don’t know.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, he’s an honest person. I don’t know. I’m a bit skeptical. But there were questions…
[Speaker K] About textual versions and disputes over the wording of the biblical text—they don’t resolve that, so what does that do?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, no. Actually that isn’t an argument. In one of the responsa of Rabbi Akiva Eiger it appears that there are seven letters about which there is uncertainty in the biblical text, where we don’t know—the tradition doesn’t give us an exact answer as to which letter is correct. There are seven such letters. So he says, look, if you move one letter there, it changes the whole game.
[Speaker F] But there are also defective and plene spellings, and in Ezra’s period things like that were discovered.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay, you can challenge it, but I’m saying that actually proves nothing; it doesn’t undermine anything. Because if I really manage to prove with statistical significance that Sadat’s murderer is found next to Sadat, then at most that proves that this is the correct text. After all, if it’s statistically significant, it’s statistically significant. What do I care that there’s a dispute about the correct wording?
[Speaker D] The question about this author who wrote it is how many times he predicts things that don’t happen. It’s like fortune tellers—he says this and that, and one time he succeeds.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Fine, okay, that can be checked.
[Speaker D] It can be like economists who predicted the coming crisis. Listen, they predicted a thousand things; one of them succeeded.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Like those who predicted the Holocaust. Fine. So in any case, let’s return to our topic. Here then—we said there are two steps in Kant’s path to solving the synthetic a priori. First step: the distinction between the world as it is in itself and the world as we perceive it. The second step is to claim that science deals with the world as we perceive it and not with the world as it is in itself. And now the punch line comes. What Kant basically wants to say is that it’s no wonder we can, by thought alone, make claims about the world—because that’s the problem of the synthetic a priori, right? How can you, by means that are without observation, a priori means, purely mental means, produce a synthetic sentence, a sentence that makes claims about the world? Because it’s not about the world; it’s about yourself, about how you perceive the world. And therefore we can derive synthetic sentences in an a priori way. That’s his claim. In other words, what he’s saying is this: Newton’s second law, say, that force is proportional to acceleration—okay, with mass of course as the proportionality constant. So Newton’s second law is really a claim about how we see the world and not about the world as it is in itself. That’s his claim. Because every law of nature deals only with how we perceive the world and not with the world itself. And therefore it’s no wonder that we can make a generalization—which stems from how we are built—and arrive at a result that is supposedly a claim about the world. Because it’s not about the world; it’s about the phenomenological world, not the noumenological one.
[Speaker C] So that’s what he says. David Hume asks—so yes, true, we don’t really know; that’s only how it seems to us. Exactly. But then there’s no difference at all between…
[Speaker D] a priori
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] and a posteriori, between…
[Speaker D] observation and theoretical thought.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right. That’s one of the problems. Maybe I’ll formulate this problem in a different way—what happened here. So that’s the solution Kant proposes.
[Speaker F] But if so, then there’s no… whenever I speak about the world, I’m never really speaking about the world. Right. So how does that help me?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Why? It helps a lot, because all of science deals only with the world as you perceive it.
[Speaker F] I’ll still rely on that and fly on an airplane.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Obviously. But that reliance too—everything ultimately happens within you.
[Speaker F] It could be that the world of the post… is the world of ideas between us and bodies.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, not that it’s non-physical. There are bodies and everything, but they behave differently; you perceive them in this way.
[Speaker I] You fly on the airplane as you experience it. But…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It
[Speaker F] could be that the world as it is in itself does not operate in accordance with how I perceive it, and still I rely on it.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay, I accept that. It’s a cousin of the previous question. I’ll now reformulate it. Why do I…
[Speaker D] think one can say: until it’s refuted, apparently it’s true.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, that you can always say. But then we haven’t said anything. We aspire to be able to say something about the world, not just set up working assumptions. You can set whatever working assumptions you want; I have no problem with that. But the question is whether you know the law of gravitation, not whether it’s a working assumption for you. After all, if it were only a working assumption, I wouldn’t get on an airplane, as you say. How would you know? Working assumptions—with all due respect—I don’t…
[Speaker I] But if I experience takeoff and I experience landing safely, what do I care that the airplane in the meantime… No, but who says you’ll experience takeoff?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Who says you’ll experience takeoff tomorrow?
[Speaker I] Science and technology prove that dealing with the world as we experience it gets me there.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] They deal with the world as we have experienced it until today. Who says that’s true tomorrow?
[Speaker I] Meanwhile everyone experiences takeoffs and landings.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay, so what? Who says tomorrow too? But tomorrow—who says? I’m not talking about yesterday. Ah, so that’s the question.
[Speaker C] Here for example, that’s the question of how you relate to the phenomenon of a miracle. Suppose now the Exodus from Egypt happens again live. What’s your judgment? David Hume basically says: you don’t see anything here.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay, David Hume has a well-known challenge to miracles, but that’s not this. No, a different challenge.
[Speaker C] He challenges the
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] the reports about miracles, not the miracles themselves. He challenges the reports about miracles; we talked about that one year.
[Speaker C] What does he challenge? He says that you don’t know—one hundred times you saw it one way, and today the sun will rise in the west.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I don’t remember such an argument of Hume’s about a miracle. Hume’s famous challenge, the famous argument of Hume about a miracle, is the claim that it’s more reasonable to assume there’s some flaw in the report of the miracle than that there was actually a miracle.
[Speaker C] Why? Because he says, after all, like you know. The way reports work.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, the opposite! The opposite. Hume’s claim actually contradicts the Humean view here, because he does place trust in science and isn’t willing to accept that a miracle really happened. He says it’s implausible. So if reliable reports of a miracle come in, a tradition about a miracle, he says you should assume that apparently a flaw entered the tradition. Because if you have two alternatives—either to say there was a miracle, which is extremely implausible, or to say there was a flaw in the tradition, which is more plausible, even if not all that plausible, but still more plausible than saying that something happened here against the laws of nature—then I prefer the second interpretation. That’s Hume’s well-known argument about miracles. This argument here I don’t know, and it stands in contradiction to his Humean conception, which takes the laws of nature so unseriously. But for our purposes, that shows that he too, of course, didn’t really believe what he was saying. But for our purposes, Kant’s claim doesn’t provide a solution, because he can keep drifting into fantasy and then call that a solution, but this is really a fantasy that’s harder than the problem he came to solve, so that doesn’t help. Suppose a body now moves in a way that doesn’t fit Newton’s second law—you apply a certain force to it and the acceleration is different, not according to Newton’s second law. What’s the claim—that in the world itself, what’s the claim, that I won’t be able to see it?
[Speaker G] Yes, that’s the claim.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I can’t see it. Meaning, a body moves with an acceleration of four meters per second squared and not two meters per second squared, so it’s impossible to see that? Why not? After all, I can see another body moving at four meters per second squared. One of the understandings. But you have no indication whatsoever—that’s science fiction. What you basically want to claim is that there are bugs in my observation that match the structure of my thought. There’s no indication of that. Now I’m asking you: about that itself, how do you know? You won’t be able to give me an answer to that. So in the end this is an English-English dictionary. You solve one problem that I don’t understand with a principle that is no less fantasy than what you came to solve.
[Speaker F] There’s some serious thing in psychology that, say, the first Indians who had never seen giant ships approaching the shore—it took them a few minutes before they internalized it, before they kind of saw the ships when they were already very close to shore.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay, but in the end they saw them. But here I’m saying more than that. You’re talking about things that are completely outside their world, outside the space of their imagination. But I’m talking about a body moving with an acceleration of four meters per second squared. I’ve seen thousands of such bodies. It’s just that if this body has mass two and the force is not eight, then suddenly I won’t be able to see it? It’ll disappear from my eyes? Even though it’s still in fact moving at four meters per second squared. But if the force causing it doesn’t exactly fit Newton’s laws, suddenly I won’t see it—what, will it disappear? Why should that happen? That’s fantasy; it’s not reasonable. It could be true; it could be that all kinds of demons are circling around in my head and organizing some huge fraud. But is that a solution to a philosophical problem?
[Speaker J] Why do you have to hear a sound at a certain frequency and not another one?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What? No, but here I’m saying that’s exactly the point. Fine, there’s a range of frequencies I know I’m limited with respect to. But an acceleration of four meters per second squared—I have no limitation there; I can see it. So why, if the force doesn’t match that acceleration according to Newton’s laws, suddenly I won’t be able to see it? This body itself, moving at acceleration four, I can see, as long as the force that caused it is the appropriate force. But if the force that caused it is not the appropriate force, then suddenly what—my eyes are dazzled because the force is doing something? There’s no indication of that. It’s just—it’s like saying some demon comes and arranges everything for you and therefore everything is justified; that’s the solution. If someone thinks that’s a solution to a philosophical problem, fine. But that is basically the Kantian solution—he’s basically talking about demons. Not literally, but that’s basically what he’s saying. Some ad hoc fantasy that arranges the world for you. That doesn’t solve anything. And therefore Guberman says there is no solution within the methods of philosophy to this problem. Okay.
[Speaker F] But what he says is that you can’t—you can’t know what happens, because the thing in itself is outside…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right, and there I ask: if in the world, in the world in itself, which I cannot know, the acceleration is not four meters per second because there is no such law—the law is only in me—and in the world there is no such law, so the acceleration will be five. So now what, I won’t be able to see the body? In the world that I experience, it won’t be there?
[Speaker F] But you never see the body in itself.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I see the body. What does it mean, I don’t see the body in itself?
[Speaker F] No, you see some phenomenon of it.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, I see the body. It’s just that the appearance is not the body. What generates that appearance is the body. The body in itself is out there; I don’t know how to get close to it. We’re with Kant here, not Berkeley.
[Speaker C] Explain what the world in itself is and what…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] There is no explanation, because every explanation would be given in terms of…
[Speaker C] What is Kant’s claim, actually? I feel like you’re attacking exactly the core of the matter here.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right, right, the core of the matter—that’s exactly the point. If you want to say there’s a world outside, unlike Berkeley—and that’s what he wanted to say, and Hume too and so on—you’re not an idealist or a solipsist, then if you want to say there’s a world outside, what you’re really saying is that there are limitations on our observation of the world, and therefore it always comes in the same pattern, even though in fact there is no fit between what the world does and what I think. But the censorship I impose on what happens in the world is what creates the fit. Fine. But if that’s so, then if the plane crashes, I’ll go on experiencing as though I’m still alive. What kind of thing is that?
[Speaker L] But I don’t think he says there’s no fit; he says you can’t analyze what happens in the world itself, because it doesn’t exist for me—what I have is only the translation into consciousness.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But is that the correct translation of what happens in the world?
[Speaker L] There’s no proof that it isn’t.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So I’m asking you why. Who told you?
[Speaker L] There’s no proof that it isn’t,
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] There’s also no proof that there aren’t fairies with three wings.
[Speaker D] I have no idea.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So what? So that’s your constraint, that you don’t have other concepts. What does the world owe you? Fine, analyze whatever you want, but what does the world owe you? Why does the world behave in this way? After all, that is the question we’re dealing with. Again, whoever isn’t troubled by this question isn’t troubled. But that is the question we’re dealing with. How can we apply the way we think about the world? After all, that’s the question we’re asking here.
[Speaker L] The world doesn’t owe us anything, and that’s why there’s no answer to that question, because I don’t need to resort to that question since I have no other means.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] “I have no other means” isn’t an explanation; “I have no other means” is a constraint. It’s like Shimon Peres saying, “What’s their alternative?” Right? As if we’re against—say, the Right is against negotiations with the Palestinians. So what’s their alternative? Who said there has to be an alternative? Maybe there isn’t one. What, does there always have to be an alternative?
[Speaker D] But then I think I get to the point where as long as there is no refutation, I have to stay with it.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Fine, if you have to, lovely—but the question is whether it’s correct to stay with it, not whether you have to. If you have to, do whatever you want. The question is whether it’s true. We’re asking a philosophical question here. What you’ll do in practice everyone will decide for himself, but the philosophical question is: how can you know the laws of nature if they’re a product of your own generalization? How can it be that you always experience—every body on which a force acts—you’ll always experience it as flying off or moving with acceleration according to Newton’s law?
[Speaker D] Because we are part of the world, of the real world.
[Speaker G] What do you mean, part of the world?
[Speaker D] The observations. The observations too. They’re also part of the…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay, so what? Fine, but still, I—it’s not the body. Of course I’m part of the world, but the conditions that are dictated… I’m saying: when I make a generalization, I make the generalization because that’s how my thought is structured. By the way, other people can make a different generalization. Generalizations can be made in different ways. And yet somehow science manages to generalize and move forward. And the question is how that happens.
[Speaker D] But even the question you’re asking is a translation of this thing into consciousness.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] As far as I’m concerned, true, but that’s a philosophical question. A philosophical question is allowed to be a translation. I’m not making a claim about the world; I’m asking a question about the world. A question I ask even with my own conceptual framework. When I want to claim something about the world itself, then tell me what happens in the world itself. It doesn’t help to say I have no way of knowing. Fine, there is no way of knowing. But don’t tell me that because of that, therefore it’s true. No—because of that maybe I’ll
[Speaker E] ignore the question; it doesn’t interest me.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Can one say that because of that, therefore it’s true? Yes, certainly. After all, that’s what he’s trying to do. If not, then what does he want—to tell us only that this is how we got used to thinking? Hume already says that. Hume already says that… I got used to thinking this way—it doesn’t mean it’s true, it means that’s how I got used to thinking.
[Speaker E] As far as I’m concerned there’s no other way.
[Speaker M] Fine, that doesn’t mean it’s true.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It’s not… as they said earlier, there’s a sound at a frequency that is not within our hearing range. We don’t hear it, so because of that it doesn’t exist? There’s no acoustic wave there? Of course there is an acoustic wave there. We don’t hear it because we have a limitation. Our limitations don’t mean the world behaves that way. He says that world is inaccessible. But if that frequency kills me, I’ll die even if I didn’t hear it, if that is the nature of that frequency. It’s not—if the plane crashes, the plane in itself crashes, then I die even if I can’t experience crashing planes. Okay? It doesn’t really solve the problem. It can drag us into realms of fantasy and tell us that we live in some perfect fantasy somehow, with demons arranging it for us—that doesn’t really solve the philosophical problem. Look, there may be—okay, before I get to that. I think that what?
[Speaker M] Maybe today there’ll be a connection between this and intuition? Yes, yes.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Intuition—that’s the thing, that’s the solution. A solution? I don’t know if it’s a solution; I’m also not sure that what I’m saying is a solution to the philosophical problem. Maybe. I’m debating whether to call it a solution or not. Or a description. Yes, I don’t know exactly. I’ll tell you, and you tell me. Look, I think the whole problem stems from the fact that… I’m making the opposite move from Kant. Kant wanted to turn observation into thought. Right? He basically says: what we think is observation, looking at the world—that’s not what it is; it’s the world as we perceive it. Basically scientific facts are thought; they are not facts in the independent world, in the objective world. I want to make exactly the opposite move. And I want to claim that when we generalize, our ability to generalize is a cognitive ability, not a thinking ability. The whole problem of Hume and Kant’s whole move and the whole tangle that philosophy of science is stuck in to this very day—this is what it deals with. Philosophy of science deals almost exclusively with this problem in one form or another, at least the classic problems. Everything else is footnotes. It all stems from the fact that people see the process of generalization as a process of thinking. And then they say: wait a second, I’m built in such a way that I generalize like this, but what does the world owe me? Why should this fit the world? But if I claim that this generalization is a form of observation—that I see the general law, not that I see the particular facts, as I assumed until now the whole time in order to present the problem—I see the general law through the particular facts, I simply see it. I don’t see it with my eyes; I see it with the mind’s eye or whatever, but it is some sort of cognition and not thought. If that’s so, then the whole problem is solved. The problem is solved—notice—because the synthetic a priori is actually a posteriori. It is a posteriori because I observe. I don’t observe with the five senses. I have other means of observation. Call it fantasy if you want, I don’t know, but that’s my claim. Now this has—what I want to get to, so I’ll do it briefly—this has precedents in philosophical thought. The most prominent one is Edmund Husserl, the man of phenomenology, the twentieth-century Jew, who argued that I see the ideas through their concrete expressions. I see horseness through the horse. I don’t perform an abstraction in my mind and arrive at the existence of horseness. The idea of horseness is not the result of abstraction. The idea of horseness is something I observe. When I see horses, I simply see through them the perfect idea of horseness, the abstract idea—maybe not perfect, the abstract idea—of horseness. Okay? And likewise, when I see the particular cases of gravitation—yes, that bodies with mass attract one another—through that I see that in fact this happens to every two masses. Now this seeing is not unequivocal. You have to be careful with it. It is an observational tool, and observation can mislead. By the way, ordinary sight can also mislead; there are mirages. Meaning, the fact that I say this is seeing doesn’t mean it is one hundred percent correct. Generalization too is something you have to be careful with. It’s not one hundred percent correct. What I only want to claim is that categorically, this belongs on the side of cognition and not on the side of thought. Then there is no problem at all anymore. No problem. Once I observe the world, then of course it’s clear why I know the world—because I observe it. It’s not because that’s how I’m built. I have an ability to observe the world. That ability is intuition. There, we’ve arrived. Okay? Intuition, I said, is not logic and not observation; it is a kind of observation, just not sensory observation. And the point is that this is basically a process that looks to us like thinking, but it is cognitive thought or thinking cognition—call it what you want. That’s the point. I think there is no escape; there is no other solution to this problem of the synthetic a priori, the most basic problem in the philosophy of science. There is no other solution. Now again, to say that this is a solution—I don’t know, because I can’t point to which sense I use to perform this seeing. I don’t know exactly. Maimonides calls it “the eyes of the intellect” at the beginning of The Guide for the Perplexed. The Nazir Rabbi calls it “auditory logic.” What do these two expressions have in common? That they both combine an epistemic, cognitive expression with a thinking expression. Right? Vision—“the eyes of the intellect.” Eyes are sensation; intellect is thought. So what are “the eyes of the intellect” in Maimonides at the beginning of The Guide for the Perplexed? Or the Nazir Rabbi’s “auditory logic”? Hearing is a sense; logic is thought. Both of them, I think, are really trying to express that the distinction between thought and cognition is not sharp. There is something that stitches these two things together and creates some mixed faculty out of them—thinking cognition or cognitive thought—and that is what is called intuition.
[Speaker D] There are different intuitions, but that’s true.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I said, intuition is not an unequivocal tool. You can make mistakes too. Fine. But we have such a faculty. It’s not a shot in the dark—that’s what I want to claim. Meaning, when I say that I have,
[Speaker D] sensory sight can also mislead.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, true. When I say—it’s not—the important point is that I’m not aiming for certainty. There is no certainty. What I’m aiming for is reasonableness, rationality. That’s what we started with—what is rationality. Okay? I’m saying: when I look at bodies with mass attracting each other, I no longer end up, apparently, with: bodies with mass attract one another, and I infer the conclusion that all bodies with mass probably attract each other, the law of gravitation. Someone who really sees this from Hume’s perspective is supposed to see it as a completely arbitrary assumption. And that’s how Popper saw it: a working hypothesis. Now go, measure, and see whether it’s true or not. Okay? What I’m aiming at is not to turn it into certainty, but to turn it into something I can claim about the world. It’s a reasonable working assumption—not just a working assumption. The concept of reasonableness—that’s what I’ve rescued. Not the concept of certainty. Or at least I hope I’ve rescued it. That’s the goal. My goal is to say that when I make such a generalization, it is not a shot in the dark, it’s not arbitrary. I’m not claiming that it’s certain. Obviously this sense of intuition can confuse, can mislead. But that’s true of everything, as we said in the previous class. And that’s true—it’s a justified attack. But those who infer from that that none of this is worth anything, that intuition is arbitrary, that it’s a shot in the dark, and turn into skeptics and postmodernists and “everyone has his own world” and all kinds of silly statements of that sort—they’re taking a step, making some sort of leap, because they’re basically assuming that every process that is not observational and not logical is arbitrary. Right? That’s basically what they assume: either logic or direct observation. Anything that is not observation or a logical process is arbitrary. And what I want to claim is: no. We have this faculty called intuition; by means of it, with quotation marks, we observe the world, the world in itself. And we succeed—not, again, we always observe the world in itself, but it produces a picture within us. Yet the picture is correlated with the world in itself; it is not a disconnected picture as Kant describes it. And when I describe the color of this table, the color of this table is different from the color of another table because there is something in this table itself that is different from the other table. Therefore the picture of it in me is of a different color. So you can say that I grasp the world in itself, only I grasp it in terms drawn from my own cognitive world. Someone else can look at this table and of course see it—or hear it, for that matter, if his visual center, say, his eyes, were connected to the auditory center in the brain, then he would hear a symphony when he saw this table. And he would be no less right than I am; there’s no holiness in this wiring of our brains. There is—yes, right—there are all kinds of such wiring bugs, and that’s perfectly fine; it’s not a bug. It’s a bug only because it doesn’t fit the norm, what most people… yes, exactly, he grasps it like I do, there’s no problem. So what am I claiming? There are those who want to say: fine, if so, then everyone has his own picture, so you’re not claiming anything about the world. And I say: no, we are making claims precisely about the world, and we are making claims that are necessarily tied to something true in the world itself. It’s just that we formulate that claim within our personal conceptual system. And it may be different. One person hears the table, the other sees it, but both are saying the same thing. Meaning, when they build the airplane, both of them will board a plane that works and won’t board one that doesn’t work. Their physics textbooks will look completely different. One will speak about sounds and the other about sights; it doesn’t matter. But the language in which I describe what happens in the world is my language, and still I claim that this language stands in some sort of correlation to what happens in the world. My point is the hyphen—the thing that connects this language to the correlation. The languages are certainly subjective, and certainly we can use other concepts and other insights and other worldviews, and many times our disputes are indeed resolved in this way. Resolved—not as the postmodernists say, that our disputes are built in because there is no such thing as a world, everyone has his own worldview and he’s just as right as the other. No. I claim that everyone is right in a necessarily connected way—not because there is no truth, but because there is truth. There is one truth in the world, only it has different translations. I once spoke about the feminist incident that Gadi Taub brings in The Limp Rebellion, about radical feminists who challenge physics. They say physics is framed in masculine terminology, so men developed it, and therefore men succeed more in physics than women. Now Gadi Taub said there that he would not want to board a plane built with female physics. Because there is one correct physics. And I say Gadi Taub is mistaken. He is mistaken. Why? Because if female physics were done the way… suppose there is such a thing as female physics—I’m not entering the question whether there really is—suppose there is, you would arrive at the same results. The airplane would look the same, or maybe you would build a different kind of airplane and it too would work. Meaning, it describes the same reality, only your conceptual world and your cognitive world and your ways of looking are different from someone else’s, like you mentioned the Indians earlier. It may be that women and men perceive the world differently. So it may be that if they had really built the physics, it would have looked different—that is entirely possible. And maybe it would even have looked more efficient. I’m only claiming that if that plane works in masculine physics, it ought to work in female physics as well. Otherwise it isn’t female physics; it’s nonsense, it’s not physics. Okay? Therefore I say there is something real in this claim. It may be that the masculine mode of thought through which we describe physics really does make it harder for women to succeed in physics. That is definitely possible. But that doesn’t mean it is a different physics. It only means that the language we chose to describe physics is a language more suited to masculine thinking. And that may be so—I’m not saying it’s true, but it may be so. Gadi Taub’s attack is not, in my view, a valid attack.
[Speaker C] I just want to add something, just offhand. We’re dealing here with… say with language: instead of calling it connection, they’d call it birth or something like that—is that what would be called female physics?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, that’s language, but I’m not talking about language; I’m talking about the concepts—not the terms but the concepts. You’re talking about the words, that they’d call it this or that—no, I’m talking about what you see before your eyes. Like we spoke earlier with the philosophical harmonies. I see yellow and he sees blue. But all the physics he builds and all the physics I build will look the same. The practical implications will be the same, only for him it will belong to the field of optics and for me it will belong altogether to acoustics, and the laws will look different altogether—but that doesn’t matter. The instruments we build will be the same instruments and it will work. So it’s not just a word; it’s different forms of description of the same reality. But these are forms of description not like translating from Hebrew to English; this is translation like moving from Hebrew culture to English culture—meaning, you really do see something differently, not that you’re simply using different words. Your phenomena are genuinely different. And it’s not like the distinction I made earlier, where Kant talks about phenomena, that science deals with phenomena—he’s not talking about the color yellow. He’s talking about the electromagnetic wave, and that too is a phenomenon. Because women, say, might not describe it at all as an electromagnetic wave, and not describe frequency and amplitude and phase at all; they would use a different language. Not only a different language, again, but a different conceptual system, not just different words. Not that they’d call phase by another word, but that this would not even be the conceptual system in which they would operate. That doesn’t matter, as long as they put it to the test, make generalizations properly, reach results, and carefully build instruments accordingly—everything would have to work. Everything would work there. I have no doubt about it: if we had not begun analyzing science in terms of position, velocity, acceleration, and all kinds of things like that—Galileo and Newton started doing that, and from there everything rolled in that direction—we could have gone in a completely different direction in physics, in a completely different conceptual system. People who are talented at today’s physics might not have been talented at that physics. But the plane that works today—that physics would have had to explain why it works, in its own language. That’s the point. Meaning, it is bound to reality. It’s not that these languages, though they are different—I accept everything the postmodernists say: the languages are different, and many arguments are indeed apparent arguments. What I do not accept is their bottom line
[Speaker D] that there are two truths.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Exactly. That there are two truths. Check in the world itself: if you build a plane and it works, both physicses have to explain it. On that, there is only one truth. And therefore what I want to claim is that these languages are simply the different forms in which our intuition grasps the world. And different intuitions—women and men have different intuitive forms—they can grasp the world in different languages, in different ways. They can assign phenomena to different conceptual worlds. If you are consistent, it should be compatible in the realm of phenomena; what happens in the world should fit.
[Speaker C] For example, there maybe you could use the theory of the four elements, and there…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right, right, that’s one of the examples I bring in the book, if I remember correctly, in Two Carts—that it’s basically like rotating a coordinate system. Meaning, the four elements—earth, wind, air, and water—the claim is… today everyone says, there’s the periodic table and so on. Well, the periodic table—so what? I can say that hydrogen is something very airy, with very little earth—that is, build a vector with four values, how much earth, how much water, and that’s hydrogen. After all, we’re not talking about literal soil here; we’re talking about properties. Earth is something heavy; air is something that rises upward. So you can speak in that language too. And maybe if one does it carefully and in a precise empirical way and makes generalizations and puts them to empirical tests and everything—not the way Aristotle did in a general hand-waving way—maybe with the four elements you can build physics too. That is entirely possible; there’s nothing strange about it. It’s not…
[Speaker G] It’s hard to define things…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Fine, maybe it’s hard to define things and maybe it’s impossible altogether. I’m only saying that at the principled level, it’s not—many things we think were refuted were not actually refuted. We simply moved to another language, and in that language it works better, or at least it’s more convenient for our mode of thought. And therefore, for example, Thomas Kuhn wants to claim that a paradigm shift is simply a subjective sociological process—changing a mode of thought or a conceptual system about the world. And here I disagree with him. I disagree with him because he thinks this really says nothing about the world. And I say: we do change a mode of thought and language, but through them we are saying something about the world. There is scientific truth. The fact that there are different languages and different paradigms through which to approach that truth—that is certainly true, I agree. Therefore the rigid people are mistaken, yes? The dogmatists who aren’t willing to accept that there are different languages—one language and that’s it. Of course there are different languages, and different people and cultures see things differently. But the postmodernists on the other side are also mistaken when they say, ah, if that’s so then everything is arbitrary and there is no truth. Not true. And that’s the point of intuition. Intuition is the ability to grasp the world. Intuition is a faculty that seems subjective, but it’s a mistake to call it subjective. It is the insertion of the objective dimension into our language or conceptual system, because only that way can we see. I cannot see the table in itself. But when I look at the table