Faith and Its Meaning – Lesson 19

Table of Contents

• The “Welcome to Scotland” parable and Richard Taylor
• The analogy to the eyes and the reliability of the sensory system
• The pincer attack on the atheist and the possibility of escape
• Extending the proof from one sense to perception as a whole, and why the majority does not confirm it
• Cognition versus thinking, and David Hume’s questions about induction and causality
• Kant, “how” rather than “whether,” and paradoxes that illustrate sticking to trust
• Popper and Thomas Kuhn, and the example of Shimon HaAmsoni and Rabbi Akiva
• Kant: analytic/synthetic and a priori/a posteriori, and the problem of the “synthetic a priori”
• Noumenon and phenomenon, colors and sound, and red cellophane as a transcendental argument
• Rejecting Kant’s solution and proposing “cognitive thought” through the eyes of the intellect
• Completing the proof from epistemology and a divine correlation between consciousness and the world
• Anecdotes about Hugo Bergmann and Leibniz

Summary

General Overview

The text presents an argument for the existence of God built on reverse logic: if we accept that the system by which we know and think about the world came into being spontaneously and by chance, then there is no justification for trusting it, and therefore no way to justify knowledge of the world either. The argument opens with Richard Taylor’s parable about a stone inscription, “Welcome to Scotland,” and expands from the eyes to the entire sensory system, and then to thought and science through David Hume’s problems of induction and causality and Kant’s attempt to answer them. The conclusion is that an intended correlation between cognition and thought, on the one hand, and the world, on the other, is the only condition that makes epistemic trust possible, and such a correlation is attributed to God; the only way to evade the argument is at the price of a consistent atheism that, in principle, gives up trust in knowledge and the senses.

The “Welcome to Scotland” Parable and Richard Taylor

Richard Taylor presents a situation in which people are traveling by train and see a stone inscription on the mountainside saying, “Welcome to Scotland.” At that point there are two possibilities: either conclude that we have reached the borders of Scotland, or claim that the stones arranged themselves by chance, with no guiding hand. The claim is that you cannot hold both positions at once, because if you conclude that the inscription is accidental, then there is no indication that we have arrived in Scotland, even if by some rare coincidence the inscription did in fact appear right at Scotland’s border. The text emphasizes that an independent indication could confirm that one has reached Scotland, but from the inscription alone you cannot infer that if you assume chance.

The Analogy to the Eyes and the Reliability of the Sensory System

Taylor’s analogy is the structure of the eyes as a complex system: creationists attribute it to intentional design by the Holy One, blessed be He, and therefore see it as a reliable system from which one can infer reality. The neo-Darwinist can argue that eyes came into being spontaneously through the laws of nature, but according to Taylor he cannot both claim chance and also trust the eyes without some independent indication of their reliability, because that reliability itself becomes “chance squared.” The text sharpens the point by saying that the issue is not low probability but lack of knowledge or justification: if all the information about “the air conditioner” comes through the eyes, then there is no independent access that could confirm the system is reliable if it is regarded as accidental.

The Pincer Attack on the Atheist and the Possibility of Escape

The text describes a pincer attack: if the atheist is unwilling to accept that complexity arises spontaneously, then he is required to conclude that there is a God; and if he is willing to accept spontaneity, then he is required to give up trust in the sensory system. The atheist can escape into the position, “There is no God, and I really don’t trust my eyes,” while still continuing to behave practically as though the senses are useful, but without philosophical justification for their truth. The argument is presented as a tool for self-examination rather than as a decisive polemical weapon, because one can always reject premises, and in particular choose a consistently skeptical stance that neutralizes the proof.

Extending the Proof from One Sense to Perception as a Whole, and Why the Majority Does Not Confirm It

The text argues that cross-checking between senses does not solve the problem, because the sensory system as a whole still remains without any external indication that could confirm its reliability. The claim that hundreds or thousands of people see the same thing does not confirm reliability, because they are all built in the same way and therefore “all make the same mistake,” and the analogy is to the rule that “you don’t count a father and son” in counting Torah scrolls. From here the proof expands from the eyes to cognition in general, arriving at a parallel to the train to Scotland, where there is no external “flag” that can confirm the system’s reliability.

Cognition versus Thinking, and David Hume’s Questions about Induction and Causality

The text distinguishes between two toolboxes: a scientific-empirical one through the senses, and a philosophical-logical one through thinking. David Hume, as a British empiricist alongside Locke and Berkeley, argues that anything beyond direct empirical observation is unacceptable as a claim about the world; therefore induction such as “the sun will rise tomorrow” is not justified by the fact that it rose in the past. Hume also argues that causal relation is not perceived through the senses, because what we see is only a sequence of events, not the “because of,” and therefore scientific laws and generalizations are not justified by empiricist standards. The result is a skepticism that leaves only a collection of particular facts observed in the past, without any ability to justify general knowledge about the world.

Kant, “How” Rather than “Whether,” and Paradoxes that Illustrate Sticking to Trust

Kant is described as someone whom Hume “awakened from his dogmatic slumber,” but he does not give up trust in knowledge; rather, he looks for a justification for the trust that already exists, and therefore asks “How is it possible to acquire knowledge about the world?” rather than “Is it possible?” The text brings examples such as Zeno’s paradoxes and the surprise-exam paradox to show that one can continue to believe the intuitive conclusion even in the face of a strong argument in which no flaw has yet been found, on the assumption that the failure lies in the proof and not in reality. The parable of the blind man and the sighted man with the furniture illustrates a clash between logical proof and sensory experience, and presents a tangle in which someone who does not grasp the argument will not place trust in it.

Popper and Thomas Kuhn, and the Example of Shimon HaAmsoni and Rabbi Akiva

The text presents Popper as emphasizing falsification: a scientific theory is not proven, but only survives attempts to refute it, and one counterexample can topple a rule. In contrast, Thomas Kuhn is described as arguing that strong theories are not immediately abandoned in the face of anomalies; rather, the community looks for a correction, an experimental error, or an expansion of the framework. To illustrate this, the text brings a passage from the Babylonian Talmud, tractate Pesachim 22, about Shimon HaAmsoni, who stopped interpreting occurrences of the word “et” because of the verse “The Lord your God shall you fear,” whereas Rabbi Akiva interpreted it as “to include Torah scholars,” and the text maps this onto Popper versus Kuhn.

Kant: Analytic/Synthetic and A Priori/A Posteriori, and the Problem of the “Synthetic A Priori”

Kant divides claims according to a logical distinction between analytic and synthetic, and an epistemic distinction between a priori and a posteriori, and explains that in most of the classification it seems as though a priori overlaps with analytic and a posteriori overlaps with synthetic. Kant identifies that laws of nature and scientific generalizations are synthetic, yet seem to be a priori, because observation gives only particular cases and the general law is obtained from a generalization that is an act of thought. In Kantian terms, the general question is, “How are synthetic a priori judgments possible?” and this is translated into the question of how it is possible to accumulate information about the world that is not merely definitions of concepts and not merely a list of historical events.

Noumenon and Phenomenon, Colors and Sound, and Red Cellophane as a Transcendental Argument

Kant proposes a distinction between the world as it is in itself, the noumenon, and the world as it appears to us, the phenomenon, and the text illustrates this through the distinction between an electromagnetic wave and the experience of “the color yellow,” and between an acoustic wave and “sound.” The text adds the problem of qualia and the claim that there is no way to know whether two consciousnesses experience the same thing even when their language is synchronized. The example of red cellophane presents the possibility of knowing in advance, without any additional observation, that everything seen will be red, because appearance depends not only on the world itself but also on the structure of perception, and this is called a transcendental argument that derives knowledge about appearance from the structure of cognition.

Rejecting Kant’s Solution and Proposing “Cognitive Thought” through the Eyes of the Intellect

The text rejects Kant’s solution on the grounds that it turns the laws of nature into constraints of perception that prevent us from seeing anomalies, something regarded as unintelligible and no more plausible than the problem it was meant to explain. The text proposes that the only solution to Hume’s difficulties is to reject the dichotomy between thinking and cognition, and to recognize that there exists a capacity for “cognitive thought” or “thinking cognition,” in which one sees patterns and regularities in the world. The claim is formulated in terms of “through the eyes of the intellect,” as attributed to Maimonides at the beginning of Guide for the Perplexed, and the intellect is described as a power that not only infers but also observes the structure of reality and makes it possible to see a general law beyond isolated facts.

Completing the Proof from Epistemology and a Divine Correlation between Consciousness and the World

The text concludes that the proof from epistemology is not limited to the eyes or the senses, but concerns the very ability to know the world through an integrated system of sensing and thinking. The claim is that if this system is accidental, then there is no justification for trusting it; and if one nevertheless does trust it, then one is implicitly assuming a non-accidental factor that created it in such a way that it fits reality and synchronizes the form of thought with the way the world behaves. The conclusion is that only faith in God, as the correlating factor, makes it possible to trust knowledge, science, and intellectual inference about the world, and that without this one is left with Hume’s skepticism, for which there is no other philosophical answer.

Anecdotes about Hugo Bergmann and Leibniz

The text quotes Hugo Bergmann from “Introduction to Epistemology” as surveying many answers to Hume and claiming that only Kant seemed to offer a possible direction, yet in the end he does not find a solution that really holds water. The text brings, in the name of Leibniz, the possibility that the solution is a coordination carried out by God, but notes that Bergmann presents this as not “a philosophical option,” even though he himself did not find any other option. The text points to a “historical riddle” according to which, in the introduction to “Thinkers of the Generation,” Bergmann does in fact write that the only way to explain the phenomenon is faith in God as a correlating factor, even though “Thinkers of the Generation” was written before “Introduction to Epistemology.”

Last time I began what I called a proof—or actually I didn’t give it a name then, I’ll give it a name today—but some formulation of a proof for the existence of God that’s built on reverse logic. Basically it’s based on Richard Taylor, yes, an American philosopher, who says that if we see—say we’re traveling by train to Scotland, and we see a message made of stones on the side of the mountain saying “Welcome to Scotland”—we have two options. Either to conclude that apparently we’re at the gates of Scotland, start packing our things, get ready to get off, or to decide that those stones were arranged by chance, nobody organized them there. But if that’s the case, then obviously I have no indication at all that I’m at the entrance to Scotland, and therefore I can’t—it makes no sense to pack my things and conclude that I really arrived in Scotland. Meaning, one thing cannot be: that I decide it happened by chance and nevertheless conclude that I’m at the gates of Scotland. That can’t be. In other words, you can choose either of the other two options. And again I’ll sharpen something that will accompany us later as well: it could also be at the gates of Scotland. Meaning, assuming that this stone inscription really could have arranged itself by chance, without a guiding hand, it could also happen by chance at the gates of Scotland. That too is possible. But that changes nothing for our purposes. Why? Because if I conclude that it was arranged by chance, it may be that it’s at the gates of Scotland, but from the fact that there’s a stone inscription here saying that, I cannot infer that I’m at the gates of Scotland. In other words, if I had some independent indication—say we saw a flag somewhere, a Scottish flag, and okay, then the coincidence here is doubled and redoubled—not only was it arranged by chance, it also happened to be at the gates of Scotland, fine. But from the mere fact that I see the stone inscription, I cannot conclude that I’ve arrived in Scotland. That’s clear, okay? Therefore I’m saying: this doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen at the gates of Scotland; it means that if the only information I have is just the stone inscription I saw, then you can’t conclude from that that I’m at the gates of Scotland. Now basically what I said is that this thing is a parable, and the lesson—as Taylor says—is: think, for example, about our sense of sight, about the structure of the eyes. Our eyes are a very, very complex system. Now there’s a dispute: the creationists say this is a system intentionally built by the Holy One, blessed be He, in order to allow us to see, to orient ourselves in the world, yes. And then there’s no problem: I see, my eyes show me something, so I can infer from that that it’s probably really there. I see there’s an air conditioner here, so there probably really is an air conditioner here, because I assume my eyes are a reliable system. Meaning, if they show me—show me—that there’s an air conditioner here, then there probably really is an air conditioner here. The neo-Darwinist can come along and say: no, what are you talking about? The eyes are a chance system that organized itself spontaneously in some way according to the laws of nature, no matter how, and therefore you cannot infer from this that someone created these eyes. So what if it’s complex? A complex thing can also arise by chance or spontaneously. Chance is already another issue, but spontaneously. But there’s one thing, says Taylor, that the neo-Darwinist cannot do. He cannot say that it happened by chance and also trust the eyes—that is, regard the eyes as a reliable system. That can’t be. Because the fact that some very special process happened here that organized a highly complex and unique structure without a guiding hand—okay, you accept that accidental claim, you neo-Darwinist—but if that’s so, and you have no other indication that the eyes are reliable, all you have is that the eyes show you something, you don’t know whether that something really exists or doesn’t really exist, you have no independent access to that air conditioner apart from seeing it with your eyes. Okay? So in that situation you can’t really conclude that there’s an air conditioner here, because even if a chance process happened to build a very, very unique and complex system here, who said it happened precisely at the gates of Scotland? Meaning, who said that this complex and special thing also happens, by chance, to be reliable? Meaning, it’s a squared coincidence. Now—and again I want to sharpen this—the fact that it’s a squared coincidence is not my claim. Meaning, my claim is not that it’s very improbable that this happened. That’s the claim of the standard physico-theological argument. My claim is that you don’t know that it happened. If you don’t know that it happened, then yes, even rarer coincidences can happen, but in order to assume that they in fact did happen, you need to verify that that’s really the case, that it really happened. But if you have no indication that it really happened—what you do have is an indication that this complex system exists in you. We saw it: we have eyes and we see that they’re very, very complex. But we have no indication that they’re reliable. Because the fact that there’s an air conditioner here—the only information I have about that is the information I have through my eyes. I have no independent information. It’s like the information that I’m at the gates of Scotland: I have it only from looking at the stone inscription. I didn’t see some flag or anything else that could confirm for me the fact that I’m at the gates of Scotland. Therefore in that situation, says Taylor, one of two things is true: you can say it happened intentionally, and then trust the system. You can say it happened spontaneously, and then not trust the system. One thing you cannot do is say it happened spontaneously and trust the system. That is impossible. Yes, there’s another combination. You can say that someone intervened at the beginning, planted some one cell with a program and it learned this. That doesn’t matter; from my perspective, from my perspective, that’s non-spontaneous creation. It doesn’t matter. So that’s like third-generation missiles—fire and forget. It can be Darwin. So what? Sure, so what? Still, still, exactly, right, there’s no contradiction, but you still have to arrive at there being a God—if you trust the system. If you don’t trust the system, then no problem. You can’t assume that there is no God, that it happened spontaneously, but that the system is nevertheless reliable. No matter how—it doesn’t matter, that’s really not important. What difference does it make how God decided to produce the eye? Did He decide to create it with tweezers on the spot? Or did He make some system of laws that operated for fourteen billion years and in the end eyes came out? He says it makes no sense that He created you like that in one day. No problem. But then you still accept that evolution is His handiwork. I don’t care. He planned it and did it. No problem, everything’s fine. But you still have to say that there was someone here who planned it. Therefore you can’t get out of this. That is, you won’t be able to accept the claim that the eyes are reliable together with the claim that this is a system that arose just like that and you have no indication of any creator or anyone who did it intentionally so that it would reliably reflect reality for you or something like that. That seems to be an option that doesn’t exist. That’s basically the argument. Did someone want to say something earlier? Yes, he just saw eyes—I just don’t quite remember the inscription. I’d be happy if you’d expand on it a bit more; maybe you’ll talk about it in a minute, maybe we’ll discuss it at the end. Okay. Basically, if I now place this in the perspective of the previous formulation, then my claim—and I said this last time—my claim is that there is here a pincer attack on the atheist. I’m basically saying to him: look, this world is very complex. A complex thing doesn’t arise on its own, therefore it has a composer—there is a God. A very simple formulation, but that’s basically what we did the last time. Okay? Now the atheist will come and say: no, what are you talking about? The anthropic principle, I don’t know exactly what, it happened by chance. Coincidences can happen; maybe they’re rare, but I don’t know, maybe there were many attempts or something like that, or even without many attempts. But the atheist is willing to accept the claim that such a thing happened by chance. And he’ll even tell me more than that: this coincidence is more plausible to me than assuming there is a God. That’s so improbable that I already prefer to believe that this thing happened by chance. Okay, accepted. Now I say: fine, but according to your position, do you trust a system that was formed in such a way—say, our eyes? You can’t. Meaning, if you say it happened by chance, then trust you cannot give. So now I attack him from the side with this formulation I gave. I say: but after all, you do trust your eyes. Don’t tell me that you don’t think there’s an air conditioner here—obviously there’s an air conditioner here. No, then it’s like the case that we’re at the gates of Scotland; that won’t help you. How can you check? With your eyes. You touch it, so that’s touch. What difference does it make? Touch and eyes are the same thing. In the end, your senses are the only tool you have to teach you about what’s going on out there, right? If you don’t trust them, then how will you know they’re reliable? They work to my benefit, so that’s… The fact that they work to your benefit is wonderful; it doesn’t mean they’re reliable. It means they work to your benefit—which is a completely different thing. Many times, many times what will be to my benefit is not knowing the truth. That often works to my benefit. But I’ll get to that later, in the reflections from evolution and things like that. For now let’s leave it for the moment. The final claim is that there is basically a pincer attack here. We said: whichever way you go—if you’re not willing to accept that a rare thing happens just like that spontaneously, then there is a God. If you say yes, a rare thing can happen spontaneously, fine—then don’t believe your eyes. You can’t both say there is no God and believe your eyes. That is—here, do you understand?—that’s the pincer movement. Now the atheist can decide to which side he flees. He can say: look, in my opinion a complex thing can arise by chance, but then he’ll have to pay the price of not believing his eyes. He can say: no, no, a complex thing can’t arise by chance, therefore I trust my eyes because they didn’t arise by chance. Fine. If they didn’t arise by chance, then you have to accept that there is a God. One of your two assumptions you have to give up: either the assumption that there is no God, or the assumption that the eyes are reliable. You can’t hold both assumptions together. And that is basically the meaning of this pincer attack. There is one thing you really can say. You can say: look, I think the whole story was created by chance, there is no God, and indeed I do not trust my eyes. No, I really don’t trust them. What does it mean not to trust my eyes? I won’t change anything in my behavior. That is, I’ll go on behaving as though I trust my eyes because it’s useful to me, because it’s comfortable for me, or because that’s how I feel, I don’t know, I’m used to it—everyone with his own wording. So I’ll keep behaving as if I trust my eyes, but you’re right: on the philosophical level I really don’t—there’s no justification for it; I don’t trust my eyes. Okay, if he says that, then my claims are exhausted. There’s nothing to argue against him. The question is whether that is really what he thinks—and only he knows. Meaning, I can’t tell a person: look, you don’t really think what you’re saying. Only he can know that. Therefore I say that in an argument of this sort you also won’t come out victorious. This is not a polemical tool—it’s not a tool for debate—but only a way to give a person a tool to check where he stands. He has to examine it with himself, not report back to me. If he reports back to me, he can always back himself into a corner: right, I don’t trust my eyes, I’m just used to it and that’s all. I behave this way because that’s what I’m used to. What do I care, philosophically, whether there really is an air conditioner here or not? I know that if I turn this on, I get cold. That’s what I know. And that I feel directly. That’s all. All the speculations about whether there is an air conditioner here, and whether there is such a mechanism there at all, and how the remote works and whatnot—all that I don’t know, I have no clue. Meaning, I know nothing. All I know is only the phenomena, yes, what is grasped by me. Okay? If he says that—excellent—then he can be a consistent atheist. He just has to ask himself honestly whether he really stands there. Meaning, whether he truly wants to tell me there is no air conditioner there—that I just act this way because that’s what I’m used to. I don’t think there are people—I’m sure not many people—who really hold such a position. But if that’s his position, fine, then he’s consistent. I have nothing to say to him. Okay? So therefore the proof from epistemology, on its face—it now gets a name, I said I’d give it a name, in a moment I’ll explain why—but a proof of this sort has a weak point. The weak point is that you can always evade it. I can’t prove to you that there is a God. You can always say: right, I don’t trust my eyes, and that’s it. So it’s not an argument you can decide. In the first formulation, supposedly I can force you. Because I can say to you: look, even you agree that a complex thing doesn’t arise spontaneously, so that means there is a God. I’m forcing you. But as we saw, no—I can’t force you. Because you can always tell me: yes, but maybe it was nevertheless created by chance. That’s an illusion. Therefore I say that in the end I have here two arguments, each of which suffers from a difficulty. And what is the difficulty? It’s clear that if there is some assumption in the argument, the other person can always say: I don’t accept the assumption. There are no arguments without assumptions, right? We already reached that conclusion last semester with the ontological argument. Okay? There are no arguments without assumptions. So there is always an assumption. Once you present an argument based on assumptions, your interlocutor can always say: fine, one of the assumptions isn’t acceptable to me, or all of them aren’t. And then you’ll never be able to defeat a person who decides to insist. Of course, he himself will have to examine honestly with himself whether these assumptions are acceptable to him or not. But in the sense of whether he won or lost—you won’t get anywhere that way. I’m just telling you from experience, yes—these instructions were written in blood. So therefore both of these formulations are formulations one can escape from. But you have to notice that you can’t flee from one horn of the dilemma to the other horn of the dilemma. That won’t help. You have to reject both. Once you reject both, you basically find yourself in a position that says: there is no God, and I really do not trust my eyes. And that is the only consistent position possible after I activate both horns of the dilemma. Okay? Whoever holds such a position—I have nothing to say to him. He can say: I trust my eyes, but with doubt—maybe yes, maybe no. Doubt doesn’t change anything. No, because there’s also a magician who gives me displays and I see with my eyes—it doesn’t help at all, it doesn’t help at all, because… because if this thing was created by chance, then that means I do not believe—not necessarily believe my eyes, not that I don’t necessarily think they’re right. That’s not the same thing. Exactly—not necessarily believing, that’s me too. I too, as someone who believes in God, do not necessarily trust my eyes, as I said: there’s a magician, there’s a mirage, there’s everything. That’s not what we’re talking about. You as an atheist have to not trust your eyes categorically. Not say: well, not certain, maybe it isn’t right. No—there’s no indication at all that it’s right. Not that I have some concern that maybe I missed something. That’s a very important difference. One of the problems—maybe the basic problem—in postmodern thought is the mixing up of these two kinds of doubt. They take a situation that says: look, maybe, who knows, you were wrong in the past, so maybe here too you think you’re right, maybe you’re wrong. One hundred percent true, I accept that. But to infer from that that I cannot now hold any position, and that every position and its opposite are equally unsupported—that’s a logical leap. Meaning, there’s a difference between saying: look, it’s not one hundred percent, it’s ninety percent, and saying it’s zero percent, or it’s fifty-fifty with its opposite, that you really have no indication at all that it’s true. And my claim is that if you don’t believe in God as the one who created your sensory system, your eyes, then that basically means you are not supposed to trust that system at all—not that you can cast some doubt on it, but rather there is no indication at all that what my eyes show me is really, really that. Okay? That’s something completely different. Wait—before we close the challenge from evolution, just regarding that point: in the end I also don’t know that the sun will rise tomorrow. Since it has risen every day since I was born, then apparently… Yes. So likewise with the air conditioner—because since I was little I turn on the air conditioner. You’re like an English-English dictionary. Why? An English-English dictionary is a dictionary that explains one word I don’t understand with ten others I understand even less. Right—but how do you know that you don’t know the sun will rise tomorrow? I really don’t know. No—on the contrary, I’m saying the opposite. You do know that the sun will rise tomorrow, and I’m now going to present the same argument I used here about the eye regarding this belief of yours in induction. And that’s what I’m going to do in the next step. Okay? So let’s now widen the scope, because so far we talked about the Scotland example and then the analogy to the eyes, and now I want to widen it further. Yes—so you said earlier: fine, I can see there’s an air conditioner here by touch. Okay. And I said: fine, and about the sense of touch I can ask exactly what I asked about the eyes. You’ll say: yes, but there’s cross-checking. The sense of touch confirms what the eyes say—touch confirms, yes, what the eyes say, and vice versa, and the eyes confirm what touch says. No, leave that—I’m talking about all of our perception. Our whole sensory system is a terribly complex system, right? The fact that it confirms itself is of no interest to me whatsoever. Fine, so now one hundred percent or ninety-nine percent my perception says there’s an air conditioner here. I’m only asking: okay, but from the fact that my perception says so, who said it really exists? I’m talking now about the whole sensory apparatus, all the senses. A thousand people see it—listen, everyone sees it. Of course everyone sees it, because everyone is built the same way. So what? But who said that that form is also reliable? All people are built the same way—assuming you accept that. So what? You know, it’s like in Jewish law when you want to check, for example, an error in a scroll, a Torah scroll. You have two Torah scrolls; one has one reading and the other… meaning, one version is one way and the other… and now you don’t know which is correct. What do you do? We follow the majority. Okay? We follow the majority, that’s the law, we follow most Torah scrolls. Therefore it may be that what we have is actually mistaken, but we follow the majority—that’s the Jewish law. Okay? But when we follow the majority, we don’t take a father and son. Meaning, we don’t take two Torah scrolls where one was copied from the other, where the scribe who wrote this one looked at that one and from it wrote his scroll. Those won’t count as two scrolls. Why not? Because it’s one, obviously, because it’s one. It’s like you don’t count a rabbi and his students in a quorum on a religious court; you don’t count a rabbi and his students as several voices. Because it’s the same—or among decisors, among legal authorities, doesn’t matter—it’s the same voice, right? So exactly the same thing here. Meaning, when many people say the same thing, that confirms nothing. Because all of them have the same system regarding which I have a doubt. So the fact that they all trust it—fine, they all make the same mistake. Meaning, if each one made an independent judgment on the basis of an independent system, I might perhaps understand. But if they all essentially rely on the same system, and my problem is with the system that exists in all of them, then what does it help me that they all think the same thing? Of course they think the same thing, because they’re built the same way. That’s father and son, yes? It can’t count as a thousand voices; it counts as one voice. Okay? So in fact I’ve now widened the scope and said: the proof is not a proof from the eyes, from our sight, but from our sensory perception generally. Now I ask a more general question, yes, about perception in general, or about our cognition in general. When I know something about the world by means of my senses, no matter which and how many senses, but by means of the senses, okay, the question that arises is: who created this sensory system? If anyone did. And here again there are two possibilities: either someone created it so that it would be reliable, and then I can trust this system, or it was created spontaneously. Fine, I’m willing to accept that for the sake of discussion, though it’s very unlikely, but I can accept it for the sake of discussion. But then don’t trust this system. And you cannot say that it was created spontaneously and also trust this system. And when you speak about the whole sensory system, then you no longer have any independent indication. That is, when you talk about the eyes, you can say: fine, touch confirms what the eyes show me, or hearing, or all the other senses. Okay? But when we’re talking about the whole sensory system, we have no other tool for knowing the world besides our five senses. Okay? So when I speak of the whole sensory system, I’m really in the Scotland train situation. There can be no flag at all that signals to me that this stone inscription indeed happened by chance at the gates of Scotland. That is, if I had an independent indication, and I wasn’t relying only on the fact that I simply saw the inscription saying “Welcome to Scotland,” then I understand—that would be an independent indication. But if the indication is not independent, if it’s part of the issue itself, then it won’t help at all. If the stone inscription said “Welcome to Scotland,” and the inscription itself was also a true inscription, everything written in stone—and this inscription—and that doesn’t help at all, right? Because if I assume it was arranged by chance, then none of that helps. Right? So I say—that’s why I said that assuming it’s at the gates of Scotland just adds complexity, but it can happen; still, you need an indication that it happened. So therefore I say this won’t help at all. Whoever is willing to accept that a probability of one in who-knows-how-many billions of billions can happen by chance, then a probability of one in billions of billions of billions can also happen by chance. Meaning, where exactly is the line drawn? If you’re not willing to accept probabilistic arguments, then this is not where your glory will lie. But that’s not relevant. So I expanded this to the whole sensory system, but I’m not stopping there. I’m continuing. Now I want to talk about—until now I talked about cognition, yes, perception is the system of the senses, they’re basically what underlie my cognition, yes, they’re what enable me to know the world. But I’ve already said more than once that we essentially have two toolboxes when we deal with claims about the world. One toolbox is the scientific-empirical toolbox, and the second toolbox is the philosophical-logical-intellectual toolbox. Let’s call them cognition and thought. Fine? These are basically the two fundamental cognitive tools we have. Of course we have other functions as well—memory, will, we have other mental functions—but as far as our cognitive tools go, we have cognition and thought. Okay? So basically the proof I gave now is built on our cognition, on the five senses. Right? That’s why I call it the proof from epistemology. It is basically a proof from the very fact that I’m willing to accept that I have the ability to know the world. If I believe in my ability to know the world, that means I implicitly assume that my sensory system was not created spontaneously. Someone created it, and intentionally—that is, in such a way that it would be a reliable system. But now I want to expand this even further, to expand it to the realm of thought and return to Hume’s questions, which we already discussed—I don’t remember whether this semester or only last one—about the problems of Hume and Kant. Did we talk this semester about synthetic a priori? I talked about it last semester. So I’ll do it briefly here because it’s important—it comes back here again and it’s important. David Hume was one of three British empiricists: Locke, Hume, and Berkeley. Yes? There were three British empiricists. Empiricism is basically the philosophical position that says that everything I can know about the world comes only from what is given to me in empirical observation, by means of the senses. Okay? Anything beyond direct empirical observation cannot be accepted as a valid claim about the world. For example, this is what Hume asked: when I generalize—induction. Up till now the sun rose every morning, apparently tomorrow too it will rise in the morning. How do you know? Because until now it rose. So what? What you observed empirically were the previous sunrises. The previous sunrises I accept—they occurred. Every empiricist will accept that, although even about that one can discuss who says the eyes reflect reality, but empiricists accept that. Okay? But the claim that tomorrow too the sun will rise, or every future morning—the empiricist cannot accept that as a direct empiricist claim about the world, Hume argued. Because that claim is based not on a cognitive principle but on a principle of thought. Right? I did not sensorially see that the sun will rise tomorrow; rather my mind infers from the fact that the sun rose in the past that apparently it will rise tomorrow too. That is a conclusion I arrived at by means of thought, not cognition. But thought—as Mark Twain says—the world was here before you; it owes you nothing. The fact that you think something gives no reason to assume that this is also how the world will behave. The world owes nothing to the way you think. Okay? And therefore anything that is a product of thought and not of direct cognition should not be acceptable to empiricists. But if that’s so, then Hume, as a thorough empiricist, found himself in serious trouble. Because there is almost no claim—and especially in the realm of science—that an empiricist can accept as a claim about the world. No claim. Why? Because there is no scientific law, for example, that is not the result of a generalization. That is, you saw some facts and then you form a generalization and say there is some general law of nature like this. As we said earlier, generalization is an act of thought, not of cognition. That’s how you’re used to thinking: if these are the examples, then apparently there is some general law. You’re used to thinking that—very nice. What does that have to do with the world? Why do you think the world will also behave that way? So even if you accept the results of your direct observations of the world, the products of intellectual processing, yes, of intellectual inferences, you should not accept as claims about the world. So therefore he says, for example, I’m not willing to accept generalizations, says Hume, and for example I’m not willing to accept relations of cause and effect, or the principle of causality as such. The principle that says every thing must have a cause, or the principle that says if I threw wood into the fire and the wood burned, I say it burned because of the fire. Who told you that? All you saw was that you threw it into the fire and afterward saw that it burned. The “because”—the “because” is your conclusion. You don’t see the “because.” You don’t see that because of the fire, therefore it burned. You see that first it was in the fire and afterward it became burned. That you see. But the relation between these two events—that it is a causal relation, yes, that being in the fire causes it to burn—that you didn’t see. That is your conclusion. Therefore causal relations, generalizations, various things of that sort are products of acts of thought and not of cognition. And therefore David Hume is not willing to accept them as claims about the world. But if you don’t accept the principle of causality and causal relations generally, and you don’t accept generalizations, what are you left with? With absolutely nothing. You’re left only with the collection of things you observed directly. That’s all. That is, it’s a collection of particular facts that you observed. Say, the fact that yesterday you let go of this and it fell downward. That’s true. But you don’t know whether tomorrow, when you let go of it, it will fall downward. That you cannot know. And certainly not that if tomorrow you let go of it—after all, you didn’t see that at all. You saw only cell phones; you didn’t see it with shtenders. Okay? And as for the law of gravity in general, obviously you can know nothing. So what are you left with? You’re left with a collection of specific facts you observed directly. That’s it. Okay? Therefore what Kant—how Kant described the problem Hume raised—he basically says: Hume emptied all our science of content. He basically says—precisely as an empiricist, yes—we’re usually used to thinking that empiricists are people who put all their trust in science. That is, they are what today is called scientistic, yes? People who see science as the whole picture, and it will solve all the problems and everything. No. Reflective empiricists are very, very skeptical people. The opposite of the self-confidence one often hears from empiricists—unselfconscious empiricists. A self-aware empiricist is an empiricist who has no confidence in anything. All he knows is the collection of facts he observed. And even about that one can ask skeptical questions: who told you that what you saw really happened? But fine, suppose we got past that. Beyond that—nothing. No scientific law. No natural phenomenon. No implication for human beings. You ask someone what time it is; he says quarter past three. Who told you he’s not lying? What indication is there that it’s really quarter past three now? And how do I get to a place? So he says: go straight, second turn right, you’ll see a big building—that’s not a building, that’s a bank—pass it, then afterward—yes, that’s from the old comedy sketch—pass it, and then you’ll reach your destination. Okay? Maybe he’s just making it up. Maybe that person wasn’t there at all, never existed. But even if he was there, I trust my eyes, and my ears too—I heard what he said. But who says he’s telling the truth? Who says he’s not just messing with me? Because I have some experience that people generally tell the truth. So you’re generalizing on the basis of prior cases. In previous times I got directions and went, and usually I reached the place I was directed to. Okay, so we say, fine, apparently he too is directing me correctly. Who says so? That’s induction. Do you see that a direct empiricist—let’s say an honest empiricist, one who takes himself seriously and insists on intellectual honesty—will remain a total skeptic? He cannot accept anything about the world apart from the collection of facts he observed in the past. Okay? There are no such people in reality. That is, there are people who declare themselves to be such, but there are no such people in reality. Okay? So then the question arises: what is the justification for the trust we place in our knowledge of the world—especially scientific knowledge, but not only that; any knowledge of the world. Knowledge of how to repair shoes is also knowledge of the world. It’s not specifically scientific knowledge, but it’s knowledge accumulated from experience, from thought, yes—you develop different kinds of knowledge about the world. How can you trust it? So Kant says that Hume awoke him from his dogmatic slumber. What does that mean? Basically we all grow up with this sense that yes, this is obvious, we think, we reach logical conclusions, and everything seems fine to us. Hume says: wait, wait, wait. This whole story is just a very dogmatic attitude toward our tools of thought and our tools of cognition. Wake up. Who said it’s true? Maybe you’re living in a movie—in the Matrix, yes—you’re living inside some fiction. And then Kant says—or asks, actually—so how can we nevertheless trust the knowledge we accumulate about the world? How can we accumulate knowledge about the world? That is basically the question. Because you understand that direct empirical observation is not a way to accumulate knowledge about the world. Say I saw that I let go of this and it fell to Earth. What knowledge did I accumulate? That yesterday at 3:10, if you let go of this phone, it falls to Earth. That’s not knowledge about the world. At most it’s irrelevant historical information. Knowledge about the world is knowledge about the world as I understand it now and going forward, yes—something essential that is always true, not some particular event that happened at a particular hour by chance. That isn’t called knowledge about the world. So how can one accumulate knowledge about the world? That’s basically the question. Now notice that formulation already—and I think I noted this last semester—many commentators on Kant pointed this out: Kant does not ask whether it is possible to accumulate knowledge about the world; Kant asks how it is possible to accumulate knowledge about the world. And this is very important, and it will also be very important for our purposes later. Why? Because for Kant it was obvious that he trusts his knowledge about the world. That is, Hume did not undermine his trust in his knowledge about the world—scientific knowledge, again, trust in the same sense we spoke about earlier, ninety percent, yes, not one hundred percent trust, but ninety percent trust—that is, not a shot in the dark. Okay? Why? If Hume asks such good questions—there’s no basis for believing the knowledge you accumulated about the world—then why do you believe it? You should ask whether to believe this knowledge, not how to believe this knowledge. How to believe this knowledge means that first of all I already believe, and indeed it’s a good question—I need to give myself an explanation why I believe, or what the justification is for the trust I place in it. That is, Kant is basically asking a question that I will now call a theological question and not a philosophical one. I spoke about this in the previous class or the one before, I think. What is a theological question? A theological question means: I basically assume the conclusion, and now I ask what logical path could lead me to it. Remember the joke about the philosopher who takes assumptions and derives conclusions, while the theologian takes conclusions and derives assumptions—meaning he looks for the assumptions that would yield an argument leading him from them to his conclusion. That is basically what Kant is doing. Kant says: look, I trust the knowledge I have accumulated about the world. But indeed Hume’s questions are excellent questions. I need to understand the basis of this trust. Why? Why do I trust it? But it never occurs to him to give up the trust. Clearly he has the trust. By the way, as a general lesson—I wrote about this on my website in several columns—think, for example, about Zeno’s paradoxes. Like Achilles and the tortoise—the paradoxes that challenge the concept of motion. So I assume you know them, right? That Achilles can’t catch the tortoise even though he runs ten times faster than it, the flying arrow, that whole family of paradoxes. Suppose I encounter such a paradox, yes, Achilles can’t catch the tortoise. And to all of us it’s obvious that if they race, Achilles will catch the tortoise. Right? He runs faster. Okay? But here I show you in a neat mathematical argument that that’s not true—it can’t happen. Okay? Now I’m stuck. I don’t know what to do. Do you think that if you ask me, in the next race will Achilles catch the tortoise or not, I’ll say no? Obviously yes. Right? Wait—but there’s a mathematical proof that it’s not true, that it can’t happen. Zeno has—don’t know the paradox? Suppose Achilles runs twice as fast as the tortoise, fine? For the sake of discussion. And he gives the tortoise a one-meter head start. Fine? So the tortoise is one meter ahead of him, the starting gun fires, and they begin. Okay? After one second, Achilles is where the tortoise started. But meanwhile the tortoise has moved another half meter, right? When Achilles gets here, the tortoise has in the meantime moved another quarter meter, right? But I’m saying: it’s obvious he runs faster—that’s the whole point. No, listen to what I’m saying: I’m now describing the race for you. Okay? After one second Achilles reaches the tortoise’s starting point, but the tortoise is half a meter ahead. After another half second he reaches that point, right? But the tortoise has already run another quarter meter ahead. When he gets here the tortoise will be an eighth of a meter ahead, when he gets here the tortoise will be a sixteenth of a meter ahead. So every time Achilles gets to the tortoise’s previous spot, the tortoise has already moved a little farther. Fine? Less than Achilles ran, but still a little farther. So Achilles can never pass it. Because every time he gets there, the tortoise will already be a bit ahead. So Achilles cannot pass the tortoise. That’s Zeno’s paradox. Okay? And there’s a whole family of such paradoxes. Now never mind—the solution is very simple. But let’s leave the—say I’m perplexed. I don’t know what to do; I didn’t find an answer to Zeno’s question. Do I really think Achilles will not catch the tortoise? Obviously not. Obviously Achilles will catch the tortoise, right? Rather, at most I conclude that I missed some point here. I wasn’t smart enough; I didn’t spot the bug in Zeno’s argument. But it’s obvious to me that Achilles will catch the tortoise. Meaning, many times when someone brings us an excellent argument against the position we hold, and we have no answer to that argument—we haven’t found a refutation of it—that doesn’t mean we’ll give up the position we hold, and it’s also not true that it’s intellectually dishonest to continue holding that position. People say that’s dishonest—they brought you proof against your position and you’re just stubborn. No. It’s not dishonest. If it’s clear to me that it’s true, then I assume there must be some failure in this proof, some bug, and I’m just not smart enough to see it. So what? What can I do? Yes? Like here—I wrote those columns around the surprise-exam paradox. Do you know the surprise-exam paradox? Yes? It’s called the Swedish army paradox. The commander comes to his unit and says: during the coming week, at 6 a.m., there will be a one-day drill, twenty-four hours, a surprise drill. Okay? During the—he says this to them on Saturday night. It can be Sunday or Monday, from 6 in the morning and the next twenty-four hours. Okay? Let me prove to you that such a surprise drill cannot exist. Why? Because suppose that the drill is planned for Friday, fine? Now we get to Thursday and 6 a.m. has passed. We’re at 7 a.m. on Thursday. So the drill already didn’t happen on Thursday and there is no remaining time except Friday morning—sorry, Friday at 7 a.m. So only Friday morning remains. There is no other possibility. But then it’s no longer a surprise drill, because I’m preparing for it, I know it will be the next day. Right? So it can’t be on Friday. If it can’t be on Friday, then it can’t be on Thursday either. Because otherwise on Thursday at 7 a.m.—Friday, sorry—I already know it can’t be, and on Thursday at 7 a.m. I already know that it didn’t happen on Thursday, so what remains is only Friday. So it can’t be Friday either. But if it can’t be Friday and Thursday, then it can’t be Wednesday either, and not Tuesday either—there is no surprise exam. There can’t be one. A surprise exam cannot exist in the universe. There is no such thing. “Surprise exam” is a concept that contains an internal contradiction. This paradox, unlike Zeno’s paradoxes—which are very simple, although people get tangled up in them—this paradox drove me absolutely crazy. For years. I didn’t know what to do with it. It’s something completely insane. All the while, of course, it was absolutely clear to me that there is such a thing as a surprise exam. Surprise exam—just go and see. Announce a surprise exam, and when you do it Tuesday morning everyone will be surprised. It doesn’t—it won’t help at all. But where is the bug in the proof? There has to be a bug in the proof. I can’t find the bug in the proof, but it didn’t make me give up the position that there are surprise exams or surprise drills. No, because—you know, here in the Talmud, right, the beginning is open to challenge and the end is open to challenge. Here the whole end is open to challenge, but the fact is—I see that there are, what do you mean it tricks me in what I see, that there is such a thing as a surprise exam. No, because you thought, because you saw—but even what I saw could be a mirage. Meaning, I can doubt many things. Yes—it’s like, I think I gave this example, I don’t remember—when I was in Yerucham, the Chabad emissary, Rabbi Yitzhak Kahan, came to stay with us at the yeshiva, at the hesder yeshiva there. So I hosted him there, and he gave a talk to the guys in the study hall. And he gave an illustration there that really struck me, and I’ve used it quite a bit since. He says: there are two guys. One blind and one sighted. Okay? Sighted meaning he sees, yes? They enter a certain room and see that the room is packed with furniture. Full of furniture to the brim. Okay? Now in that room there are no windows, no other doors, nothing; there is only one door through which they entered, and that’s it. Nothing else. A sealed room. Okay? They go outside, lock the door, and both sit on chairs by the door. Okay? Fine. After an hour, the sighted one says: okay, Yankel, I’m stepping into the room for a moment. He opens the door, goes in. He’s stunned. The room is completely empty. No furniture at all. He says to him, Berel—meaning, to the blind man sitting outside—the room is empty. There isn’t a single piece of furniture here. What, Yankel, didn’t this happen to you? I mean, before that we saw the room was full of furniture, right? There’s no entrance or exit to the room other than the door we sat on and locked, and nobody passed by us. We sat there, right? So he says: nobody took out the furniture. So the furniture is still there. Meaning, the room is full of furniture, as was to be proven. Fine—but I saw there’s no furniture. What? He has a great logical proof. But I saw there’s no furniture. What am I supposed to do? Now you understand that if you were the seeing person in that situation, the blind man’s proof would not affect you. If you don’t see furniture, then there’s no furniture. Right? The blind man, though, he doesn’t see. Right, he’s blind. Fine? He’s also blind from birth. So if he’s blind from birth, he doesn’t even know what seeing is. Yes, he doesn’t understand, he never experienced this matter of sight. So he understands that Yankel—well, apparently sight is deceiving him. Fine, so apparently sight isn’t the most reliable thing in the world. Okay? Therefore he says: right, I understand that you see there’s no furniture, but you understand—I have a logical proof that there is. You’re wrong. Now go convince him there’s no furniture. After all, he never experienced what seeing means. If he never experienced what seeing means, then the confidence he doesn’t place in sight—the absolute confidence we place in sight—he won’t accept that. Meaning, what are you talking about? Here, I have a logical proof that you’re mistaken. But I, who have experienced the sensation of sight—with all due respect to your logic—I’m telling you there’s no furniture. I don’t know what’s with the logic; I have no answer, I don’t know where the problem is, but there is no furniture. You understand that this is a deadlock with no way out. Meaning, he will never accept that sight is reliable; he has a logical proof that it isn’t. And I, because I’m aware that sight is—I place absolute trust in my sight—so with all due respect to your logic, and I have no refutation of your logical argument… what? Tell him: in the next room, do you believe it’s possible that the furniture will suddenly disappear? Because after all, you too generally believe in logic. Here you say, in reality I don’t see the furniture. What will happen in the next room? I’ll start taking the possibility more seriously, yes. It’s not one or zero, but yes, that possibility will suddenly become something not absurd. Here I see: furniture has a tendency sometimes to disappear. A fact—I saw it. One example is not yet proof, but it already starts to undermine my confidence. And every physical theory—say, after Einstein wrote his formula, they did the experiment and proved that it happens, so couldn’t you say… No, there there’s no problem, no dissonance. The theory and the result fit. Right, but if he had written a formula that doesn’t work—suppose they didn’t prove it—then his formula would have been rejected. Surely there were scientists who wouldn’t accept it. That’s not so simple. I think we talked about this too. What you’re describing is Popper’s conception in the philosophy of science. Popper said that a scientific theory can be falsified but cannot be proven. If I say all ravens are black, I have no way to prove it. I’ll see one raven and another raven and another raven; I never know that I saw all the ravens. Therefore there’s really no way to prove the scientific theory. But there is a way to refute it. One raven that isn’t black is enough to refute the theory. Okay? Therefore he proposed that a scientific theory is defined as a theory that can be subjected to a test of falsification, but not as a theory that can be proven—you can’t prove a theory. Okay? Now against that, Thomas Kuhn, who was a philosopher-sociologist of science, says: look, factually it doesn’t work like that. If you examine scientific communities, you see that if they have a good theory, then even if there are a few cases, a few experiments that show the theory is not correct—the formulas don’t work, as you said earlier—we won’t give up the theory. We’ll say: okay, apparently we weren’t smart enough to understand exactly what the problem was in those experiments, or how to refine the theory so that it also fits those cases, but we still remain with that theory. Therefore—even if it takes some blows—does it still remain? Of course. Obviously. Here’s an excellent example. If now you measured and found that force and acceleration are not in direct proportion to mass, would you throw out Newton’s second law? Never in your life. Obviously not. You’d say maybe there’s a mistake in the experiment, maybe this is a certain kind of object that behaves differently, maybe do the experiment a hundred times. You won’t throw out that theory. It’s a theory that has stood through so many tests, it’s so strong, that counterexamples won’t bring it down. Many waters cannot quench love, nor can rivers sweep it away. The first time, surely there were many people who tried it. So what? Then if they saw there were many experiments… No problem—as I said, when the theory isn’t strong enough, fine. But after the theory was established, it explains many, many facts, it’s a strong theory in my eyes—one counterexample or five won’t bring it down. But you’ll test it, you’ll have one theory, you’ll do it twenty times. Right, right. Fine. So as I said, if there were one example, I’m not sure I’d abandon the theory that furniture doesn’t disappear. But it would start to become shaky. If there were several more examples like that, then I’d start considering it more seriously. Okay? This is a Talmud in tractate Pesachim 22b. The Talmud says there that Shimon HaAmsuni would expound every occurrence of the word “et” in the Torah, until he reached “the Lord your God shall you fear” and got stuck. Then he withdrew. He said: I do not expound “ets.” Apparently expounding “et” doesn’t work, because here it doesn’t work. So his students said to him: and what about all the other interpretations you gave until today? So he said: just as I receive reward for the exposition, so I receive reward for the withdrawal. I withdraw from everything. Meaning, the rule that “et” comes to include something collapsed—there is a counterexample. Pure Popper. Yes, the rule that “et” comes to include something collapses because there is a counterexample. Why is this an opposing example? Because it was obvious to them on logical grounds that nothing can be included in addition to the Holy One, blessed be He. Okay? Until Rabbi Akiva came and expounded “the Lord your God shall you fear” to include Torah scholars. What does he say? Counterexamples don’t overthrow my theory. The theory that “et” comes to include something is very strong. Because we received it at Sinai or because it worked in many cases—it doesn’t matter—but from his perspective it was very strong. There’s a counterexample? Fine, then I need to think what to do with the example; I don’t give up the theory. So basically Shimon HaAmsuni is Popper, and Rabbi Akiva is Kuhn. Okay? That’s exactly this dispute. So what is the point I want to make? Kant too—even though there were very, very good arguments against our trust in the information we accumulated about the world—was not willing to give it up. What he did want to do was to try and find a justification for that trust, because Hume really did show there was no justification for it. And in that sense—Hume awakened him from his dogmatic slumber not in the sense that he really reconsidered the dogmas he held. He continued to hold them with the same level of attachment—even a greater level of attachment. But he understood that they were dogmas. Meaning, he understood these were not rationally grounded things; they were dogmas. And because he was a rational person, he tried to seek justifications that would turn them into something rational and not dogmatic. Okay? But he didn’t give up those claims. And this will connect for us very strongly to the theological and philosophical arguments I’ll get to later. In any case, right now we have a problem. So Kant, in order to solve this problem, first of all reformulates it—the problems of Hume, induction and causality and so on. He reformulates the problems and says as follows: he divides the claims we make into two kinds of distinctions: a logical distinction and an epistemic distinction. An intellectual-logical distinction and a cognitive distinction. Okay? The logical distinction is a distinction between analytic and synthetic propositions. An analytic proposition is a proposition that basically follows from analyzing the concepts involved in the proposition. For example: the sphere is round. That’s an analytic proposition. Why? Because by the very definition of a sphere, it is round. I don’t need additional information. That is, if I analyze the concepts involved in the proposition, then I know the proposition is true. Or: Shmuel is a bachelor, therefore he is unmarried. Or: every bachelor is unmarried. That is an analytic proposition, because if you understand what “bachelor” means, you understand that if someone is a bachelor then he is unmarried. That is the definition of the concept bachelor. Okay. Those are analytic propositions. What are synthetic propositions? Moshe Yankel is married. That is a synthetic proposition. That is, it does not follow from the definition of Moshe Yankel that he is married. He could have been married, he could have not been married. If by chance he is married, then he is married, but that is a synthetic proposition. Okay. So an analytic proposition is one based on analysis—therefore “analysis” means analysis—of the concepts involved in it. A synthetic proposition is a proposition that requires additional information beyond the information contained in the definition of the concepts. You need more information. Fine. That’s analytic and synthetic—a distinction on the logical axis, between analytic propositions and synthetic propositions. There is also a distinction on the epistemic axis. The distinction on the epistemic, cognitive axis is how I know that the proposition is true. Is it an a priori proposition or an a posteriori proposition? A priori is a proposition that precedes observation; a posteriori is a proposition that requires observation in order to know it. Okay. Now this distinction is a cognitive distinction—that is, how do I know that the proposition is true? Do I need observation, or can I know it without observation? So the first distinction is on the logical axis, the second distinction is on the epistemic axis. And since these are two different axes, the conventional view should ostensibly be that we have four kinds of propositions. Four kinds. An analytic a priori proposition, analytic a posteriori, synthetic a priori, and synthetic a posteriori. Okay? Two independent distinctions should give me four categories. But when you look at propositions and try to classify them, you discover that there are only two kinds, not four. Every a priori proposition is analytic, and every a posteriori proposition is synthetic. Let’s take examples. Every bachelor is unmarried. That’s an analytic proposition, right? We saw that. Is it a priori or a posteriori? A priori. You don’t need observation to see that this bachelor is unmarried, right? So it is analytic and a priori. Now what is an a priori proposition? I know that two plus three equals five. Kant doesn’t agree with this, but basically yes—it’s a priori. But two plus three equals five. Do you need observation in order to verify that? No. Right? That is an a priori proposition. Is it analytic or synthetic? On the face of it, it is analytic. That is, if someone understands what two is, what three is, what plus is, and what five is, he understands that two plus three equals five. That is, it’s only a matter of properly understanding the concepts involved in the proposition. You don’t need additional information beyond understanding the concepts involved in the proposition. Now if every analytic proposition is a priori and every a priori proposition is analytic, then that means that these two distinctions are identical. Although it seems to us they are two different distinctions, they are not. They are two sides of the same coin. And what is the idea behind that? The idea is very simple. If the proposition is analytic, then obviously you don’t need observation to know it. Analyze the concepts involved and that’s it—you don’t need observation, right? On the other hand, if there is an a priori proposition—you know it without observation—then how do you in fact know it? You didn’t observe it, it’s not from observation, so how do you know it? Apparently from analyzing the concepts. What else could it be? Through thought. Okay. What else could it be? Fine? Therefore an a priori proposition is analytic, an analytic proposition is a priori, and vice versa. And likewise, a synthetic proposition is a proposition that does not emerge from analysis of the concepts. So how do I know it’s true? Apparently from observation, right? What else could it be? Therefore a synthetic proposition is a posteriori, and so on. Okay. Therefore, if you think about it again, you discover that these two distinctions are actually identical or overlapping distinctions. Now Kant noticed that laws of nature, for example, or our generalizations—scientific generalizations or generalizations generally—are propositions that do not fit into these categories. They are synthetic but a priori, which doesn’t fit together. Synthetic is a posteriori, and a priori is analytic. So synthetic and a priori propositions—what does that mean? Let’s look, for example, at the law of gravitation. Every two masses attract one another with such-and-such a force. Okay, now this proposition is obviously synthetic. Someone who understands what mass is cannot from that derive the conclusion that masses attract one another. Right? It does not follow from the definition of the concepts. It is a proposition; it’s not a definition, right? It’s a proposition—we discovered it. Okay? What? Is it like two plus three? No, it’s not like two plus three. With two plus three, you need only understand what two is, what plus is, and what three is. You need nothing beyond that. But if you understand very well what masses are, you still won’t derive from that that they attract each other. That’s a law of nature of the world. There could be another world in which masses do not attract one another. It doesn’t follow from their very definition; it’s a law of nature, not a mathematical law. Okay? So that is basically an a priori proposition—sorry, yes, sorry, a synthetic proposition. Not an analytic proposition; it doesn’t follow from the definitions of the concepts. It is a synthetic proposition. Now I ask: is it a priori or a posteriori? A synthetic proposition is supposed to be a posteriori, as a result of observation, right? But this proposition is not the result of observation, as Hume said. Because observations give us particular cases, but afterward we make a generalization, and from the generalization we extract the general law, right? So the generalization is an act of thought, not of observation. So it turns out that this proposition is a synthetic proposition, but a priori and not a posteriori. But there is no such category as synthetic a priori, because every synthetic is a posteriori and every analytic is a priori. There is no such category. What Kant claims is that the whole collection of puzzles and difficulties Hume raised can be summarized in one general question: how are synthetic a priori propositions possible? Because what exactly are synthetic a priori propositions? They are propositions that contain information about the world beyond the definitions of the concepts—that’s synthetic, right? But on the other hand this does not come from observation, as Hume the empiricist tells us. Observation doesn’t give us that. It’s a priori. So that means that the question “How are synthetic a priori propositions possible?” translated into plain human language, is basically asking: how is it possible to accumulate information about the world? That is the question. Right? Do you see Kant’s brilliant translation of the question? He begins with a philosophical question, analyzes it, and arrives at a logical formulation of that question. And it’s the same question. The question of how we accumulate information about the world and the question of how synthetic a priori propositions are possible are the same question. Because synthetic a priori propositions are propositions that contain information about the world. Propositions that are the result of definitions do not contain information about the world. Here we have propositions that contain some information about the world, and they did not come from observation, as David Hume says. So how then? A priori—you can say something you think with your intellect, you can say something about the world? That’s what Hume said—no, you cannot. The fact that you think a certain way for some time—why should the world behave the way you think? To understand how the world behaves, you need observation, you need to see, right? That’s all of modern science. Okay? So that is the translation Kant proposed for Hume’s set of questions. What does Einstein do in a thought experiment? No, don’t get carried away. There was empirical infrastructure there; there were many facts he relied on. But yes, he did thought experiments too, and of course those were influenced by things like the elevator and so on. Yes, that’s general relativity. But even in special relativity there are thought experiments, with a ray of light and so forth. In any case, the claim is in short that we do succeed in accumulating knowledge about the world. If we do succeed in accumulating knowledge about the world, some kind of miracle is happening here. Because knowledge about the world is always expressed in propositions that are synthetic and a priori. And that apparently doesn’t fit; that is what Hume was asking. Synthetic should be a posteriori—it should be the result of observation. How can something synthetic not come from observation, but be a priori? So Hume was unwilling to accept that. Then Hume says that the laws of nature, which are synthetic a priori propositions, cannot be claims about the world. I’m not willing to accept them as an empiricist. But Kant says: the trust I have in the information we accumulated about the world—I do not give that up. That trust is alive and well. All I ask is: how? What is the basis of that trust? What could be the justification for the trust I place in it? Another translation of that claim is that Kant is asking how it is possible for us to accumulate information about the world by means of thought. We said that either observation yields information about the world—information we did not see in direct observation—and we really do trust it, and the result is something we trust as describing what happens in the world, how the world behaves. Okay, that is basically the question. Now what answer did Kant give to this? He proposed the following. He distinguished between the world in itself and the world as we perceive it. The first is the noumenon and the second is the phenomenon. Phenomenology, yes—that’s how we perceive things. What does that mean? When we, say—Bertrand Russell gives this example—I ask you: what is yellow light? What is the color yellow? People will say: it’s an electromagnetic wave of a certain wavelength, and that creates the yellow color. Of course that’s mistaken. An electromagnetic wave of a certain wavelength is a physical phenomenon. The color yellow is a cognitive phenomenon. The color yellow exists only within our cognition, and it is the result of the processing that our visual system performs on that electromagnetic wave. But if, for example, our processing system—our perception—were different, then we could take that electromagnetic wave and it would be translated for us into the color green. It would simply be that that wavelength would connect to another region of the spectrum in the brain, and then it would appear before our eyes as the color green, or as Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. If it were connected at all to the auditory center and not the visual center, then when an electromagnetic wave struck the eye it would go to the auditory center and you would hear sights or see sounds. What? That solves nothing. There’s no question yet. It was yellow before and now you would… There isn’t even a question yet. I don’t know which question you’re solving; I haven’t asked one yet. I’m describing facts right now. And the facts are that colors exist only in our cognition. There are no colors in the world. In the world itself there are no colors. Colors are a cognitive phenomenon. In the world itself there is an electromagnetic wave of some wavelength—assuming our physics is correct—there is an electromagnetic wave at various wavelengths with various properties. Colors are the translation those electromagnetic waves undergo after they strike our retina and are processed in the brain; then inside our cognition there is formed a colored picture with all kinds of colors. Only inside us. More than that—this is the philosophers’ qualia problem. We have no way to know whether when I say this table is brown and you say this table is brown, we are really seeing the same thing. It could be that I see what I call brown, while you are actually hearing right now what I call Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. That’s what is produced in you when brown strikes your retina, except that from the outset you’re used to calling that “seeing the color brown”—hearing Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. So you say: I now see a brown table. What you actually mean, translated into my inner language, is: I now see a table that plays Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony to me. And you call that seeing a brown table. We have no way to synchronize the inner world, the inner cognition we experience. The synchronization takes place on the level of language. We describe it in a certain sentence, and you describe it in that same sentence. The sentences are the same sentences. We speak to each other and feel that we understand each other—everything is excellent. There is no way to know that we are really describing the same thing. Okay, yes, the famous koan: if a tree falls in the forest and nobody is there, does it make a sound? If you ask people on the street they say: what a funny question, of course it does, so what if nobody hears. Of course that’s nonsense. Obviously not. It doesn’t make a sound. Only when there is an eardrum there, such that the acoustic wave that the tree created strikes the eardrum and undergoes transformation in our brain and some sound is generated that we suddenly hear—only then is there sound. If there is no eardrum there with a brain processing the data and creating sound from it, then there is no sound. There is an acoustic wave. That’s a physical phenomenon. But sound is a cognitive phenomenon. Okay. Therefore, says Kant—this isn’t Kant’s argument, but these are nice illustrations of Kant’s argument—Kant says that when we speak about the world, we are not really speaking about the world in itself. We are speaking about the world as we perceive it. Okay? We can speak about the colors of the world, the shape of the table, its hardness—all these are only properties that undergo translation into our inner language. In the world itself there are completely different things. I don’t know how to speak about them in a different way. Okay? Now, says Kant, if that is so, then when we speak about the laws of nature, the laws of nature do not describe the world as it is in itself. The laws of nature describe the world as it appears to us. We describe the relation between the different phenomena we observe. Okay? If so, then it is no longer so surprising that I can say things, just from pure thought without observing the world, about what I will see when I observe the world later. Why? Because what I will see when I observe the world later is subject to my perceptual system, to my sensory system. It’s not only a function of what is happening in the world itself. It is an illusion to think that the picture that appears before our eyes—picture of course means not only sight but all the senses, yes?—the cognitive picture that appears before our cognition is really the world itself. It isn’t. It is a translation we make from things happening in the world itself into our subjective inner language. That is our inner cognition. Now this translation is not only a function of what is happening in the world; it is also a function of the sensory tools. Think of when I look at the world through red cellophane, and I close my eyes. I’ll tell you now, with my eyes closed: when I open my eyes, everything I see will be red. Wow. Without observing the world, I could know about everything I will see later. How can that be? Here is a synthetic a priori proposition. A priori because I didn’t derive it from observation, right? But it’s synthetic—it contains a lot of information. How can it be that I’ll see things specifically as red? I could have seen them as green. Because the world I’m speaking about is not the world itself, but the world as it appears to me. And the world as it appears to me is also a function of the cellophane, not only a function of what is happening in the world itself. And if I know something about how I am built, then from that I can derive all sorts of things about what is happening in the world—which of course is not the world itself, but the world as I perceive it. Therefore, says Kant, this is what is called a transcendental argument. It is an argument that says I can derive propositions about the world from an understanding of my tools of thought and cognition. Okay? Therefore I can state propositions that are synthetic and a priori, without observation, because I can derive them from understanding how my perception is structured, and then I can know things, say general things about the world. Fine, that sounds like a brilliant solution. That’s Einstein too, no? Can’t you say that about Einstein, that what he did was a priori? You can say that about every scientific theory if you accept this. But Kant was a hundred and fifty years before Einstein. But in the end he proved it from reality. Proved or didn’t prove—Newton proves it to the same extent. I don’t think Einstein is any greater proof; reality as a whole proves it. There’s some achievement here that a person can’t explain. Here you see stones falling. There you didn’t see that the stones… You see—you only need more sophisticated observational tools, but you see. A normal person can’t explain it. Fine, one studies, yes. I’ll say more than that. This claim of Kant’s—there’s a book by Hugo Bergmann, a philosopher at the Hebrew University around the founding of the state, and he wrote a book called Introduction to the Theory of Knowledge, a book on epistemology. In chapter nine he surveys all the answers given to Hume’s questions throughout history. He surveys, I don’t know, nine, ten, eleven, twelve answers, something like that. None of them, not a single one, really holds water. The only one some people think did answer Hume’s questions is Kant, with this answer I just described. Isn’t that like prophecy? Like Maimonides says—if you reach the level of a prophet, then you can… If you reach the level of a prophet you can say whatever you want; that explains nothing. For them it’s really physics. It’s like saying they saw. That explains nothing. The fact that prophets see various things—so what if they see? That explains nothing. I’m speaking now about how I infer conclusions about the world. An ordinary person—not a prophet, nothing. Who gave the laws? The things of the prophets, supposedly. From the prophets? Meaning Einstein learned from the prophets and from that he derived relativity? It could be that he had a very developed imagination, he saw things. What does that mean, imagination? But imagination is imagining. He saw things in reality, but you can’t—you don’t observe in reality. That’s what Hume showed. You can’t. No, he took synthetic things and proved them a priori. He gave you a generalization of everything. How a priori? If it’s a priori, then it says nothing about the world. What—it won’t help, you can’t escape this. If it’s a priori, it’s not from observation, so how does it say something about the world? And if it’s from observation, then everything’s fine—but then there isn’t. So here I can say the following. If Kant indeed offers a good explanation of the knowledge accumulated in our scientific laws, the laws of nature—then I think not. I’ll explain why not. I’ll just say that Hugo Bergmann argues that if there is any direction at all that can offer an explanation, this is the only one. All the other explanations don’t hold water. Now I’m also going to knock this one down. Why? Because look—let’s think for a moment about, say, the law of gravity. Fine? I’m basically saying: look, I saw several times that I let go of a massive object and it falls to Earth. I’ve seen this several times in the past. Okay? Kant tells me: now I know this will happen in the future too. Hume asks: why? The fact that it happened in the past is no guarantee it will happen in the future. You are making a generalization. Generalization is a form of your thought—that’s thought, not cognition. Who says that the product of your generalization describes what is happening in the world? Then Kant comes and says: because I basically understand that in my cognition, if there is an object standing in the air, I won’t be able to see it standing in the air; I will necessarily see it falling to the ground. Because that is the form of my cognition. Is that serious? Is it a joke? What do you mean, if an object stands in the air I won’t see it? What—why—what will happen, will my eyes close? What will blind me and prevent me from seeing it? Even if you yourself won’t be there to observe it? No—yes, there will be. I’m saying now that suppose reality is that the object remains in the air. But Kant says: yes, but I won’t be able to see that. Therefore for me the law of nature is that the object always falls. That doesn’t mean that in the world itself it really always falls, but in my cognition it always falls. What does that really mean? Let’s translate it. It basically means that in the world itself there could be objects that remain in the air—I just won’t see them. I’ll see only the objects that fall. Why? What, I can’t see an airplane, for example, standing in the air? I can’t see it? What prevents me from seeing it? What’s the problem? I’ll measure its acceleration and it’ll come out as two. What blinds me and prevents me from seeing when this object accelerates at two? There is no logic in this at all. Therefore Kant’s explanation doesn’t really solve Hume’s problems. No—it’s logic. I’m speaking about physics, not logic. Mathematics and logic are the same thing; I’m speaking about physics. Fine? So what I want to claim is that Kant’s solution also does not solve the problem. Fine, then we’re completely stuck. What do we do? Let’s reexamine our assumptions. Our assumptions are that we basically have two toolboxes: thought and cognition. That’s the first assumption. The second assumption is that cognition is the only tool for knowing the world. Thought cannot provide me with information about the world because thought is merely how I am built; it has nothing to do with what happens in the world itself. Now I want to claim that the only solution to Hume’s questions—because all the other solutions don’t hold water—is that the distinction we make between thought and cognition, this dichotomy we create, is not a correct distinction. They are not two dichotomous categories. There is a certain domain that is thinking cognition, or cognitive thought, or I don’t know what you want to call it. There is some wing of our intellectual capacities that is a combination of thought and cognition together. Or in other words, I want to claim that when I see objects falling to Earth, I see one and another and another, I see that there is a general law here that all massive objects fall to Earth. I see that. I don’t see it with my eyes; with my eyes I saw the concrete objects I observed. I see that there is some pattern here, and this pattern is not a pattern merely because this is how I’m built—thought in the sense that it is something inside me. No. I have the ability to understand that this is how the world is built. How? Well, it’s not with the eyes; with the eyes you don’t see that. It’s with the eyes of the intellect, as Maimonides writes at the beginning of Guide for the Perplexed. The intellect knows not only how to think but also how to see. That is a very interesting phenomenon. And the claim is that we essentially have a faculty that can observe the world—it’s a kind of observation but not through the senses: the intellect observes the world. And that sounds very mystical, some kind of sixth sense, one can talk about it in that sort of language. But understand that anyone who doesn’t accept this—there is no accumulation of knowledge about the world. There isn’t. And again, you can say: okay, then I don’t believe in any knowledge about the world and I remain a skeptic. But if you do believe in knowledge about the world, then you are basically saying that our thought has some ability to grasp something in reality, even though it is thought and not cognition. Or in other words, that there is some correlation between the way we think and what happens in the world. There is a correlation between them. Now, how is there such a correlation? Maybe there isn’t. How do you know there is? Do you have some way, other than the senses or thought, to know that there is such a correlation? Once again, here the argument from epistemology comes in. One of two things is true: either I think that the Holy One, blessed be He, created our thought and its reliability, its ability to grasp how the world behaves, and then I can trust the findings of thought and thought can be a tool for knowing the world. Or I think that it’s just something—it’s simply how I’m built, how I came to be for all sorts of reasons, no problem. Very improbable, because it’s terribly sophisticated and so on, but fine, the atheist is willing to accept such a thing. But then you can’t trust it. And then you cannot place trust in the products of thought. You remain stuck with Hume. And now I want to complete the proof from epistemology—I need to stop here because I have to get somewhere, so I’m ending a bit early. What I essentially want to say is this: the proof now is a proof from epistemology in general, not from sight and not even from all the senses. It’s from our ability to know the world. And that ability is composed of intellect, thought, and cognition. And this whole system, if it were the only basis I had through which I know the world, then why do I trust it? If it happened by chance—stop. Maybe it can happen by chance, but there is no reason to trust it. If I trust it, that means there is something here that is not accidental. Someone is synchronizing our thought with the way the world behaves. And therefore, when we think about something, about some matter, it fits, it corresponds to what happens in the world itself. We can draw from it conclusions that contain knowledge about the world. But in order for that to be so, you have to assume there is some coordinating factor. Someone created this system intentionally so that it would be reliable. Because if you think it is a chance system, then maybe it’s chance—I’m willing, for the sake of discussion, I don’t think it’s plausible, but for the sake of discussion I’m willing to accept that it’s chance—but then trust it you cannot. And you remain stuck with all the problems of Hume and Kant, and there is no other answer to them. Therefore I claim that the only way to solve all of Hume’s and Kant’s problems and so on—no other philosophical route works—is only this route: that there was a factor, the Holy One, blessed be He, yes, God, who coordinates between my thought and cognition and what happens in the world. Then I can trust the things I think and see my thought as a means of accumulating information about the world. By the way, as an anecdote—and with this I’ll finish—in Hugo Bergmann’s book, after he goes through all the possible answers that were given throughout history, he says—he brings this in the name of Leibniz, I think—and Leibniz claimed that this is a coordination carried out by God, but that is not a philosophical option; we are looking for a philosophical answer. He just forgot that after he finished the chapter, he didn’t find a philosophical answer. So you’re left having to remain with the only option there is—what can you do? That’s the only option there is. And an even more interesting anecdote—this is historically puzzling to me—in the introduction to another book by Hugo Bergmann called Thinkers of the Generation, there he writes this explicitly: that the only way to explain this phenomenon is only through belief in God as the coordinating factor. What is strange to me is that Thinkers of the Generation was written before Introduction to the Theory of Knowledge. So if he had already figured it out there, then I don’t understand why in Introduction to the Theory of Knowledge he remained with “this requires further analysis.” That’s a historical riddle. But we’ll stop here—I really have to get somewhere, so forgive me.