Dispute and Truth – Lesson 2

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[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, exactly. So that’s why, basically, the analytic is a priori, and the a priori is analytic. And of course, by implication, the synthetic is also a posteriori. Okay? So apparently these are two divisions: one on the logical axis, the other on the epistemic axis, but in fact they overlap. That was the picture up to this point. But Kant defined these two axes in order to say: no, there’s a third category. There are synthetic a priori judgments. Even though they are synthetic, they are a priori. What led him to that conclusion? Think, for example, about the laws of nature. Say, the law of gravitation. The law of gravitation says that every two masses attract each other with a force inversely proportional to the square of the distance. Okay? There is an attractive force between every two—between every two masses. Fine. How do I know that? From experience? I may have seen it in a few objects that I tested. How do I know that it’s true of every object with mass? Say, stars. What does that have to do with stars? How do I know it about every object with mass?

[Speaker L] Induction. Induction, right?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Meaning, you can’t say that it’s the result of observation. Observation gives me a number of cases that I observed. But a general law is never the result of observation alone. Observation is some kind of motivation, it gives me direction, but in the end, after the observation, I still have to generalize. Okay? So in fact, a law of nature is, on the one hand, a synthetic claim. Meaning, when I say that two masses attract each other, the law of attraction is not a result of the definition of the concept of mass. There could be an imaginary world in which there are two masses and they do not attract each other. In our world there is a law of gravitation. Meaning, the laws of gravitation are not laws of logic; they are scientific laws. Okay? So they can be true in our world, and perhaps not in another world. They are not logically necessary; they are not logical relations. So the laws of nature are, on the one hand, synthetic claims, and on the other hand they are not a posteriori. They are a priori because they are not the result of observation. Meaning, observation is not enough to get you there. Okay? And therefore all the laws of—just a second—all the laws of nature actually do not fall into either of the two categories that existed before Kant. Not the synthetic a posteriori category, and not the analytic a priori category. These are judgments that are, on the one hand, a priori, and on the other hand synthetic. Or in other words: these are judgments that add information for me, but that information does not come from observation. So how? How can it be that I derive a conclusion containing more information than the premises I started with, from the scientific generalization? And it’s not the result of observation? As Mark Twain said, the world doesn’t owe you anything; it was here first. Just because you think in a certain way, does that mean it’s true? That’s just how you’re built—so what? Right? A great many challenges in the philosophy of science are based on that. Because scientific laws are some kind of generalization we make, but with all due respect to generalizations, generalizations are a product of our way of thinking. Observation only gives me the cases that I saw. When I move from those cases to a general law, I’m actually carrying out an act of generalization. And generalization is, all in all, just my invention. If someone else is built differently, he’ll make a different generalization. You can make infinitely many generalizations. Right? That’s really a major question in the philosophy of science, just as it is in epistemology, and all these questions basically map onto one another. How can it be that we can learn, accumulate information, without observation? That is really the question. How is the scientific process possible at all? The scientific process? The scientific process is essentially about accumulating information. But observation only gives you more and more particular facts. Yet the laws of nature, which are the information we have accumulated in the scientific process, are general laws, not a collection of specific observations that I happened to see. So how can one accumulate information about the world without observation? In other words, this is Kant’s problem of the synthetic a priori. The solution is—

[Speaker G] Simply to predict in advance what happens between the poles. But how—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] How can you predict in advance what will happen?

[Speaker G] No, you decide. You decide that this is a law of nature.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Deciding is nice. I can also decide that there is no law of gravitation. Deciding is excellent. There are a few decisions I’d be happy to make on that matter.

[Speaker M] No, but it—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It won’t help at all; it doesn’t solve the problem. I can decide whatever I want, but the question is how I know, not how I decide. How can I know a general law that contains a lot of information about the world without observation? How can that be? Now, there are indeed those who claim that the laws of nature are a statement about us, not about the world. Meaning, what I know about the world is only what I observed in it. The laws of nature are just our forms of thought. It’s convenient for us to organize the data this way or that way, but it’s a statement about us, not about the world. That can’t be right—I have a mathematical proof that it’s wrong. But such a claim does exist in philosophy. Still, nobody really believes that, except for a few philosophers who need to write articles. Everybody understands that it’s not certain that the laws of nature are true, but clearly they are the best thing we currently have, and we think they are true. We have reasonable grounds to assume that they are true. And it works. Right, and it also works. Besides that. It’s both true and it works. Amazing. Usually what is true doesn’t work. That’s what I discovered in my fourth year of engineering. I went to Tadiran to work on the Lavi, of blessed memory. To make some filter or something, I don’t know exactly what. I put in orthogonal polynomials there; everything was completely correct, and fortunately they canceled that project halfway through, because otherwise there’s no chance it would have worked. And the probability that something works is one divided by the amount of mathematics inside it. That’s the well-known engineering rule. Anyway, the principle says that if I want to explain how I can accumulate information without observation—how can that be?—there are various proposals. Kant himself proposed one; I’m sparing you all the proposals that in my opinion are wrong. The only really possible proposal here, in my view, is that we have some intellectual faculty—I called it intuition—some intellectual faculty that enables us to identify general truths directly. I see a collection of facts that I observed, and from that I understand that the general law governing them is the law of gravitation. What does it mean to say, “I understand”? One could say that I make some generalization because that’s how my mind is built. But that won’t do, because then we remain with the same problem: how do you know it’s true? No—I claim that I see the law of gravitation. Not with my eyes. I see it in what Maimonides calls, at the beginning of The Guide for the Perplexed, “the eyes of the intellect.” The intellect has some ability to contemplate—not only to think and analyze the data that consciousness brings to it, but the intellect has a wing, or a part, that is a cognitive part. Meaning, it can engage in cognition of the world through the eyes of the intellect. Okay? And therefore what we usually call intuition—what people usually think is a product of learning from experience—I don’t agree. Meaning, intuition is a cognitive faculty; it is a precondition for learning from experience. In other words, if we didn’t have this faculty, we also couldn’t learn from experience, because any collection of facts can be generalized in infinitely many ways. And the faculty called intuition directs us toward the correct generalization from among the possible generalizations. Okay? Therefore you can’t say that intuition is the result of generalizations. That cannot be true. Intuition is a faculty we are born with. Those who know a bit—there’s a debate in linguistics, Chomsky—everyone thought that a person is born tabula rasa. You’re born empty, and then you learn language, learn this, talk about linguistic ability. And Chomsky argued that linguistic ability cannot be explained that way; there must be something built into the person, the ability to speak, a linguistic faculty. It’s not something acquired; it’s something innate. Once that thing exists within me, I can learn this language, that language, this grammar, that grammar, but without that basic faculty I could not learn. Right, think about it—I once brought a different example for this, Wittgenstein’s example. In his argument about rule-following—following a rule—he says: think, for example, that on the psychometric exam you are asked the following question. Suppose they give you a sequence of numbers: what is the next number? Nineteen. Why nineteen? Okay. You say nine. Fine. Any other suggestions? Eleven. Why eleven? Right, primes. The one who says—it’s not wrong, it’s also right. You can put eleven here if the pattern is prime numbers. You can put nine here because it’s the odd numbers, right. You can also put nineteen or minus pi if you want. You can put whatever you want. Why? No, it will be a series. It will be a series, no problem at all—I’ll organize a series for you however you like. Meaning, I can define for you: if a-sub-n is the sequence, okay, a plus bn plus cn squared plus dn cubed. I have four coefficients: a, b, c, and d. Now I want when n equals one that it will give me three, when n equals two it will give me five, when n equals three it will give me seven, and when n equals four it will give me minus pi. Fine? Plug it in: four equations with four unknowns, find a, b, c, and d, and you have the series, no problem. Okay. Therefore, when you go to the psychometric exam, for example, and they ask you a question like that, and someone answers minus nineteen, he won’t be accepted. Why won’t he be accepted? Because… how are you going to manage to teach him? Everything you teach him he will interpret differently from what you mean. He won’t be able to learn. The psychometric exam tests conformity. Meaning, it tests who thinks the way everyone thinks. Whoever thinks the way everyone thinks gets accepted.

[Speaker E] Meaning, that’s the—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Not mediocre people—it may be geniuses—but they think the way everyone thinks. It has nothing to do with talent. It has to do with whether you think like everyone else or think differently. You can be a conformist genius, and you can be a conformist idiot; you can be a nonconformist genius, and you can be a nonconformist idiot. Meaning, it’s not really about genius or lack of genius, but the test doesn’t examine genius; it examines conformity. Maybe, maybe it also examines ability within the conformist world. That could be, if we want to be a little generous. So what does this actually mean here? Wittgenstein is basically claiming: suppose I want to teach someone mathematics. Okay, so I teach him to count. One, two, three, four, five, nine, ten, twenty, thirty, ninety-nine, one hundred, one thousand, ten thousand, and so on. We get to one hundred thousand. Okay, I’m already drenched in sweat—I taught him to count up to one hundred thousand. From here on, continue in the usual way, and so on. Okay? Fine, next week there’s a test. Count forward twenty numbers starting from ninety-nine thousand nine hundred ninety. Fine, so he counts the way he learned. Ninety-nine thousand nine hundred ninety-one, ninety-two, ninety-three, one hundred thousand, and then minus pi, e, and i. Okay? He writes Euler’s formula there for us. Meaning, what—you grab your… tear your hair out. You say: I went with you up to one hundred thousand, I’m already sweating, and it still didn’t help. But it didn’t help simply because his mind is built differently from yours. Not because he is mistaken or because he is stupid. He simply makes different generalizations from yours. That’s all. His mind generalizes differently from the way your mind generalizes. Therefore there is actually no way to teach him. You can’t teach him, because whenever we teach, we always teach bottom-up, never top-down. We always teach from examples to the general principle. Now, once you are standing before examples of the general principle, you are assuming that the student will already make the generalization. But if he makes different generalizations from yours, nothing will help. He can’t learn from you. That is why the psychometric exam filtered him out.

[Speaker F] But he said it’s mathematical. A trick of the mind might be more reasonable as a generalization.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] You can assume whatever you like, but it’s not mathematical—it’s an assumption. Yes, but you think it’s simpler, Occam’s razor. Who says it’s simpler? You can argue. In your description it might be simpler. I can expand the space of these functions in a basis of sines rather than a basis of polynomials, and then I can produce for you different criteria for simplicity. Okay. Anyway, the point is—the point is that in order to adopt a worldview in which there are truths, and this is really the important point, I’m summarizing everything we have done up to now—in order to reach a worldview in which there are truths, you have to assume in the background some kind of faculty, some kind of intellectual faculty or cognitive faculty that I call intuition, or, in a synonymous term, faith. Faith is not necessarily in God. Faith means some ability to understand that something is true not because I have a proof for it and not because I saw it, but because I understand that this is what is true. What is sometimes called common sense. Right? Faith or intuition are not certain tools—I said that explicitly. Synthetic maturity is maturity that is willing to accept claims that are not certain, but not everything that is uncertain is doubtful. An uncertain thing means: I think it is true, but okay, there is a warning label attached to it, so it’s worth checking. Fine?

[Speaker F] Can you come to someone with complaints because he doesn’t believe it’s true?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Why not? If common sense says so, then why not?

[Speaker F] In principle, I tell him this is true and he tells me it isn’t.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] If he doesn’t agree with you, no problem. But if he says, yes, it’s very plausible, but in my eyes plausible things are unacceptable—fine. If he doesn’t agree, okay, clearly he doesn’t agree, there’s nothing to be done. There’s also a philosophical dispute about this, right? A postmodern person will say: okay, common sense is also a hallucination. Meaning, I don’t accept anything on the basis of common sense, only something absolute. If the disagreement is real, you can’t blame anyone. Meaning, if it’s the result of drives, the result of other things, then you can start assigning blame. But if it’s a different conception—a different conception—what can you do? So that is really what stands in the background here: what I earlier called intuition, faith, common sense, whatever you want to call it, when the basis of the matter is some kind of combination of thought with cognition. What actually leads to Kant’s problem of the synthetic a priori is too sharp a distinction between thought and cognition. The epistemic axis deals with cognition; the logical axis deals with thought. And the claim that these axes are perpendicular basically means that neither casts any shadow on the other—they are two operations unrelated to each other. But no: there is a certain faculty, a certain human faculty, that combines thought with cognition—cognitive thinking. Fine, my intellect contemplates the world—contemplates in quotation marks, but it contemplates; it doesn’t only think about data that it received—and it reaches the conclusion that the law of gravitation is true, that there is a generalization here. This generalization, in my view, is not an act of thought; it is an act of cognition. I cognize that the law of gravitation is the correct law. Not that I have data that I accumulated by observation and then I make a generalization that is an act of thought—that is how people are usually accustomed to treating it—but that’s not correct. If that were so, it could not work. Meaning, even in the act of generalization there is something that is not merely thought, not merely internal, but some kind of interaction between our mind and the world, which is cognition that this is probably the right generalization. Not with certainty, of course—there is never certainty—but—

[Speaker P] The principle of causality.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The principle of causality, for example, is a product of exactly that kind of contemplation. Because that’s what Hume asked: how can one know the principle of causality, how can one know causal relations at all? It doesn’t come from observation. But on the other hand, every normal person believes it is true, that things have causes and that event A is the cause of event B. How do you know that? Because I contemplate the world and I understand that there are causal relations here—I simply understand it. It’s not—so there are many who say, no, no, that’s just your form of thought; you are used to thinking in causal terms because that’s how you are built, but it’s not really a claim about the world. And whoever thinks it is a claim about the world must understand that we are not dealing here with the product of thought alone. If it’s a product of thought, there is no justification for projecting it onto the world. The fact that I think this way—the world doesn’t owe me anything, okay? Rather, what? I claim that I see that this is really how the world itself behaves. So that is a cognitive capacity, not only a thinking capacity. Right, exactly. That’s what Maimonides calls at the beginning of The Guide for the Perplexed, “the eyes of the intellect.” What does “the eyes of the intellect” mean? Notice: eyes belong to epistemology, to cognition. Intellect belongs to thought, to logic. What are “the eyes of the intellect”? It’s a mixing of categories. The intellect deals in thought; why does it need eyes? You need eyes in order to see, in order to cognize. Meaning, there is something in the intellect that deals in cognition and not only in thought. Now, there are other philosophers who said similar things. Husserl spoke about eidetic seeing. Eidetic seeing, contemplation of ideas. Right, what is contemplation of ideas? Ideas are ostensibly products of thought, so what is contemplation of ideas? They say maybe it’s a borrowed term. No, it’s not a borrowed term—that is contemplation, that is cognition. In the Platonic conception, for example, the ideas are located somewhere and I contemplate them. So what looks like thought is actually an act with cognitive dimensions. “Auditory logic” of the Nazir is the same thing. Auditory is hearing—that’s epistemology, that’s cognition—and logic is thought. So auditory logic is like the eyes of the intellect. It is the joining of a cognitive, epistemic concept with a thinking concept. The eyes of the intellect or auditory logic are the same type of combination, okay? It seems to me that all these point toward the category I spoke about here. I’ll just give you an illustration of the matter in order to sharpen the point, because it’s a very important point. Think of the following: I’m sitting over some difficult mathematical problem, some differential equation, I don’t know what. I sit over it for months trying to solve it this way and that. Finally I come to the conclusion that e to the power of sine three x is the solution. Fine, I’m happy and in good spirits after months of work. Then a good friend of mine comes over, looks, says: so what are you doing? I say: look, this differential equation has completely destroyed me, I can hardly breathe, I don’t know how long it’s been. He says: what, what’s the problem? It’s e to the power of sine three x—I see it immediately, he tells me. So I’m stunned. How did you know? He says: I just had a feeling, I felt that this was the right solution, okay? Now you have to understand that when I say “I felt” in this context, it’s not like “I felt love” or “I felt fear.” Because love and fear are not claims about the world—they are my psychological state; I feel this way, I feel that way, it’s the result of how I am built. If you feel fear and I don’t feel fear, we have no disagreement. You’re simply built differently; you’re built in such a way that you feel that. But if he feels that the solution is e to the power of sine three x, and someone else feels that the solution is eight, then this is not a matter of a different psychological state. One of them is right and the other is wrong—or at most only one of them is right, because the solution is unique. So they cannot both be right. Okay? When you say “I feel,” you’re using a problematic, imprecise expression. What do you mean when you say that? According to postmodernism it could mean lots of things, because this is an empty world. Right, what he means is: I understand directly, without the calculation that you’ve been working on for months. I see directly that this is the solution. But the product of what I’m telling you is a claim about the world. It can be checked—is it true or not true? Plug it into the equation and see whether it solves it or not. It’s not like saying, “I love so-and-so.” That can’t be checked; it’s not a claim about the world, it’s a claim about me. I feel love for so-and-so. Okay, if someone else doesn’t feel love for so-and-so, we have no disagreement. You’re built that way and I’m built differently. But if someone feels that the solution is e to the power of sine four x, then we do have a disagreement. You have to plug it into the equation and see who is right and who is wrong. So the use of the term “I feel” is very misleading in this context. And the reason people use the term “I feel” is because I did this without logical or mathematically rigorous justification. I immediately tell you the answer without doing the orderly calculation and arriving at it. Someone who is a genius can sometimes do that even without all the calculations. You have to be a genius in order to do the calculations too, never mind, but one particular kind of genius is that you have a very strong intuition that sees the correct answer immediately; it doesn’t need to do the calculations. I’ll do the calculations, and maybe I’ll get to that answer too after half an hour with much blood, sweat, and tears. So that’s why in both cases—both emotion in the emotional sense and intuition—people often speak in terms of “I feel that such-and-such is the case.” Because in both cases we are dealing with something for which I have no logical justification. I cannot present a rigorous argument supporting it.

[Speaker Q] Isn’t it possible to explain the justification? Never mind. I’m saying this from personal experience, from managing investments and so on, that when you came—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] with—

[Speaker Q] an answer, people calculated it and arrived at the same answer. It’s simply a matter of experience.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Correct, but that experience is not a subjective result. That experience yields something that is true.

[Speaker Q] So how did it happen?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That is exactly the point. You don’t know how to do the calculation, but the result is a claim about the world. The result is not a claim about you. I don’t know how to explain why I love so-and-so, but the result is not a claim about the world. I have nothing to explain—I’m simply built that way, what is there to explain? Someone else is built differently and won’t love him. Therefore the “feeling” of the emotional kind is not about claims concerning the world; it is simply a report about a psychological state. I feel this way, I feel that way. But there is another kind of “I feel,” where I say “I feel,” but in fact I am making a claim about the world. It can be checked, and it is either true or false, and if someone else says otherwise then he is wrong—we have a disagreement. So the use of the term “I feel” in this context is confusing. Prima facie, I would have preferred not “I feel,” but rather “I think” or “I have an intuition that such-and-such is the case.” People use “I feel” because in both cases I lack logical justification. That is why they use “I feel.” Especially if you are a pluralist and you think that logical justification in any case gives you nothing—that is, logical justification gives you nothing because the premises themselves require justification—then you basically say: okay, so having an intuition and “I feel” in the emotional sense are the same thing. I can’t speak for everyone; I can only say that most of them are talking nonsense. I don’t know whether all of them are; maybe there are some who aren’t.

[Speaker D] I also—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Someone could also come and say that his intuition is that this phone is a soccer ball. Fine, okay. The fact that someone throws out the phrase “I have an intuition that such-and-such” is not a magic word. Even when I myself have an intuition, I check myself again to see whether I myself at least find it sufficiently persuasive. And even after I find it sufficiently persuasive and not just a bias, I still attach a warning label to it. It could be that I have an intuition and I’m mistaken. I am not claiming that intuition is an instrument for reaching certainty; I’m claiming the opposite. Even though it doesn’t bring me certainty, it is still admissible. I don’t throw it out just because it isn’t certain. That’s the point. We don’t have any better instrument than that. What can you do? That’s what we have. In short, what I’m basically claiming is that when we want to examine what is true and what is not true—and now I’m coming to the question of truth—when we want to check whether something is true or not, then of course I have to check it against reality. If I say that there are twenty chairs in this room, and I want to say that this claim is true, how do I know? How do I verify whether it’s true or not? I simply count. Right? I need to compare the claim to the state of affairs in the world that it describes, and see whether there is correspondence. If there is, the claim is true; if there isn’t, the claim is false. Okay? Meaning, truth is the product of a comparison. A comparison to the state of affairs. A claim—by the way, there is no such thing as a state in the world that is true. The state in the world is just the state in the world. True or not true refers to claims. Claims can be true or not true. When are they true? When they describe something real in the world, something that exists in the world. Then the claim is true. To say that something is true is always to make a statement about a claim, not a statement about a fact. A fact is a fact; it is not a true fact. There is no false fact; a false fact is not a fact. This factual claim can be true, and another factual claim can be false. Truth or falsity is a property of claims, not of facts. So when we talk about truth, we need to understand that truth is not exhausted merely by logical derivation of the conclusion from premises, as people often think—or truth as coherence, as philosophers call it. I can check whether what someone says is true by seeing whether it is consistent with his premises, or with my premises, or whatever. But that really reduces the concept of truth to the concept of consistency, logical consistency. But no: I claim that the concept of truth is a product of correspondence to the state of affairs in the world. A claim is true if it corresponds to the state that it describes. And this has nothing to do with the question of logical derivation or non-derivation. Logical derivation deals with validity, not truth. Validity and invalidity are properties of arguments; truth and falsity are properties of claims. When I examine whether a claim is true or false, I need to examine it against the world. To examine whether an argument is valid or invalid, I need to examine its structure and see whether its conclusion follows from the premises. I don’t need to look at the world in any way. There can be a valid argument—blessed are You, Lord our God, King of the universe, by whose word all things came to be—there can be a valid argument all of whose premises are false. All frogs have wings; this table is a frog; therefore this table has wings. That is a valid argument. Two false premises, and also a false conclusion. There is complete independence between the validity and invalidity of arguments and the truth and falsity of claims. The only dependence between them is that if an argument is valid, then it cannot be that its premises are true and the conclusion false. That is the only connection between the question of an argument’s validity and the question of the truth and falsity of claims. Okay? When we talk about truth, we are not talking about consistency and not talking about validity; we are talking about truth. Therefore, when you tell me, “These and those are the words of the living God,” I immediately jump to conclusions—which we will get to later—“These and those are the words of the living God.” So what are you telling me? That each one is consistent with his premises. Thank you very much. “Each one is consistent with his premises” is a trivial statement. That is not what it says there. What it says is that each has truth. I will qualify that later. So we need to understand how it can be that a thing and its opposite are both true. The concept of truth is not a concept of consistency; the concept of truth is an absolute concept. But consistency is—

[Speaker F] Relative.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right, a necessary condition but not a sufficient one. Something that is inconsistent is certainly not true.

[Speaker F] If we assume that the world—

[Speaker K] is absolute with the Master of the Universe, therefore if there is a dispute, the absolute is with the Master of the Universe but not with flesh and blood.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, but I’m saying that truth, in principle, is an absolute concept. When I say that there is truth on both sides, there is absolute truth on both sides. That is my claim.

[Speaker K] No, absolute like Beit Shammai and Beit Hillel, yes.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] There is absolute truth on both sides. And that does not contradict the principles of logic—we’ll talk about it, I’ll explain it more later. But the concept of truth is an absolute concept—that is exactly the point. I want to avoid all the escape routes that usually accompany these discussions, like “everyone is consistent with his own premises,” which is precisely an escape into narrativity, into standard postmodernism. No, no—I am speaking within a monistic world, a world in which there is one absolute truth, and within that I need to understand what “these and those are the words of the living God” means and how we relate to dispute, and that is our topic: dispute and truth. Okay? Therefore, when I talk about truth, I’m not talking about truth as consistency; I’m talking about truth as correspondence. That is one thing. Second, when I talk about pluralism, about a multiplicity of truths, then of course one can talk about it in the descriptive sense. There are many positions in the world. Right? Different groups or different individuals hold different positions. That is a fact that one cannot argue with, right? It is clearly true. About that fact there is no multiplicity of truths. That fact is certainly true—certainly, almost certainly. Okay? But that is not substantive pluralism; that is descriptive pluralism. I am describing that there are many positions in the world. Substantive pluralism is a claim that—it does not speak about different groups, but says that all the groups are right together, or that none of them are right, or that there is no such thing as being right—you can formulate it in different ways. Substantive pluralism means that there really are many truths, not that there are many groups who think different things. When I say there are many groups that think different things, I can still be an out-and-out monist in the substantive sense, and in the substantive sense I can believe that there is only one truth. Right, there are many different groups who think differently—and they are mistaken. So what? So to say that there are many groups that think different things is descriptive pluralism. Substantive pluralism means that there is a multiplicity of truths, or that there are several truths and they are all truth, all of them correct. That is substantive pluralism. Therefore I am not talking about pluralism as a fact or social pluralism, but about philosophical or substantive pluralism, okay? Okay, so that is just the initial introduction to the concepts of truth, and now I’ve also opened up the question of pluralism a bit, because what I want to address later is this issue of how to relate to different positions in Jewish law—but not only in Jewish law; in general. There is a dispute. Does that necessarily mean one is right and the others are wrong? Maybe not? Of course, the fact that there are different opinions—as I said—is a fact, a correct description; about that I have nothing to say. But the question is what we do with that. How to understand “these and those are the words of the living God,” and so on. Therefore this conceptual framework opens a door to begin discussing the question of dispute, and that is why the topic of this series is dispute and truth. So on the one hand I define the concept of truth as something absolute and not merely consistency, okay? On the other hand, we will have to see what that means for disputes. Apparently what this says is that disputes can exist—because factual pluralism is a fact, there are people with different opinions or groups with different opinions—but it means that one of them is right and the others are wrong, because there is only one truth.

[Speaker N] If I believe that a whipped-cream cake is also, I don’t know, say sweet, and it also causes health damage, then that’s still true.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] One person says—

[Speaker N] that it’s sweet and the other says that it’s harmful to health. Right.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] And the third person says this lectern is made of wood. So what does that have to do with anything? I don’t get it, right? That’s also true. Obviously they’re both right, but there’s no contradiction between the two things they’re saying, so why do I care that they’re both right? This lectern is also made of wood, so what? When you’re talking about contradictory positions and you say they’re both right, then you need to understand why, how that can be. Yes, with contradictory positions, then ostensibly if you’re a monist, if you think truth is something absolute, it’s not a matter of coherence, then the moment there’s a dispute, factually there is a dispute, but on the other hand it’s pretty clear that one is right and the others are wrong. So about that we’ll see that maybe even that isn’t entirely precise. If someone says it isn’t tasty, then here one is right and the other is wrong. If one says it’s tasty and the other says it isn’t healthy, okay, so what? And the third says it’s brown. Why? Ah, no, then you’re not claiming “it’s tasty,” you’re saying “it tastes good to me.” So we’re back to the subjective issue, and that’s obvious; there’s no dispute here.

Okay. Yes, it’s like—there’s a very nice book by, do you know C. S. Lewis? Narnia? That children’s writer? So he has philosophy books too; he’s the clearest philosopher I know, really a brilliant person. He was a believing Christian, and he has books defending Christian faith and conservative philosophy; not for nothing do the Shalem Press people like him. Among other things he has a little book called The Abolition of Man. That little book begins with some description from Coleridge, some British poet I think, about two people standing in front of a waterfall and exchanging views over whether the thing is sublime or not sublime or something like that, and he brings two literature textbooks from schools and just tears into them. So he doesn’t mention their names so as not to hurt them, but he says, I saw these books and because of that I decided to write this little book. They say that basically in these textbooks it says that the argument between the two people standing by the waterfall—one said it’s sublime and the other said it’s banal—there’s really no argument at all, because each one is only describing the experiences or feelings inside him. I feel feelings of sublimity and he doesn’t feel them. Okay.

But C. S. Lewis says that’s a huge mistake. Clearly, when someone says this waterfall is sublime, he doesn’t just mean to convey feelings that are being stirred in him. He means to say something about the waterfall. This waterfall is something that justifies the awakening of feelings of sublimity. And if those feelings of sublimity aren’t awakened in someone, then something is wrong with him. That’s the claim. And that’s how it is, and clearly that’s how it is. Otherwise there’d be no point in communicating this from one person to another. I have feelings—but why do I need to convey my feelings to you? I want to see that you also have the same feelings, because I think you’re supposed to have them too. When people argue, when people argue about a work of art, they always say, “Well, there’s no arguing about taste.” Not true—there is. When you argue about a work of art, you’re basically assuming that there is a way to judge a work of art, a correct way and an incorrect way to judge a work of art. And the fact that there are arguments—true, factually there are arguments—but that doesn’t mean it isn’t true that one is right and the other is wrong. The fact that there are arguments doesn’t mean anything. It’s just worth reading what he says there; his formulation there is very beautiful.

Okay, right. The claim I actually want to move toward is that although I’m a monist in the sense of truth—truth is truth as correspondence, absolute truth and not truth as emergence or coherence—still, the world of dispute is not such a simple world as it appears. And that still doesn’t mean that in the context of a dispute it’s obvious that one is right and the other is wrong. But up to this point I’ve given the introduction on the topic of truth. Now I’ll talk about an introduction to the topic of dispute. Okay, that’s the second player on our field. Okay, let’s talk a bit about dispute, and I’ll do it in a historical perspective. That is, again in the halakhic context. I want to talk a bit about the development of disputes in the world of Jewish law.

So, historically, I want to talk about a collection of topics in the Talmud—aggadic topics, by the way, which is not usually what I deal with—where there’s a very strong sense that they have something in common. First of all, the intensity, the literary power, the tension accompanying these aggadot is very similar. Even though they’re in different places—one is in Bava Metzia, another in Sanhedrin and Berakhot and in different places—I’m talking about the Oven of Akhnai on the one hand, the deposition of Rabban Gamliel from his office in other places, his disputes with Rabbi Yehoshua, things like that, all the passages of that sort. A collection of passages scattered throughout the Talmud, but it seems to me there’s some line there, at least on first impression it’s pretty clear that they have something in common. And I think this can be deciphered through a historical look. These stories involve sages from the same generation, and it’s pretty clear that this is really centered around a very specific historical moment: the deposition of Rabban Gamliel from his office. And all the stories are really around that issue, even if they don’t mention it. They’re all around that issue, and in a certain sense this is a description of the formation of dispute in the world of Jewish law. And that’s why it was so powerful and even tragic, I would say, because it was something new, something that hadn’t really existed until that time, and it created a crisis. It created a crisis, and I think through this it’s very interesting to examine the topic of dispute a bit.

I’ll start maybe with the first chapter of Tractate Avot. In the first chapter of Tractate Avot it says: “Moses received the Torah from Sinai and transmitted it to Joshua, and Joshua to the elders, and the elders to the prophets, and the prophets transmitted it to the Men of the Great Assembly.” Stop there maybe. Yes, so as I said earlier, they said three things—who are the Men of the Great Assembly? “Be deliberate in judgment, raise up many disciples, and make a fence around the Torah.” And what did all the people before them say? The generation at the beginning of the Second Temple period. What happened from Moses our teacher until them? Nobody said anything? They said three things. I don’t know, it doesn’t say. Mishnah 2: Shimon the Righteous was one of the last surviving members of the Great Assembly. He would say: On three things the world stands—on Torah, on the service, and on acts of kindness. Suddenly Shimon the Righteous is already a named authority, meaning a person with a defined name, a specific person who says three things. The first person in the history of the Oral Torah whose words of Torah are registered in his name in the land registry. There’s nobody before him. This is the end of the Great Assembly, meaning we’re already well into the Second Temple period, into the era of the Second Temple. Okay?

After that Antigonus of Sokho received from Shimon the Righteous. He would say: Do not be like servants—and then suddenly everybody starts talking. Yes, “the Lord opened the mouth of the donkey.” Suddenly everyone starts to speak. Meaning up until the Men of the Great Assembly, who said some statement—three collective statements without names yet—nobody said anything. The Men of the Great Assembly say those three collective statements. The remnant of the Great Assembly, Shimon the Righteous, already begins to say statements in his own name. And from there on, each one already has words of Torah that he says and that are attributed to him. There’s already personal Torah, yes, Torah attributed to specific people, people with names.

Then Yose ben Yo’ezer of Tzeredah and Yose ben Yohanan of Jerusalem received from them, which is really the first pair, the two Yoses. And they too said things: Yose ben Yo’ezer says, Yose ben Yohanan of Jerusalem would say—each of them already has his own sayings—and then the five pairs up to Shammai and Hillel, which was the last pair. I remind you that the two Yoses—it’s in the Jerusalem Talmud in Hagigah, and Rashi says it too on the Talmud in Hagigah in our Babylonian Talmud—that the dispute about laying on of hands on a Jewish holiday, the dispute between the two Yoses, is the first dispute in the history of the Oral Torah. That’s where the dispute of the Oral Torah began, the dispute of the Oral Torah. Now I assume there were arguments earlier too. There were arguments. But a dispute that remained, where each opinion got attached to a different person—a dispute like that, which remained for a long time, maybe forever if you like—that began with the two Yoses. And Rashi even writes that this was because of the Greek conflict and so on; that was already at the beginning of the confrontation with the Greeks.

After that, yes, as I said, all the pairs: Nittai the Arbelite, Judah ben Tabbai and Shimon ben Shetah, Shemaya and Avtalyon, Hillel and Shammai. All right? And then Hillel and Shammai of course said many things; we already know their sayings. Then Rabban Gamliel says: “Make for yourself a rabbi.” Rabban Gamliel is already among the disciples of Hillel and Shammai, then Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai, and after Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai comes Rabban Gamliel and Rabbi Eliezer the Great, and so on. So Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai—Rabban Gamliel basically says, “Make for yourself a rabbi, remove yourself from doubt, and do not tithe by estimation too much.” Yes, they all say three things for some reason; I don’t know why, they were fond of it, like Bezalel. Shimon his son, the son of Rabban Gamliel, then Rabban Shimon ben Gamliel says, etc. There’s a whole chain there, and with that chapter 1 ends.

I move to chapter 2. Rabbi says—we’ve already jumped down the line of descent from Rabban Gamliel and so on—Rabbi, their descendant: “What is the straight path a person should choose for himself?” Rabban Gamliel, the son of Rabbi Yehudah HaNasi—yes, that’s a later Rabban Gamliel—also used to say all kinds of things, all kinds of statements he would say, he would say. Mishnah 8 in chapter 2: “Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai received from Hillel and Shammai.” Now you remember him? I don’t understand. Until now everything was chronological. You finished with Hillel and Shammai near the end of chapter 1, moved on to all kinds of sages who said all kinds of things, already generations later, still in order of the generations, and then you go back: “Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai received from Hillel and Shammai. He would say: If you have learned much Torah, do not take credit for yourself, for that is what you were created for.” He also said things, Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai. “He had five disciples, and these are they: Rabbi Eliezer ben Horkanus, Rabbi Yehoshua ben Hananiah, and Rabbi Yose the Priest,” and so on. He would enumerate their praise, and then each of them says various things, and now each one says. That’s it, it spreads out. Notice: regarding these five disciples it doesn’t say he received Torah from him and transmitted it to so-and-so. That description of received and transmitted does not appear here. From Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai onward there is no more “received and transmitted.” It doesn’t appear. He had five disciples. But he didn’t receive and transmit. What is the meaning of this? Why this strange description? Why is Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai pushed off to the second chapter of Avot instead of being brought in order? Something happened with Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai. Something that broke this whole business. The destruction—but the destruction is of course the physical event. What does it mean in terms of the formation of dispute, in terms of the development of the Oral Torah?

Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai, after all, asked for Yavneh and its sages, right? He left besieged Jerusalem, asked for Yavneh and its sages, and basically established the Sanhedrin in Yavneh. The first exile of the Sanhedrin; afterward it moved to various stations, but he basically established Yavneh. All the tannaim, the first generation of tannaim, is the generation after Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai. What we call tannaim—we don’t call the pairs tannaim. What are really called tannaim are the disciples of Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai. The five who appear here and others—from there the period of the tannaim begins, and they are all sages in Yavneh. The sages of Yavneh, those are the tannaim. What happened in Yavneh at the beginning? The first generation of sages of Yavneh was Rabban Gamliel and Rabbi Eliezer, who was Rabban Gamliel’s brother-in-law, and Rabbi Yehoshua, who was Rabban Gamliel’s disputant—and Rabbi Yehoshua and Rabbi Eliezer are colleagues of the same generation too. And after them there was the whole gang, yes? There was Rabbi Elazar ben Azaryah and Rabbi Akiva and also the younger ones. Rabbi Shimon bar Yohai is already after Rabbi Akiva. Those were already younger, the second and third generations in Yavneh. But the first generation in Yavneh was the disciples of Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai, first and foremost the two brothers-in-law, Rabban Gamliel and Rabbi Eliezer, and Rabbi Yehoshua, who was basically their disputant. Okay?

And this context basically tells us where we can place all the stories I started with, because they all deal with Rabban Gamliel, Rabbi Yehoshua, and Rabbi Eliezer. All those stories deal with them, and Rabbi Akiva gets brought in there too, their disciple. Okay? What happened in that period? Why does it break the Mishnah’s description of “received and transmitted”? Until that stage, until that break, “He received the Torah from Sinai and transmitted it to Joshua,” etc. Received, transmitted to this one; received, transmitted to that one. From Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai onward, the whole thing breaks: “He had five disciples.” Nobody received, nobody transmitted, nothing. There are still disciples, there is still a rabbi and disciples, but there’s no “received and transmitted.” Something there.

[Speaker F] He himself did receive.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, from there it breaks. Okay? The question is what exactly happened there. More than that, it happens a generation after Hillel and Shammai. Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai still learned from Hillel and Shammai. A generation after Hillel and Shammai—and after all we know that the first great dispute that is preserved, that could not be decided for years as the Talmud says, is the House of Hillel and the House of Shammai. So something in that generation awakens the issue of dispute. The issue of dispute begins to take shape in that generation. From there on, sayings begin that belong to specific people. Torah becomes personal Torah. Until that stage there are no disputes. “He received the Torah from Sinai and transmitted it to Joshua, and Joshua to the elders.” Received and transmitted—a kind of chain of messengers, where the transmitters and receivers are hollow pipes. The Torah comes from Sinai—not really, but that’s the ethos. Okay? Hollow pipes. They just pass it on. There are no disputes; if there are disputes, they solve them and decide what to pass on, and there is one Torah.

[Speaker F] I don’t think there were no disputes, because there was only one person each time.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, I didn’t say there was only one person each time. Why?

[Speaker F] No, that when Moses receives the Torah from Sinai, then when he passes it to Joshua he can’t pass it—not pass it directly but…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] He can do anything, but that’s not what happened. What do you mean, not what happened? The description in the Mishnah comes to teach us something about the mode of transmission up to Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai, or up to Hillel and Shammai, and from there onward. Everything happened both before and after as well—I’ll talk about that too—but there’s something here; it comes to tell us something about the formation of dispute. After all, Maimonides himself cites the Talmud that says disputes were created because the disciples of Hillel and Shammai did not serve their masters sufficiently. The formation of dispute is this generation. This whole story is not accidental. There’s something here telling us: in this generation, something happened, okay?

And I think what happened in this generation is that up to Hillel and Shammai—and maybe Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai preserved this a bit, tried to receive from both of them—the Torah basically passed as reception and transmission, a hollow pipe, and people lived with the consciousness that they were passing the torch on. It’s not their Torah; it’s the Torah of the Holy One, blessed be He, and we pass it from one to another. At a certain stage disputes begin. And why? Because each one has his own Torah, his own view, his own whatever, and he says this and that one says that. Disputes begin. There is an opinion attributed to so-and-so, an opinion attributed to someone else. From here on, Torah no longer passes through hollow pipes. The Oral Torah begins to be created, not merely transmitted. People create Torah; they don’t only pass Torah from the previous generation to the next, but begin to produce the Torah. That is the concept of the Oral Torah.

Okay, we spoke about Shimon the Righteous, that he was the first person whose words of Torah were in his own name. Right? Shimon the Righteous—there’s a very interesting story in the Talmud, that when Alexander the Great arrived in Israel—which never happened—the sages of Jerusalem went out to greet him, headed by Shimon the Righteous. And then when he saw Shimon the Righteous he got off his horse and bowed before him, and when his companions asked him why he got down before him—

[Speaker S] So what did he say?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] He came to the Land of Israel and the sages of Jerusalem came out to greet him, like this—

[Speaker S] Shimon the Righteous was the one he saw in a dream before every victory.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So he said, yes, “The image of this man went before me and was victorious in all my wars.” And actually, he was the one who led me all along the way; suddenly I see him here live, right in front of my eyes, so that’s why I got off my horse. Now I’ve already heard a number of people who take this in an essential direction. More than that—the event of course did not happen. Many aggadot didn’t, but here it’s clear it didn’t. Why? First, because Shimon the Righteous did not live in the time of Alexander the Great—

[Speaker N] He did not—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] —he was not from the same period, and Alexander the Great did not arrive in the Land of Israel. Now if there’s a true story, there’s not much point asking lots of questions on it: that’s what happened, and that’s that. But when a non-true story is constructed, then it is definitely worth checking why they constructed it this way and why this happened rather than that. Everything has meaning, because the story was constructed in order to convey some kind of meaning. So precisely a non-true story is a story that comes to teach me more than a true story. A true story—well, that’s what happened, so that’s how it’s told. What was there exactly?

The claim is that Shimon the Righteous was basically the beginning of the era of the Oral Torah. He was the first man who had words of Torah attributed to him. And Alexander the Great’s claim is basically—Alexander the Great, as is known, was an enlightened conqueror, and his purpose was to spread Greek culture, philosophy, art, and so on throughout the world. Okay? And he said that the one who really led his move was Shimon the Righteous. And the claim is that the Oral Torah basically paved the way—so to speak paved the way—for the spread of Greek culture. Or in other words, the spread of Greek culture was an instrument enabling the Oral Torah to take shape. It was really the torch for whose sake this whole process happened. In the perspective of the Sages, an aggadic perspective of course—it doesn’t matter at the moment, I’m not getting into that question now.

[Speaker P] Was Shimon the Righteous influenced by Hellenism?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, no, this is not a historical claim. Not a principled historical claim; call it a historiosophical claim, not a historical one. It’s a claim that says that in order for the Oral Torah to take shape, we needed philosophy and logic. We didn’t have that before, and therefore before that the Torah was some kind of dogmatic thing passed from one to another, fine, but we really didn’t have a way to produce Torah, analyze things, think about things systematically. Those tools we had to receive from this encounter with Greece. And it was, of course, a very traumatic encounter. A very traumatic encounter because critical, logical, philosophical thinking meeting a conservative group or position—that’s a recipe for an explosion. Someone comes and asks you: who told you? Prove it. Maybe it isn’t true. And you’ll always say what? A law given to Moses at Sinai, that’s what the Holy One, blessed be He, said, a scriptural decree. Suddenly someone asks, wait, wait—what decree? Who says? Maybe it isn’t true? These are heretical questions, right? Meaning there’s a very great tension in the encounter between a conservative group and a critical group. Okay? Right?

That’s why many times the Talmud says that—actually not the Talmud, it’s Megillat Ta’anit—it says there that darkness descended on the world on the eighth of Tevet, darkness descended on the world for three days when the Torah was translated into Greek. That’s on the one hand. There was a very great tension in the encounter with Greekness, yes? In all cultures we don’t find people becoming Egyptianized or Babylonianized; we find people becoming Hellenized. In other words, the cultural interaction was not so dramatic as it was in the Greek context. At least that’s how it was perceived—again, these statements are not historical. And on the other hand it says: “May the beauty of Japheth dwell in the tents of Shem.” The Sages saw this encounter with Japheth, with Greece, in some sense as very positive too, unlike all the other cultures. Therefore, for example, Rabban Gamliel writes in Megillah that it is permitted to translate the Torah into Greek, and only Greek, not any other language. Okay? With all the reservations about Greekness, on the other hand there is some appreciative statement, a statement that understands there is something here.

The father of the Oral Torah, basically, is the first sage who has Torah that is not from the Holy One, blessed be He; it is his Torah. Okay, Torah that comes from him. He was basically the one who paved the way for Greek philosophy and logic. In other words, this is basically saying, in other words, that the systematic mode of thinking formed in Greece is what created the Oral Torah among us, and it is what enabled the Torah to become a human Torah, a developing Torah, a Torah of disputes, a Torah of arguments and proofs and practical ramifications and everything we know today and that seems totally obvious to us, but once did not exist. This encounter with Greece was necessary for this thing to come into being.

Now that’s Shimon the Righteous. From then on there are all the pairs and Hillel and Shammai and then Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai, first generation of Yavneh. A few hundred years pass—but a few hundred years pass—and this process crystallizes over those several hundred years and explodes in the first generation of Yavneh. In the first generation of Yavneh we reap the fruits of the formation of the Oral Torah, which by definition has dispute embedded within it. Because a human Torah always has dispute: you think this way, I think differently. The Torah of the Holy One, blessed be He, is very clear—what did He say; my opinion is irrelevant. The moment I speak about what I think, different opinions, disputes arise. Therefore this process, which began at the beginning of the Second Temple period or a bit after the beginning of the Second Temple period, with the formation of the Oral Torah and human thought, ultimately exploded at the end of the Second Temple period or after the destruction already in Yavneh with the creation and crystallization of dispute. And that’s what I want to continue with next time. Thank you.

[Speaker J] Thank you very much. I just have one short question. Okay. Regarding the power of intuition you spoke about—you also called it faith / belief.