Positivism in Halakha and in General, Lesson 1
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Table of Contents
- Deduction, validity, and the emptiness of the analytic
- Truth versus validity and how to test each one
- Analogy and induction as non-necessary inferences with weight
- The information criterion and the philosophical uncertainty principle
- Prediction, intelligence, the capital market, and the statistics of apparent success
- Skepticism, postmodernism, and the price of demanding certainty
- Stages of intellectual maturation: dogmatism, enlightenment, maturity
- Three ways out: skepticism, fundamentalism, and synthetic maturity
- Truth versus certainty and the attitude toward science and common sense
- A historical parallel in the West and tension with Greek culture
- The West versus the Far East and the example of Zen
Summary
General Overview
The text draws a distinction between valid deductive inferences, in which the conclusion adds no information beyond the premises and therefore one cannot accept the premises while rejecting the conclusion, and non-necessary inferences such as analogy and induction, which do add information and therefore are not valid in the logical sense, yet still carry practical weight. It formulates a trade-off between certainty and the amount of information added, calling it the “philosophical uncertainty principle,” from which it follows that science cannot be certain by definition, whereas logic and mathematics “play it safe” because they add no information. From this, it develops an account of intellectual maturation, both personal and historical, in three stages, and presents three possible exits: skepticism, fundamentalism, or “synthetic maturity,” which accepts probability without confusing truth with certainty.
Deduction, Validity, and the Emptiness of the Analytic
A valid logical argument is one in which it is impossible for the premises to be true and the conclusion false, because anyone who accepts the premises is already committed to the conclusion. Breaking down the general premise “all tables are white” into a collection of particular claims shows that the conclusion adds no information that was not already included in the premises, and therefore validity stems from “the emptiness of the analytic.” Validity is not truth, and an argument can be valid even when both its premises and its conclusion are false, because validity describes only the relation between premises and conclusion.
Truth Versus Validity and How to Test Each One
Truth and falsity are judgments about statements, and they are tested against reality through correspondence between the content of the statement and the state of affairs it describes. Validity and invalidity are judgments about arguments, and there is no observational way to test them, because they do not claim anything about the world but rather about the structure connecting premises to conclusion. Testing validity is done through analysis of the structure, and at its root it asks whether the conclusion contains information beyond what is included in the premises, with Aristotle’s maps of syllogisms serving as a catalog of patterns in which this can be shown.
Analogy and Induction as Non-Necessary Inferences with Weight
Analogy and induction are not valid because in them the conclusion adds information not found in the premises, and therefore does not follow from them necessarily. Even so, they are used in every area of life, in science, and in law, because using them means believing that the conclusion is true on the basis of reasonable grounds rather than logical necessity. Trust in induction is not certainty, but it is also not “a shot in the dark,” and the text argues that there is a continuum of levels of plausibility between absolute validity and sheer speculation, even if there are no clear tools to measure it.
The Information Criterion and the Philosophical Uncertainty Principle
The distinction between a valid argument and an invalid one depends on whether the argument adds information, and how much information it adds relative to what is given in the premises. The more information one adds, the more one pays in certainty; and the higher the certainty, the smaller the amount of added information, until a completely certain argument adds no information at all. The text formulates this as a “philosophical uncertainty principle,” according to which the product of certainty and the amount of information is constant, and concludes that science is never certain because it deals with accumulating information, whereas mathematics can demand absolute proof because it adds no information about the world.
Prediction, Intelligence, the Capital Market, and the Statistics of Apparent Success
The text casts doubt on the possibility of estimating the reliability of intelligence assessments, and argues that the things that really matter are hard to measure, and that it is difficult to show that expert prediction is better than that of a layman or random chance. It presents the claim that a 50% prediction on a binary question is worth nothing, and is even worse than a biased prediction that can be reversed to obtain a higher probability. It brings in Nassim Taleb (“The Black Swan”) to explain how, out of a huge number of random “analysts,” serially successful ones will emerge after the fact and appear to be geniuses, and suggests checking whether there is a statistically significant deviation from the expected distribution. It gives the example of criticism of David Passig as someone who formulates amorphous predictions that cannot be falsified, and includes a discussion of age pyramids and policy implications such as changes in China’s birth policy.
Skepticism, Postmodernism, and the Price of Demanding Certainty
There is a tendency to regard any argument that is not certain as worthless speculation, and refusal to accept “intermediate levels” of plausibility leads to skepticism that accepts only logical certainty. The text argues that this approach saws off the branch it sits on, because a logical argument adds no information, and therefore the demand for absolute certainty prevents the accumulation of knowledge and ends in total skepticism. It presents positivism as the peak of the Enlightenment, from which postmodernism burst forth following the recognition that “only what is certain is admissible” together with “nothing is certain” leads to “nothing is admissible.”
Stages of Intellectual Maturation: Dogmatism, Enlightenment, Maturity
The text describes three stages in a person’s intellectual maturation: a dogmatic stage in which claims are accepted from authority; a rationalist “adolescent rebellion” stage in which proof is demanded for everything; and a crisis stage in which one discovers that every proof rests on unproven basic assumptions. It describes Descartes as someone who tried to “save rationalism” by means of the cogito and to offer proof without assumptions, and argues that this attempt did not succeed. It also adds a personal description of a period in which he devoured books on logic out of a decision to accept only what was proven, until he understood the “broken trough” of the demand for absolute proof.
Three Ways Out: Skepticism, Fundamentalism, and Synthetic Maturity
The text presents one possibility of maturing into consistent skepticism that refuses to accept any non-absolute claim, but in practice continues to function on the basis of psychology and habit, such as eating and boarding airplanes. It presents a second possibility of fundamentalism, which gives up the claim that certainty is unattainable and accepts sources “above reason” such as prophecy, divine inspiration, “the leading sage of the generation,” or any charismatic source, while refusing to subject the foundations to rational criticism; it argues that fundamentalism is not necessarily violent, and that even Mother Teresa can be a fundamentalist in the philosophical sense. It presents a third possibility, that of “synthetic maturity,” which accepts the premise that not everything can be proven but gives up the demand that only what is certain is acceptable, and is willing to rely on plausibility and intuition while maintaining a constant warning that one may be mistaken.
Truth Versus Certainty and the Attitude Toward Science and Common Sense
The text states that truth is a question of correspondence between a claim and the world, whereas certainty is a question of the degree of a person’s conviction, and therefore one can hold a claim to be true without seeing it as certain. It argues that much postmodernism and skepticism stem from a mistaken identification of the true with the certain, and presents the synthetic position as a sober outlook that believes in plausibility without turning a question mark into an exclamation point.
A Historical Parallel in the West and Tension with Greek Culture
The text sketches a Western history parallel to the three stages of maturation: an ancient dogmatic age of myths and authority; a rationalist “adolescence” reaching its peak in Greece with the demand for proofs and with Aristotle; and an Enlightenment crisis peaking in the mid-20th century in positivism and erupting as postmodernism. It describes the tension between religious culture and the Greek demand “who says so? prove it” as a parent-versus-teen dynamic, and argues that the attitude toward analogy and induction lies at the center of the process, because synthetic maturity accepts “soft” inferences as carrying necessary weight for the accumulation of information.
The West Versus the Far East and the Example of Zen
The text distinguishes between the West and the Far East, presenting Western thought as conquest, analysis, and placing the subject at the center, as opposed to an Eastern stance of living and merging that does not “understand” the thing but exists within it. It mentions the book “Zen Buddhism and Psychoanalysis,” edited by Yehuda Ragbi, and Suzuki, and illustrates the gap through poems by Tennyson and Basho about looking at a flower, showing the difference between the Western desire to take, use, and control and the Eastern contemplation that says, “how lovely you are in the crack of the wall.”
Full Transcript
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Let’s start with a distinction between two kinds of arguments. A regular logical argument is an argument that derives a conclusion from premises. We say that such an argument is valid in a case where it’s impossible for the premises to be true and the conclusion false. In other words, if the premises are true, then you also have to accept the conclusion. For example: all tables are white, this thing is a table, therefore this thing is white. Okay? That’s a valid argument. Why is it valid? Because anyone who accepts the two premises also has to accept the conclusion. There are softer kinds of arguments that are not necessary, like analogy or induction, or inferences—I don’t know whether people call them non-logical inferences, but you could also call them part of logic. Traditionally, logic usually deals with deductive inferences, necessary inferences. So inferences of this kind are non-necessary inferences. For example: this table is white, this is also a table, so this is also white. That’s an analogy. It makes an analogy between the two tables. Or induction: this table is white, this table is also white, so apparently all tables are white. These two kinds of arguments, both analogy and induction, are arguments that are not necessary, right? It could be that this table is white and that’s also a table, but it’s green. In other words, there’s no necessity to say that all tables have the same color. But we still use this kind of argument even though it isn’t certain, it isn’t necessary. We use it. What is the source of the difference between these types of arguments? In other words, why is one of them necessary and the others not necessary? So here—we’ve talked about this in different contexts in the past, so some of this will probably be familiar, but still I’ll try to do it in an orderly way. A valid logical argument, like the one I mentioned before—all tables are white, this thing is a table, therefore this thing is white—why is it valid? Why is it necessary? Why can’t someone who accepts the premises reject the conclusion? So let’s try to imagine someone who comes down to us from outer space and says: yes, the premises sound reasonable to me, but the conclusion really doesn’t—I don’t agree with the conclusion. What am I supposed to tell him in order to explain to him that he’s wrong? Or to convince him? In other words, he accepts that all tables are white, he accepts that this thing is a table. But why infer from that that this table is white? Or that this thing is white? That he doesn’t see. Now, to us it seems obvious. In other words, if you accept the premises, you can’t deny the conclusion. You can’t reject the conclusion. Fine, but he opens up a pair of calf eyes at us and says, what, I don’t know, who says, maybe it’s green? I don’t know. I accept the premises, I don’t accept the conclusion. What am I supposed to tell him? In other words, how do I convince him that it’s true? It seems to me that the way to try to do this is to try and break down the two premises. In other words, let’s look at our two premises. You say that this thing is a table, and you say that all tables are white. Those are the two premises. The conclusion I want to derive is that this thing is white. But let’s look for a moment at the two premises. What does it mean that all tables are white? It means that table A is white and table B is white and table C is white—we go through all the tables in the world, all of them are white. Now the second premise says that this thing is also a table. That means that among other things we also went through it. When we say all tables are white, one of the items on that list is this table. And we said it is white. And you accepted that. So you accepted that this table is white. So how can you deny the conclusion that this table is white? In other words, if we break down the big premise in the argument—that all tables are white—and simply build from it a collection of particular claims, this table is white and this is white and this is white and this is white, instead of saying them all together, then we suddenly see that the conclusion contains no information that wasn’t already in the premises. In other words, when you accepted the premises, you had already accepted this. In other words, there is nothing in the conclusion beyond what you accepted in the premises. Usually it’s just less, but certainly not more. Therefore, anyone who accepts the premises has to accept the conclusion. What this basically means is that a logical argument is valid because of—
[Speaker B] That is—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It means the claim is that a valid logical argument never adds information. That’s why it’s valid, because it doesn’t add information. In other words, it is valid because the information in the premises from which I inferred includes within it the information in the conclusion. And if I agreed, then I have to agree to the conclusion. There’s nothing in it beyond that. Because it doesn’t add new information, that’s why it’s valid. In other words, that’s why I must accept the conclusion. Of course, validity doesn’t mean that the conclusion is true. It means that someone who accepts the premises must accept the conclusion. He may reject the premises, but you can’t accept the premises and then reject the conclusion. That can’t be. That’s the meaning of validity. Validity is a concept adjacent to, but different from, the concept of truth. In other words, truth and falsity are judgments that speak about sentences, about claims. A claim can be true and it can be false. An argument—there’s no such thing as a true argument. True applies to claims, not to arguments. An argument can be valid. Valid or invalid. Invalid means not valid. Okay. The truth or falsity of claims is measured against the reality they describe. If I say that it is dark outside now, then how do I know whether that claim is true or false? I look. If it really is dark outside, there is correspondence between the content of the claim and the state of affairs it describes, then the claim is true. If there is no correspondence, then the claim is false. And the way to check the truth or falsity of a claim is simply to compare it—for example, in an observation. A factual claim is the simplest case. So you observe the fact it describes, and then I immediately see whether it is true or false. In contrast, with arguments, to know whether an argument is valid or invalid, the statement that an argument is valid is a statement that establishes a connection between the premises and the conclusion. It doesn’t establish anything about the truth or falsity of the claims. So there’s nothing here to compare. In other words, you aren’t asserting something that you can compare with a fact and see whether it is correct or not. I’m not talking here about the truth of claims, I’m talking about the validity of arguments. Okay? So how do I nevertheless test the validity of arguments? What is the way to do that? Aristotle already drew maps—several maps—of what he called syllogisms, in other words necessary inferences. Various patterns of necessary inferences, and of course you can see whether the argument pattern presented to you fits one of the Aristotelian patterns. But of course that only pushes the claim back one step. In other words, how did Aristotle determine those patterns of argument? So he determined them. And now I can compare to the patterns he determined. But how did he determine them? In other words, how can you know whether some particular argument is valid or invalid? What is the criterion? If it’s not observation, then what is it? Clearly there is something analytic here. In other words, you aren’t observing anything, you aren’t making a comparison between a claim and some fact the claim describes; you look at the structure of the argument, and by analyzing the structure of the argument you can see whether it is valid or not. And basically what you need to check, if I now go back to what I started with, is simply whether there is information in the conclusion beyond what was in the premises. That’s all. All of Aristotle’s argument patterns are simply kinds of arguments in which I can show that there is no information in the conclusion that wasn’t included in the premises. That’s all. That’s how you determine it.
[Speaker B] Doesn’t a premise have to be true? No. No. Validity is just a game.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right. Right. There is no connection between the validity of an argument and the truth or falsity of claims. The only connection there is—it doesn’t concern us all that much, but just to complete the picture—the only connection there is between the concepts of truth and falsity and the concepts of validity and invalidity is the connection I mentioned at the beginning. When I say that a certain argument is valid, that means that if the premises are true, then the conclusion is also true. That’s the connection. In principle, that means there can be a valid argument whose premises are false and whose conclusion is false. And still the argument is valid. All frogs have wings, this table is a frog, therefore this table has wings. That is a valid argument. Even though both its premises are false and the conclusion is false as well. Nothing here is true. But validity doesn’t speak about truth, it speaks only about the relation between the premises and the conclusion. Okay? So therefore you cannot, by observational means, by means of comparison to some fact, know whether an argument is valid. What do you need to do instead? You need to check whether there is information in the conclusion beyond what was in the premises. If not, then the argument is valid. That is basically the way to test valid arguments. Okay, what happens with analogy and induction? Those are the other two kinds of arguments I brought up. Let’s say: this table is white, and this is a table, so this too is white. The premises here are that this table is white—that’s one premise. Second premise, that this too is a table. Those are the two premises. The conclusion is that this thing is white. Let’s put it through the test I described earlier. Is there information in the conclusion beyond what was in the premises? Yes? Obviously yes, right? In the premises there was no information that this thing is white. There was information that this is white and this is a table, and there was information that this too is a table. That’s all. Nowhere there is there some hidden premise that this thing is white. Okay? So that means that the conclusion contains information that was not in the premises. And therefore that basically means that this argument is not valid. Or in other words, that the conclusion does not follow necessarily from the premises. Okay? The same thing with induction. Yes, when I say this table is white, this table is also white, so apparently all tables are white. Again, I have two premises. This table is white, one premise. This table is white, second premise. Conclusion: all tables are white. Clearly the information in the conclusion, which is much broader than what is in the premises, is not included in the premises.
[Speaker B] Let’s not get confused—this isn’t mathematical induction, there’s someone there—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Mathematical induction is something else; I’m talking about scientific induction. In other words, in the conclusion there is information broader than the information that was in the premises.
[Speaker B] And because of that, does that mean that induction is not a real tool? A proper tool for testing validity?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It’s not a valid argument.
[Speaker B] True—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] True or not true—we said that’s a claim about reality. No, I understand, valid. It is not a valid argument. Now, that’s a good question you’re asking here, because in the end we do use analogy and induction. Exactly. We use them in all areas of life, in science, in law, in all sorts of fields. Now, if it’s not valid, then every—
[Speaker B] Every law in physics is induction.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, it’s the result of induction. So how do we actually use this? It turns out—what does it mean to use it? To use it means that we believe the conclusion is true. Right? That’s what it means to use analogy or induction. I make some generalization. So I formulate the general law, and I believe that from the examples I have seen I can generalize that conclusion. What does that mean? That on the basis of the examples I saw, I have reasonable grounds to assume that the conclusion is also true, even though it contains much more information than what is contained in the examples I saw. What does that mean? After all, how am I supposed to test whether the conclusion is true? That is already a matter of truth and falsity, not validity. How am I supposed to test it? Only by observation. To see whether the conclusion is true or not true. I can’t observe all the tables in the world. I have no observational way to verify that. Okay? So then how do I nevertheless think it’s true? Not know for sure that it’s true, but think it’s true. Because I have confidence in this process called induction. True, it isn’t certain, but I have confidence in it. Okay? In other words, on the one hand it isn’t certain, but on the other hand it also isn’t a shot in the dark. It’s not a guess. A guess is just something that is either true or false; I have no basis for it, I can’t determine anything regarding whether it is true or not. That’s what’s called a guess. I’m just guessing. When people say an intelligent guess, they mean something else. They mean: I’m not sure, but it isn’t a shot in the dark. In other words, I have some basis to think it’s probably correct. Let’s say I won’t die if I discover that it isn’t true. It’s not a deductive argument. I’m not certain that it’s true. But it’s also not a shot in the dark. There is something in between here. And therefore what I want to claim is that analogy and induction, although they are not necessary inferences, are inferences that have weight. In other words, between validity and invalidity—or not invalidity, but falsity, not falsity, anti-validity, yes—there are intermediate degrees. In other words, invalid arguments are arguments whose conclusion does not follow necessarily from the premises. So the fact that it does not follow necessarily from the premises does not mean that the move from premises to conclusion is weightless, valueless. It has some weight. Each person will assess that as he assesses it. There are no clear tools for evaluating such a thing. But we all make such judgments.
[Speaker B] But it’s more dangerous, because then on the basis of these things you start building all sorts of supposed truths.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right, right. But there’s nothing to do about it. I didn’t promise you a rose garden, like I said. Dangerous, but what can you do?
[Speaker B] But the airplane you fly in was built on the basis of induction. And in one sense—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That won’t help you. If you stop flying, everything else you do is built on induction. In other words, you won’t be able to do anything that isn’t built on induction. Induction also says that if I eat, I stay alive, and if I don’t eat, I die. If I don’t believe in inductions, then I can also stop eating.
[Speaker C] That’s already something programmed into one’s feeling.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] When I examine it with my reason, I can decide that my reason is broken.
[Speaker C] It’s something to say to a Martian. If he didn’t eat, he died. Huh? It’s something to say to a Martian. If he didn’t eat—look, that’s what happened until now.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Who says it will continue to happen? You’re making an induction. Okay, and we assume that it will probably continue. Who says? If you accept nothing that isn’t certain, then you won’t be able to do anything. And if you look at this through the lens I described earlier, what distinguishes a valid argument from an invalid one—putting aside for the moment whether it’s invalid and worthless, a shot in the dark, or invalid but still carrying some weight—is the question of how much information it adds, or whether it adds information and how much information it adds. That is basically the criterion. In other words, a valid argument is one that adds no information at all. There is no information in the conclusion beyond what was in the premises. Invalid arguments are arguments that add information. Fine? An argument that adds a huge amount of information, in a way disproportionate to the facts I have, and therefore is very speculative—I very much doubt whether it’s true or not—will indeed be a very dubious argument. An argument that is more conservative, more careful, more moderate, not going wild—in other words, it doesn’t add disproportionate information but allows itself some expansion relative to the information I saw—then I’ll be willing to give it more weight. Or in other words, there is a kind of trade-off here, a kind of interplay, between the level of certainty of the argument and the amount of information it adds. That’s what I called the philosophical certainty principle. The philosophical certainty principle basically says that the product of certainty and the amount of information is constant. In other words, the greater the certainty, the smaller the amount of information you add.
[Speaker B] Meaning the additional information that you add.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The information you add. In other words, if the certainty is absolute, then you add no information. In other words, if it’s infinity then it’s zero. If you add infinite information, the amount of certainty is negligible—that is, zero. If you add a little information, then you can already give it some degree of certainty. And now it depends on how speculative you are. The more speculative you are, the more dubious the argument is, and therefore we always have to balance… the argument is dubious. Yes. And my confidence in the move from premise to conclusion is… the argument is invalid in any case. No, clearly, invalid doesn’t yet mean valueless. Invalid means non-necessary. Okay, but it can still be reasonable. So therefore I say: a dubious argument means an argument that is not reasonable. A plausibility level of one is a valid argument, but there are lower levels of plausibility. And of course there is such a thing as sheer speculation—a plausibility level of fifty percent, or say, if there are two possibilities then fifty percent. Zero is actually a great argument, by the way. An argument whose certainty is zero is excellent, because then you can make the argument and infer the opposite conclusion. Because if it’s certainly wrong, then the opposite conclusion is certainly right. The most problematic argument is an argument whose level of certainty is fifty percent.
[Speaker B] I wonder whether anyone checked the conception on the eve of Yom Kippur—what the product was there.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] You know, it seems to me that a friend of Shmuel’s dealt with that a bit. I once even heard him on the radio, I think, talking about it—Yitzhak Ben-Israel. Yitzhak Ben-Israel? Yes, about… he’s a kind of philosopher of intelligence. So he… let’s say I talked about this with one of my students who served in intelligence, and he also got the impression, as I do without really knowing, just from the outside: you can’t measure the reliability of an intelligence assessment. In other words, I don’t think anyone ever did a serious statistical study and checked the reliability of the forecasting of intelligence systems.
[Speaker B] There’s a lot to say about that, but not here. Okay.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Compared to a prediction you’d just get from a random person on the street, an idiot.
[Speaker B] I said what I had to say about it once in the General Staff forum after an annual intelligence situation assessment.
[Speaker C] To whom did you give it?
[Speaker B] About the fact that nothing can be done. That the things that really matter can’t be predicted.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes. I’m saying this… so in the end you appoint experts and gather information and all that, but in the end you have no way of determining whether this prediction is worth anything. And it’s not at all clear how much this prediction is any better than mere random chance or the forecast of an idiot. Assuming that the forecast of an idiot can be better than random chance, after all he has some intuition, it’s not just a shot in the dark. Now again, a fifty-percent forecast on a binary question is worth nothing. Fifty percent sounds like a lot, ostensibly—it’s much above zero—but no, fifty percent is worth nothing. On the contrary, a thirty-percent forecast is preferable, because then take the option he did not predict and assume that will be the outcome. And how do you know it’s thirty percent? No, I mean if you could assign some estimate, some assessment of the reliability of the prediction, then a fifty-percent prediction is the worst kind. Thirty percent is good, seventy percent is also good, fifty percent is the worst. Once there are only two options, it’s like a coin toss.
[Speaker E] But for a question to be binary, you already have to assume a lot of assumptions that you know and so on.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Fine, not important. I’m speaking hypothetically, of course, assuming there is a binary question. I flip a coin, okay? Now I ask whether the result will be even or odd? A binary question. Or whether the result is—sorry, a die. A coin is heads or tails. Heads or tails? Will it land heads or will it land tails? Fine, a binary question. Now let an expert predict, or let a layman predict. Fine, I don’t know how much that would be—let’s say even a biased coin, okay? So that there’ll be some meaning to the prediction and not just fifty-fifty.
[Speaker D] Well, in any case, in the stock market they always say the blind monkey succeeds like the best analyst.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, right, no one ever beats the market. Pure statistics. He succeeds like the average.
[Speaker E] More than the average, but not like the best analyst. The good analysts—it’s heroism after the fact, I don’t know whether that means they’re smart or whether they guessed well.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The question is whether he’s a good analyst after the fact or a good analyst going forward. After the fact we all make money. After the fact—it’s that Lebanese guy, Nassim Taleb, Nassim Taleb, yes exactly, The Black Swan. He claims that all the good analysts are good analysts after the fact. Take a hundred thousand analysts, okay? Out of them, let’s say we run a forecast every week just to define the experiment better. Okay, let’s say there are ten possibilities. A question that has ten possible answers, and I ask the analysts to tell me what the answer is. Now let’s say that none of these analysts has the faintest clue—there is no such thing as an analyst at all, it’s all just a fraud for the sake of discussion. What result will emerge? In the first week, if there are ten possibilities, then one tenth of the analysts will guess correctly, assuming it’s just a shot in the dark. Okay, ten thousand analysts will guess correctly. In the next round, among those ten thousand there will again be others who guess correctly, but among those ten thousand there will be another thousand who guess correctly. The week after that there will be another hundred who guess correctly, the week after that another ten who guess correctly, the week after that one more who guesses correctly. That means there will be one analyst who, for five or six—I don’t know exactly how many—five consecutive weeks predicted correctly. Okay? That’s a genius. Five consecutive weeks the man predicts what will happen out of ten possibilities—that’s not a simple prediction, okay? You understand that even though this is a blind monkey, that’s what would come out, because if there are a hundred thousand analysts, with one of them this will happen. Now the question is—what’s that American called? Buffett. Warren Buffett, yes, Warren Buffett, who somehow knows how to predict, to succeed—he’s considered someone who understands, who knows how to invest, that is, how to evaluate businesses, how to identify good investments. How do you know maybe he’s just the one who happened to remain at the top of the pyramid, and that’s why he’s succeeded for long enough, because there has to be one like that out of all the millions involved in the capital market. Right? So who knows whether you can trust him or not. Somehow the feeling is yes, but I don’t know. Because it depends—I think you can to some extent test Nassim Taleb. I think that’s a thesis you can check.
[Speaker C] There was some economist, Dan Shefronze, who was a pension adviser or something. He checked all the pension funds in Israel. Over time there’s no difference between them. In other words, when you see an ad saying Meitav Dash did such-and-such over the last five years, let’s check it and its competitors over double the time. And he says he checked it, and he seems to me a completely, completely reliable person.
[Speaker B] Sounds reasonable. Sounds reasonable.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] In any case, the point is: how can you check that? Simply look whether the pyramid narrows by a factor of ten at each stage. If you have one who predicted ten trials ahead and those after him predicted only three or four, then it’s already no longer a one-tenth distribution. Now I’m saying there are deviations; a one-tenth distribution is also a kind of average, and it depends on the significance and the standard deviation around that average. But you can see to what extent there really is someone here who nevertheless breaks beyond the statistics in a fairly significant way, beyond the statistics we would expect from a blind lottery. Then you say, apparently he does in fact have some abilities and it’s not merely a successful statistical accident. So yes, I think you can test that thesis. In the capital market I think you can; in intelligence-prediction experiments I have my doubts. The question is how many events you have, how many forecasts, against what you test it—in other words, it’s much harder. What counts as predicting correctly? Because after all, I read a few years ago—we’re drifting into completely different things by now—but a few years ago someone sent me with great excitement an article by that forecaster from Bar-Ilan, what’s his name? Passig, Passig, right, Amit Passig. That man makes a living off nonsense, it’s unbelievable. Yes, exactly.
[Speaker C] His predictions don’t even hold up for a year.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What do you mean they don’t hold up? I didn’t see predictions. In other words, this is the Delphic oracle. All he does is say things that you can’t really test. They’re so amorphous that whatever happens will more or less fit them. Now the man got a position at Bar-Ilan, he’s a professor of forecasting. He came from the United States and imported this profession to Israel. When he arrived in Israel, someone sent—
[Speaker B] To futurology, futurology, yes.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Some rabbi who was terribly excited by the whole thing because he predicted a rosy future for the State of Israel—I don’t remember exactly when he arrived—so he asked me what I thought, in some group of rabbis I once belonged to until they threw me out. So he sent me this article by Passig and asked what I thought. I told him that the Delphic oracle predicted better than he does. In other words, these amorphous statements—you can’t know what “better” even means. In what sense is the condition of the State of Israel better? Give me some quantitative measures. I expect you to tell me how much money there will be in the State of Israel’s treasury down to the shekel. But give me something that one could at least try to falsify—so that if something happens I’ll know you were wrong. These are predictions that—if they predict a rosy future—
[Speaker C] For years I’ve been reading an economics blog called Tamritz, yes. Every time he’s wrong in a forecast, then a week or two later he points it out. We’re the only developed country that has an age pyramid like an underdeveloped country. That’s why there is constant growth in productive labor power. By contrast, in European countries with an average birthrate of less than two per family, a situation is created where a quarter of the population has to support, like—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] In China too, that’s why they increased the number of children allowed in China. In China they used to allow only one child. And there we’re talking about billions—every smallest mistake you make is a catastrophe. They didn’t take into account—they were afraid of a population explosion, so only one child was allowed. They killed children there, murdered girls, well-known stories.
[Speaker C] In China there are tens of millions of bachelors, and that is a factor threatening the stability of the regime—that’s one of the reasons.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, but I’m saying, beyond that, in this issue of the age pyramid, what happened there is that when you have one child, you don’t manage to preserve the ratio between the young and the old. In the end everyone gets older and there aren’t enough young people who are going to work in order to support all the pensioners. There has to be an age pyramid with a broad enough base. Hm?
[Speaker E] That’s only assuming that people retire.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Now they can keep working. Yes, but it doesn’t matter—even if they don’t retire, someone has to support them, even within the family.
[Speaker E] No, they can keep working until they—where from?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] They don’t have it; they can’t work. He’s already sick, he’s old, he can’t work. That happens at some point. So the family has to support him even if the state doesn’t do it, then the family does. But the family also doesn’t have enough children to do that. How is the child himself supposed to support all the elderly people in the family when he’s an only child? It’s… so that’s why now they increased it to two children. A few years ago they made a decision to increase it to two children because they understood they were heading for disaster. So that’s… how did we get to all this?
[Speaker C] From prediction—whether it’s possible to predict? Induction and some kind of arguments, analogy, induction, I don’t even remember how we got there anymore, doesn’t matter.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So analogy, yes—so through analogy and induction, but I haven’t lost the thread. In any case, for our purposes, the point is that analogy and induction are inferences that add information for us, whereas deduction doesn’t add information. And therefore, basically, whenever you want to add information, you pay for it in the currency of certainty. Meaning, you can’t add information with absolute certainty. You’ll always have to pay in certainty in order to get more information. And therefore science is never certain, because science deals with accumulating information, and so science is never certain by definition. Mathematics doesn’t add information, and therefore it can play it safe—that is, accept only something that has absolute proof. Meaning, given the assumptions, you can’t reject it.
This problem of how to relate to inductive and analogical inferences—that is, non-necessary inferences—is a problem that embarrasses a great many people, thinkers and so on. People have a tendency—maybe they’re not sufficiently aware, maybe they are, I don’t know, but to my mind many times it feels like simple lack of awareness of when you understand that you’re not right but you’re not always conscious of it—to say that any argument that isn’t certain is speculation. Meaning, it’s entirely at your own risk; in other words, it’s a shot in the dark. People who aren’t willing to accept that there are intermediate levels of plausibility between absolute certainty and sheer speculation—a shot in the dark. If it isn’t proven, so you think it’s plausible—so what if you think it’s plausible? Maybe you’re right, maybe you’re wrong; why relate to it at all? You think so—so what?
So this philosophical dilemma—how to relate to non-certain inferences—lies behind, I think, quite a lot of the debates that fill the air in our world. A great many skeptical approaches actually begin there. They begin with some kind of doubt regarding our judgment. I’m willing to accept logic, willing to accept something that’s proven absolutely. I’m not willing to accept things that you think are true—so what? Or that I think are true. The doubt is directed toward myself as well. Why should I accept it? So I think so—so what if I think so? Who says it’s true? If it isn’t certain, then it’s a shot in the dark. Very often skepticism comes from there. Skepticism basically attacks every argument that isn’t a mathematical, logical argument. But of course that is an approach that cuts off the branch it itself is sitting on. Because as I said earlier, a logical argument never adds information for me. So if you’re willing to accept only things that have absolute certainty, logical certainty, you will never accumulate information. Right? And therefore, in practice, someone who demands certainty remains a total skeptic. It’s the same uncertainty principle between the amount of information and certainty. Meaning, if you demand absolute certainty and without it you’re not willing to accept arguments or the conclusions of arguments, then you’ll remain an absolute skeptic.
Now, fine, a person can say: I’m a skeptic, I don’t believe anything. That’s a consistent position. I’m just saying: know that this is the price. Meaning, you can’t demand absolute certainty and still accept any claims or accept information as true. That’s living in an illusion. You have to choose: either be a skeptic, or give up the threshold of absolute certainty, lower the threshold, the threshold of certainty. Okay?
Now even someone who accepts the… well, maybe I’ll say a few more sentences about this point. I’ve already spoken and written about it, but I’ll say it briefly. I think one can see the formation of this skeptical phenomenon in a certain historical process. A historical process whose reflection can also be seen in the maturation of a single person. You can, let’s say, divide a person’s development schematically—the intellectual development, not the psychological development—into three stages.
The first stage is the dogmatic stage. That’s the stage in which a person accepts things because someone authoritative said them. Dad or a teacher, doesn’t matter who—the grownups know. Okay? So you accept it because someone said so, dogmatically. The child asks, “Dad, tell me, why is the sky blue?” so Dad tells him such-and-such. “Ah, I understand.” Since Dad said it, it’s probably true. It doesn’t even occur to him to think: wait a second, Dad, how do you know? Who told you it’s true? Okay? So that’s the stage of childhood, the dogmatic stage.
The point at which childhood ends in this description—of course this is a very schematic description—but the point where childhood ends and adolescence begins is the point where the person suddenly starts to cast doubt on the dogmas they’ve been fed. Meaning, the adults, the teachers, the parents tell him something, and he says: who told you? Prove it. Just as I don’t know, you don’t know either. How do you know what I don’t know? Why should I accept what you say? Okay? So that question of the teenager is yes—who told you? Prove it. A very characteristic question of teenagers. So that’s the beginning of the age of adolescence, or the teenage rebellion. And again, I mean teenage rebellion not in the psychological sense, but in the intellectual sense.
And then the second stage of the biography begins: the stage of dogmatic childhood, and the rationalist rebellion of youth. Meaning, the rebellion in which—what is the teenager assuming in his subtext? If you prove it to me, I’ll accept it. If you don’t have proof, and you tell me it’s plausible—plausible in your eyes, not plausible in mine. What does “plausible” even mean? I don’t know what plausible is. Prove it. And if you don’t prove it, I don’t accept it. The claim is that basically I accept only something proven. That’s what stands behind the intellectual rebellion of youth.
At the next stage, adolescence ends in the embarrassing phase where the teenager discovers that nothing can be proven. Right—because every proof is built on some assumptions. And if you don’t accept those assumptions, or you accept them only if they themselves are proven, then they too are proven on the basis of some assumptions. At some point there will be fundamental assumptions that you won’t be able to prove. And then the teenager basically understands that if he requires proof as a condition for accepting a claim, he won’t be able to accept any claim. And that’s exactly what I said before: someone who demands certainty will have to be a complete skeptic; he won’t be able to accept anything. Okay?
So therefore the crisis at the end of adolescence is the point where he becomes an adult. From a youth to an adult—I described the point where he went from child to youth. I’m talking about the point where he goes from youth to adult, and that’s the point where the youth discovers that nothing can be proven. By “proven” I mean in a sense that isn’t dependent on basic assumptions. Descartes tried to break this vicious circle with his cogito principle, when he said, “I think, therefore I am.” He basically tried to offer an argument that proves a conclusion without assuming any assumptions and by logical means alone. That was really Descartes’ true aim—not to prove my existence or God’s existence, but to save rationalism. Meaning, to try to prove something without needing to assume premises. That is, through conceptual analysis in some form. In my opinion he didn’t succeed—but in the opinion of many people like me, of course—but that’s what he tried to do. So the youth eventually discovers that nothing can be proven.
[Speaker H] So now, the Rabbi describes this process—does the Rabbi see reality this way, that this is what teenagers go through?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, in my opinion, yes. I experienced it completely the way I’m describing it, exactly like that. I could point to what stage I reached each phase of this process. You don’t remember? I can see once… I never know anyone on the level that I know myself, but I can see that people are in different stages, and my impression is that overall this is a process that many people go through. Again, not everyone and not always in the same form, but generalizations are always crude.
[Speaker E] To what extent would you define this as serious thought about the option of total skepticism? What? People who, during adolescence, arrive at serious thought about the option of comprehensive skepticism—not in a specific context like religion but radically, in itself?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] In my opinion, intelligent people—almost all of them go through this stage. That’s what I think.
[Speaker E] I thought it was something like a very small percentage of the population that even…
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] A small percentage of the population are people who engage in thought. Those who engage… no, really. You engage in thinking. I remember when I was in Gush, I remember—I studied logic like crazy, devoured books of logic from the National Library there. Why? Because I decided that I was going to prove; I don’t accept anything I don’t prove. Meaning, only what’s proven will I accept. And then suddenly—I still remember that period—suddenly I understood that I was standing before a broken trough, because I suddenly understood that a logical argument proves a conclusion from premises. In the end you’ll always have to assume something in order to prove. You can’t accept only proven things, because if you want only proven things, you’ll accept nothing.
[Speaker B] But you didn’t check statistically what you are out of all teenagers. You don’t sound to me like that kind of adolescent teenager—“prove it to me, who said so, and why.” And no matter what explanation you give, not… no.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Look, I met many, I meet very many people, teenagers, yes—or it doesn’t matter. Completely. I meet many such people. Again, these are people who make the effort to think about their path; usually they also arrive at this point. There are people who simply flow with life, and again, they’re not always stupid—it’s not a distinction between stupid and smart. It’s a distinction between people who think and people who are willing to go along with what they feel without thinking; they can be very smart people. It’s not the same division.
[Speaker G] Could be that a teenager at an early age will read this, will reach the conclusion that the narrative is empty, and then he’ll automatically skip this stage of skepticism.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Then he matured early, doesn’t matter.
[Speaker G] No, matured because he read it, because they showed it to him; he didn’t reach it on his own.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Nobody shaves on someone else’s beard. As long as you don’t experience it yourself, you don’t understand it. It’s not—you can’t just read it. Reading can move you along this track. And of course reading helps; it’s hard for everyone to reinvent the wheel on their own. But if you don’t experience it, then you read it—it’s not a process you’re undergoing, you’re just reading. Okay, that’s interesting. It’s not something you go through.
By the way, one of my great disappointments when I was at Tel Aviv University—I studied engineering there—and this is always a lesson I tell students as well: you’re already at the university, go in and hear all kinds of other things. You’re already in a place where they teach so many things, you have free hours, gaps—go in and listen. It’s an opportunity. When will you be in such a place where you can go in and hear all kinds of things from all kinds of fields? Who’ll be in the cafeteria? Here and there there are breaks in the cafeteria, there are breaks.
[Speaker C] Linguistics in Hebrew, or the humanities studies at the Technion.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, but beyond the courses that are intended—Cornerstones are courses intended for all students. Leave it. Go into courses in some field, not intended for you, don’t register. You have a free hour, go in and listen—what do you care? Especially when you have a fixed hour, after all it’s a fixed schedule, so take a course. That’s what I did in my undergraduate degree, that’s what I did. I had gaps, and usually I built my schedule so as to leave myself gaps when there were courses that interested me in various places.
Now I heard some philosophy courses, and one of my great disappointments from what happened there in the philosophy department, in Gilman Building, was that people came there to amuse themselves. It didn’t really interest them. Maybe here and there intellectually, some came just because it was a relatively easy degree, they probably didn’t have the energy for physics or mathematics, and very few, if any—I wasn’t involved enough there to know—but the general impression was that it passed right by them. By the way, also lecturers—also lecturers, many times you see that they know the material but they don’t understand what it means. They don’t understand what it means. If you don’t experience it, you don’t understand what you’re reading; you don’t understand the significance of things.
You can see it—I write things—I’ve met people whose profession this is, and they don’t understand at all the magnitude of the rupture Kant is talking about when he talks about the synthetic a priori. It should have shattered them. They were simply experts in Kant; they deal with something else. What do I care whether you’re an expert in Kant or not? What do you answer to that? How do you explain to yourself that what you say is indeed truly correct in the world itself? It’s not a simple question. There is no answer to it in the history of philosophy, as Hugo Bergmann writes in his book Introduction to Epistemology. No answer has been accepted. Now ask people, they’ll say there are different approaches, this one thinks this and that one thinks that—no approach stands up, there is no answer to it in the history of philosophy. So how do you believe yourself? The simple skeptical question that every child asks himself. But when you analyze it at the philosophical level, when you understand the significance of things, you ought to stand before that trough and tear your hair out. It’s something that ought to trouble you deeply—and it troubles neither the lecturers nor the students.
[Speaker E] Maybe it seems to me that it’s because of what you said earlier, meaning most people, even people who do think about their lives, they don’t really think. It could be that they also don’t—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] They think at this or that point, in some dilemma, fine, they think—but this isn’t a person who examines his path and really thinks what it means, from one end to the other. A kind of understanding of where I’m going, what I’m relying on, why on earth to believe things. To me this is a basic thought for someone trying to formulate a worldview. I don’t know, my whole life revolves around this issue.
[Speaker E] It seems to me that most thinking people don’t work like that, but rather think at certain points, in a certain dilemma. There are people who engage in thought, people who think—it’s—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] People who examine the mode of thinking. Okay, so from this crisis point where the youth reaches the conclusion that nothing can be proven—now let’s define the problem at that point. The problem at that point is basically this: the youth’s first assumption—and this is the subtext at the beginning of the age of enlightenment—is: I accept only things that are proven. An unproven thing is speculation; it’s a shot in the dark. Second assumption: nothing is proven. Let’s apply logic to that itself. If I accept only things that are proven, and nothing can be proven, what’s the conclusion? That I accept nothing; I’m a skeptic. Right? Meaning, if you remain with the two insights you acquired—one at the transition from childhood to youth, and the second at the transition from youth to adulthood—you usually come out a skeptic. Right? There’s no escaping it.
But there’s still… in the end you’re a skeptic more because you have to—
[Speaker G] decide whether to live or—
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Or not die from the fact that you don’t… so you’ll explain it on the intellectual plane, and you’ll explain it just as a psychological tendency. You don’t really believe that you’re dead, but you feel like you’re dead—so what, you eat? You eat. After all, they say they’re skeptics. People who tell me about themselves that they’re skeptics—so I tell them, wait a second, do you get on a plane? Maybe it’ll crash tomorrow morning? Right, maybe it’ll crash, but I’m used to planes working—it’s not that I have confidence, right? There’s no indication that the plane really works; that’s what I’m used to and that’s how I live. If it crashes, it crashes. I have no other way to live; I can’t not believe anything, including not getting on the plane. Maybe I’ll crash by not getting on the plane. Exactly, right. So he explains it; he reduces it to psychology. Meaning, this skepticism is… I also think so, but—
[Speaker E] That’s what he explains to himself; he doesn’t really believe it, he believes it because of an intellectual problem.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, I don’t think so. I think that intellectually too he doesn’t believe it. In my last column, sort of—the one before last—I talked about unconscious beliefs. And the question is what the status of unconscious beliefs is. Here it’s clear, to me it’s clear, that he doesn’t believe it, otherwise he wouldn’t get on a plane if he were a skeptic. But he explains to me, at least at the conscious level—again, I don’t think he’s deceiving me, rather he isn’t deciphering himself correctly—so he says: I don’t really believe it, but I live this way because I just go with it; in any case I have no intellectual way of determining, because I don’t believe anything, so I just live how I live and that’s it. I have no justifications for anything; don’t expect justifications from me, okay?
So that’s the necessary conclusion from the two assumptions accumulated in the biography I described. Basically you mature into being a skeptic. Again, the intellectual skeptic keeps going with his psychology—eating and getting on planes and looking for faults; if there’s a fault on a plane then there’s an investigative committee, all true—but he doesn’t believe, as it were, doesn’t believe anything at the declarative level; it’s all just psychology, psychological biases. There are two other ways to mature, and that is of course if we give up one of the two assumptions. One can give up the first and one can give up the second. After all, what got us into this tangle was these two assumptions, right?
So one option is to go into the tangle and become a skeptic: these two assumptions are acceptable to me and I’ll become a skeptic. Of course one can ask: if you’re a skeptic, then why do you accept these two assumptions themselves? Okay, those are the well-known arguments. But there’s an alternative. Who said one has to accept these assumptions? You can give up either one of them.
Whoever gives up the assumption that nothing can be proven—the second assumption—that’s what’s called a fundamentalist. A fundamentalist basically says: look, logically it’s clear that nothing can be proven, because logic is always built on assumptions. I agree. But there are things beyond logic and beyond reason, okay? I don’t know what: “The secret of the Lord is with those who fear Him,” prophecy, the leading sage of the generation told me, the prophet told me, I don’t know exactly who, the caliph told me—yes, al-Baghdadi, it doesn’t matter—each person and his own “leading sage of the generation.” But in the end I have some kind of faith in some charismatic source, some non-logical, non-philosophical source—absolute faith. Meaning, I still remain with the assumption that only something certain is acceptable, yes? I gave up the second assumption, not the first. Only something certain is acceptable. But the second assumption, which says that nothing is certain, is not true.
It’s true that logic can’t give me certainty because logic only tells me “if, then”; it can’t give me certainty about the conclusion. But there may be other sources of certainty—non-philosophical sources, non-logical sources, charismatic sources. Fine? Religious, divine, prophecies, holy spirit, aliens, channeling, New Age, doesn’t matter—everyone with his own nonsense; there’s lots of nonsense. So this view, which gives up… which remains with the first assumption that only something certain is acceptable, and gives up the second, is what’s called fundamentalism.
Fundamentalism is accepting something because it is true as something certain—because it is true because its source cannot be questioned—without my having rational criticism of it. Meaning, I do not subject these things to rational scrutiny, to logical scrutiny. It’s simply so; it’s true, period. True with certainty—again I say, not just true, but true with certainty. That’s an important point, because I too think certain things are true just because I think they’re true; I just don’t think they’re certain. Fine? Someone who says it’s certain remains with the view that only something certain is acceptable, and nevertheless is willing to accept things, simply because he accepts things not through logic. Therefore he is a fundamentalist, yes.
[Speaker E] The intent here is only specifically things that really go beyond reason in the everyday sense—like holy spirit or whatever—or also things that, let’s say, most people would accept as a basic assumption?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, those too. In my view it’s the same fundamentalism.
[Speaker E] If you think that the world exists, for example, that too is fundamentalism; that too is, by definition, fundamentalism.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, because if you’re not willing to put it at all under rational review, you can arrive at the conclusion that you think it’s true; I also think it’s true. But if you say that this thing is definitely true and I’m not willing to hear any argument against it, that simply doesn’t stand under rational criticism. It doesn’t—I’m not willing to subject this claim to the criticism of reason—then you’re a fundamentalist.
Now I’m saying: fundamentalism today—today because of ISIS it’s really in the headlines—but fundamentalism as we usually define it, and I really discussed this in Truth and Stability, in the introduction to Truth and Stability, we usually define fundamentalism as some kind of violent extremism. But I think that’s a mistake. The philosophical definition of fundamentalism is someone who does not subject his principles to rational examination, to intellectual examination. Except that someone in such a situation may act on the basis of problematic, extreme, violent principles or something like that, and since he does not subject them to examination, he goes with them. If that’s what he thinks, that’s what he goes with. And then the result of his fundamentalism is extreme and dangerous activity. And why is it dangerous? Because you won’t be able to persuade him to stop. You won’t be able to persuade him that it’s immoral or that it’s not true, not logical, whatever, because he isn’t willing to listen. He doesn’t subject it to rational examination.
But in my view, even Mother Teresa, if she is completely convinced of what she’s doing, is a fundamentalist. She’s a fundamentalist who threatens no one. I have no problem living next to her because it’s not violent activity. But philosophically, in my view, that too is fundamentalism. It’s fundamentalism because she does not subject the principles she believes in to any rational test. She is not willing to allow the possibility that maybe they are mistaken. Fine? For me that is what is called fundamentalism—not necessarily a fundamentalism that ends up beheading people. Those are the disturbing expressions of fundamentalism, but what disturbs me is the philosophical fundamentalism even before its practical expressions. What disturbs me is someone who accepts something without subjecting it to… without even being willing to consider the possibility that it may not be true. No matter what it is, but to me that is a dangerous phenomenon in itself even before its practical consequences.
[Speaker F] But skepticism itself can also be a kind of fundamentalism, because skepticism itself—you don’t subject it to rational examination.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right. That’s what I said, that many times they attack skepticism with the argument: how are you so sure that skepticism is correct? Meaning, why don’t you doubt that? They’ll tell you: yes, I doubt that too; I doubt everything. This is a question I’ve wrestled with quite a bit: whether this is a closed circle, or whether one can really make that claim, meaning that yes, I also doubt my skepticism. Meaning, I don’t know. I don’t know how to define it all the way. The feeling is that there’s still something problematic here, but I don’t know.
[Speaker E] Or the opposite—that every point… no, not like—skepticism, intellectually, is the default. At least intellectually, in the sense that we think things through from beginning to end, skepticism is the default. I don’t need to doubt skepticism. Meaning, if I have no reason, if I don’t think anything is true, then I’m automatically a skeptic, as it were.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The argument you’re making now is itself also an argument. You can’t open your mouth if you’re an absolute skeptic.
The third option for maturing—so we said there is maturation into skepticism and maturation into fundamentalism. The… the third option, of course, what remains, is to give up the first assumption and adopt the second. Meaning: nothing can be proven—that’s the second assumption, and that I adopt. This time I give up the first assumption that only something certain is acceptable. No—even something that seems plausible to me is acceptable. That’s what I called synthetic maturity. I think that in the end, in the biography I described earlier, this is where I ended up. At the moment I’m at this stage. I don’t know what the future holds, but at the moment I’m at this stage.
Synthetic maturity means that it is true that nothing can be proven, but if there is something that seems plausible to me—intuition, let’s say, which is the name I give to that tool by means of which I determine the plausibility of things—
[Speaker B] What Dara calls “the gaze into the eyes of reason”? Some kind of thing like that, yes, right.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So the claim is basically that I’m willing to accept also things that are not certain, as long as they are plausible. And if I return to what I said at the beginning about analogy and induction, then the skeptic will say: I don’t accept that. The fundamentalist will say: what do you mean, this is my common sense, therefore it’s certain. And I say: no, it’s not certain, but it’s also not a shot in the dark—it’s plausible. And in my view, plausible is good enough. And not only is plausible good enough—I can conduct experiments to confirm. I don’t have anything beyond the plausible, because certainty gives me no information. So I go with the plausible, and I always write myself a warning note on the side: nothing is absolute. Everything may turn out for me to be a mistake. I can’t know anything except for what I already said, except for this thing itself—that nothing is absolute. But maybe even that can turn out for me to be a mistake; I don’t know. Even that can turn out to be a mistake. There—I’m giving the same answer the skeptic gives, who doubts even his own skepticism.
So many times people treat such a thing as skepticism. That’s a mistake. It isn’t skepticism. It’s rationality. Skepticism means that anything that isn’t absolute is a shot in the dark. To turn the question mark into an exclamation mark—that is skepticism. To remain with some question mark—that is only rationality, that is simply being clear-eyed. To understand that you can make mistakes, that you’re not Superman. And therefore if you’ve reached some conclusion, okay, either you were right or you weren’t; you think you were, that’s fine. I don’t think it’s a shot in the dark; I trust my intuitions. And on the other hand, I’m not all-powerful; it may turn out that I was wrong. That has happened more than once in the past and can happen in the future as well. So therefore I won’t relate to it as something certain; I will relate to it as something true. There’s a difference between true and certain. And that’s an identification people often miss.
Very often all of postmodernism and skepticism are based on identifying truth with certainty. They’re not willing to accept something as true if it isn’t certain. And I say: not true. In my view the assumption is that it’s true even though it’s not certain. And therefore, for now, I think it’s true. If it turns out not to be, then not—but it can be true even without my… You need to understand that to say that something is true, as I said earlier, is to make a claim about correspondence between the content of the claim and the fact it describes. Right? Such correspondence can exist even where I’m not sure of it. The question whether there is correspondence or not has nothing to do with whether I’m sure or not sure.
Suppose I think there is a law of gravity, but I’m not sure of it, though it sounds very plausible to me. Okay? The question whether it’s true or not has nothing to do with whether it is certain for me. Certain or not is a question of how I relate to it, or how convinced I am of it. The question whether it is true or not is the question whether this claim matches what is happening in the world. That’s a completely different question. Okay? Therefore when I believe it is true, that does not force me to say that it is certain in my eyes. These are two entirely different things. I think it is true, but it is not certain in my eyes. Certainty and truth are not synonyms. That is basically the fundamental synthetic claim.
This three-stage process that I described here, this three-stage maturation process, I claim also has a parallel in world history. The history of the West, at least, is built in a way… when I say the West I mean the West not as against Islam or the Near East, but as against the Far East. Okay? There it works a bit differently.
[Speaker E] But Islam also participates in the same play?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I don’t know enough, but I think that overall you see the modes of thought that we know from everywhere else. There’s nothing special in Islam in that sense. It’s not like the Far East, where it’s a completely different mode of thought altogether. There are those who wouldn’t even call it thought—a kind of experience, existence, life, less thought. Thought is already a Western concept; it’s a concept of reflection. I think about things. In the East you more simply live them, you don’t think about them.
There’s a very beautiful article by a Japanese scholar named Suzuki. There’s a book called Zen Buddhism and Psychoanalysis, edited by Yehuda Regavim, who died relatively young. There are three essays in that book: an essay by the psychologist Erich Fromm, there’s an essay by the Japanese Suzuki, and there’s an essay by some well-known Mexican psychiatrist, apparently—I don’t know him, but I understood he was a well-known figure. Now this Suzuki comes to explain Zen Buddhism to Western ears; that was his craft. Suzuki dealt with explaining Eastern thought, Zen Buddhism, to Western ears. And he tried to illustrate the relation between the two, so he brought two poems, one by Tennyson and one by some Basho, some Zen sage from the 17th century, I don’t know which, and both of them speak about a person looking at a flower.
And Tennyson writes there in the poem, “Oh wonderful flower, if only I could master you and pluck you and take you home with me and use you and decorate my house with you,” and yada yada, something like that—I’m only giving the spirit of it, okay? And probably with somewhat less poetic value than the original. And Basho says, “Oh wonderful flower, how lovely you are between the cracks in the wall,” also in spirit, something like that. That’s it. I think that is a wonderful illustration of West versus East. The West is “and subdue it,” yes, that comes from the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh). Meaning, you are supposed to master things, you are supposed to relate to them; the subject stands at the center and you think about the world and understand it and impose your patterns on it and enslave it and analyze it. And that man simply lives it, merges with the flower—he does not understand the flower. To think about things is already a Western concept, okay? So it’s hard even to speak in that language about this Eastern mode, about the Eastern relation.
In any case, the West too went through three such stages in its maturation. There was the stage of childhood, the dogmatic stage, in which there were all kinds of myths and such beliefs that people accepted because that’s what they were told; no one cast doubt on them. That’s the stage parallel to the childish stage. When was that? It’s hard to draw lines. What, the Renaissance, say? No, much, much earlier. I’m talking about really ancient eras—I don’t know, the period of the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh) more or less. So yes, the Iron Age, the first Iron Age, lower down.
[Speaker E] Iron Age II already had skeptics?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] And Iron Age II is already King David, I think, somewhere around there—I don’t remember those dates exactly. In any case, the claim is that also in the maturation of the world one can see the three stages one sees in the maturation of the individual person. At first there’s the childish dogmatic stage; people accept things. The sorcerer says you have to dance around the fire in order to bring rain, so everyone dances around the fire. If you need to drink some potion that no one has ever seen actually work, no indication of it at all, but that’s what the sorcerer said—then that’s the medicine and that’s what people do. Okay? That’s a dogmatic age.
After that rational thought begins, whose peak is of course Greece, but the first sparks already appeared earlier. First development of philosophy, of thought—even mathematics existed before Greece. In Greece it coalesced, and therefore I would call Greece really the crystallization of adolescence. In Greece they were already talking about proofs—Aristotle with the Organon, his logic. He is basically saying, wait a second, I want to prove things; I don’t accept things just because someone said so. And that was part of the struggle—we just passed Hanukkah—part of the struggle between this religious culture that we had and the Western mode of thought in which everything stands a test: “Wait, prove it. Who says so? So you believe—so what if you believe?”—that kind of thought, “prove it.”
And they didn’t really know how to digest that, and therefore there was a very strong conflict. They didn’t know what to do with those guys, just as a parent relates to his child who asks him, “Who says so? Prove it.” What do you do with this annoying kid? And you can’t prove anything to him. You already know that you can’t prove it to him because you’ve gone through maturation. He hasn’t yet. So what do you tell him? Listen, I can’t prove this to you, but accept it—it’s plausible. “Plausible?” Yes, yes, I ate ten like you for breakfast, says the teenager to me, I ate ten like you for breakfast. So the adult says to him, fine, I know—you’re this idiot who keeps deluding himself; I too was once like that when I was little. There’s nothing you can say to him. Nothing. He laughs at you.
It’s like that tireless Mark Twain too. He once said that when I was seventeen my father was a complete idiot. Only a few years passed, and truly, look how much he learned in those few years. Meaning, until age seventeen you’re sure your father is a complete idiot, until you pass through adolescence and understand that there is common sense. Nothing can be proven, but the fact that nothing can be proven doesn’t mean it isn’t true. You mature and then you accept things because common sense says them. Okay? So until you—and after all, a person doesn’t shave on someone else’s beard—so until he himself goes through the stage of maturation he won’t internalize it; nothing will help. You have to let him go through it; nothing else will help.
But yes, don’t despair—tell him yes, common sense says so; nothing can be proven. In the end he’ll get it, and the hope is that he’ll mature in a reasonable way. In the world too it’s like that. The adults—say, the Sages of Israel who encountered this Greek culture that asks, “Who told you? Prove it”—they didn’t know what to do with those guys. They didn’t know how to prove anything to them, and you are helpless in the face of this phenomenon, especially if standing opposite you is an intelligent youth. Meaning, he won’t buy the nonsense you’re selling him. He’ll discover very quickly that you can’t prove anything to him, until eventually he discovers that not only can you not prove anything to him—he also won’t be able to prove anything himself, and then he matures.
And in my opinion in the historical process this happened more or less in the middle of the twentieth century. That’s positivism. Positivism is the peak of the Enlightenment—those who thought that one can speak only about something fully proven and fully defined. And then suddenly postmodernism burst forth. Why? Because that was exactly the crisis point, the end of the Enlightenment period, which runs from Greece until the middle of the twentieth century. And the middle of the twentieth century is more or less the point of maturation, if I had to mark a year on the timeline. Roughly, of course—give or take a few decades. And then suddenly postmodernity was born. What is it? It’s skepticism. Because if only something certain is acceptable, and nothing is certain, then nothing is acceptable. That’s how postmodernity was born.
Today I think the world already understands that there are other alternatives for maturing. Postmodernism has somewhat lost its luster, it seems to me. At least compared with twenty or thirty years ago when I wrote The Two Carts, it was clear to me that the world was going to be destroyed. Fine—the world probably doesn’t get destroyed so quickly, and I too matured in the meantime. In any case, in the world too one basically goes through these three stages, and I think that the attitude to analogy and induction is at the center of this process. Because the youth is not willing to accept analogy and induction. Analogy and induction are not proven. It only sounds plausible to me? Okay, it sounds plausible to you; it doesn’t sound plausible to me—prove it. Can’t prove it. What do you do with that?
So the rebellion of youth is basically the unwillingness to accept this thing that isn’t logical, this thing that isn’t necessary. And maturity—at least the third form of maturing, which in my opinion is the correct form—basically says: no, analogy and induction are also tools. True, they are not certain tools, but they are tools that carry weight. And when I want to accumulate information, there are no other tools; these are the only tools I have. And therefore I must—if I don’t want to remain a skeptic, because if I’m a skeptic then I’m a skeptic—but if I’m not a skeptic then I have to give some weight to softer inferences, non-logical inferences, non-deductive, non-strict, non-rigorous, as it’s called. Okay, good, we’ll stop here.