Q&A: The Argument from the Senses — Conceptual Clarifications
The Argument from the Senses — Conceptual Clarifications
Question
Hello,
I’d appreciate some precise definitions, after really combing through everything on the site and going over this chapter in Taylor again and again.
What does the definition “our senses are reliable” actually mean?
It sounds like an attempt to measure the senses in terms of the degree of correspondence they reveal between phenomena and noumena. But there it is obviously clear that we have no ability to grasp the latter, so it’s not clear to me how there could be any metric connecting those two planes.
If so, what is the meaning of the term “the trust we place in them”? After all, everything we know about the world will always be only what passes through them. Plus perhaps intuition and the use of non-observational capacities of reason on those sensory observations.
So I don’t understand the claim that says each of us places trust in the fact that the senses correctly convey “reality” to us.
For comparison, what would a world look like in which we do not trust the senses because they do not describe reality correctly? A situation in which, for example, we saw different and inconsistent behavior every time would not lead us to say that our senses are unreliable, but simply to say that there is no law of nature requiring fixed behavior in that case.
The fact that we have no way of knowing, and nevertheless we claim they are reliable and therefore implicitly assume the existence of a coordinating factor, is necessarily based on some metric of correspondence between two things—and I do not understand how one can even claim such a metric exists when only one of them is accessible to us.
In other words, it sounds a bit like an oxymoron to say that we trust the senses to describe the world reliably when everything we know about it, by definition, can never go beyond what is conveyed by the senses. That is not trust but necessity and compulsion (which is also why we do not presume to say anything about the world in itself, including the true essence of phenomena that we can observe sensorially).
I would appreciate clarification of the concept of correspondence.
Thank you.
Answer
I don’t understand the question. Not trusting the senses means that what appears to us is not the real truth. The question of whether we have any way to know that is a different question. But we do believe that they are. The conclusion about a coordinating factor does not follow from the fact that we know the senses are reliable, but from the fact that we assume they are reliable.
Discussion on Answer
If you read what I wrote in the fourth talk in The First Existing Being, I explained this well. This is an argument of the type I called “revealing” and not “inferential.” Such an argument starts from a position that I hold, regardless of my justifications for it, and shows what assumptions underlie it. This is basically a proof from the conclusion back to the assumptions. One who holds the conclusion necessarily assumes those assumptions, and therefore this is a proof for him. I explained there why this is not pragmatism (adopting assumptions that are practically convenient for me).
Of course, one can always deny the conclusion, and then there is no proof of the assumption. But the argument is addressed to someone who does adopt the conclusion. For example, this is how the proof from morality that there is a God is structured. Without God there is no valid morality, and therefore if you believe in valid morality then you necessarily believe in God. You can wonder how we know that there really is valid morality, but that is not a relevant question for the argument. The argument is addressed to someone who thinks so.
As an aside, I ground the beliefs from which such an argument proceeds in intuition. My claim is that intuition is a non-sensory cognitive tool. I have written about that on the site more than once. See, for example, column 653.
Regarding the structure of a revealing argument and the logic underlying it, I devoted the fourth talk in The First Existing Being to that at length. You can read there.
1. Is it even well-defined what “the real truth” is?
2. Do we have any basis for believing that what our senses perceive is the real truth?
3. Aren’t we by definition limited to seeing only what the senses present, without any ability to grasp what the real truth is?
4. And if that is the case—isn’t it nonsense, or at least baseless, to claim that “we trust” that our senses show us something to which, by definition, we have no access?
5. You say that “we believe that they are.” On what basis? Because it seems to me that nobody seriously claims anything about what exists in the world beyond what is observed by the senses and consciousness. We do, of course, make generalizations and arrive at laws—but it seems to me that the only reality whose laws we discuss is the one accessible to us through our senses, and we have no basis on which to assume its correspondence to the “real” world that includes something beyond what is observed by the senses.
Even if we assume that the physical forces we have conceptualized are entities and not just efficient ways of organizing the information around us—these are entities about which we know how to speak only regarding those aspects of them that are accessible to our senses.