The Doctrine of the Two Worlds

In the first section of my favorite book, The Illusion of Technique by William Barrett, we watched as Wittgenstein became disillusioned with Russell’s attempt to capture all of human experience and truth in a system of abstractions, represented by p’s and q’s.  There must be more to truth than these abstractions, Wittgenstein thought.  Rather than try to eliminate the ambiguity, which was what Russell wanted to do, Wittgenstein realized we have to embrace the ambiguity.  Not just p’s and q’s, but the everyday experience of our common language, thereby establishing the basis of most American education in philosophy today. 

Barrett finishes this section of the book wondering where Russell ever got the idea that this abstraction was possible.  And that is where I left off in the last blog post.

The Doctrine of the Two Worlds

The second section of The Illusion of Technique is called “Being.”  In it, Barrett focuses in on another European nobleman, who, like Wittgenstein three centuries later, was interested in philosophical exploration.  This man, sitting in his apartment, wondered how we could find Truth.  It couldn’t be from our senses, he believed, as it was obvious that our senses were faulty, and all too often provided us misinformation.  And yet our senses were our only medium to the outside world, the real world that we inhabited, but couldn’t fully explain.

He looked around his apartment, doubting his sense of his surroundings, doubting all that he saw.  The fire, the bed, the window, the chair he seemed to be sitting on – none were bedrock, all were the offerings of his unreliable perception.  So, he systematically catalogued his doubts, and eliminated them one by one.  At last, he came down to the only thing that it made no sense to doubt.  He was thinking, and he knew he was thinking.  To doubt that was madness.  This, he realized, was the bedrock he was looking for.  If we know we are thinking, then we must actually exist.  Cogito, ego sum.  I am thinking, therefore I must exist.

This man, Descartes, assumed that there was not one reality, of which he and his perceptions were a part.  He assumed that there were two worlds, one which was real, outside of our perceptions, not contingent upon our appreciation of it.  This would become known as “objective reality.”  The other world was our inner world, made up of all of our sensations, reactions, perceptions.  This “subjective world” was the world we lived in intimately, but our understanding of it was clearly not reliable. 

He then proceeded to outline how we might venture into the real, the objective world, and, by staging carefully regulated, highly controlled observations, we might be able to say something meaningful about reality.  Through careful scientific method, we might be able to touch objective truth.  Barrett calls this assumption the “Doctrine of the Two Worlds.” 

What’s the big deal?

For many readers, this may not sound like an assumption at all.  Isn’t this the very nature of reality as we know it?  This is the learned truth offered to us throughout our education.  No one ever presented it to us as an “assumption.”  There are, absolutely, two worlds, one objective and real, “out there,” and one subjective and unreliable, “in our heads.”  Science is the process of testing our measurements of the objective world and posing theories of what these observations said about how things worked, and why they were the way they were. 

We know, as a “given” handed to us at every stage of our learning, that science involves the exploration of and the attempt to understand objective reality.  And we know that our subjective reactions to this world are, by their nature, unreliable and dangerous.  Our perceptions can’t be trusted.  The last 400 years of Western thought argue that we are dangerous to the truth.

That’s why we learn to conduct science in such a way as to guard against the undue influence of our subjective natures on the thing we are studying.  We know, from Descartes’ time till today, that the subjective can not be trusted.  If we want to study a social phenomenon scientifically, we can’t just go watch what happens, then talk to the people involved and finally draw our own conclusions.  That, says the common pejorative, is “just subjective.” 

That isn’t the way science is practiced under the Doctrine of the Two Worlds.  All you will have done is to generate subjective impressions, mere perceptions, for which there is no proof of validity or reliability.  Scientific truth requires measurement of the underlying objective reality.  Our reactions to that reality are dangerous to the truth.  Any decent participant in an eighth grade science fair understands this.  What’s the problem?

The problem

For the purposes of these blog posts, one big problem is that, if there are two worlds, one concrete and formidable and one misty and evanescent, it is pretty obvious that our moral values arise out of the mist.  If we were looking for a way to make a case for the moral values that we experience in the Box, the experiences that keep us from “giving in” or “giving up,” then we are at a dead end. 

Why should the third of the women in the world whose dignity and rights are disrespected be treated differently?  Well, not because of any compelling scientific truth, but just because we would prefer the world to be that way.  The oppressors of those women see it differently, so it is their perception against ours.  And whose perceptions are better, if there are Two Worlds?

Do you want to have a public policy arena that condemns the falsehoods of the tobacco industry, that makes polluters morally culpable, that makes facing climate change before it is too late a moral imperative? 

Should everyone have a right to healing when they are sick, and clothing when they are cold, and shelter against the storm, and comfort against their fears?  Really, an actual “right” to these necessities, not just a privilege that they can buy in the marketplace, and then only if they can afford it. 

Don’t you see, almost daily, moral failings in our private and in our public lives that require that we act?  Not because we have some misty, “feel good” perceptions, but because the world ought to be ordered in such a way that those moral shortcomings must be addressed by the community? 

If so, then you need to be able to reject the second-class status that the Doctrine of the Two Worlds gives to your moral priorities.  You need a worldview that makes moral truths and scientific truths the same kind of thing.  One world, one idea of truth. 

And the search for how that might be leads us right to the weirdness of high energy physics.