CHAPTER II

 

ALTERED STATES:

AMERICAN EMPIRICISM,

AUSTRIAN RATIONALISM, AND UNIVERSAL INTUITION

 

ANOOP GUPTA

 

 

INTRODUCTION

 

Intuition can be understood as immediate awareness of a fact. What constitutes the class of facts that one can intuit, however, varies from, for example, James’ radical empiricism1  (whereby the object of intuition is stripped of conceptual content), to the rationalistic tradition of Husserlian phenomenology2  and, more recently, the mathematical realism of Kurt Gödel (whereby the object of intuition is the relation of concepts).3 

According to Gödel, on the one hand, empiricists traditionally abandon realism (whereby the truth-values of the statements of the domain P are recognition-transcendent).4  On the other hand, rationalists achieve realism but leave one with an unpalatable epistemology. Gödel wanted to avoid the anti-realism of the empiricist and the problem of cognitive access faced by the Platonist.5  Being a realist, Gödel looks to providing an adequate epistemological account, which includes appeal to intuitions.6 

Gödel writes:

 

But, despite their remoteness from sense experience, we do have something like a perception of the objects of set-theory, as is seen from the fact that the axioms force themselves upon us as being true.7 

 

Gödel maintains that mathematical intuition – which is to give us access to mathematical objects – is just as solid as sense perception.8  Gödel’s mathematical intuition concerns the perception of the relation of concepts.9  He writes:

 

[Intuitions] are necessary not only for obtaining unambiguous answers to the question of transfinite set theory, but also for the solution of the problems of finitary number theory (of the type of Goldbach’s conjecture).10 

Gödel claims that there are proofs that are not fully formalizable (which is supposed to support his view that machines could never do some things humans can).11  Humans have a mysterious power – intuition – that allows access to abstract objects.

Guillermo E. R. Haddock complains, however, that there is "insufficient elaboration"12  of how one comes to know mathematical objects. An intuitive account is like replacing a mystery (e.g., how does one access mathematical objects) with a mystery (that of intuition). On Gödel’s account, sticking with that example, one does not know the scope of intuition: Does it apply to logical truths?13 

Intuition shall be discussed in the following authors thus: first, James’ notion of pure experience, second, Husserl’s pure consciousness and Gödel’s appropriation are considered. Finally, it is argued that (both empirical and rationalistic) intuitions have value in a program of naturalized epistemology.

 

AMERICAN EMPIRICISM: WILLIAM JAMES AND INTUITION

 

According to James, empiricism, on the one hand, starts with parts (perceptions) and tries to reconstruct the world in accord with human cognitive faculties (and has often been thought to stand to collapse into idealism if one cannot get outside ones head, as it were). On the one hand, rationalism starts at the top, with certain ideas (for which realism is maintained), and works it way down to the world.14  James seeks to avoid both idealism and realism (subjectivism and objectivism, respectively).15  James’ pure experience is supposed to circumvent – and precede – the idealist-realist hypotheses. According to James, one does not experience sense data or an external world.16  His strategy to escape the idealist-realist dichotomy is as follows.

By purging oneself of abstractions (like idealism and realism), James seeks to attain a pure experience, where one has direct access to what is presented to one.17  James says:

 

The instant field of the present is at all times what I call the Pure experience. It is only virtually or potentially either object or subject as yet. For the time being, it is plain, unqualified actuality, or existence, a simple that.18 

 

In pure experience, one has only an unadulterated, immediate presence, which one intuits.19 

 

AUSTRIAN RATIONALISM: HUSSERL AND INTUITION

 

Husserl also attempts to avoid idealism and realism.20  According to Husserl, the empiricists21  are dogmatic by assuming ideas to be constructions of sense data; they fail to recognize that ideas may proceed all theory.

Husserl’s starting point is the everyday view of the world, one’s "natural attitude," which is anti-intellectual in that it avoids abstracting to the philosophical quandary of the idealist-realist debate and the doubt of the global sceptic.22  Like James, Husserl hopes to find a middle ground between empirical "psychologism" (which is subjectivist) and rational "logicalism" (which is supposed to be objective). Through bracketing23  the "natural attitude" Husserl hopes to discover of a "new region of being,"24  i.e., phenomenological orientation.25  He attempts a "cognitive critique" and a "critical modes of inquiry."26  The epoché is to provide the residuum of the phenomenological reduction, which "excludes" and "puts out of action" all positing; one is supposed to be left with direct access to something given, pure consciousness.27  Intuition promises access to essences which Husserl is a realist about.28  Like James’ pure experience, Husserl’s natural attitude is also supposed be immune from doubt (though, admittedly, the phenomenological stance imports a methodology foreign to James).

If phenomenology can attain pure consciousness and remain self-critical, Husserl thinks it can be a "first philosophy."29  Pure consciousness, according to Husserl, lays bear the dual structure of consciousness.30  On the one side, there is the noetic (the perceiving act), and on the other, the noematic (the perceived),31  the perceiver (cogitation) and a perceived (cogitatum), respectively.32  Furthermore, pure consciousness, according to Husserl, allows access to essences. The phenomenological goal is to attain "pure mental process," where ideas are "seen."33  Husserl identifies two types of perception, that which is primary (empirical) and universal (categorical acts).34  Finally, in these pure states, James recognizes the flux of experience and Husserl observes a successive flow.35  Furthermore, James distinction between the "known" and the "knower" parallels Husserl’s conception of the perceived (noemata) and perceiving (noematic).

The experiences in question are supposed to provide direct access to what is given, though the content of the purging differs from James to Husserl. James’ pure experience is pre-conceptual. Conversely, Husserl’s pure consciousness includes conceptual participation on the part of the subject. According to Gödel, Husserl provides a "procedure or technique that should produce in us a new state of consciousness in which we describe in detail the basic concepts we use in our thought, or grasp other basic concepts hither unknown to us."36 

On the one hand, taking the empiricists’ tack, intuition can be indexed to one’s experiences (a posteriori knowledge). In empiricist programs, like that of James, it is to provide access to sense datums upon which knowledge is to be based.37 

On the other hand, taking the rationalists’ tack, intuition can be indexed to one’s deductive insights (a priori knowledge). Rationalists, like Husserl, often appeal to intuition to provide access to mind-independent abstract objects in order to justify the necessity of certain types of knowledge (e.g., mathematical knowledge).

The historical distinction between empiricists and rationalists find expression in the contemporary realist debate that accompanied it. The a posteriori–a priori distinction was accompanied by an evaluation of the necessity of the knowledge yielded by each type of knowledge. Generically, empiricists were anti-realists (or sceptics) and rationalists were realists.

The realist debate can be traced perhaps, as part of the legacy of Christianity. Kant had said, in the preface to the Critique of Pure Reason, that he had posited the thing-in-itself to make room for faith. Since Kant prohibits the option of intuiting the thing-in-itself (i.e., mysticism), he may be considered sceptical (one can never know what the world is really like).

Upon the anti-realist (i.e., traditionally empiricist) gleaning of Kant, intuition functions within empiricist programs that yield tentative knowledge (i.e., mind-dependent knowledge) about the phenomenal world. Upon the realist gleaning of Kant, intuition functions within rationalist programs that yield knowledge that is possibly recognition transcendent about the phenomenal world (or in Husserl’s case, access to mind-independent abstract objects, like essences).

James was read by Husserl, and in turn was studied by Gödel after 1959, in order to clarify his notion of intuition. Tieszen writes, however, "What exactly is the [phenomenological] method supposed to be? How does one learn it? What are some examples of this method? What are some of its fruits?"38  Why did those in the past not have the intuition we now do? Are evolutionary changes going to result in different intuitions?

Intuition does not break a chain of justificatory regress for empiricists (there is no apodictic foundations of knowledge one can intuit). Empirical treatments of intuition – like that of James – stand to be viewed as psychologistic, for instance, by Husserl (thus abandoning realism and collapsing into idealism).

Yet Husserl’s program (or Gödel’s) can also slide into anti-realism (or scepticism). If the veracity of intuition is called into question, truth is either agent-dependent or exiled to the neither world of unknowability. Since intuition is not (so the story goes) veridical as empiricists and rationalists demand, its inclusion in ones epistemology is dubious (if intuition does not guarantee cognitive access to X, it can be used as a justification of X).

 

BACK TO AMERICA: NATURALISM AND INTUITION

 

The notion of intuition, however, – as conceived of by empiricists or rationalists – has epistemological cash value for a naturalized epistemologist.39  The dissolution of the analytic-synthetic split in Quine’s "Two Dogmas of Empiricism," lays the basis for his naturalist program (because all statements are empirical to some degree).40  According to Quine, some claims though depending upon concepts that are empirical at their base require a further act on the part of the subject that relates ideas in fruitful ways. Quine writes, "[A] statement is analytic if everybody learns that it is true by learning its words. Analyticity, like observability, hinges on social uniformity."41  Quine calls such statements "stimulus-analytic."42  Analytical statements (e.g., mathematical ones) have become calcified from the stream of experience.

Quine’s naturalist program depends on two arguments, one negative and one positive.43  The negative argument is against first philosophy. Naturalized epistemology grew out of the ruins of its foundationalist predecessor. The positive argument is a scientific account of the acquisition of basic concepts, which has already been considered.

Foundational epistemology attempts to justify knowledge on a model akin to an axiomatic system like that of Euclid. On the foundational model, knowledge is contingent upon a finite number of first principles (the so-called self-evident, intuitive truths). On the foundational model, upon a finite number of first principles (the conceptual) rests knowledge (the doctrinal).

Also, since Popper, according to the traditional foundational epistemologist, there is a difference of the context of discovery from that of justification. How one acquires the values, practices, and knowledge (the doctrinal) says nothing about their epistemic justification. Intuition as a state to be examined by the scientist, for example, does not operate within Husserl’s foundationalist program because it violates justificatory priority, where science has to rest on something deeper than itself (something other than how knowledge is acquired).

According to a naturalized epistemologist, however, empirical psychology is to explain how one acquires basic concepts which serve as the foundation of knowledge. Naturalized epistemologists use science to help explain its methods of justification. There is still what is foundational (i.e., acquired, basic concepts) and what rests upon that (the doctrinal), but one begins with an epistemic content.44 

For a naturalized epistemologist, the distinction between the context of discovery from justification is rejected. One has to separate, however, three types of cases. First are the cases where justification differs from the way claims are discovered. For example, the mathematization of electro-magnetic theory by Maxwell served as a corroboration. Yet Maxwell’s mathematization played no role in the discovery of electro-magnetic theory.

Second, are the cases where features of discovery play no role in justifying a belief (e.g., hitting one’s head on the bathtub may be the way one discovered X, but that would not count as the justification for X).

Finally, however, there are the cases where features of the discovery of P are co-extensive with the justification P. For example, in the case of basic arithmetic, the logic of discovery (e.g., as explained by Philip Kitcher in The Nature of Mathematical Knowledge45 ) is isomorphic with justification.

For the naturalist, the debate about whether what one intuits has conceptual content or not is moot since scientists decides when and how (different types of) intuitions function.46  One may have intuitions with little conceptual content (roughly, empirical ones) or ones that are highly conceptual (roughly, rationalistic ones). Intuition (in whatever form it takes) can be of service to a naturalized epistemologist once explained by cognitive psychologists. For example, pure consciousness is a state present in, say, the discovery of new theorems (a process which, in turn, is naturalized). A cognitive explanation provided by empirical science may aid in the justification for a belief. If intuition explains how one acquired a belief, its explanation can play a role in the justification of that truth-candidate.

What intuition could not do for empiricists and rationalists alike – i.e., guarantee access to something which is necessary in ones epistemological tale – naturalism can. Naturalism works backwards. It begins with epistemic content (e.g., science) and seeks to explain how it is justified (or should be justified). For the naturalist, the priority of empiricism is pragmatic, that is, beginning with practices that work.

Consider the foundation for a scientific insight. Knowledge gained by intuition – e.g., intuiting the second axiom of Peano number theory, which states that every number has a successor – serves the naturalized epistemologist (in this case, in justifying the second axiom). One has, presumably, learned, for example, adding an apple to a set of them increases the membership by one. Intuition comes, for instance, when one makes an inductive inference – "membership can go on increasing by one (because it has so in the past)," or as Peano put it for number theory: Every number has a successor. The intuition (with the apples, in the example) is codified by Peano as his second axiom.47  As Putnam writes, "Science at best is a way of coming to know, and hopefully a way of acquiring some reverence for, the wonders of nature."48 

It has been argued that intuition can be utilized by a naturalized epistemologist in accounting for the some of the truths of P. The knowledge produced about different types of intuitions – perceiving tables, the butter knife slipping off the counter, the end of a story, or a scientific fact – can be empirically investigated and serve in an epistemological account.

 

NOTES

 

  1. Empiricism claims "that experience is the only source capable of furnishing us with knowledge of the world... [A]ll knowledge originates in what is immediately perceived" (Cf. Hans Hahn, Empiricism, Logic and Mathematics, ed. Brian McGuinness, London: D. Reidel Pub., 1980).

  2. Rationalism is the view that reason has access to truth independent of experience. Husserl calls it pure consciousness, but I will, in the most part, stick to pure experience for the sake of simplicity.

  3. Gödel divides up views within the philosophy of mathematics by their proximity or distance from metaphysics (or religion) ("The modern development of the foundations of mathematics in the light of philosophy [English translation]," in Collected Works, Volume III, ed. S. Feferman, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990, p. 375). On the one hand (the right one), there is spiritualism, idealism, and theology, e.g., a priori rationalism, which is optimistic and realist. On the other hand (the left one), there is scepticism, materialism, and positivism, e.g., empiricism, which is pessimistic and relativistic. Gödel acknowledges that there are positions that have features of both (e.g., empirical theology and Schopenhauer’s pessimistic idealism) (Collected Works, Volume III, p. 375). Gödel chastises Bertrand Russell for backing away from realism (a fault he attributes to the influence of Wittgenstein): "When he [Russell] started on a concrete problem, the objects to be analyzed (e.g., the classes or propositions) soon for the most part turned into ‘logical fictions’" (Collected Works, Volume II, ed. S. Feferman, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990, p. 121). Gödel claims that there is a fact of the matter independently of whether we recognize it or not. One should believe, according to Gödel, what is not decidable now could be so in the future (Collected Works, Volume II, p. 268).

  4. Gödel writes, "[T]hese nihilistic consequences are very well in accord with the spirit of the time..." (Collected Works, Volume III, p. 379). Under the nihilist spirit of the times, the antinomies of set-theory have been "exaggerated" by empiricists, but he laments that arguments are "of no use against the spirit of the time" (Collected Works, Volume III, p. 377). Gödel’s writes, "[T]he correct attitude appears to me to be that the truth lies in the middle or consists of a combination of the two conceptions... In any case there is no reason to trust blindly in the spirit of the time..." (Collected Works, Volume III, p. 381).

  5. Charles Parsons, "Platonism and Mathematical Intuition in Kurt Gödel’s Thought," The Bulletin of Symbolic Logic, Vol. 1, No. 1 (1995), pp. 44-74, at p. 51.

  6. Richard Tieszen, "Mathematics" in Cambridge Companion to Husserl, ed. B. Smith and D. Smith, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, pp. 438-462, at p. 438.

  7. Collected Works, Volume II, 1990, p. 268.

  8. Just because abstract objects cannot be associated with any "actions of certain things in our sense organs, [they] are not purely subjective, as Kant asserted" (Collected Works, Volume II, p. 268). He goes on, "Rather, they, too, may represent an aspect of objective reality, but, as opposed to the sensations, their presence is in us may be due to another kind of relationship between ourselves and reality" (Collected Works, Volume II, p. 268). The two relationships between ourselves and reality can be cashed out in terms of our interaction with physical and abstract objects. Gödel adopts Husserl’s distinction between perception of physical – as opposed to – abstract objects.

  9. Tieszen writes, "We do not intuit numbers in ‘straightforward’ perception, but only in founded acts. The intuition of mathematical objects is said to be founded on perception because perceptual acts provide the concrete, immediate, and non-reflective basis of all our experience, and any intuition of abstract objects, by various kinds of acts of reflection." See Richard Tieszen, "Phenomenology and Mathematical Knowledge," Synthese, 75 (1988), pp. 373-403, at p. 387.

  10. Collected Works, Volume II, p. 269. Gödel is committed to a faculty of cognition that allows access to mathematical truths, and links necessity to order. He writes, "One of my reasons [for belief in the continuum hypothesis] is that I don’t believe in any kind of irrationality such as, e.g. random sequences in any absolute sense" [written to Tarski, see Gödel, Collected Works, Volume II, p. 175].

  11. Tieszen writes, "There must be, in other words, a kind of ‘informal rigor’ in mathematics. This suggests the possibility that human minds might surpass machines in solving problems or in obtaining proofs of statements based on an understanding of the abstract meaning of statements involved. Gödel has noted this implication in many places in his writings...". See Richard Tieszen, "Gödel’s Path From the Incompleteness Theorems (1931) To Phenomenology (1961)," The Bulletin of Symbolic Logic, Vol. 4. No. 2 (1998), pp. 181-203, at p. 190.

  12. Guillermo E. R. Haddock, "Husserl’s Epistemology of Mathematics and the Foundation of Platonism in Mathematics," Husserl Studies, 4 (1987), pp. 81-102. at p. 81.

  13. Charles Parsons, "Platonism and Mathematical Intuition in Kurt Gödel’s Thought," The Bulletin of Symbolic Logic, Vol. 1, No. 1 (1995), pp. 44-74, p. 44.

  14. James observes that "the whole philosophy of perception from Democritus’s time downwards has been just one long wrangle over the paradox that what is evidently one reality should be in two places at once, both in outer space and in a person’s mind" (Essays in Radical Empiricism and a Pluralistic Universe, Gloucester: P. Smith, 1967, p. 11).

  15. Ibid., p. 15.

  16. As James says, "Experience... has no such inner duplicity; and the separation of it into consciousness and content comes, not subtraction, but by way of addition..." Ibid., p. 9.

  17. Ibid., pp. 5, 7.

  18. Ibid., p. 23.

  19. Intuition could be useful for those interested, for example, in religious experiences. Religious experience is non-dualistic (neither subjective or objective), anti-intellectual (free from doubt) and primordial (i.e., one has direct, transparent access to reality). If intuition, like pure experience and consciousness, are construed in with a religious experience, they could contribute to cognitive descriptions of those types of states.

  20. Phenomenology, Husserl says, is concerned with the "descriptive eidetic doctrine of transcendentally pure mental process as viewed in the phenomenological attitude." (Ideas, tr. W.R. Boyce Gibson, New York: Allen and Unwin, 1969, p. 167). Husserl says, "We put out of action the general positing which belongs to the essence of the natural attitude; we parenthesize everything which the positing encompasses with respect to being... If I do that, as I can with complete freedom, then I am not negating this world as though I were a sophist; I am not doubting its factual being as though I were a sceptic; rather I am exercising the phenomenological epoche which also completely shuts me off from any judgment about spatio-temporal factual being" (Ideas, p. 61).

  21. These, sciences, are based on an empiricism. Husserl acknowledges that empiricism sprang from honest motives, that is, a rigorous genealogy back to the ground of knowledge. The empiricists, however, have proclaimed experience the ground of all knowledge (Ideas, p. 35).

  22. In describing, in order to clarify, he says: "The annulment in question is not a transmutation of positing into counter positing, of position into negation; it is also not a transmutation into uncertain presumption, deeming possible, undecidedness, into a doubt (in any sense whatever of the word): nor indeed is anything like that within the sphere of our free choice. Rather it is something wholly peculiar. We do not give up the positing we effected, we do not in any respect alter our conviction which remains in itself as it is as long as we do not introduce new judgment motives: precisely this is what we do not do. Nevertheless the positing undergoes a modification: while it in itself remains what it is, we, so to speak, put it out of action we exclude it, we parenthesize it" (Ideas, pp. 58-9).

  23. Parenthesizing is a "specifically particular mode of consciousness" (Ibid., p. 59).

  24. Ibid., p. 63.

  25. Husserl says: "We shall therefore keep our regard fixed upon the sphere of consciousness and study what we find immanently within it. First of all, without as yet effecting the phenomenological judgment exclusions, we shall subject it to a systematic, though by no means exhaustive, eidetic analysis" (Ideas, p. 65).

  26. Ibid., p. 48.

  27. Husserl writes, "Consciousness is consciousness of something" (Ibid., p. 73). Husserl says: "We do not yet know... what fundamental lines of description are prescribed by the most universal essential species of mental process" (Ibid., p. 173).

  28. Ibid., p. 177.

  29. Husserl’s terms should conform "faithfully to what is given" (Ibid., p. 151). Husserl remarks, "We have originary experience of ourselves and of our states of consciousness in so-called internal or self perception." Yet internal perception cannot of itself be the foundation of knowledge, until it is submitted to his type of analysis.

  30. Consciousness is intentional; it is intended towards some "object" (Ibid., p. 231). Husserl says: "Cognitions of the essential two-sidedness of intentionality, according to noesis and noema, have the consequence that a systematic phenomenology is not allowed to direct its aim one-sidedly at an analysis of what is really inherent in mental processes and specifically of intentive mental processes" (Ibid., p. 308).

  31. Husserl says, "Just as every intentive mental process has a noema and therein a sense by which it is related to an object, so, conversely, everything which we call object, of which we speak, which we confront us actuality which we hold as possible or probable, no matter how indeterminately we think it, is precisely therefore already an object of consciousness..." (Ibid., p. 322).

  32. Ibid., p. 73.

  33. Ibid., p. 41.

  34. Richard Tieszen, "Kurt Gödel and Phenomenology," Philosophy of Science, 59 (1992), pp. 176-194, at p. 180.

  35. Ideas are experienced by both James and Husserl as "relations." See Essays in Radical Empiricism and a Pluralistic Universe, p. 42.

  36. Collected Works, Volume III, p. 383. Gödel writes, "Now one may view the whole development of empirical science as a systematic and conscious extension of what the child does when it develops in the first direction" (Collected Works, Volume III, p. 385). Charles Parsons also sees some idea of empiricism in Gödel, but again not developed. See C. Parsons’ "Quine and Gödel on Analyticity" in On Quine: New Essays, ed. P. Leonardi and M. Santambrogio, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, p. 309. Gödel does not – like Husserl did – relate primary and categorical intuition, which could be formed into a plausible tale of how mathematics is developed. Rather, empiricist’s perception (which deals with physical objects) and intuition (the relation of concepts) seem to be mutually exclusive.

  37. Wilfrid Sellars, for instance, has told us that appeal to a given is mythical (Wilfrid Sellars, Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, intr. R. Rorty, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997, p. 13).

  38. Richard Tieszen, "Gödel’s Path From the Incompleteness Theorems (1931) To Phenomenology (1961)," p. 201. He goes on to only to edge one away from these concerns, but one is left unsatisfied: There is no answer to how intuition works, the mechanics, which is what one is seemingly promised by an analysis of consciousness.

  39. Husserl had read James’ Principles of Psychology, and referred to him as a "genius," for instance. See James M. Edie, William James and Phenomenology, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1987.

  40. Note that the deterioration of the Kantian distinction between a priori and a posteriori knowledge by Quine does not determine the issue of the necessity (i.e., what "necessary" means, or what, if any, of knowledge is necessary?). Also note, however, necessity can be explicated in terms of realism and be applied to the phenomenal world (e.g., scientific realists maintain necessary knowledge about the phenomenal world) since, according to the scientific realist, it is the only world.

  41. W.V. Quine, Roots of Reference, La Salle, IL: Open Court. 1973, p. 79.

  42. W.V. Quine, Word and Object, Cambridge: MIT Press. 1960, pp. 55, 65-9.

  43. Roger Gibson, "Quine on the Naturalizing of Epistemology" in On Quine, pp. 89-103, at p. 89.

  44. Van Frassen, "Against Naturalized Epistemology" in On Quine, pp. 68-88, at p. 81.

  45. The Nature of Mathematical Knowledge, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984.

  46. Gibson, "Quine on the Naturalizing of Epistemology," op. cit.

  47. The second axiom: N(x) N(x+1). For the naturalist, induction can rest upon itself. Note, intuition need not always have a proximate empirical analogy as has been chosen here. One can have intuitions when playing chess, for example; one makes discoveries. Induction (which the apple example depended upon) also perhaps rests on an acquired intuition, which pushes cognition forward, as it were.

  48. Hilary Putnam, Mathematics, Matter and Method: Collected Papers, 2 vols., New York: Cambridge University Press, 2nd ed., 1979. Vol. 1, p. xiv.