Stardate 20040110.1905

(On Screen): Andrew Schouten made a long post in response to my recent two articles about the three-way war, and also sent me a letter, which I'll quote here and answer. In part, his questions arise because I'm not finished and he is asking about things I intended to write about later. And in part his questions arise because he apparently misunderstands what I'm trying to accomplish.

To summarize it, I had a issues with your treatment of "realism". I think that it glossed over realism's (what I call philosophical realism) debt to philosophical idealism, as well as it overemphasized science's empirical nature (which, it is not, at least, not entirely).

I had intended to deal with a lot of the points you raise in later articles.

For instance, one reason for not paying attention to various pure philosophical strains of thought is that what I'm mainly concentrating on is how those things actually manifest now, and they do not coincide with any such pure strains. As a practical matter, there's a degree of merging of multiple strains, as well as a considerable degree of distortion in the actual practice.

But the questions that I really have for you are these:

1. [In relation to environmentalism and other crack-pot "science"] to what extent, Mr Den Beste, do you think that science is religion? How much of what constitutes science is "faith"?

I don't think that question is very important within the context of what I was discussing, and I'm not sure that I am capable of answering it, mostly because I'm not sure we share a common definition of the word "religion" (or "faith").

Your post on your site talked about induction, but you and I apparently don't have the same opinion about what induction involves, based on how you wrote about it. I wrote at length about induction here. In that post I did talk about the way that some kinds of inductive conclusions amount to "faith", and I also talked about how science was inherently inductive. But I don't agree that all inductive conclusions are inherently matters of faith in any important sense, and I don't see science that way.

When it comes to junk science, all I can say is that those who practice science correctly are not responsible for the way that others misuse it. I don't consider abuses of science to indicate anything about science itself.

2. How does an empiricist arrive at humanism? Might somebody guide me along this path? Moreover, is any empiricist exposition of humanism following from "there's an objective reality, and you can only determine the nature of that reality by looking at it" without contamination from any form "philosophical idealism"?

The way that the locus of beliefs which are clustered together today in the faction I call empiricism ended up collected together is to some extent the result of historical contingency. In the particular case you ask about, it isn't so much that empiricism automatically leads one to humanism, as that in the first part of the Enlightenment empiricism was best able to flourish in the areas where humanism was also coming to dominate, and as a result the two ended up largely co-mingled thereafter. That's the kind of thing that happens in history, whether it makes philosophical sense or not.

I had intended to talk about that in a later post. There are several different ways in which the p-idealism and empiricism factions ended up with collections of basic ideas which are only loosely if at all related on a philosophical level.

3. The founding fathers might have been Enlightened empiricists, but I cannot see the path of empiricist observation "of how the world really is" that leads to a creed of natural rights and legitimacy as consent of the governed. So, exactly how is it that the idea of America is philosophical realist in nature?

It grew out of the basic empiricist locus of ideas which had previously been developed in Europe, which included humanism even though humanism doesn't directly follow from empiricism. It didn't grow logically out of empiricism specifically, as such.

That said, you underestimate the extent to which empiricism directly informed the opinions of the founders. The political world as it really was, as far as they could tell from history and current events, seemed to demonstrate that if government was given any kind of unconstrained power it would eventually become tyrannical, so they tried to specify a form of government whose powers were strongly constrained in various ways, such as the balance of powers among three co-equal branches of government.

I've seen commentary that suggests that the single most amazing innovation in the US Constitution was the creation of the Supreme Court as a power co-equal to the executive and legislative branches. I gather that there had never been anything like that before, and as we all know, three-way balances of power are far more stable than two-way balances.

Nonetheless, this question is another case of ju