Epistemology of the Human Sciences:

Restoring an Evolutionary Approach to

Biology, Economics, Psychology and
Philosophy Walter B. Weimer
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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN CLASSICAL LIBERALISM
SERIES EDITORS: DAVID F. HARDWICK · LESLIE MARSH

Epistemology of
the Human Sciences
Restoring an Evolutionary
Approach to Biology,
Economics, Psychology
and Philosophy
Walter B. Weimer
 Palgrave Studies in Classical Liberalism

Series Editors
David F. Hardwick, Department of Pathology and
Laboratory Medicine, The University of British Columbia,
Vancouver, BC, Canada
Leslie Marsh, Department of Pathology and Laboratory
Medicine, The University of British Columbia, Vancouver,
BC, Canada
This series offers a forum to writers concerned that the central presup-
positions of the liberal tradition have been severely corroded, neglected,
or misappropriated by overly rationalistic and constructivist approaches.
The hardest-won achievement of the liberal tradition has been the
wrestling of epistemic independence from overwhelming concentrations
of power, monopolies and capricious zealotries. The very precondition
of knowledge is the exploitation of the epistemic virtues accorded by
society’s situated and distributed manifold of spontaneous orders, the
DNA of the modern civil condition.
With the confluence of interest in situated and distributed liber-
alism emanating from the Scottish tradition, Austrian and behavioral
economics, non-Cartesian philosophy and moral psychology, the editors
are soliciting proposals that speak to this multidisciplinary constituency.
Sole or joint authorship submissions are welcome as are edited collec-
tions, broadly theoretical or topical in nature.
 Walter B. Weimer

Epistemology
of the Human
Sciences
Restoring an Evolutionary Approach
to Biology, Economics, Psychology
and Philosophy
Walter B. Weimer
Washington, PA, USA

ISSN 2662-6470 ISSN 2662-6489 (electronic)

Palgrave Studies in Classical Liberalism
ISBN 978-3-031-17172-7 ISBN 978-3-031-17173-4 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-17173-4

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature
Switzerland AG 2023
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This book is dedicated to all who fight scientism in science and society
 Praise for Epistemology of the Human
Sciences

“Weimer is a polymath. His writings range over disparate domains

including induction, psychology, epistemology, economics, and mensu-
ration theory. His views have proven to be not only trenchant but
prescient. For example, Donald Hoffman’s position regarding “The Case
Against Reality,” and the constructivist nature of perception was presaged
by Weimer over forty-five years ago. Similarly, those confronting the
replication crisis in today’s psychotherapy research, would do well to take
seriously his admonitions regarding measurement theory. This volume
should be essential reading for anyone involved in or concerned about
the nature of the sciences.”
—Neil P. Young, Ph.D. Clinical and experimental psychologist

“Minds/brains are complex systems within complex systems (living

organisms) within complex systems (human societies) within complex
systems (ecosystems). Consequently, knowing the mind is infinitely more
challenging than knowing the objects studied by the physical sciences.
Weimer’s book rises to the challenge, thoroughly reviewing the strengths
and shortcomings of both famous and forgotten thinkers such as Bühler,

vii
viii Praise for Epistemology of the Human Sciences

Hayek, Popper, and von Neumann to identify key issues for an evolu-
tionary epistemology: consciousness, duality, determination, description,
explanation, mensuration, semiotics, and rationality. The result is a
guidebook that points the human sciences in the right direction.”
—John A. Johnson, Professor Emeritus of Psychology, Penn State
University

“Having researched and written on the neglected problems surrounding

measurement and experimentation in the social sciences, I am encour-
aged to find those topics highlighted and emphasized as of central
importance in this book on epistemology. Social scientists need to realize
their fields cannot simply borrow the tools and techniques of physical
science without understanding the limitations and differences involved.”
—Günter Trendler, Industrial Services Project Manager,
Ludwigshafen a. R., Germany
 Epigraph Source Acknowledgements

Chapter 3: S. Siegel (1956) Nonparametric Statistics for the Behavioral

Sciences, Page 22.
Chapter 4: A. Islami and G. Longo (2017) Marriages of Mathematics
and Physics: A Challenge for Biology, Page 13.
Chapter 5:

A: C. D. Broad (1933/1949) The “Nature” of a Continuant, 1949,

Page 476
B: A. Rand (1982/1984) The Stimulus and the Response: A Critique
of B. F. Skinner, Page 186.

Chapter 6: I. Lakatos (1976) Proofs and Refutations: The Logic of Mathe-

matical Discovery. Page 142.
Chapter 7: C. G. Hempel (1952) Fundamentals of Concept Formation
in Empirical Science, Page 74.
Chapter 8: W. Block (2020) Personal Comunication, also Letter to the
Editor, The Wall Street Journal.
Chapter 9: Robin Williams (1979) Vinyl Album (Cover) Title:

ix
x Epigraph Source Acknowledgements

Reality: What a Concept. Casablanca NBLP 7162

© Casablanca Record and Filmworks
© Playboy Publications, Inc.
Published by Little Andrew Publicatios, Inc.

Chapter 10:

A: H. Weyl (1949) Philosophy of Mathematics and Natural Science,

Page 300.
B: K. R. Popper (1977) Part 1, in The Self and Its Brain, Page 70.
C: V. Vanberg (2004) Austrian Economics, Evolutionary Psychology
and Methodological Dualism: Subjectivism Reconsidered. Page 4.
D: F. A. Hayek (1952) The Sensory Order, Page 121.

Chapter 11: F. A. Hayek (2017) Within Systems and About Systems,

Page 2.
Chapter 12: H. Weyl (1949) Philosophy of Mathematics and Natural
Science, Pages 215–216.
Chapter 13: H. H. Pattee (1981) Symbol-Structure Complimentarity in
Biological Evolution, Page 118.

F. A. Hayek (1978) New Studies in Philosophy, Politics, Economics

and History of Ideas, Page 43.

Chapter 14: J. Bronowski (1978) The Origins of Knowledge and Imagina-

tion, Pages 105–106.

H. H. Pattee (2001) The Physics of Symbols: Bridging the Epistemic

Cut, Page 13.

Chapter 15: F. A. Hayek (1973/2012) Law, Legislation and Liberty, Vol.

1: Rules and Order, Page 33.

Justice L. Brandeis (1927) Dissenting Opinion. Olmstead V. United

States XXX, 277, U. S. 479 of 1927.
 Epigraph Source Acknowledgements xi

Chapter 16: A. McIntyre (1979) Rear Jacket Cover, R. Rorty, Philosophy

and the Mirror of Nature.
Chapter 17: R. B. Gregg (1984) Symbolic Inducement and Knowing: A
Study in the Foundations of Rhetoric, Page 136.

T. S. Kuhn (1970) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Page 200.

Chapter 18: W. W. Bartley III, The Retreat To Commitment. Page XXVI.

 Contents

1 Preface 1
References 10
2 Understanding, Explaining, and Knowing 13
The Nature of Understanding 13
From Axiomatics to Hypothetico-Deductive Method 16
Learning and the Limited Role of Experience 17
Where Does the Illusion of Certainty Come From? 18
Mathematics and Other Notational Forms of Linguistic
Precision 19
How Does Meaning Relate to Understanding? 21
The Use of Mathematics in the Social and Physical
Domains 22
Measurement 23
Understanding and Knowledge Are Functional
Concepts Not Subject to Natural Law Determinism 25
Pitfalls and Promises of Ambiguity and Ignorance 28
A Bucket or a Searchlight? 32
References 34

xiii
xiv Contents

Part I Knowledge as Classification, Judgment, and

Mensuration
3 Problems of Mensuration and Experimentation 39
Physics and the Cat 41
Another Fundamental Problem: Experimental Science
Requires Classical Level Apparatus 42
Historical Excursus: The Nature and Role of Experiment
in Classical Science 45
Change Is Inevitably Scale-Dependent,
and Theoretically Specified 46
References 51
4 Problems of Measurement and Meaning in Biology 53
The State-of-the-Art (Isn’t the Best Science) 54
Probability Absolutes and Absolute Probabilities 57
Replicability Is Scale Dependent 58
What is an Organism? 60
Phenomenalistic Physics is Incompatible with the Facts
of Biology and the Nature of Epistemology 62
References 68
5 Psychology Cannot Quantify Its Research, Do
Experiments, or Be Based on Behaviorism 71
A: Psychology Has Neither Ratio Measurement
Nor Experimentation 72
The Psychology of Robots Has Nothing to Do
with the Psychology of Subjects 73
No One Has Ever Discovered a Natural Law
in Psychology 74
Social Science Is Just Fine with Demonstration Studies 77
B: Epistemic Fads and Fallacies Underlying Behaviorism 79
The Failure of Phenomenalism 80
Excursus: Consciousness Alone Is Not the Issue 81
The Spell of Ernst Mach 81
The Haunted Universe Doctrine of Behaviorism 85
Control at All Costs 87
 Contents xv

References 89
6 Taking the Measure of Functional Things 93
The Role of Statistical Inference in Contemporary
Physics 95
How Shall We Study Co-occurrence Relationships? 98
In Defense of Miss Fisbee 101
References 104
7 Statistics Without Measurement 105
Nonparametric Statistical Procedures Work
with Nominal, Ordinal, and Some Interval Data 107
Generalizability, Robustness, and Similar Issues 110
Back to the Drawing Board, at Least for a While 111
Testing a Theory in Psychology is Paradoxical for Those
Who Do not Understand Problems of Scaling
and Mensuration 111
Back to History for a Moment 113
References 115
8 Economic Calculation of Value Is Not Measurement,
Not Apriori, and Its Study Is Not Experimental 117
Austrian “Subjectivism” Begins with the Impossibility
of “Physical” Mensuration 118
Behavioral Economics Is Just Applied Social Psychology 121
What Has Been Called “Experimental Economics” Is
Actually Constrained Demonstration Studies 121
This Is Your Problem as a Consumer of “Scientific”
Knowledge 123
Scaling Procedures Crucially Influence the Progress
of Science 124
Probability Theories Help Nothing Here 126
Human Action Is Not Given Apriori 127
Productive Novelty Cannot Occur in an Apriori System 129
xvi Contents

Creativity Is Tied to Ambiguity 130

References 132

Part II What can be Known, and What is Real

9 Structural Realism and Theoretical Reference 137
Structural Realism and Our Knowledge
of the Non-mental World 138
Acquaintance and Description 144
From Phenomenalism to Structural Realism 146
Science and Structure 150
From Structure to Intrinsic Properties 152
Science and the Search for Structural Descriptions 152
Acquaintance Is Not Knowledge 154
References 155
10 The Mental and Physical Still Pose Insuperable
Problems 157
A: The Classic Problems 158
Sentience and Qualia 160
The Problem of Functionality Again 162
B: Consciousness, Objectivity, and the Pseudo Problem
of Subjectivity 162
Our Individual Consciousness Can Never Be Causal
Within Our Own Bodies 163
Consciousness Does Not Exist in Time 165
Consequences of the Fact That Acquaintance Is Not
Knowledge 166
The Traditional Problem of Objectivity Is Backwards 167
Excursus: The Chicken and Egg of Subjectivity
and Objectivity 170
C: Clarifications of False Starts and Important Issues 173
Austrian Subjectivism Is a Misnomer and Often
a Red Herring 173
Awareness of Our Own Internal Milieu 173
Is “Silent Consciousness” of Epistemic Importance? 175
 Contents xvii

Excursus: Chance, Constraint, Choice, Control,

Contingency 176
Rate-Independent Formal Concepts Are Not Objects
of the Laws of Nature 177
D: Knowledge Depends Upon the Functional Choices
of Nervous Systems 179
Boundary Conditions Harness the Laws of Nature 179
Initial Conditions and Boundary Conditions 180
Information Structures Are Constraints, but Not Just
Boundary Conditions 182
Physical Information (Differences or Bits) Does Not
Explain Meaning 182
Functionality Is Fundamentally Ambiguous Until Its
Derivational History Is Specified 184
Old Wine in Better Bottles 186
References 190

Part III There are Inescapable Dualisms

11 Complementarity in Science, Life, and Knowledge 195
Observers and the Observed 196
Subjects Make Choices 198
Life Began with Functional Instruction 200
Symbols and Meanings Are Rate-Independent 201
Physicality Can Only Be Disambiguated—And Hence
Understood—By Concomitant Functional Analysis 204
Physics Is Only a Beginning 206
Context Sensitivity and Ambiguity 207
Emergence Beyond Physicality 207
Semiotic Closure as Self-Constraint: Agency as a Matter
of Internal Determination 216
References 222
12 Complimentarities of Physicality and Functionality
Yield Unavoidable Dualisms 225
Downward Causation 227
If Laws Do Not Cause Emergence, What Enables It? 230
xviii Contents

Evolution and the Competitive Basis of Cooperation 231

Epistemology Originated In and Is Shaped by Selection
Pressure in Open Systems 232
Adaptive Systems in Learning and Cognition 233
Economic Orders Are Not Agents and Do Not Have
Expectations 238
Recapitulation: Adaptive Behavior Shows Apparent
Teleology Does Not Violate Causality 240
The Laws of Nature Are Not the Same as the Rules
of Behavior 242
Another Recapitulation: The Physical Sciences Also
Require a Duality of Descriptions 244
References 245

Part IV Complexity and Ambiguity

13 Understanding Complex Phenomena 249
Explanation of the Principle 250
A Precise But Unspecifiable Definition of High
Complexity 251
Limits of Explanation: Complexity and Explanation
of the Principle 252
The Superior Power of Negative Rules of Order 254
Negative Rules of Order Constrain the Social Cosmos 256
Science Is Constrained by Negative Rules of Order 258
Negative Rules of Order in Society 259
Excursus: The Context of Scientific Inquiry 261
Excursus: Notes on the Methodology of Scientific
Research 264
References 267
14 The Resolution of Surface and Deep Structure
Ambiguity 269
The Inevitable Ambiguity of Behavior 271
Deep Structure Ambiguity Is Fundamentally Different
from Surface Structure Ambiguity 273
Why Is Behavior in Linear Strings? 276
 Contents xix

Excursus: Ambiguity and Dimensionality 280

Dimensionality of the Mind 285
Surface Structures, Deep Structures, and the Ambiguity
of Dimensionality 287
References 291

Part V The Corruption of Knowledge: Politics and the

Deflection of Science
15 Political Prescription of Behavior Ignores Epistemic
Constraints 295
Progressivism and the Philosophy of Rationalist
Constructivism 297
Liberalism and the Division of Labor and Knowledge 298
The Data Relevant to PoliticalTheory Is Economic,
Psychological and Sociological 301
Science Is No Longer a Spontaneously Organized
Endeavor 306
The Moral: The Constructivist Desire to Make
Everything Subject to Explicit or “Rational” Control
Cannot Work 308
Evolved Social Institutions Are Indispensable Knowledge
Structures 308
Sociology Has Lost Sight of Earlier Insights 313
References 316

Part VI Appendix: The Abject Failure of Traditional

Philosophy to Understand Epistemology
16 Induction Is an Insuperable Problem for Traditional
Philosophy 321
Is There a Foundation to Knowledge? 323
From Certainty to Near Certainty or Probability 325
The Retreat to Conventionalism in Sophisticated
Neo-Justificationism 327
Hermeneutics and the New Pragmatism 330
Realism Is Explanatory, Instrumentalism Is Exculpatory 333
xx Contents

References 335
17 Rhetoric and Logic in Inference and Expectation 337
The Functions of Language 339
Criticism Is Argument, Not Deduction 339
Theories Are Arguments, and Have Modal Force 340
Adjunctive Reasoning in Inference 341
Science Is a Rhetorical Transaction 343
References 347
18 Rationality in an Evolutionary Epistemology 349
Comprehensive Views of Rationality 350
Critical Rationalism Starts with the Failure
of Comprehensive 352
Comprehensively Critical Rationalism 354
Rationality Is Action in Accordance with Reason 355
Rationality Does not Directly Relate to Truth or Falsity 356
Action in Accordance with Reason Is a Matter
of Evolution within the Spontaneous Social Order 358
Rationality and Its Relativity 361
Rationality Is Neither Instantly Determined Nor Explicit 362
Like the Market Order, Rationality Is a Means,
not an End 364
Comprehensively Critical Rationality is Rhetorical
(and so Is All Knowledge Claiming) 365
Rationality in the Complex Social Cosmos 366
The Ecology of Rationality 367
Science and Our Knowledge Must be Both Personal
and Autonomous 369
Rationality and The “New” Confusion About Planning
in Society 370
References 376

References 379
Name Index 395
Subject Index 401
 List of Tables

Table 4.1 Commonly discussed measurement scales in social

domains, with brief defining relations, appropriate
statistics, and type of test (Siegel, 1956) 56
Table 7.1 Common scale types, permissible transformations,
domains, arbitrary parameters, and meaningful
comparisons (after Houle et al., 2011) 108
Table 11.1 Differences between physicality (inexorable laws
or physical boundary conditions) and, on the other
side of an epistemic/cybernetic cut, the functional
realm of choice control 203
Table 13.1 Minimum complexity for the understanding
of science: two types of activity and three levels
of analysis After Weimer (1979) 262
Table 17.1 Truth tables for common propositional forms
compared to the adjunctive conditional form 342

xxi
 1
Preface

A truism of the biological and social studies is that topics such as “the
methodology of scientific research” or “epistemology” or “philosophy
of science” are to be met with a groan. Students avoid such courses
until forced to take them at the last minute, and most professors and
researchers don’t want to “waste their time” either teaching them or
studying the issues they present. The faculty assume they are wasting
their time because the students won’t learn or remember anything,
and the students hate mathematics and don’t want to memorize more
formulas (which, unfortunately, is almost all such courses involve) just
to pass another course. Such “high falutin’” issues are regarded either as
detached entirely from day-to-day research, or as involving mere rituals
one must go through to look “scientific,” which means they are only
something to pay lip service to in order to publish in prestigious jour-
nals. The usual attitude is that we are doing just fine on our own, happily
adding our well-designed research to a “significant” body of knowledge
that is steadily accumulating, and our students are doing just fine doing
what we tell them to do. So writing a book on methodology and episte-
mology is to be avoided, exceeded in its avoidance only by the onerous
tasks of reading such a book, or teaching its contents. If you must do it,
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1
Switzerland AG 2023
W. B. Weimer, Epistemology of the Human Sciences, Palgrave Studies in Classical
Liberalism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-17173-4_1
2 W. B. Weimer

be sure you just tell us we are doing fine, and only update our entrenched
approaches, don’t point out that “musty old literature” has continually
shown that what we are doing is of little empirical or theoretical value,
because we don’t believe that ancient history.
The answer to that line of response is “No, we have not done
well at all.” That “osterich approach” (head buried in the sand at the
mention of something frightening) has an appeal, but also a very high
cost. Nagging issues invariably intrude—how can we be contributing
to scientific knowledge if we don’t even know what knowledge is, or
how it is acquired? How can we follow any scientific “method” if we
have no knowledge of what science is, or no understanding of what
adequate methodology involves? How can we evaluate whether presti-
gious professor X’s work and research program is better than professor
Y’s? How do we know our field is “scientific” (which invariably means
“empirically based”) in any sense? What if the “practical” advice we
provide to everyday citizens in the world is wrong, or more often, just
useless? Not really knowledge at all? What makes you think that what you
are doing evades the well-articulated criticisms of the past and present?
Such issues are present because of one simple fact: epistemology puts
unavoidable constraints upon ontology. The nature of epistemology—
how and what we can know—puts limits, which can never be exceeded,
upon speculation about ontology—our theories of what exists or is
real. It tells us what we can consider as actual knowledge claims, and
what, beyond those claims, remains unknown and in many cases simply
unknowable, and in all honesty must be labeled as just metaphysical
speculation.
And not surprisingly, when epistemological issues are presented
outside the usual boring framework of mathematical and statistical
procedures one is forced to use in order to get published, both students
and faculty are quite willing to learn about them.
Is it possible to present epistemology to both researchers and students
in a fashion that they will both learn from and also find palatable? Hope-
fully yes. I believe it can be done, and this volume is an attempt to
do so. The alternatives to traditional statistical memorization texts or
philosophical discussions of probability, induction and knowledge “jus-
tification,” and so on can be far more interesting, and far more alive, as
 1 Preface 3

are the issues in the sciences themselves. Indeed, they often are issues in
the sciences themselves.
Examined from the standpoint of an evolutionary approach to epis-
temology (and the nature of the empirical differences between what
is involved in scientific knowledge claims in the physical sciences in
comparison to the “soft” social and life sciences), the answers are
devastating to the osterich approach noted above, to traditional and
contemporary philosophy (especially the philosophy of social science)
and the methodology primers based upon them. Knowledge is not what
traditional accounts say it must be, and there is no such thing as “the”
scientific method to acquire it. Commonly used sophisticated research
techniques are often incapable of delivering either real measures (or
real experiments) or meaningful results or actual “knowledge” at all.
The social domains (especially) study entities of essential complexity in
spontaneously arisen orders of functional phenomena in a very different
manner than how we study the “simple” and always identical phenomena
which the physical domains postulate as their objects. These approaches
are complimentary (both are necessary, neither reduces to the other)
rather than either-or.
A final preliminary point. Please note at the outset one thing that
this book is not. Epistemology should not be confused with, nor is it
synonymous with, either the philosophy of science or the philosophy of
the social sciences. Epistemology has to do with the theory of knowledge
and its acquisition. It is concerned with the nature of science only to the
extent that science exemplifies the nature of and acquisition of knowl-
edge. The philosophy of science is broader, dealing with other topics that
are common to scientific endeavors, and discusses the nature of knowl-
edge only to the extent that it is important for topics such as the nature
of explanation, the “logic” of science, the issue of reductionism, recent
hot button issues such as sex and race in science, and other topics. For
that, there are many introductory texts available, such as Godfrey-Smith
(2003), or Risjord (2014). This book does not compete with them, and
it does not care what contemporary philosophers say except with regard
to the nature of knowledge.1 In fact, actual epistemology is more and
more the domain of psychologists and scientists (ranging from physicists
and biologists to psychologists, sociologists, and economists) and less
4 W. B. Weimer

and less the province of traditional justificationist and nonevolutionary

philosophy. Much of the core findings overviewed in subsequent chap-
ters originated in the work of biologists, economists, mathematicians,
and psychologists rather than philosophers of science.

Chapter organization and main themes. After an introductory

chapter, we begin in Part I by looking at human knowledge as the result
of nervous system classification, which is always judgmental (or value-
laden), and focus upon the fundamental activity of measurement. The
chapters 2 through 8 below introduce epistemic problems of mensu-
ration—of correctly (or meaningfully) assigning numbers to data in a
domain—which are far different in the complex subjects than in physics,
where it is easy and “natural” by comparison. The necessity of epis-
temic constraints upon knowledge—such as the necessity of a duality
of descriptions of physical (rate-dependent or dynamical) and functional
(rate-independent, intentional or “teleological” or meaningful) nature in
all sciences—requires fundamental changes in our conception of how
knowledge is acquired. Traditional philosophical accounts of knowledge
and its acquisition are incorrect and outmoded. Knowledge is not “justi-
fied true belief” gained by inductive “logic” from a given factual basis as
its source. As Xenophanes said 2500 years ago, no one has ever known
certain truth, and “even if by chance he or she were to utter the final
truth, they would not know it: For all is but a woven web of guesses.” The
biology and psychology of inference and expectation—which supplies
our cognitive apparatus and thus our knowledge—cannot be modeled
upon the conception of individuals as mindless machines (like robots)
fully and completely described by “social physics” and molecular biology.
Better accounts have long been available, and we need to discard the still
all too prevalent revivications of earlier inadequate views and utilize the
better ones. Measurement and its role provides a case in point.

Mensuration in physical theory is easy because it deals only with

identical and unchanging objects, never always differing living subjects.
Objects such as atoms, alpha particles, quarks, etc., are all identical,
and any one of them can substitute for any other one in our exper-
iments and theory. But those objects could never be known to exist
 1 Preface 5

as such unless there were subjects (of conceptual activity) who, as

agents, study the physical domain and construct theories about it. Those
theories transcend the purely physical domain which they are about—
they are epistemic products of human conceptualization. All knowledge
depends upon the existence of the functional or semiotic (as well as
pragmatic) domain. Conceptualization can transcend and harness the
physical realm: it is not a deterministic byproduct of purely physical
processes (or just another physical process). Our choices harness physi-
cality and produce genuine novelty—new behavior and new knowledge,
even new existent things. Traditional determinism exists only in the rate-
independent realm of human conception—it is a theoretical idea, a way
of conceiving things, not a fact of “external” reality. That novelty (from
our choices) can even reshape the physical universe, since it (our thought)
can guide our actions in doing so—as in our building of extensions of
our senses for knowing our environment, and machines and artifacts that
terraform our planet and change our econiche. We are co-creators of our
econiche.
Part II examines the nature of our knowledge of both ourselves and
the non-mental realm (including our own bodies in the latter cate-
gory) as disclosed by structural realism. Epistemology is the theory of
the nature of knowledge as well as just its acquisition. Here, we must
trace the history of the gradual refinement of realism, the thesis that
there is a real world external to our senses which is causally responsible
for what we can come to know, to indicate why the world of appear-
ance (naive or direct realism and the doctrine of phenomenalism) is
not reality. All we can know is a matter of the relations between our
appearances, never any ultimate or intrinsic properties of that reality.
This separation of the knower from the known is explored throughout
the book in many aspects and ramifications. In traditional philosophy,
these are problems of the relation of mind and body—stemming from
the Cartesian separation of a mental “substance” from the physical
world (originally intended to stand outside reality to judge or assess it).
Descartes created the ontological dualism of the mental and the physical.
Examination of epistemology refutes such a speculation. What we can
know—the nature of epistemology—constrains what ontological theo-
ries are possible. Part II reformulates the distinctions between knower
6 W. B. Weimer

and known as dualisms in epistemology, not ontology. We can reformu-

late the separations of traditional mind–body problems by distinguishing
the physical from the functional domains of existence, and explore how
fundamentally emergent phenomena characterize living systems even
though they are embodied in “physical” forms. In place of the usual
mind–body problems, we find that epistemology requires a context of
constraints consisting of the complimentary employment of dualisms
(opposed or irreducible alternatives). Without specifying accounts from
the viewpoint of these dual perspectives, we are unable to explain life or
the evolution of the knowledge it has produced.
Part III explores inescapable dualisms and complimentarities in
science, life, and the nature of knowledge. Epistemology is one of the
life sciences. That is a striking claim to traditional approaches, used
to regarding it as an ahistorical “rational reconstruction” of codified
propositions. The theory of knowledge can only be understood as an
endeavor carried on by living subjects of conceptual activity. All life
sciences require an evolutionary and historical account, because no two
subjects (and subjects came into existence only with the beginning of
life) are ever identical fundamental objects (as are postulated in physics).
Throughout history, thinkers have argued about whether there is only
one, or are many, theories of knowledge necessary for the different scien-
tific endeavors. Because the physical sciences were traditionally assumed
to be more advanced than others, it was also assumed that they are
paradigm exemplars of both what knowledge is (and should be) and
how it is achieved. Many argued that there is only one ideal type of
knowledge, exemplified by physics and its hard science cognates, and that
nonphysical domains (whether dealing with biology, higher mammals as
individuals [as in psychology], or social phenomena as products of living
groups) have not made as much progress because they failed to adopt the
mathematics and controlled methods of inquiry that have worked so well
for physics (as examined in Part I). Part III explores why physics alone
is only a beginning. Problems of agency, meaning, and evolution, such
as what is an elementary concept (like specifying what is an organism),
transcend the laws of nature disclosed by physics. Agents are functional
phenomena exhibiting self-determination by internal constraint systems,
not physical ones determined by external constraints. There is genuine
 1 Preface 7

emergence in the biological as well as the conceptual realms, involving

such things as the semantic closure of physical and symbolic compo-
nents, the inability of laws of nature to explain speciation, the role
of downward causation in adaptation, the anticipatory structure of all
organismic cognition, the role of ambiguity and ignorance, why rules of
behavior are not laws, and more.
Part IV looks at domains of essential complexity, arguing that there
are fundamental differences in the complexity of the subject matters
involved in the human science domains, which therefore require a
different sort of explanatory framework to understand their subject
matter. The domains of complex phenomena can neither be studied
nor be explained in the same manner as the simple domains. First, the
domains in question cannot be experimental (as discussed in previous
Parts). All human sciences (including the biological, psychological, and
social) are indeed empirical domains subject to “scientific” inquiry that,
because of their inherent complexity, can never have the sorts of control
or measurement theory scaled mathematical underpinnings found in the
“hard” sciences. They are thus empirical but not experimental (in the
sense of physics). We do demonstration studies to show that general
patterns of behavior are found, and cannot expect ratio-scaled point
predictions in essential complexity. It turns out that the rules of behavior
most capable of guiding the indefinitely extended domains of behaviors
are negative in character, since an attempt to specify a potentially infi-
nite list of “positive” actions to be performed cannot be held in any
living memory. Evolution has chosen to guide organisms by negative
prohibitions to general classes of behaviors. Learning is negative in char-
acter in an uncertain and changing world. We learn what mistakes to
avoid instead of what specific behaviors we must produce. Ambiguity and
lack of understanding surround us at all times in the real world. That is
our evolutionary existential predicament. The only resolution to ambi-
guity requires the provision of more context. In the environment, that
resolution is provided by action—by sampling more—walking toward
and around an unfamiliar object to see what it is, listening to more of
a speaker’s words and “going back over” their context to see which of
several alternatives was intended, and so forth. In short, behavior—ours
or others—can only be disambiguated and “understood” by supplying
8 W. B. Weimer

the derivational history behind the surface structure linear strings of

which it is constituted. That approach is the future of psychology and
all the other complex human sciences.
Part V explores a problem for scientific inquiry that has become
cancerous in the era of “big science” and big government. That problem
is not the acquisition of knowledge but rather the suppression of knowl-
edge and its acquisition (and dissenting views) by factors external to the
practice of science itself. When research is commissioned and directed
by other social forces rather than the intellectual curiosity of researchers
themselves—by religion, by political expediency, by momentary “correct-
ness” of opinion—the unwillingness to disagree with powerful funding
agencies and fear of loss of job security and one’s place in the research
community (being canceled) will force results to be determined by those
external demands. The problems posed by free inquiry into a domain
will be supplanted by research tailor made to agree with what politi-
cians, funding administrators, special interest groups, or vocal popular
opinions or “feelings” demand, instead of by facts and theories resulting
from unhampered research. The technology of politics (there is no
“science” thereof independent of social psychology, anthropology, soci-
ology, and economics) provides almost nothing except more and more
egregious examples of this. Progressivist researchers and funding sources
have become cultural Marxist to such an extent that unbiased research
(or research that does not support its momentary correctness) is all but
impossible to find, and harder still to evaluate.
Part VI concludes with a survey of problems in epistemology as it is
found in traditional Western philosophy. These views all define knowl-
edge as justified true belief, while the history of philosophy is that of
the gradual abandonment of this conception, first in a classic sense,
then in the last two centuries as a “neo” version based upon probability,
and finally with the “positive” thinkers (who believe genuine knowledge
is possible) being overcome by the skeptics who, for one or another
reason, give up on the possibility of knowledge and adopt one or another
form of conventionalism or instrumentalism instead. Here, we will find
the majority of references to currently popular positions, primarily in
critical discussion, because they exemplify one or another of these inad-
equate views. When understood from a non-justificational evolutionary
 1 Preface 9

epistemology, they can be put into perspective and in many instances

reinterpreted very differently.
Speaking of understanding, that is the first issue to address in
Chapter 2.

∗ ∗ ∗

This volume stems from over 50 years of study and interest in epis-
temology, philosophy of science, and the methodology of scientific
research. It owes much to discussions with, and the work of, the late
professors Wilfrid Sellars, Paul Meehl, Herbert Feigl, David Bohm,
Grover Maxwell, Thomas S. Kuhn, William Bartley III, Donald T.
Campbell, Sir Karl Popper, Gerard Radnitzky, as well as professors
Robert Shaw, Howard Pattee, John Anthony Johnson, William N. Butos,
James Wible, Doctors Neil P. Young, Gunter Trendler, and Leslie Marsh
(for wanting it in his series on classical liberalism and helping it get
there), and many more, but with special thanks to the late professor
Friedrich A. Hayek, who, as another marginal man on the border of
many disciplines, understood most of the problems addressed in this
volume before the rest of us even knew that there were problems.

Note
1. Rosenberg on the philosophy of social science. A comprehensive intro-
ductory text by Rosenberg (2016) provides a contrast to what is intended
in this book. Like this volume, Rosenberg argues for a historical approach,
describing the persistent issues, but in “the new vocabulary” of the social
fields for each new edition. I certainly agree that we face “old wine in new
bottles, but just as intoxicating as ever” (see p. x) in stating and criticizing
these issues. At that point, however, we diverge. Despite characterizing the
“one central problem” of the social sciences as “what sort of knowledge
they can or should seek,” there is no discussion of the issues this book
addresses. Written from the standpoint of a philosopher, Rosenberg’s
volume regards epistemology from that standpoint alone rather than as
one of the life sciences. As such, it offers no treatment of the evolu-
tionary theory of society stemming from the eighteenth-century Scottish
10 W. B. Weimer

moralist philosophers (historically the first social “scientists,” and also not
noted by Rosenberg) through the nineteenth-century continental liberal
theorists to the twentieth-century Austrian economists, or the theory
of spontaneously organized complexity for the biological and psycho-
logical individual, as well as for the social order as the result of action
but not design stemming from Hayek and the evolutionary epistemolo-
gists discussed in Weimer (2022a, 2022b). Nor is there any discussion
of the conceptual connection between that evolutionary approach to
epistemology and the social philosophy of classical liberalism. Thus one
searches in vain through Rosenberg’s Chapters 7 and 8 (entitled “Social
psychology and the construction of society” and “European philosophy
of social science”) for anything comparable to the discussions in this
book, or the discussions of the fundamental issues of mensuration found
in the first seven chapters. Nor is there any understanding of the fact
that rationality is not exhausted by any explicit or fully conscious theo-
ries thereof. The approach of this volume is that epistemology, as one
of the life sciences, is informed primarily from biology and the social
domains (such as psychology and economics) rather than from traditional
justificationist philosophy of the sort criticized in the appendix chapters.
That is why central positions discussed here stem from the philosophy
of physics, “origin of life” research, individual and social psychology,
economics, and similar areas. In a nutshell, despite large overlap on several
topics, the focus of this volume simply is not upon the traditional or
“received view” philosophical positions on social science epistemology. In
that regard, this volume seeks to replace that traditional viewpoint with
a more adequate one to guide future inquiry. Evolutionary epistemology
is not traditional philosophy—it points toward its replacement by non-
justificational philosophy, and informs it with recent scientific problems
and potential solutions as replacements for traditional ones.

References
Godfrey-Smith, P. (2003). Theory and Reality: An Introduction to the Philosophy
of Science. University of Chicago Press.
Risjord, M. (2014). Philosophy of Social Science: A Contemporary Introduction.
Routledge.
 1 Preface 11

Rosenberg, A. (2016). Philosophy of Social Science. Westview Press.

Weimer, W. B. (2022a). Retrieving Liberalism from Rationalist Constructivism:
History and its Betrayal (Vol. 1). Palgrave Macmillan.
Weimer, W. B. (2022b). Retrieving Liberalism from Rationalist Constructivism:
Basics of a Liberal Psychological, Social and Moral Order (Vol. II). Palgrave
Macmillan.
 2
Understanding, Explaining, and Knowing

Any fool can know. The point is to understand

Commonly attributed to Albert Einstein

What is knowledge, and how is it used? Knowledge is the result of our

theoretical understanding of our selves and our econiche—our life and
the universe we inhabit. We use our knowledge claims to understand
ourselves and our world. Knowledge is functional rather than physical—
it functions to aid survival. But what is the “understanding” for which
we use knowledge?

The Nature of Understanding

Einstein was claimed to have said that any fool can know—the point is
rather to understand . Regardless of its source, we need to explore this
idea. In both science and ordinary reasoning, as well as logic and math-
ematics, understanding is the same thing: we reason by classification
and analogy to determine identity of apparent disparates through a basic
statement of equivalence, literally an equation of the terms. In all cases,
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 13
Switzerland AG 2023
W. B. Weimer, Epistemology of the Human Sciences, Palgrave Studies in Classical
Liberalism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-17173-4_2
14 W. B. Weimer

this equation is symbolized as an equals sign:

X equals Y(or X = Y).

In ordinary language, this means that something (X) is equal or equiv-

alent to something else (Y). All argumentative claiming, which is what
both commonsense and scientific knowledge claims are, is of this form.
We are fundamentally analog devices, making analogies—arguing this is
like that—in the process of understanding. In all theories, it is a specifi-
cation of how that which we wish to account for (to explain) is identical
to (or equal to, or can be taken to be, represented as, etc.) something
else, which is a description that is on the other side of the “equals” sign.
Symmetry between descriptions based upon identity is what constitutes
human understanding. Explanations in science and ordinary discourse
are rhetorical—they are arguments claiming that equality (which means
identity in some specifiable form) obtains between two disparate terms
or propositional structures: In ordinary language, we are saying “This
is equal to that,” or “this isa that,” to use a common “logical” term.
We are creatures who are in the business of making equations to relate
disparate things, all the way from the most basic judgments of similarity
or disparity in nervous system activity through thing-kind identifications
of classes to scientific theories. All knowledge claims are arguments. They
are arguments in two essential respects. First, they are arguments for the
equivalence of what is on each side of the equals sign. We explain by
saying: “This” means “that.” And this conceptual equivalence structure
entails that knowledge, as part of a subject’s conceptual scheme, can never
be identical to that which is known, and in consequence, entails that the
knower cannot be the same as that which is known.
A second essential sense of argument is that theories and knowledge
claims are themselves arguments. We argue—or affirm and attempt to
persuade others—that “since my theory is true, the world (of the theory’s
data domain) is necessarily the way it is.” Our “logic” is not the tradi-
tional material implication or “if—then” reasoning of classical logic, but
more the adjunctive implication of the old Stoic logicians, who addressed
propositions (not classes), and whose implication statement is “since—
necessarily.” We are in the business of argumentative claiming, and our
 2 Understanding, Explaining, and Knowing 15

theories are always arguments. In the classic distinction of logic, dialectic,

and rhetoric, science is a series of argumentative rhetorical transactions,
not just a matter of “logic.” (Whether it is ever dialectical is an empirical
issue.)
While we are not all mathematicians (or logicians), we all constantly
do what they do for a living—make equations between knowns (or, what
is the same thing, taken-for-granteds) and unknowns. Thus thing-kind
identification, or the problem of stimulus equivalence as it came to be
known in psychology, is the fundamental problem at the heart of all
human activity and inquiry. Everything we do is basically a matter of
judgment —of searching for identities and noting disparities. This leads
immediately and inexorably to problems of functionality, and meaning
and its manifestations, because (physical) stimuli are equivalent (or are
dissimilar) within our conception only because they mean the same (or
mean dissimilar) thing(s) to a living (in the functional-semantic realm)
subject. We judge things to have the same or different meanings. Under-
standing is a basic psychological process. It is our attempt to adapt to an
ever-changing world.
What can we learn in determining identities? If we postulate that, to
use a classic example, F = ma, do we learn anything? No. What we do in
making such an equivalence statement is literally just that—we postulate
something as a starting point. As a knowledge claim, such a postulation
may then be seen to occupy a definite place in our conceptual schemes
and to entail that certain results must obtain in the universe if our postula-
tion is true or near to the truth. The laws of nature (as our best knowledge
claims in physics) have to be tied down to empirical reality to have
any empirical meaning. Are the deductive consequences of such schemes
instances of learning? Not if learning is taken in its usual interpretation
as learning-from-experience. The empirical realm has not yet played any
role in determining the correctness of the conjectured postulate or claim.
We have to look at the world to see if the postulated and deduced results
fit with observed reality. Thus empirical reality enters later, after the fact
from an explanatory theory, in the testing of a knowledge claim.
16 W. B. Weimer

From Axiomatics to Hypothetico-Deductive

Method
With the advent of non-Euclidean geometries in the nineteenth-century
physics dropped the pretense (left over from infatuation with Euclid)
that laws of nature were somehow justified or true because they were
derivations from “true” premises (axioms). Theorists realized that they
had simply been postulating (conjecturing, guessing, whatever) what was
necessary to have the “laws” work. Those postulations were called theo-
ries of the realms involved. Before that era, explicit empirical theories
did not play a central role in explanations. Heinrich Hertz is usually
credited with beginning this new approach. Boltzmann (in a lecture in
1899) summarized Hertz’s change from axiomatics: Hertz noted that
“Especially in the field of physics our conviction of the correctness of
a general theory ultimately does not rest on its derivation by means of
the Euclidean method, but rather on the fact that the theory leads us
to correct inferences about appearances in all the cases then known.…
Experience, after all, remains the sole judge of the usefulness of the
theory…” (1960, p. 248).
Hertz proposed that theories were thought “pictures” of a domain (a
view further fleshed out in the mid-twentieth century by, among others,
Hanson, 1958, 1970, Bohm, 1965; and Kuhn, 1970, 1977). Boltz-
mann noted that our task is only to construct what he called “inner
representation-pictures”:

Proceeding in this way, we do not as yet take possible experiential facts

into consideration, but merely make the effort to develop our thought-
pictures with as much clarity as possible and to draw from them all
possible consequences. Only subsequently, after the entire exposition of
the picture has been completed, do we check its agreement with experi-
ential facts…. We shall call this method deductive representation. (ibid.,
p. 249)

Thus was born the famous hypothetico-deductive “method” of science

that has since dominated positivist and empiricist accounts. From
that time on, so-called hard science abandoned the axiomatic method
 2 Understanding, Explaining, and Knowing 17

(although pockets of social science have attempted to retain it). This

H-D account of explanation provides only “the logic of the finished
science report” and deliberately ignores entirely what became called the
context of discovery (where learning occurs), leaving discovery and thus
the growth of knowledge to “mere” psychology or sociology (which is
where David Hume, in the Treatise in 1739, and Adam Ferguson in his
Essay in 1767, had already left it).

Learning and the Limited Role of Experience

First consider how we learn (not what). What is the role of experi-
ence, or of empirical results, to the practice of science? The answer can
be stated quite succinctly: very crucial and very limited. The evolu-
tionary approach to epistemology (Campbell, 1974b, 1988, Popper,
1963, Weimer, 1979) teaches us that all learning is a matter of trial and
error elimination. Our hypotheses can never be shown to be completely
correct (any more than a species can be perfectly adapted to an econiche),
since any interesting hypothesis has an infinitude of data that is relevant
to its assessment. We can never accumulate, let alone assess, an infi-
nite amount of data. But finding any instances of errors, results that are
incompatible with the hypothesis, always suffices to show that the whole
picture cannot be correct. As thinkers since Duhem (in 1914/1954) have
noted, something must be discarded because of the inconsistency—either
the hypothesis is false, the data incorrectly collected or interpreted, or
some combination thereof.
Advances in understanding consist in clarifying abstract conceptual
frameworks (which are by definition transempirical) and creating and
assimilating new data to emerging conceptual-theoretical structures.
Empirical data are relevant to these processes, but can never totally
resolve issues in them. Conceptual issues can be changed (sometimes
clarified, sometimes confused) by data, and data can be changed by
conceptual frameworks (because facts are always relative to theories), but
no resolution in either direction is ever final. Experience in its role in
the creation of data is relevant but never decisive. We infer to facts (the
18 W. B. Weimer

theoretical entities we call “data”) rather than from them. All factual attri-
bution is relative to a theoretical (conceptual) framework. As Goethe said
so aptly centuries ago, were the eye not already attuned to see it, the sun
could not be seen by it. If our nervous systems did not already operate
with a theory to specify what constituted a fact we could have no facts at
all. Facts are not neutral bits to be mindlessly picked up and thrown into
a bucket. They are as conjectural as our other theories. We are co-creators
of our knowledge of the “external” world.

Where Does the Illusion of Certainty Come

From?
Against the very fallible and uncertain factual “basis” of our knowledge,
there is a sense of certainty in our conceptual structures. We know (or
rather, feel we know) that there are eternal verities (e.g., 2 + 2 = 4)
and theoretical truths (e.g., in the kinetic theory, molecules in a state
of rapid agitation must of necessity be hot—that statement represents
an analytic truth, a definitional fusion of the concepts, a statement of
equivalence between the terms). We feel that things must necessarily
be related, and since that is so, things are necessarily internally related.
Why is this so? Probably the answer is in the over extension of the
theory of human linguistic conceptual structures—which are syntactic
and semantic definitional fusions or statements of equivalency—from epis-
temology into ontology, which is to say, from a theory of the acquisition
of knowledge into a thesis about the nature of reality itself. It is true
that syntactic systems, if internally consistent, yield “deductions” that are
“eternal verities” in the sense that they are valid without time limit within
that system. Such truths are true ex vi terminorum, literally in virtue of the
definition of the terms involved, and not because of any content that we
attach to them via a separate empirical or semantic component or iden-
tification. The doctrine of internal or semantic necessity over extends
definitional fusions from conceptual thought into the “outside realm,”
the nature of the dynamical universe itself. For this overextension, there is
no empirical evidence at all. The necessitarian position, tenable in empty
 2 Understanding, Explaining, and Knowing 19

syntactic systems like logic or mathematics, is untenable when extended

to reality—to empirical domains.

Mathematics and Other Notational Forms

of Linguistic Precision
Mathematical expressions in science are not knowledge or sources of
knowledge—they are just notational shorthand devices to express iden-
tity relationships. Thus mathematics is propaedeutic to science rather
than definitive of its essence. Human understanding is about explicating
conjectured identity relationships, and that may or may not involve
mathematics. A brief excursus with an apocryphal story concerning
a clash between Denis Diderot and Leonhard Euler about a putative
“mathematical proof ” for the existence of God illustrates this, as well
as the perennial clash between the “hard” heads who attempt to math-
ematize everything and the “muddle” heads who do not. The fictional
confrontation several centuries ago at the Russian Imperial Court had
Euler putting on the board the following formula, which was intended to
have the explanatory power of a mathematical proof. This showy proce-
dure mirrors the procedure of mathematical: “proof ” as an explanation
(or explanatory structure). It begins with producing an equation and
then claims to “deduce” certain or true consequences from it:

(a + b)n
=X
n
After writing this, Euler solemnly intoned to Diderot “Donc Dieu existe;
repondez!”.
Let us see what this empty syntactic formula could possibly mean,
to determine whether we need safe conduct tickets back to France (as
Diderot was alleged to demand from the Russian Court) or not. In plain
English what Euler said is:

Some unknown quantity, called X, is equivalent to some other quantity

which is determined by adding the two quantities denoted by a and b,
20 W. B. Weimer

which are then multiplied by their sum for n number of times, and then
the resultant total is divided by the same number n. Thus God exists.
Now reply.

Put in this fashion, no one could possibly construe this pronouncement

as a “proof ” (which has to “deduce” a conclusion) of anything at all.
All this or any other mathematical formula does is provide a shorthand
notation for how we are to manipulate specified quantities in order to
obtain their equivalence to something unknown, usually designated by
“X.” All of mathematics is a matter of putting empty symbols that we
agree to have represent something on one or the other side of an equals
sign. What the symbols stand for is a shorthand notation for quantities
and operations to be performed upon quantities (or on other symbols
standing for quantities). The meaning of those symbols in the real world
is totally outside the symbols themselves. All of mathematics specifies
what is on each side of the undefined primitive symbol =, understood as
what is expressed in natural language English as the word “equals.” When
we “solve” a problem in math, we specify that the unknown (the x) is
equivalent to the symbol manipulation procedure denoted on the other
side of the = sign, and plugging in certain quantities to find a solution
specifies a particular determination as that result. Mathematics is about
performing operations on quantities or variables standing for quanti-
ties to produce equivalences. Nothing more, nothing less. Mathematical
formulae have no meaning whatsoever—math is about the manipula-
tion of contentless symbols. Syntactic structures are totally meaningless
in themselves. We have to add semantic content to the syntax to have
anything meaningful.
So where is the meaning in mathematical concepts and formulae? The
answer is always the same: outside of the symbols themselves, in a theory
of what the symbols stand for. Mathematics is a set of symbol manipu-
lation systems according to syntactic structuring devices, or the rules of
symbol manipulation (this is why a mindless algorithmic machine can
do mathematics). Whether “pure” or applied, mathematics is constituted
of nothing more nor less than syntactic rules of determination of equiv-
alences. The study of pure mathematics uncovers systems of syntactic
structures that specify certain forms of outcome when the rules of symbol
 2 Understanding, Explaining, and Knowing 21

manipulation are applied. Applied mathematics utilizes the empirically

empty systems of pure mathematics after independently having postulated
their relevance in the description of given empirical domains. Within
the realm of the pure or un-interpreted syntactic structures (or calculi),
there is no meaning attached to the merely nominal symbols and all
that is of concern is the consistency of the structures. Once consistency
of symbols is established, results of symbolic manipulation (if correctly
carried out) are certain and thus inviolate. Within all applied mathemat-
ical systems, “applied” by (non-mathematical) theoretical identification
with (idealized) empirical phenomena, there is no certainty whatever
even though the empty symbol system is consistent and thus internally
coherent and “certain.” Mathematics is nothing but symbol manipula-
tion systems defined by their syntactic rules. There is never a semantic
component in pure mathematics—all meaning comes from our inter-
preting in some outside theoretical framework what those empty symbols
represent.

How Does Meaning Relate to Understanding?

Human understanding is inherently a matter of relations. The primitive
form of relation we employ is judgment of equality—the equals sign in
an equation. Equations relate meanings on one side of an equals sign to
meanings on the other side. “Equals” is a relation (a relational structure).
As such, it is a purely structural or syntactic concept, with no intrinsic
meaning beyond the structuring it provides. To say that X equals Y (or
with negation, that X does not equal Y) does not put any particular
meaning in the “equals,” it only relates the meanings found in speci-
fying X and in Y. So understanding is not meaning. Understanding is only
tangentially related to meaning because it states that some given meaning
is equal to another given meaning. This applies in both mathematics
and natural language (or any aspect of semantic cognition). Meaning is
not a relation—in itself it is a predication. All extant “theories of mean-
ing” tend to ignore this (for example, meaning as “use,” or meaning
as neural activity, or meaning as XYZ). They are in fact theories (or
statements) of the relationships in which meanings participate. What
22 W. B. Weimer

meaning is as a predication—which is what an actual theory of meaning

should provide—appears to be beyond our reach except from an evolu-
tionary perspective. Given our present knowledge, meaning appears as a
brute fact; it is something that we take for granted as referring to our
perceived existential predicament, and let it go at that. One should not
confuse “what meaning is” with the issue of how it arose. Here, we have a
more adequate picture: it appears to be a concomitant to classification in
neural activity, as when an organism must make a rapid classification—
a value judgment—as to whether a stimulus pattern is threatening or
harmful or not threatening and not harmful. The rapid reptilian “fight
or flight”—or even earlier faint response (still used to good effect by
the opossum or hognose snake)—appears to be the source of our basic
meanings. Mammalian meaning arose in and is based in the primitive
judgments of what are traditionally called “passions” and emotions, not in
cold, reflective cognition, which is a relational reworking and refining of
that initial broad based snap judgment classification in the CNS. What
we call reason is a refinement of judgmental passion, not a different,
somehow superior, kind of judgment.

The Use of Mathematics in the Social

and Physical Domains
Looking at an article in a physics journal usually reveals a bewildering
welter of equations and little explanatory or theoretical text. Looking
at an article in psychology usually reveals dense text and rarely if ever
any equation. This is indicative of the differing subject matter of the
social and physical domains, and reflects a corresponding difference in
the nature and role of mathematics in such disciplines. In the physical
domain, the “subjects” are all identical objects in a class, having no unique
properties whatever. Electrons and photons, for instance, are all iden-
tical instances of their class and are completely interchangeable. In the
social domain, all subjects are different, having vastly different knowledge
and experience and skill and evolutionary or developmental history. No
two human beings (or any living animals) are the same, no matter how
carefully they are matched on some dimension by the most meticulous
 2 Understanding, Explaining, and Knowing 23

“experimenter.” This fundamental and unavoidable difference between

the “subjects” of the social domains and the objects of the physical
domains forces us to acknowledge equally fundamental and unavoidable
differences in the nature and role of measurement (and thus the use of
mathematics) in these domains.1
Physicists make models describing patterns of interaction among
conceptually (and, what appears to us as empirically) identical objects.
Mathematical formulae (usually algebraic) describe abstract patterns
when we do not assume, or are unable to possess, particular informa-
tion about the specific entities actually involved. A familiar example is
thermodynamics, where we know absolutely nothing about a movement
or a magnitude of any individual molecule in a cloud of gas. Here, the
so-called law of large numbers enables us to make statistical probability
statements that do allow predictions of probabilities with a high degree
of accuracy, but these predictions can never be about or even involve any
single individual entity (e.g., molecule of gas) in any way. Physics makes
predictions of ensembles only, never of a single fundamental “object.”
Physics is a matter of idealizations about identical members of totally
homogenous classes.

Measurement
Measurement is always and indispensably an act of classification (and
thus inherently a judgment, an assignment of meaning to the flux of
non-mental phenomena). Physicists and social scientists assign numbers
as “measurements” of things, and assume that there is no problem in
doing so. However, the fields are fundamentally different here. Physi-
cists classify by measuring definite magnitudes which have been shown
to have powerful generalizability and important mathematical properties
in virtue of having been made according to specified scaling theory prop-
erties. Social scientists cannot blindly follow this approach because their
attachment of “numbers” to living entities does not meet the criteria of
scaling and measurement found in physical domains. Consider this:
24 W. B. Weimer

The true reason why the physical sciences must rely on measurements is
that it has been recognized that things which appear alike to our senses
frequently do not behave in the same manner, and that sometimes things
which appear alike to us behave very differently if examined.
The physicist,... was often compelled to substitute for the classification
of different objects which our senses provide to us a different classification
which was based solely on the relations of objective things toward each
other.
Now this is really what measurement amounts to: a classification of
objects according to the manner in which they act on other objects. But
to explain human action all that is relevant is how the things appear to
human beings, to acting men. This depends on whether men regard two
things as the same or different kinds of things, not what they really are,
unknown to them. (Hayek, 1983, pp. 23–24)

In social domains such as economics or psychology, one cannot expect

to find permanent (or even relatively constant) relations between aggre-
gates or averages. Our populations are never large enough for the law of
large numbers to apply—and thus we can never actually ascertain ratio
scale based probabilities. The social domain does not actually deal with
true mass phenomena, nor with identical objects. It deals with ambi-
guity. Every living individual subject is different in some crucial aspect
that no experimenter can ever hope to “measure” (or often even know
about, let alone “control” for). This ensures that there are inherent and
fundamental limitations to our possible knowledge and hence to our
predictive ability. This cannot be overcome by making finer or more
precise measurements. Perfectly fine measurement would merely confirm
what we already know—that every subject is unique in detail with
respect to every other subject. Hence the differences that cause our lack
of knowledge cannot be “measured” away. All we can hope for is to
find generalized or abstract patterns of regularity, and we will never be
able to predict particulars in any social domain. This is a fundamental
conceptual difference between the complex functional and the relatively
simple physical domains that science studies. This difference in what our
knowledge consists of in these very different domains of physicality and
functionality will ramify throughout the discussion that follows. In all
cases, there will be only a bare minimum amount of symbolic equations.
 2 Understanding, Explaining, and Knowing 25

There is never anything in any of the equations of any science that cannot
be said completely and correctly, with no loss of semantic content, in the
natural language(s) available to our common sense reasoning. Mathe-
matics provides only a shorthand formulation, literally a shortcut, to be
used as an aid in understanding. All of science can in principle be done in
a natural language with adequately determinate semantics and concepts
to substitute for the mathematical functions and variables. We use math
because it is so economical as a shorthand approach to working out
the logical consequences of relationships that would be often impossibly
long and cumbersome to state in natural language. In no case is there
any extra or hidden meaning in the mathematics beyond the syntactic
consequences of the symbol manipulations.

Understanding and Knowledge Are

Functional Concepts Not Subject to Natural
Law Determinism
The domain of our understanding is within the conceptual realm of prag-
matics. Pragmatics deals with functions and meanings in their contexts.
Functional specification is not and cannot ever be physical. The laws of
nature that physics can disclose do not apply to the functional domain.
But while we cannot become Superman (or Woman!) and leap over tall
buildings because we cannot violate those natural laws, our functional
specifications and concepts are not determined by the laws. So long as we
do not violate natural law constraints, we are free to do (and to think
and theorize) whatever and however we want. Thought and theory are
constrained by the laws of nature, but they are not determined by them.
There is genuine freedom, true novelty, and unpredictable creativity
in human conceptualization and behavior. Creativity or productivity
is rule governed, but it is not directly determined by natural laws or
deducible from prior events. Laws are inviolate and unbreakable. Rules
of conduct (which apply to thought and indeed to all behavior) can be
broken and changed, corrected and often improved, even refuted. Under-
standing how this can be so is one of the most important things that
26 W. B. Weimer

an evolutionary approach to epistemology can provide. We must realize

that understanding and explanation in an evolutionary framework is not
every-where every-when deterministic.
Finite organisms in a universe of infinite variety and complexity
face immense problems in surviving. To survive requires adaptation to
the ambiguous flux, the local environment (the econiche) in which an
organism is found. How does this occur? Aside from religion (super-
natural determinism or predestination), only one hypothesis has been
advanced and explored: that evolution through time has enabled adap-
tation to an econiche for those populations who survive. We no longer
debate this (it is taken as a truism) and now debate only what possible
“mechanisms” or factors are involved in the process of evolution. Factors
to consider are the structure of the universe and its necessary (law-like)
characteristics, the enormous welter of “frozen accidents” constituting
the boundary and initial physical conditions, the evolved structures
within the organism and their necessary characteristics, the interactions
of populations of organisms, and the econiche constructed by the species.
Thus theories of evolution must focus on the context of constraints
provided by the natural environment (usually regarded as the domain of
the “physical” sciences), constraints provided by the evolved structures
of the organisms and their capabilities (the biological and psychological
domains), and group structure constraints on populations (for humans,
cultural or sociological factors).
What is human knowledge, and what is an explanation? What is
understanding? We should consider proposed answers for how well they
address issues from a coherent evolutionary point of view, and how
testable the theories they generate can be. Traditional philosophy (as
noted in the Appendix chapters), based on the idea that knowledge is
justified true belief and the justificationist metatheory of inference and
rationality (Weimer, 1979), is simply false and serves no purpose except
to provide a series of puzzles and paradoxes for “academics” to publish
about in their quest for tenure, promotion, and self-aggrandizement. In
terms of explanatory adequacy for basic concepts such as understanding,
explanation, knowledge, learning, inference, and dozens more, justifica-
tionist accounts are bankrupt, as several epistemologists have argued,
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
Sure. Sure he would. This was Wednesday, a Rec. night. Tonight,
after supper, Belle and her Three Graces would make a night round.
"Personal service"—if you had the credits. He had the credits. He'd
take a fall—hell, a couple, why not—out of old Belle herself. Not that
Belle looked any better than the others, but at least she put a little
life into it. A couple of hours with Belle, twelve credits; a bottle, four
more. All right, he had them. Tonight he was really going to make a
night of it. Yeah.
Yeah?
Yeah. And the next day, Thursday, all day ... yeah! His head ached,
stomach churned; that burning back of the eye-balls; the awful, tight-
drawn humming of nerves. And on just one bottle? God, that acid-
burn gin. No, old Belle had been in rare form and he got two bottles
instead of one. But even so ... must be that stew the night before. Oh
death!
He fought the day, his work, all day. He missed quota. The fingers
were just a blistering mist before his eyes. He drank water and
gagged on it. He paced his cell. He sweated. God! Could a man live
like this?
"Boy! Say there, boy. Look alive, eh?"
Mr. Boswell, the old electronic shyster. It was afternoon, finally, of the
everlasting, miserable day. Jay 7 looked up to watch sullenly as, the
usual afterthought, Mr. Boswell rolled on off to plug in his cord; and
rolled back. Made a noise, a harrumph-type, throat clearing,
introductory noise. Mr. Boswell had no throat but he was a believer in
certain niceties, form and procedure.
"Well now, boy. Let me see, where are we? Oh yes. Bring you up to
date. My latest petition for further continuance pending a review of
the transcr...."

Suddenly, it was all too much. Jay 7 was mad, furious. He, in a word,
blew his gin-throbbing top. He was on his feet, shaking hands, white-
knuckled, gripping bars. "Goddamnit!" he shouted, "Goddamnit, you
rotten old fraud, I've had enough, you hear me? I got a by-God-
bellyfull enough."

Suddenly, it was all too much. Jay 7 was furious with the old
electronic shyster. He was on his feet, shaking hands, white
knuckled, gripping bars.

"Oh?" inquired Mr. Boswell, mildly. "Enough is enough, eh? But how
can we be sure that alternatives...."
"All right, all right." Jay 7 wouldn't get anything out of him by
shouting, he knew that. He was still tense and shaking but he
managed to lower his voice to a tense, confidential whisper of
appeal. "But I can't take much more of this. And the uncertainty. I've
got to know. How much longer, huh? Please, please, Mr. Boswell,
man to man ... when will the trial come? How much longer before we
go to court, I—we—get my acquital, huh? Man to man, when can I
walk out of here a free man?"
"Man to man? You are just a boy, boy. Show it all the time. Man to
man? Well ... perhaps it is time you did grow up a bit. So. You want
to know when you will leave here a free man? I'll tell you. Never."
"Never?!?"

"Never. Hasn't that been obvious from the start? Look. You know the
charges, the evidence against you. In your actions, in your mind,
either way you are guilty, boy. Regardless of the degree, you are
guilty. The evidence is undeniable. You know better than I how guilty
you are."
"No!"
"You are so eager to leave here? Why?"
"Just to get out. To be free. Isn't that enough?"
"Nonsense, lad; nonsense. You are doing fine here, just fine. Look at
it this way. You are here for the common good, yours and society's,
in protective custody. You have made rather a nice adjustment. Quite
nice, really. To accept it gracefully, gratefully, is best. And, with me as
your counsel, there is no reason why we cannot hope to continue
your case indefinitely—for years, for decades. Why...."
"No! No, they can't, you can't do that to me." A highly unoriginal
protest. Mr. Boswell made a mild sound of disapproval. At such times
he regretted the limitations of construction that did not permit him a
shake of the head.
"Years? Decades? No! I can't stand it; I can't, I won't. I'll find a way
out. I'll make a way."
"Suicide? Oh now, my boy, please. To take your own life? A
shameful thing. And not at all fair to my firm."
"No, not suicide. I—I'll break out. Damn you, I will. I'll grab your
damned wire—I can reach it from here; I'll pull your plug. You'll have
to take me out of here or I'll let your juice run out and you'll die.
Boswell, you're going to hide me under that machinery of yours and
take me out."
"Oh? But my boy—what then?"
"Then I'll be out, that's what."
"Then you will be out. Out of here; out in the street; out of protective
custody; outside the law. You would be alone then, lad; alone with
your guilt, cast out, apart from society and the sound, stable order
you find here. And would not every decent man's hand be against
you? Think, my boy, what that means. Could you face it?" During
these remarks, as Jay 7 clung, hot-eyed and shaking to the bars, Mr.
Boswell had backed prudently well away, out of reach from the cell
door.
"Yes! I don't care. To hell with you; to hell with all of them. I've got to
get out of here. Come back, you coward. I tell you I've got to get out,
out, out!"
Mr. Boswell backed across the corridor and pulled his plug from the
socket. The wire rolled back neatly on the spool. "Time—no more
time; other clients." He peered myopically through thick lenses back
toward the cell. "Please, lad—it pains me to hear you talk so wildly."
"I've got to get out, you hear? Out!"

"Well, my boy, if it has become such a phobia with you and you feel
you have got to do so foolish a thing ... why don't you just walk out?"
"Walk out? What in hell are you talking about? How can I walk out of
this cell?"
"Now, now, boy. You are only in protective custody, to protect you
from yourself, from an outraged society, you understand. That cell
isn't locked. Never has been. You know that."
"That's a lie!" The man, Jay 7, threw himself against the bars,
pressed against them, every muscle straining. "It's locked, locked.
You can see. It won't open."
"Now, now," said Mr. Boswell again, starting to swing around on his
wheels, "that door opens inward. You get your food through it, your
work; the other—ah—amenities, girls ... eh? Nobody ever unlocks
that door, isn't that right? They all just push it open. Right? Eh? It
opens in."
"You lie. It's a damned, rotten, filthy lie." He was yelling, shaking,
rattling the door; pushing at the door.
"Easy, boy," said Mr. Boswell, "easy now. If you say so ... perhaps
you are right after all. So. We adjust, eh? See you Sunday. There
are some details, questions of improper punctuation in the transcript
of your involuntary confession we must go over; something we can
use in the next preliminary hearing. Eh? Good night, boy." Mr.
Boswell rolled off, smoothly as always, down the corridor.
Jay 7 quit pushing then, all at once and completely, and hung limply,
two hands circling two solid bars, leaning heavily against the cell
door. He sobbed once and then sniffed. He felt thirsty. So ... well, he
had his cup, his own faucet. He could get a nice, cold drink of water
any time he wanted it. He sniffed again and turned away from the
barred door.
THE END
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