Reconsidering epistemological scepticism

What I used to think

I blogged before about how I consider an epistemological scepticism fully compatible with being conservative/reactionary. By epistemological scepticism I mean the worldview where concepts, categories, names, classes aren’t considered real, just useful ways to categorize phenomena, but entirely mental constructs, basically just tools. I think you can call this nominalism as well.  The nominalism-realism debate was certainly about this. What follows is the pro-empirical worldview where logic and reasoning is considered highly fallible: hence you don’t think and don’t argue too much, you actually look and check things instead. You rely on experience, not reasoning.

I have various reasons for being an epistemological sceptic – having been influenced by the highly sceptical British conservatives of the Oakeshott-Burke-Scruton type, having been influenced by Buddhism, having been influenced by General Semantics, Peircian Pragmatism, Eric Raymond and Eliezer Yudkowsky and Scott Alexander, who are all epistemological skeptics, but my biggest reason is perhaps an over-correction to Prog idealism: for example when Progs scream about the need to protect the environment, the simplest rejection I can offer is that the environment is just a word, an empty concept, that does not predict anything.

On other other hand, I am keenly aware that the whole conservative tradition from Aristotle to Richard M. Weaver flat out rejects epistemological scepticism or nominalism. Besides, despite being an atheist, I have a high respect for Catholic practical-mindedness, and they, too tend to reject nominalism. So I suspect there is something wrong about it, but I have not seen any truly acceptable arguments against nominalism.

What I think now

Well, reading Darwinian Reactionary is changing my mind about this. Apparently I really should read Millikan’s Language: A Biological Model   and her Clear And Confused Concepts.  It seems everybody has their favorite writers, like Moldbug has Carlyle, and DC has Millikan as his favorite writer. More or less. This is news to me, I didn’t think contemporary philosophers are worth reading?  I mean, they are, even, alive?🙂

Anyhow, the argument is that there are classes, which are indeed artificial, and there are kinds, which are products of natural forces, products of causality.

These behaviors, characteristics, and properties tended to clump together in Scottish people for historical reasons. If you plotted all the people in the world on a massively multidimensional graph that had dimensions like frequency of eating haggis, frequency of wearing argyle, frequency of listening to bagpipes, etc., you would find a clump on this graph which denotes the Scots.

And the deeper – Darwinian – argument, unspoken but obvious, is that any being with a model of reality that does not conform to such real clumps, gets eaten by a grue.

This is impressive. It seems I have to extend my one-variable epistemology to a two-variable epistemology.

My former epistemology was that we generally categorize things according to their uses or dangers for us. So “chair” is – very roughly –  defined as “anything we can sit on”. Similarly, we can categorize “predator” as “something that eats us or the animals that are useful for us”.

The unspoken argument against this is that the universe or the biosphere exists neither for us nor against us. A fox can eat your rabbits and a lion can eat you, but they don’t exist just for the sake of making your life difficult.

Hence, if you interpret phenomena only from the viewpoint of their uses or dangers for humans, you get only half the picture right. The other half is what it really is and where it came from.

So I used to think like a woodworker: this one is here a softwood, that one is a hardwood. If I want to quickly make a table, I use softwood, if I want a table that will serve my family for generations, I use hardwood. This is not wrong, but not the full picture. We glean more evolutionary fitness, more advantage if we know what pine and oak trees really are and how they became what they really are, if we know even the features that are not so directly useful for us. We could use that kind of knowledge to e.g. grow more oak trees and thus make oaken furniture less expensive.

That is why I now revoke the objections I raised in the comment section of another post of DC.

He wrote:

>On the other hand, the contemporary view is that concepts are not classification schemes. Instead, concepts are mental abilities to reidentify what is objectively the same on disparate occasions and under disparate conditions.

And I objected:

How could sharp categories exist outside the mind?

I revoke that now. Of course sharp categories don’t exist outside the mind but these clumps do. These exist even the mind of animals, like in the mind of a rabbit who runs away from foxes but from pigeons not. Of course foxes are clumps: their genes are not 100% accurate copies of each other, they are not cloned. But they really distinct clumps.

These clumps apparently exist only in biology. They are a somewhat mysterious feature of biology. Outside biology we frequently don’t find such clumps, for example, celestial rocks exist in all kinds of sizes, from tiny to planet, their size distribution graph does not have much in the way of clumps. Same thing about the size distribution graphs of hills and mountains. The lifeless universe knows no real concepts.

But biology is somehow special. The size distribution graph of lions has a certain clump, that of the average, typical lion. Moreover, the size distribution graphs of felines or great cats also has multiple clumps, which correspond to species.

I don’t know why biology works so, but it does. Why biology is not too continuous… why does it like these distinct clumps. Schelling points? Do we have a theory why speciation even exists and why does genetics tend to clump into species instead of having continuous distribution graphs? No, it is not simply reproduction. I think if the world’s largest man gets the world’s smallest woman pregnant, she has an awfully high chance of dying during childbirth. So species-clusters don’t really match with reproduction-clusters.

Anyway, the lesson is that we are biological beings. When we interact with other humans, and other biological beings, we should perceive these real clumps. Hence, concepts are more real than I used to think. Hence, nominalism is less real than I used to think.

Anyway, my mistake was to think the alternative to Aristotelean essentialism, which I reject, can only be nominalism. So for example sex is either real as in essentially real, or sex is just a concept. And I am certainly no essentialist. There is no “real essence of treehood”. That has always been nonsense – sorry, Aristotle, sorry, Ed Feser, but it really does not work like that. We need a third category, such as DC’s “teleofunction”, so we need to put more emphasis on the teleological aspect of Classical philosophy and less emphasis on the essentialist aspect of it. Not tree-as-just-a-word, nor tree-as-the-real-essence-of-treehood-embodied, but as something-suitable-for-the-ecological-function-of-trees.  The same way, sex isn’t just a concept, but isn’t an essential thing either, but a reproductionary teleofunction, that can function well or can malfunction. People with XXXY or other intersex conditions chromosomes have a real sex, but a malfunctioning one.

I still think it is a weird exception that biology works so. The lifeless universe, in general, does not have these clumps, only living beings do. Neither do artificial things have these clumps – chairs come in all sizes and shapes. Don’t know why biology works so… But we evolved to deal with living beings, and we are living beings ourselves. Thus we must see these clumps.

So basically I must reject Scott Alexander’s “The Categories Were Made For Man, Not Man For The Categories” now. Real plants and animals were not made for man, that is creationism. For whatever reason – but probably teleofunctional optimality – real plants and animals cluster. Correct and objective categories predict these clusters as they really are, as they arised from their own casuality, from natural forces, not simply based on how they seem to us. Misdetection of real clusters leads to getting eaten by a grue.

So we need two epistemology, one for biology, including ourselves, and one for everything else, such as lifeless universe and artificial objects.

I think my previous over-scepticism about epistemology and real categories comes from the fact that I am something sort of a technical guy with an engineering mind, I am far more interested in artificial things than in natural things, and nominalism is very, very correct about artificial things: there is no real clump or cluster of chairs. It is idiotic to argue if a large teacup is a real chair or not – can you sit on it safely? Yes, but it is kind of uncomfortable. OK then call it an uncomfortable chair and stop arguing whether it is really a chair or not.

Nominalism is correct about artificial things. The big mistake is confusing natural things with artificial things.

How I am going to keep my immune system against Prog Idealism now?

Can I still claim equality, justice or the environment are just words or do I have to take them seriously now? Well, I think my new Schelling-fence will be biology.  Things that are not directly biological are just words. In other words, I can still be nominalist about things like justice, equality or the environment, because they are artificial, not natural. So, the argument that something is wrong because it is socially unjust or conserves inequality still carries as much weight that saying weird chairs are wrong because they aren’t like other chairs.