Observations of Feyerabend’s Theory-Laden Underpants

 

The idea of theory-ladenness became popular in the 1960s, and has remained popular in various sections of academia ever since. It’s often said to have begun with the work of Kuhn, Hanson and Feyerabend in the late 1950s. This idea impacts on science, and is said — by some — to lead to “anti-science”, “relativism” and “the attack on objectivity”. Whatever the case is, scientific theory is obviously distinguished from observation. So are all observations theory-laden? Just some? Or is it more a question of degree? The following essay relies on the work of the philosopher of science Ian Hacking, whose position is nuanced. Hacking sees the truth in much of what Kuhn, Hanson and Feyerabend argued. Yet at the same time he stated that “[t]here have been important observations in the history of science, which have included no theoretical assumptions at all”. Hacking also argued that the overuse of the term “theory-loaded” effectively made it “trifling”.

Philosophical positions on the distinction between observation and theory range from the old “naïve” view (i.e., that scientific observations must be pure) to rejecting the distinction altogether. Many philosophers take a position somewhere down the middle, but even that middle has various grey areas.

The philosopher Ian Hacking took a nuanced position that’s partially against some distinctions between theory and observation, but one which questions the complete rejection of the distinction too.

What is original to Hacking is his stress on experiment, which he believed had been largely ignored by philosophers. More relevantly, we had the distinction between observation and theory, but now we have Hacking’s idea that “[e]xperiment supersedes raw observation” too. It may be a surprise to some that Hacking simply inverts this particular binary opposition. Perhaps there’s little point in saying that observation supersedes experiment or that experiment supersedes observation.

N.R. Hanson and Paul Feyerabend

The fixation on theory-ladenness at least partly began with the philosopher N.R. Hanson. In his 1959 book Patterns of Discovery, he came up the with the term “theory-loaded”, which in subsequent years became a bit of a cliché. Hanson argued that every sentence and term is theory-loaded.

Many of Hanson’s examples are convincing. However, is what is drawn from them legitimate too?

The American philosopher of science Dudley Shapere adds to Hanson. In his case, however, it’s the nature of scientific devices which concerns him. Hacking states that Shapere

“ makes the further point that physicists regularly talk about observing and even seeing using devices in which neither the eye nor any other sense organ could play any essential role at all”.

It can be said that there’s no serious problem with scientists using everyday terms in their own non-everyday work. Why shouldn’t they use the words “observing” and “seeing”? What’s more, it can be doubted that many scientists will be troubled with the quibbles philosophers have with their using these words.

Feyerabend went further than Hanson and Kuhn.

In his 1977 book Against Method, he argued that the observation-theory distinction is bogus. In other words, all scientific observations are always theory-laden.

Some readers may now be wondering what exactly Feyerabend meant by “theory”. (This is true about many other uses of that word too.) Hacking picked up on Feyerabend’s use of the word when he wrote the following:

“Unfortunately the Feyerabend of my quotation used the word ‘theory’ to denote all sorts of inchoate, implicit, or imputed beliefs.”

The word “theory” is often thrown around like confetti. Thus, on Hacking’s reading of Feyerabend’s position, one doesn’t need to express one’s theory explicitly, or even know that one has a theory in the first place. In addition, it’s often not the case that a person has a theory “behind” his words or statements: it’s that other people believe that he has. So a theory can be vague, unexpressed and projected onto others.

Despite all that, Feyerabend still believed that theoretical assumptions underlie

“the material which the scientist has at his disposal, his most sublime theories and his most sophisticated techniques included, is structured in exactly the same way”.

Now an everyday cliché can be used:

If everything is classed as a theory, and if theories can be found in every statement or term, then there are no theories at all. The word simply ceases to have any point.

Hacking agrees:

“Of course if you want to call every belief, proto-belief, and belief that could be invented, a theory, do so. But then the claim about theory-loaded is trifling.”

Hacking wrote the following too:

“Of course we have all sorts of expectations, prejudices, opinions, working hypotheses and habits when we say anything. Some are contextual implications. Some can be imputed to the speaker by a sensitive student of the human mind.”

Did Feyerabend really include expectations, prejudices, opinions and habits under the catchall term theory? Indeed, can’t we have expectations, prejudices, opinions and habits and it still not be the case that what we say (or everything we say) is theory-laden?

Hacking: No Theories At All

Oddly enough, although the theories-are-everywhere idea can easily be criticised, Hacking’s own position seems odd too, at least at first. He continues:

“There have been important observations in the history of science, which have included no theoretical assumptions at all.”

Following on the what was said a moment ago, it can be provisionally accepted that these important observations included no theoretical assumptions at all. Yet, at the very same time, the people who made them were (well) over-laden with expectations, prejudices, opinions and habits…

So what?

Hacking’s position may even strike a scientific realist as being extreme. Just for one. Why were such scientists making their important observations in the first place if they were completely free from theoretical assumptions? Of course, we’ll need to see examples here. Hacking, being an historian of science [see here] as well as a philosopher of science, cites plenty.

To ram the point home. Hacker argued that “[t]here are plenty of pre-theoretical observation statements, but they seldom occur in the annals of science”. Just to remind readers. Hacker took a fairly strict position on what a scientific theory is, whereas someone like Feyerabend was very loose with the term.

Logical Positivists and Quine on Observation

Feyerabend was largely reacting against logical positivism. [See here.] Hacking puts the positivist position at its most extreme when he tells his readers that the

“positivist, we recall, is against causes, against explanations, against theoretical entities and against metaphysics”.

More clearly, “The real is restricted to the observable.”

All this depends on what “the real” means. If it means observable, then that statement is true by definition. Of course, the core of the planet Earth can’t be observed, and neither can distant planets and quarks. What about numbers? Positivists had various answers to some of these examples, but not to all.

To run through Hacking’s list. Being against causes is a Humean position. Obviously, causes can’t be observed. Constant conjunctions can be observed, but not the nature of the cause itself. To be honest, I can only guess at what “against explanations” means. Is the argument that if you rely exclusively on observation, then you don’t need explanation too? The case against metaphysics is obvious from a positivist and observation-based point of view.

Now take Hacking’s criticisms of W.V.O. Quine’s position, which stresses not observations, but “observation sentences”. Quine, as quoted by Hacking, states that we should “drop the talk of observation and talk instead of observation sentences, the sentences that are said to report observations”. Hacking had a problem with Quine’s distinction (observations vs observation sentences) within another distinction (observation vs theory).

Hacking stated that Quine was “quite deliberately writing against the doctrine that all observations are theory-loaded”. Quine articulated this position in his 1974 book The Roots of Reference. That was long after Kuhn, Hansen and Feyerabend had first articulated their own controversial theories. As many readers will know, the critics of Kuhn and Feyerabend focussed on their “relativism”, rather than their stress on theory-ladenness. Of course, these two issues have been intimately tied together.

The first thing that can be said here is that Quine’s observation sentences simply seem to be proxies for… well, observations. And Hacking’s general point against Quine is that his theory of observation sentences is just as naïve as some talk about (mere) observations. So Hacking clarifies Quine’s position, which is essentially communal in nature.

Quine believed that “observations are what witnesses will agree about, on the spot”. That’s a non-scientific (or non-academic) three words to use: “on the spot”. Still, Quine provided details. He argued that

“a sentence is observational insofar as its truth value, on any occasion, would be agreed to by just about any member of the speech community witnessing the occasion”.

What’s more, “we can recognise membership in the speech community by mere fluency of dialogue”.

So we have these everyday utterances from Quine: “on the spot”, “just about any member of the speech community”, etc. But let’s remember here that Quine was a pragmatist of sorts. [See here.] So why shouldn’t he have been imprecise on these matters and simply focussed on his own self-referential observation sentences about how communities use words and sentences.

Hacking too has a problem with the above. He stated that “[i]t is hard to imagine a more wrong-headed approach to observation in natural science”. His main argument, at least at this point, was against Quine’s stress on the community. He cited the case of Caroline Herschel, the wife of William Herschel:

“No one in Caroline Herschel’s speech community would in general agree or disagree with her about a newly spotted comet, on the basis of one night’s observation. Only she, and to a lesser extent William, had the requisite skill.”

This seems to go against any notion of communal truth. Alternatively put, it shows that truth can be arrived at independently of any community.

Various communal ideas about truth and knowledge can be dated back to Wittgenstein [see here], as well as before, and Quine was much influenced by him. [See here.] Hacking’s own stress was different. The last two words, “requisite skill”, are important here. In the community of the late 18th century there wouldn’t have been many — if any — people with same skills as Caroline Herschel. But did she or didn’t she discover eight new comets? Yes she did. [See here.] Yet she didn’t need — or rely on — any community to do so, except in less direct and rather obvious senses. In other words, Herschel needed the traditions of science, the devices of science, to share a natural language with various communities, etc. However, none of this is directly connected to Herschel discovering comets, and the knowledge she gained by doing so.

Brian Greene: Thoughts and Sensations Are Physical Processes

 

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Despite the fact that many — even most — people reject the identity stated in the title above, the theoretical physicist Brian Greene believes that’s primarily because of what the neuroscientist Michael Graziano calls our “schematic representations”. Indeed, both believe that thoughts and sensations actually are schematic representations of physical processes.

Image by ChatGPT

By the mid-1970s, the Identity Theory of Mind (or Type Physicalism) was dead and buried. Why? It was mainly because it took folk-psychological types (such as beliefs, desires, etc.) as reified entities, and attempted to map them onto brain types. However, once you move away from type-type identities and focus on token-token identities, or move away from beliefs and desires entirely, then other types of identity become available. Both Greene and Graziano believe that thoughts and sensations literally are physical processes. And they explain why so many people strongly reject that identity too.

Brian Greene — Wiki Commons

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It is often said — very often said — that neurons firing, biochemicals flowing, synapses buzzing, etc. are nothing at all like thoughts and sensations. Thus, the former can’t possibly be identical to the latter.

The neuroscientist Michael Graziano has a theory about this, and Brian Greene explains it in his book Until the End of Time. It all boils down to what Graziano calls “schematic representations”. Greene writes:

“When the brain’s penchant for simplified schematic representations is applied to itself, to its own attention, the resulting description ignores the very physical processes responsible for that attention. This is why thoughts and sensations seem ethereal, as if they come from nowhere, as if they hover in our heads.”

If this passage were to be read on its own, without Graziano’s or Greene’s other examples of schematic representations, it may be hard to grasp, let alone agree with.

Firstly, Graziano argues that thoughts and sensations literally are processes in the brain. What makes this claim seem false to so many people is down to the schematic representations of what’s going on in the brain. The brain simplifies things. It turns physical processes into schematic representations which, in turn, take the form of thoughts and sensations.

This isn’t a self-conscious process in the everyday sense. However, it is an argument for the brain paying attention to itself, without any conscious thought or willing. Thus, although the resulting thoughts and sensations are conscious, the brain processes which lead to them aren’t.

We don’t “see” brain processes. What we do see (i.e., thoughts and sensations) “seem ethereal, as if they come from nowhere”. Thus, it’s the schematic representations which are actually ethereal.

Greene provides an example of a schematic representation which is more down to earth when he continues:

“If your schematic representation of your body were to leave out your arms, the motion of your hands would seem ethereal too.”

In this case, for schematic simplicity, the representation leaves out your arms. (This is just like brain processes being left out, and all we have left are thoughts and sensations.) Obviously, moving hands without moving arms (or any arms at all) would seem odd. The thing is, though, in this instance the human subject would know that the arms have been left out. However, when it comes to thoughts and sensations, many people don’t realise that brain processes have been left, and that they are so for schematic reasons.

All this would explain (if accepted)

“why conscious experience seems utterly distinct from the physical processes carried out by our particulate and cellular constituents”.

Yet it’s our lack of knowledge that our own mental schematic representations are schematic representations which leads, according to Greene’s Graziano, to the hard problem of consciousness. This problem

“seems hard — consciousness seems to transcend the physical — only because our schematic mental models suppress cognizance of the very brain mechanics that connect our thoughts and sensations to their physical underpinnings”.

Note the word “suppress” (as in “mental models suppress cognizance of the very brain mechanics”). This suppression is explained later. Suffice to say that it occurs — or did occur — for evolutionary reasons.

Paul Churchland’s Identities

Graziano’s position (if as expressed by Greene) may seem like the identity theory of mind, a position that most philosophers now regard as being dead and buried. This brings in the philosopher Paul Churchland, who moved beyond the identity theory to his own eliminative materialism.

Let the cognitive scientist Margaret Boden describe Churchland’s position here:

“For Churchland, this isn’t a matter of mind-brain correlation: to have an experience of taste simply is to have one’s brain visit a particular point in that abstractly defined sensory space.”

Here’s Boden again in more detail:

“[Paul Churchland] offers a scientific theory — part computational (connectionist), part neurological — defining a four-dimensional ‘taste-space,’ which systematically maps subjective discrimination (qualia) of taste onto specific neural structures. The four dimensions reflect the four types of taste receptor on the tongue.”

To Churchland himself, “brain processes” and “thoughts” (if not “sensations”) are a question of the following:

“[A] set or configuration on complex states. [ ] figurative ‘solids’ within a four-or five-dimensional phase space. The laws of the theory govern the interaction, motion, and transformation of these ‘solid’ states within that space.”

Churchland even goes into detail about how we may change our vocabulary in the future when it comes to describing our thoughts and sensations:

“Given a deep and practiced familiarity with the developing idioms of cognitive neurobiology, we might learn to discriminate by introspection the coding vectors in our internal axonal pathways, the activation patterns across salient neural populations, and myriad other things besides.”

Despite all that, most people are still very convinced that mental states/events can’t be identical to physical brain states/events. So what’s the problem here? As Peter Carruthers puts it:

“Even if descriptions of consciousness experiences are logically independent of all descriptions of physical states (as the cartesian conception implies) it may in fact be the case that those descriptions are descriptions of the very same things. This is just what the thesis of mind/brain identity affirms.”

Let’s now put Churchland’s position when he states the following:

“For if mental states are indeed brain states, then it is really brain states we have been introspecting all along, though without fully appreciating what they are.”

So when we introspect we “may discriminate efficiently between a great variety of neural states”. However, we may not “be able to reveal on its own the detailed nature of the states being discriminated”.

Our Schematic Representations of a Red Car

The case for thoughts and sensations being mental schematic representations of what’s going on in the brain may seem like a controversial place to start. So what about looking at a red Ferrari? Greene writes:

“[Michael Graziano’s] central thesis is that however heedful of detail you might be, your mental representations are always vastly simplified. Even describing the car as ‘red’ is a shorthand for the many similar but distinct frequencies of light — the many shades of red — that reflect off different parts of the car’s surface.”

Here it’s not clear if Greene is talking about conscious or unconscious simplifications. After all, he does say “even describing the car as ‘red’ is shorthand”. Here it’s said that the conscious self ignores the many shades of red. Yet aren’t we supposed to be discussing unconscious processes in the physical brain? This means that it must be a case of unconscious processes in the brain leading to simplified (conscious) descriptions of the red car.

This latter conclusion is backed up when Greene says that “[y]our mind would reel if it dealt with such an overabundance of detail”. Thus, the brain itself, not the conscious mind, cuts out this overabundance of detail. As a result, the word red becomes “the mind’s welcome, albeit schematic, simplification”. Another way to explain this is to say that the brain can actually deal with the overabundance of detail, but the conscious mind can’t.

The Theory of Mind/Intentional Stance

The theory of schematic representations is then applied to our interactions with other human persons, as well as “interactions” with ourselves. Firstly, other persons:

“Clearly, there is significant survival value in quickly sizing up the nature of our encounters with other life. Researchers call this capacity, refined over generalisations by natural selection, our *theory of mind* (we theorise, intuitively, that living things are endowed with minds that operate more or less like ours), or the *intentional stance* (we attribute knowledge, beliefs, desires, and thus intentions to the animals and humans we encounter).”

Perhaps these applications of the schematic representation theory seem more intuitive than the previous ones.

Evolution and Schematic Representations

This story of schematic representation is then tied to evolution. Greene writes:

“Long ago, brains that may have become distracted by the billowing details of the physical world are brains that would be swiftly eaten. Brains that survived are brains that avoided being consumed by details that lacked survival value.”

The first thing I noted about this passage is how similar it is to Donald Hoffman’s view that seeing “truths” about the world isn’t conducive to survival. Thus, in this case, rather than reality being watered down care of Graziano's schematic representations, reality is completely phased out to be replaced by what Hoffman calls “icons”. Yet, of course, there’s a huge difference between simplifying the world and erasing it. That said, Graziano’s and Hoffman’s theories are indeed broadly similar. But that’s not a surprise because Hoffman’s Fitness Beats Truth theorem icludes feature which are common in cognitive science and evolutionary theory.

Hoffman’s Fitness Beats Truth Idea

As just stated, much of what Graziano says about evolution is similar to Hoffman. For example, in the paper ‘Objects of consciousness’ (2014), Hoffman wrote the following words:

“According to evolution by natural selection, an organism that sees reality as it is will never be more fit than an organism of equal complexity that sees none of reality but is just tuned to fitness. Never.”

Graziano doesn’t go that far. After all, schematisations are schematisations of… something. If human subjects see “none of reality”, then there can’t be any mental schematisations at all.

What is seeing reality in its totality anyway?

Graziano’s theory of schematic representations obviously rules that out. However, Hoffman still targets that idea when he writes:

“When you analyze the equations of evolutionary game theory it turns out that, whenever an organism that sees reality as it is competes with an organism that sees none of reality and is tuned to fitness, the organism that sees reality as it is goes extinct.”

That seems to go even more strongly against Graziano’s position. Perhaps that is simply because Hoffman actually moves beyond animal species in evolution to all human subjects as they exist today. Indeed, Hoffman has moved to philosophical idealism.