The Limits of Reason: Cognitive Psychology, The Epistemological Crisis, and Epistemic Humility, #1.

(Palazzi, 2023)

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. Introduction

2. Background: The Cognitive Limits of Rationality

3. Cognitive Blindspots

4. The Myth of the All-Seeing Eye: The Limits of Perception

5. The Epistemological Crises

6. Conclusion

The essay that follows will be published in six installments, one per section; this is the first installment.

But you can also download and read or share a .pdf of the complete text of the essay, including the REFERENCES, by scrolling to the bottom of this post and clicking on the Download tab.

The Limits of Reason: Cognitive Psychology, The Epistemological Crisis, and Epistemic Humility, #1

There is a crack, a crack in everything

That’s how the light gets in. (Cohen, 1992)

[H]ow would we feel if science came up against experimental and intellectual brick walls, so that after centuries of trying, man finally concluded that the world was constructed – if upon intelligible principles at all – upon principles so bizarre as to be perfectly undiscoverable or unfathomable by the human mind? What if [humankind] became totally convinced that the world simply could not be understood, that the world is and always must remain an intellectual surd? Science might then continue at it pertains to technology, but not as it pertains to theory. What if all hope of theoretical understanding were permanently lost? (Davis, 1987: 293)

Only those who stop at the right moment prosper in philosophy, those who accept the limit and the comfort of a reasonable level of worry. Every problem, if one touches the bottom, leads to bankruptcy and leaves the intellect naked: No more questions and no more answers in a space without horizons. The questions turn against the mind which conceived them: It becomes their victim. Everything becomes hostile: [their] own solitude, [their] own audacity, absolute opacity, and the manifest nothingness. Woe to [that person] who, having reached a certain point of the essential, has not stopped! History shows that the thinkers who climbed to the limit of the ladder of questions, who laid their foot on the last rung, on that of the absurd, have given to posterity an example of sterility, whereas their peers, who stopped half-way, have fertilized the mind’s flow; they have been useful to their fellows, they have passed down some well-crafted idol, a few polished superstitions, a few errors dressed up as principles, and a system of hopes. (Cioran, 1949: pp. 115-116)

1. Introduction

This essay is an introduction to a research project that aims to undertake an examination of various claims about epistemological crises existing in foundational disciplines such as mathematical logic, philosophy, theoretical physics, and psychology, outlining the philosophical significance of the widespread existence of “blackholes,” or conceptual impasses in human thought.

These issues preoccupied my professional academic research, as pitiful as it is, since 1980, where I argued this in an Honours thesis at the then-Marxist dominated philosophy department at Flinders University, then in my PhD thesis, and later works (Smith, 1988a, 1988b). This 1,000 page Honours thesis was not well received by one supervisor, but liked by the external examiner, and my skin was only saved by the intervention of department head Marxist Professor Brian Medlin (1927-2004), who gave it a first class. Years later I became close friends with Brian until his death from cancer, convincing him of the dangers of the ecological crisis, which he turned to in his final years, moving beyond mechanistic Marxism. As a research fellow I shared an office with him, discussing a wide range of issues, including how he thought Gödel’s First Incompleteness Theorem was incorrect, but he did not put his finger on the fallacy (“Some invalid jump from object language to metalanguage,” he thought). This dialogue was done with work boots on the tabletop, and Brian, always dressed in black, drinking a beer. And all that now is but a memory.

I came to see early in my PhD work that philosophy cannot adequately address its core problems, despite two thousand years of concentrated efforts. I turned my attention to the sociology of the environmental crisis, only to reach a starker conclusion: that human civilization is hurtling to self-destruction (Smith & Positano, 2010). David Ehrenfeld in The Arrogance of Humanism, a book which profoundly influenced my thought as first year undergraduate student reading it in 1978, defines the doctrine of Humanism, which he criticizes, as

a supreme faith in human reason—its ability to confront and solve the many problems that humans face, its ability to rearrange both the world of Nature and the affairs of men and women so that human life will prosper. (Ehrenfeld, 1978: p, 5)

Central to this doctrine is the idea that all problems are soluble, both intellectual ones and problems of life. Consequently, human civilization will survive (Ehrenfeld, 1978: 17: Ligotti, 2011). These are the ruling ideas of rationalism and scientism, and they will be challenged in this essay too, as I’ve also done in previous publications (see, e.g., Sauer-Thompson & Smith, 2021).

There appears to be a common thread to the various foundational claims made in an extensive literature to be reviewed below, that at the deepest theoretical level of the disciplines, there are incompatibilities between core concepts or theories, paradoxes, and antinomies, and/or, fundamental problems of interpretation of the basic meaning of the essential principles of the paradigm. The best-known illustration of this epistemological crisis—a perennial search for the justification and validation of knowledge claims—is philosophy, which has been subjected to perennial debate about the rationality of its foundations, and the refutation of skepticism, since its birth in ancient Greece. If philosophical questions turn out to be unsolvable, or in some way incoherent, it may be possible then that we cannot have a coherent world view. Thus we will continue to use, for example, numbers and sets, or physical theories such as quantum mechanics and the special and general theories of relativity, even though these pieces do not form a logically cogent whole (Davis, 1987: p. 293).

In this essay, I’ll provide a very incomplete, broad-brush outline of some of the most challenging foundational issues in basic areas of knowledge, with a focus upon issues associated with cognitive psychology. Why? Because for no better reason that I am presently in a psychology department, am supposed to make some contribution to the field, and that is as good a place for me to start as anywhere. The answer to why there are a series of epistemological crises throughout many cognitive enterprises, is that the thesis of epistemic humility or limitationism is most likely to be correct: that the human mind is inherently limited, and the universe as we cognize it might well be unknowable in itself, as we “poor, bare, forked animal(s)” (King Lear: act 3, scene IV), try to make sense of what is causing the shadows on the walls of our perception (Plato, Republic: book VII, 514a-520a).

If there are fundamental cognitive limits, then what follows from this for the human project? Is it reasonable to suppose, as technological optimists do, that there is a solution to every, or even most problems confronting humanity? If there are unsolvable problems, what significance does this have for human survival in the light of the converging and compounding ecological threats facing the human race, such as climate change, species extinction, and rapid resource depletion, even if, at the end of the day, these issues have as much “reality” as anything else? If the philosophical thesis of epistemic humility is correct, then we should also accept clear limits to our technical capacity to solve all problems, and should aim for limits to growth and extreme caution with vast technological projects, such as transhumanism, all of which could blow up in our faces (Smith & Positano, 2010).

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