Experience as a Boundary Condition
An insight from Quine in the 1950s holds powerful lessons for us all today
"Boundary Conditions" by Sanctu is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.
Willard V. O. Quine was one of the most prominent philosophers of the 20th century (as well as the uncle of influential punk guitarist Robert Quine). The philosopher, who was based at Harvard University, made a significant breakthrough with an essay first published in 1951 called Two Dogmas of Empiricism. It can be a hard read for those without a background in philosophy, but the central idea is accessible and exciting.
Quine’s mentor had been Rudolf Carnap, a German pacifist who immigrated to the US after the rise of the Nazis. He was a major member of the Vienna Circle in the 1920s and 1930s when he met the younger Quine. Carnap was a proponent of logical positivism - an approach to philosophy that was laid the groundwork for the linguistic turn in analytical philosophy.
Logical positivism was based on Immanuel Kant’s sharp division of statements into two major classes. On the one hand, some ideas are supposed to be analytical, which means that we don’t need to know anything about the world outside our heads to assess them, while others are synthetic, or grounded in fact.
In his 1959 essay, Quine blew up the distinction, destroying logical positivism’s position. He takes the example “No bachelor is married” as an example of a supposedly analytical statement. He asks who defined “bachelor” as “an unmarried man” and then goes on the rampage. “Are we to appeal to the nearest dictionary, and accept the lexicographer’s formulation as law? Clearly this would put the cart before the horse.” He goes on to say that the writers of dictionaries try to observe how language is used rather than creating meaning themselves. Within a decade of the essay, logical positivism was seen as a failed project by most serious philosophers.
At the end of his essay, Quine proposed a radical new way of understanding our beliefs and their relation with reality. He said that our worldviews are “a man-made fabric, which impinges on experience only along the edges.” He proposed a metaphor for our beliefs as “a field of force whose boundary conditions are experience.” He then makes a radical statement that is extremely profound, even if the prose is a little obscure. If the quote makes your head spin, please note that I will explain it in simpler terms below.
A conflict with experience at the periphery occasions readjustments in the interior of the field. Truth values have to be redistributed over some of our statements. Re-evaluation of some statements entails re-evaluation of others, because of their logical interconnections -- the logical laws being in turn simply certain further statements of the system, certain further elements of the field. Having re-evaluated one statement we must re-evaluate some others, whether they be statements logically connected with the first or whether they be the statements of logical connections themselves. But the total field is so undetermined by its boundary conditions, experience, that there is much latitude of choice as to what statements to re-evaluate in the light of any single contrary experience. No particular experiences are linked with any particular statements in the interior of the field, except indirectly through considerations of equilibrium affecting the field as a whole
Are you still here? A later philosopher called Karim Benammar explains Quine’s insight in much more accessible language in a book called Reframing. He takes up a later metaphor from Quine of our beliefs as a web, with those at the boundary or the periphery connecting with the world around us. “The truly remarkable claim by Quine is that, when faced with contrary evidence, we are free to reassess the statements at the core of the web as well as those on the periphery.”
Benammar explains this insight with a couple of examples. In 2011, some physicists asked the scientific community to find out what they had done wrong - one of their experiments had shown neutrinos behaving in unexpected ways. In other words, they had received “contrary experience” that didn’t fit with the rest of the web of their beliefs. They were free to decide which part of the web to change, but showed conservatism, as Quine had predicted they would. They chose to keep the core but question the periphery.
If we assume that the set-up and calculations are correct, we are left with no choice but to question the law about the speed of light, a law so central to the edifice of modern physics that it is almost an axiom. That would change everything. Tellingly, only a minority of physicists were excited by the possibility that one of the core beliefs of physics could prove to be wrong. The need to reconstruct a completely new physics filled most physicists with dread.
If you want a more prosaic example, Benammar discusses some friends who were studying experimental psychology. One of them had a pet python. A group of them decided to leave the python on a bench in the university library as an experiment to see how people reacted. “Some people did not notice the python at all, and some were startled by it. But most people would do a strange double-take. You could tell by their reactions that they had seen it, but then they would walk by as if it wasn’t there. According to the psychology students, their rational brain over-rode the perception.”
What is remarkable about Quine’s essay was that it came eight years before Leon Festinger published his study that established cognitive dissonance as the cornerstone of modern psychology. For the benefit of new readers, Festinger showed that cognitive dissonance is an uncomfortable feeling we all experience when faced with contradiction. Whenever we feel it, we will always be tempted to double down on our core beliefs in order to reject inconvenient evidence.
Conspiracy theories often play a role in doubling down on our prior moves. Quine would describe this move as rejecting experience at the periphery to save the interior of the field. In previous essays, I have described conspiracy theories as the bodyguards of failing ideas - a metaphor I developed after reading Michael Barkun’s work on how fringe views tend to become conspiratorial over time.
What does Quine’s insight mean for non-philosophers? All of us should strive to align our views with the reality outside our heads, as much as possible. If we receive some inconvenient feedback, we should strive to be aware of our own sense of cognitive dissonance. It is a sign that we might need to install some updates to our worldview.
A writer called Julia Galef has a metaphor to explain the difference between the core and the boundary. What Quine calls the core can be seen as a fortress. People who are particularly susceptible to cognitive dissonance act as soldiers, who rush to defend their fortress from attack. Those of use who strive to develop a reality-based worldview strive to act as scouts, which means spending time exploring the periphery of our worldviews.
Let us take a handful of examples to dig a little deeper. Imagine you have gone down an anti-vaccine rabbit hole on the internet. You then hear about a notorious anti-vaxxer who refused to get vaccinated only to die of COVID. The information makes you feel uncomfortable. What should you do?
Quine says you have a choice between re-evaluating the periphery (for example, inventing a conspiracy theory to discredit the inconvenient report of the anti-vaxxer’s death) or the core of the field (considering the idea that anti-vaccine narratives are a branch of conspiracy speculation with a dysfunctional connection to the reality outside our heads).
Firm supporters of Catalan independence, who believed separation from Spain would make the region richer, faced exactly the same choice when both Catalan banks and the region’s most significant multinational companies moved their headquarters away from Barcelona in 2017. Should they re-evaluate the periphery (maybe by inventing semi-coherent conspiracy theories about how the King of Spain persuaded CEOs to take these troubling decisions) or should they re-evaluate the core (maybe an illegal referendum is a self-coup that will make the population poorer due to capital flight)?
To bring this essay to an end, I have a very contemporary example. Imagine you are an elected official or a strategist with the US Democratic Party or maybe just a donor or floating voter. You firmly believe “the future of US democracy is at 2024 Presidential election” and “President Joe Biden is the best candidate to defeat former President Donald Trump.” And then you see firm evidence of the 81-year-old Biden’s cognitive decline at a debate with Trump. The two statements and the observation cannot all be true. How do you adjust your views?
Finally, if you want to take the ideas in this essay seriously, I strongly recommend thinking hard about how to split your values from your worldview. -This is a difficult introspective project, but the results will be worth it. The comments are closed, as always when we mention Catalan independence. If you subscribe, though, you can hit reply to the email. I might not get to it immediately, but I will reply when I get a chance. See you next week!
Previously on Sharpen Your Axe
The linguistic turn in analytical philosophy
Cognitive dissonance and open-source intelligence (OSINT)
Conspiracy theories as the bodyguards of failing ideas
The power of debunking bad ideas
A guide to toxicology for people who are worried about vaccines
Economic collapse in Catalonia and self-coups
Separate your values from your worldview
Further Reading
A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America by Michael Barkun
Reframing: The art of thinking differently by Karim Benammar
Cognitive Dissonance: 50 Years of a Classic Theory by Joel M. Cooper
The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don’t by Julia Galef
Two Dogmas of Empiricism by Willard V. O. Quine
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