How should science approach non-empirical phenomena?

Question

I am not talking about miracles, religious revelation, or artistic expression, but something more mundane. There is a lot of "empirical" evidence that the Riemann hypothesis is true, the scare quotes indicate that the source of the evidence is "mathematical intuition". In psychology there are mental states that no one sees, touches, hears, smells or tastes, qualia with their perceptual fullness that can not be conceptualized or directly communicated, and abilities/skills "know how" with the same problem. In linguistics Kripke's theory of reference relies on "modal intuitions" to decide the truth of counterfactuals. But an empirical counterfactual is an oxymoron, especially when it is embedded into an entire "possible world".

Freudian psychoanalysis and Husserlian phenomenology are attempts to deal with some of them systematically, but they are traditionally confined to the fringe of science at best. The mainstream approach is empirical second hand, but behaviorism in psychology and linguistics, and nominalism in mathematics, were not very productive.

According to the naturalized epistemology there is no a priori "first philosophy" of science, methodology is subject to the "tribunal of experience" and revision, just as the science itself. Should it apply to non-empirical experience? Sense empiricism has served science well for centuries, and was fully embraced by Quine. Zammito takes him to task for it:

"Cognitive science is an empirical science working to unearth the mechanisms through which natural language constitutes itself. That account has had to recognize the indispensability of mental states, of beliefs, if it is ever to become adequate to the problem... There is still too much "first philosophy" in Quine. We must rescue naturalized epistemology from its own founder".

Note the use of "empirical" together with "mental states".

Questions: Does naturalized epistemology dictate that natural science should relax sense empiricism, and approach non-empirical phenomena partly first hand? If so, how can the scientific method be adapted to introspective/intuitive phenomena that are not readily reproducible, manipulable, measurable, and/or publicly accessible? What would play the selective role of empirical testing? Can there be non-empirical (more likely, not entirely empirical) natural science?

Answer 1

You've mixed a number of unrelated things together as "non-empirical phenomena", and the answers are different for each one, much like the answers would be different for how law deals with "non-larceny".

When it comes to mathematical proofs, you start off knowing that you can't know empirically whether the Riemann hypothesis is true. So you can gather evidence about where it holds, and reason or experiment or analyze data based on that. But it's just science at that point--it's going the wrong way, in a sense, from a more reliable way to know things (in a very limited domain) to a less reliable one.

Qualia are phenomena that require some sort of explanation, just as our ability to see blue does. Science can use normal evidence-based approaches (e.g. Popperian falsification). It's worked reasonably well for neuroscience so far, though we know that we don't know anywhere near enough about the workings of brains to nail down what qualia are and how they are caused. So there isn't anything to see there--but you can certainly do empirical studies to verify that the phenomenon (that people report qualia) is true!

Counterfactuals are different yet again, having to do more with the relationship between models of reality and reality than any particular empirical study. It's not clear to me that the interesting cognitive science thing about counterfactuals is that they don't correspond to reality because nothing needs to correspond to reality in the brain (what is remarkable is that many things do!). And so it's not clear to me that there is even a phenomenon there that you're studying.

The bottom line, though, is that there is no particularly good reason, either from first principles or empirically, that you can build a robust base of knowledge on top of non-reproducible, non-quantifiable phenomena. Even if we adopt the most radical interpretation of Feyerabend's "anything goes" approach to the philosophy of science, it was "anything goes that works", and we haven't any indication that it works.

So while I am not sufficiently familiar with the tenets of naturalized epistemology to be sure about what they say, the answer from those fields where naturalized epistemology is supposed to draw inspiration is "no".

Answer 2

Empirical means an epistemological property of being of and/or derived from experience. Experience can be either the subjective (psychological states) or objective (experiment) kind, so non-empirical experience is an absurdity.

To answer according to the spirit rather the letter; do inaccessible phenomena fall into the domain of science? Yes, science can study the phenomena that are not immediately accessible, but it first needs tools to make them accessible. In the same way that the moons of Jupiter were not visible before inventing better telescopes, psychological representation is inaccessible to us lacking proper computational modeling.

Quine did not create a naturalized epistemology but rather forfeited it to empirical science, which I think is incompatible with empirical science. There is no way around proper epistemology, which can be scientific in the old sense but can't be reduced to the empirical.

If you are interested in epistemology I recommend you start with Leibniz and Kant, before reading Kuhn, Quine and Popper.

Answer 3

Allow me to express a generally unpopular (but apropos) perspective...

As I see it, the entire centuries-long empiricist/rationalist divide boils down to an attempt to legislate the scope and definition of the word 'empirical'. Science and philosophy are meant to deal with an obvious tension between two obvious points:

1. We cannot deny that someone has an 'experience' without undercutting the foundation of empirical research.
2. We cannot accept that every 'experience' points to an extant phenomenon in the 'ontological' world.

Any way we look at this, 'experience' is a subjective event that occurs within the confines of our inner lives, and the analytical problem lies in relating or correlating that (inner) experience to other (inner) experiences — both in ourselves and in others — to produce a functional mapping that we can consider objective.

From this perspective, the idea that there are 'non-empirical phenomena' is a mere oxymoron. All phenomena are empirical by definition: even purely mental activities line thoughts, theories, dreams, and hallucinations are empirical experiences. The scientific/philosophical 'trick' lies in systematically sorting these experiences into two groups: those that help build a functional mapping of the 'objective' world and those that do not. In this sense, reasoning is as scientifically valid as measuring. Both reasoning and measuring take a subjective event (in the first case, the inward appearance of a putatively immaterial thought; in the second case inward appearance of a putatively material object) and subject those subjective events to a set of methods that are meant to be accessible to others so that the inward experiences can be validated.

The problem that has preoccupied the philosophy of science for far too long — as I mentioned above — is that people keep trying to legislate the definition of 'empirical' in order to avoid that moment of validation and the social and political frictions it causes. Certain fundamentalist groups deny the empirical foundation of certain sciences, because those groups have an experience of God that they refuse to question; certain hard-line skeptics draw an imaginary line through the center of human experience, demanding that experiences on one side of the line are 'real' while experiences on the other side are 'illusory'. But 'illusory' experiences do not seem illusory to those that have them, and subjective measurements are not wrong merely because they are subjective; willful ignorance swings into play, and both sides refuse to acknowledge the reality of the other's experience, which precludes the possibility of validation.

Answer 4

No one sees, touches, hears, smells or tastes an electron. Things do not need to be evident to be empirical, they just need to ultimately have notable effects. The main problem with all of these things is not that they are not empirical, it is that the environment in which they are observed has an agenda contrary to being understood. If you ask me whether I have imagined some aspect of a possible world, I can make myself believe that I have. That may or may not be true. But the limits of my imagination do shape my behavior, and on a large enough scale, that shape should be discernable.

We do not insist on removing intermediate states or placeholders that cannot be directly accessed from any other science, but we have tried to insist that they be removed from psychology and mathematics. (I continue to insist that mathematics is psychology.) We are allowed to talk about electrons, or fields, even though we can only detect them via devices whose construction presumes their existence. How then are qualia different. If we look at language, and we presume inaccessible formants, we are cheating. But if we look at gravity and we presume inaccessible formants, we are Newton.

To my mind, what there is here is not a problem, but a double standard, and it arises because we are too close to the problem. We have a very hard time with psychological models because they seem to either threaten or empower our personal existence on its own stated terms in a way that makes us defensive or uneasy. But that is just sentimentality that has to be moderated. We have to believe that if our model of qualia did not fit reality, we would actually describe it in a way that fit the public and not the private view. And we see that individuals have trouble with that.

But mathematics seems like a great example of psychological models, accessible only via introspection, that get adequately tested in a thoroughly public way. If our model of space is empirical, we can share geometry. If not, then not And that makes it empirical. It does not make it correct as physics, but it makes it empirical as psychology.

There somehow should not be a function that is everywhere continuous and nowhere differentiable, but we can agree that what we have intuited elsewhere means that this is not ruled out. We can trust our developed intuition over our more immediate intuition. So such sciences do work. They are just exceedingly slow going.

The answers are all "Do what people are already doing. The other sciences are not as different as we pretend."

Does naturalized epistemology dictate that natural science should relax sense empiricism, and approach non-empirical phenomena partly first hand? - It already does son, in the form of mathematics, and in experimental psychology and sociology.

If so, how can the scientific method be adapted to introspective/intuitive phenomena that are not readily reproducible, manipulable, measurable, and/or publicly accessible? - Volume and time. None of the other sciences use methods that are ultimately reproducible, etc. We make them appear so through statistical aggregation. Preserving the limited power of statistical methods, to make the most of limited volume, is already the approach experimental psychology takes. Sheer repetition and volume is the approach taken by mathematics.

What would play the selective role of empirical testing? Can there be non-empirical (more likely, not entirely empirical) natural science? Empirical testing should play the role of empirical testing. But we need to see things like the success of mathematics as an empirical fact. Ultimately discussion between humans is a form of empirical testing. We test maths by attracting interest and directly comparing internal mental models. Human discussion is full of empirical facts.