Reality, or, The Philosophy of Yes and No

 ©2020 by Joel Marks*

 A Tribute to Joel J. Kupperman

Most people, I imagine, think they know the world or reality directly. You open your eyes (or touch something, etc.) and there it is. That was certainly what I assumed at first too. What could be more obvious? But now I believe that what we experience is very far removed from reality. Or, more precisely, I think the answer to the question “Do we know reality?” is “Yes and no.” In fact, what I am about to talk about could be considered as much a demonstration of the Philosophy of Yes and No as an essay on our knowledge of reality. 

            My first step away from the naïve belief in knowledge of reality came in college, when I was introduced to the concept of the visual field by psychology professor J. J. Gibson at Cornell University. Ironically he intended to use that concept to debunk the idea that we don’t know reality directly, since, he argued, the visual (or other sensory) field – for example, objects further away appearing smaller – is something we usually are not aware of and must be trained to perceive. And originally I was totally with him on that. But some years later I ended up in the field of philosophy, and one of the first things a novice in that field learns about is Bishop Berkeley’s theory of idealism, according to which what we know is not an “external” or physical world but only the mental world of our own experience. (That is actually a partially distorting shorthand of his views, but will serve for my purpose now.) It is a very alluring idea, and the way had been paved for my enthusiasm for it by my earlier exposure to the visual field. 

            In my very first professional publication I made the case for idealism with a simple demonstration. If you hold a standard #2 yellow pencil in front of your eyes and shake it in a certain way, it looks like a wiggly, rubbery object. But of course it isn’t in reality (presumably). Therefore what you are seeing is not something in the world but only something in your mind. But then note that the pencil that is “in your mind” is also in your hand. Therefore the hand is in your mind too, even when you are not experiencing the illusion of the rubbery pencil! And so forth for the entire world of your experience. 

            That argument can be picked apart mercilessly by any competent analytic philosopher (including me!). However, it sets the stage. It gets you thinking. And where I am today, over 40 years later, is probably the upshot. So without further ado, here is my current conception of our knowledge of the world. 

            The way we cognize reality is via concepts. For example, I grew up “knowing” that Pluto is a planet. I believed this, my teachers believed it, and astronomers believed it; and hence we all thought we knew that Pluto is a planet. (And I was extremely proud many years later to meet the man who discovered Pluto.) But on August 24, 2006, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) voted to define “planet” in such a way that Pluto is no longer a planet. Thus, by an act of human will based on various factors, some rational and some strictly causal, a planet in our solar system ceased to exist. No Death Star required. Just a change of concept. 

            However, a number of astronomers, including the principal investigator of our first mission to Pluto, objected to this change. Naturally he has a purely psychological reason to want Pluto to retain its high status as a planet; but he also provided perfectly cogent reasons of a scientific nature for objecting to the new conceptualization and hence demotion of Pluto. 

            My meta-position on all of this is that the answer to the question, “Is Pluto a planet?” is “Yes and no.” Yes it is according to Planetary Concept A, and no it isn’t according to Planetary Concept B. Or yes it is in the hearts and minds of people like the principal investigator, but no it isn’t according to the official ruling of the IAU. 

My meta-meta-conclusion is that there are no right answers to any questions but only different answers in accordance with different concepts that are preferred by different people. And that also goes for the question, “Are there any right answers to any questions?” Yes and no! I think no, and I have given my reasons. But I can easily imagine someone else offering cogent reasons why she thinks the answer is Yes. And there is no God to decide which right answer is Right. (Indeed, that is a major function of God, as I conceptualize him.) 

Furthermore one and the same person can change his mind, or be of two minds, etc. The latter is analogous to being bilingual, since no two natural languages contain all and only the same concepts. So when a person fluent in both French and English speaks or thinks en français, they are in some sense inhabiting a different world from when they are speaking or thinking in English; and they themselves may struggle to translate from one to the other and never be completely satisfied with the result. (Which is also why even when speaking in English we sometimes use a French expression for something, etc.) 

BTW, I call someone who thinks there is a right answer for something, not to mention, for everything, a moralist. Strictly speaking (i.e., in the more common conception of the moral) a moralist is a person who thinks there is a right answer for every moral question (and he usually thinks he knows what it is to boot and lectures others who think otherwise), but I have found it useful to use the term in the broader sense indicated. 

Now note the word “useful” I just used. This is key to the next step in the explanation of in what sense(s) we do and do not know reality. So to continue: 

I presume there is a reality. I also have many beliefs about it, for example, that 2+2=4, e=mc², I exist, other people exist, tables and chairs exist, atoms exist, I am conscious, and I am not now dreaming. And I could give various reasons for why I believe the things I do, and don’t believe other things. All of these beliefs are interconnected if only because, as illustrated above, they all involve concepts, and concepts are necessarily interrelated if only because their definitions employ other concepts. So, for example, I believe Earth is planet, but what is a planet? Well, a planet is a large body orbiting a star that is not itself a star. But what is a star? And so on ad inf. Before you know it we’ve gone halfway through the dictionary. 

But what makes the beliefs about these concepts true? Note, first, that the concepts themselves are believed, and not only the various propositions that incorporate them. Thus, I not only believe that the Earth is a planet, but also believe that a planet is a large body orbiting a star that is not itself a star. But why do I believe these things? I accept the so-called pragmatic answer, which is that it is useful to do so. (There is also the strictly causal reason that I was taught them in school at an impressionable age or whatever.) 

That is not to say that a belief’s being useful makes it true. No no, those are very different concepts: Something that it is useful to believe may be quite false. (I would put belief in God in that category.) So the pragmatic criterion must apply to something broader than an individual belief. At the very least it might require that believing x be more useful than believing something else, y or z etc., not to mention the very opposite of x, which is -x. More typically a philosophical pragmatist will hold that there is a special set of beliefs that, in toto, has proved itself the most useful, or more modestly, that the standards by which we assess beliefs as true or false or at least justified or unjustified have proved themselves useful. 

Note, BTW, that the winning “set” need not be logically coherent throughout, or so it seems to me. Take the mind-body problem: Perhaps this is a "problem" only because of the assumption that all of our beliefs must be mutually coherent. Why isn't it enough that it has proved very useful for us for some purposes in some circumstances to believe we have sensory experiences and intentional attitudes, and for others that the physical world is entirely composed of cosmic strings, even though there seems no conceivable way to reconcile the two beliefs? Mutatis mutandis for Eddington's two tables and so on. To believe otherwise, I believe, would be to “adore” a “foolish consistency,” as Emerson might put it. 

I call a set of beliefs that passes pragmatic muster a worldview. One implication of this scheme, as I conceive it, is that there can be more than one worldview that passes pragmatic muster. The reason is that what counts as useful may differ from one group of people to another, in different times, in different places, under different circumstances, according to their (the groups’ or the persons’) different natures, and so forth. This is equivalent to saying that different people (and even sometimes one and the same person at one and the same time) have different (by which I particularly mean incompatible) desires. 

So for example, a group of people who have no realistic hope of rescue from their miserable state may find it eminently useful to believe in a God who promises them a blissful life in the hereafter provided only that they trust in Him and do not take things into their own hands, either by rebelling against Caesar (who would in fact crush them if they tried) or by taking their own life and denying God this prerogative. Thus, these people will survive and leave offspring, including their belief in this God, i.e., their worldview. But a different group of people in different circumstances may find it eminently useful to believe in a God who will sustain them no matter what the odds against them and thereby find in themselves the strength to overcome Caesar (who would in fact have crushed them if they hadn’t tried). Thus, these people will survive and leave offspring, including their belief in this God, i.e., their worldview. 

Then someday a people might arise who believe in no God but only science, who would succeed all the theists, who counted on God to rescue them from the pandemic or reward them in the hereafter for having left everything in His hands, and hence refused to wear masks or get vaccinated. And the new, secular worldview lived happily ever after. No, that’s a joke. This is just as much a fairytale – i.e., relative truth -- as the others and would soon enough find itself replaced by, or at least continuing to live side by side with or in conflict with, some others, and most likely theistic worldviews. 

The takeaway, as I see it, is that all actually existing worldviews are equally useful, simply in virtue of existing, and hence the beliefs that constitute them are true. The key to understanding why is that the standards for assessing beliefs are always internal to a worldview. Thus a secular worldview may bow before science, whereas a religious one might bow before Scripture. In the one, therefore, the Earth is billions of years old, but in the other it might be only a few thousand years old. Both true! … relative to their respective worldviews. 

People with different worldviews do not necessarily believe mutually incompatible truths so much as they believe mutually unintelligible truths. Thus, suppose the word “planet” appeared in Worldview (or Dictionary) A and Worldview (or Dictionary) B and was close enough in meaning in the two worldviews so as not to be a mere homonym. Nevertheless its interconnections with all the other concepts in Worldview A would be different from those in Worldview B, and so the acceptance of, say, planethood for Pluto in A would not necessarily be the contradictory of the denial of planethood for Pluto in B.

This further suggests that there is an irony or a tradeoff according to the scheme I am proposing between communication and disagreement. On the one hand people who hold different worldviews (consult different dictionaries) will almost certainly not be talking about the same thing – a planet or any other concept -- when they think they are. On the other hand, they may not be disagreeing, or disagreeing as significantly, about something – whether x is a planet, or any other proposition – when they think they are. This holds out some hope that, say, people who believe (or even the truth) that the Earth is billions of years old and people who believe (or the truth that) it is only a few thousand years old may not be so far apart as first appears. The most obvious way to see this would be if the property of being a billion years old in the one worldview had roughly similar implications as being a thousand years old in the other. So the idea that both propositions about Earth could be true takes on some sense. Reality itself, however, would contain no Earth having two different ages, on pain of being self-contradictory.

But surely, you object, it is more useful in the long run to believe in what is true simpliciter and not just relative to a worldview. So the religious people who refuse to get vaccinated will suffer more than the secular people who get vaccinated, and may even just die off. But, I reply, it does not follow that it was more useful to believe what science endorses, since, at least by what has been said, the objection presumes that what people value most is to live longer or without suffering, but the religious folk may place greater value in an eternal and blissful life in a hereafter that could only be theirs if they believed in such stuff (that is, they believe that they must believe in God etc. in order to reap the “rewards”). So their desire for supernatural bliss is stronger than their desire for mundane happiness or even existence (perhaps because their worldly prospects are dimmer than those of the secularists).           

However, if indeed the religious folk did die off due to not getting vaccinated etc., then that would “prove” that their worldview is (was) not a good, i.e., useful, one. But, I repeat, this is the only test of a worldview as such, since any other assessment of the beliefs that constitute a worldview could only come from within a(n existing, hence useful) worldview. So for example, if someone in the secular worldview were pro-vaccine and someone else anti-vaccine, they could duke it out via reference to scientific research; and presuming their acceptance of a common standard of good science as part of their shared worldview, we could expect an eventual resolution, and only the agreed-on belief (in the efficacy and harmlessness or inefficacy or harmfulness of vaccination) would be part of what I am calling their worldview. 

But, you further object, how can it be useful to desire or value that which does not exist in reality, regardless of whether your worldview holds that it does exist, since such a desire can never be satisfied? Even granting that it is the utility of the worldview, of a set of beliefs, and not of desires or values, that determines the truth of the beliefs that compose it, must not that utility itself refer to reality? So, for example, if Scripture were your standard of truth and hence the belief in a blissful afterlife for believers in God was true, then holding Scripture as the standard of truth must itself be part of a worldview that is useful. But useful for what? For getting you into heaven, which is what you desire? But there’s no such thing. So where is the utility? 

My answer, again, is that the one and only measure of the utility of a worldview is that it exists. So somehow (and we can usually come up with plausible enough hypotheses) having a Scriptural criterion of truth and believing in an afterlife etc. is compatible enough with reality to sustain the existence of a group or worldview (until it isn’t any longer; and exactly the same can be said of a science-based worldview). And that is the sum total of its usefulness. 

But perhaps an answer that zeroes in more directly to what is probably bothering the objector is that, for someone who believes in a blissful afterlife for religious believers, their desire that that belief be true will be satisfied; and since it is, ex hypothesi, their strongest desire, they will be happier than if they didn’t believe it. Granted, this means that wishing (for something strongly enough) can make it so -- a kind of Tinkerbell epistemology – since the criterion of truth in this religious worldview receives its lofty status precisely because it endorses beliefs that a certain group of people want more than anything else to be true. But … c’est la vie! 

What this also shows is that a worldview can have internal as well as external utility. I have stressed the latter in my account of knowing reality, but, as previously noted, individual beliefs can be useful or useless or counterproductive regardless of their truth or falsity. The criterion in such cases is completely various and variable and contingent, depending on what people happen to desire and how strongly. So, in addition to the Scriptural criterion of truth’s being (“externally”) useful as a means of sustaining itself and the (existence of) people who accept it, it can also be (“internally”) useful for these people to believe some of the beliefs that that criterion endorses as true, such as the belief in a blissful afterlife for believers. Why? Again, not because that belief corresponds to reality, but because, ex hypothesi, the strongest desire of this community is that that belief be true, and so believing that it is true (which is to say more simply, believing it) will satisfy that desire. 

So what becomes of reality (the topic of this essay)? Do we, can we know it? Yes and no. Yes because we are alive, so our worldview must contain beliefs that are compatible with reality having allowed us to exist to this point. But no because there could be, and most assuredly are other worldviews that are just as valid as ours (again, simply in virtue of their also having existed to this point); and in virtue of their being different worldviews, their all existing demonstrates that the true beliefs that comprise them do not correspond to reality, since, ipso facto, the beliefs of one worldview do not jibe with those of another (again, think different languages) and sometimes, as noted, not even within the same worldview (again, think mind-body).  

One practical upshot of this, it seems to me, is that it would make sense for us to downplay truth in our beliefs and assertions. For the scheme I have sketched shows that a true belief is true only relatively (specifically, to a worldview that, in toto, has sufficient hold on reality to exist) – that is the closest we can come to knowing reality. But therefore beliefs of people who inhabit other worldviews are also true in this sense, even though they may not correspond to our true beliefs and may even appear to contradict them. This suggests that a certain epistemic humility is in order, over and above the normal variety according to which a belief could be false according to the standards of one’s own worldview. Even true beliefs can be false, so to speak. The practical upshot, then, is that it might be conducive to a world more to our liking if we refrained from asserting that things are true and instead said simply that we believe them (with whatever strength of conviction) and, if possible, explained why we believe them, especially in a way that our beliefs would appear to be not only the result of various causes but also of plausible reasons in the eyes of our interlocutor or opponent or audience. 

Acknowledgment: I owe the notion of “Yes and No” to my graduate advisor, philosophy professor Joel Kupperman. That was an answer he characteristically gave to philosophical questions, which I have now extended to all questions. Another relevant idea I picked up from him (which, in the spirit of this essay, he most likely intended slightly otherwise than I have grokked it – and, by the way, this method of casual appropriation I picked up – however casually! -- from another graduate professor, Samuel C. Wheeler III) is of a familiar weirdness. That is how Kupperman characterized our own worldview, which we take for granted as natural and commonsensical, whilst viewing others’ as “weird.” 

Yet a third notion of Kupperman’s that I find very apt to the present discussion comes from a question he once posed, “What time is it on the sun?” Consider that on Earth people will give different correct answers to the question “What time is it?” … indeed, ranging over the entire spectrum of answers at hourly intervals … at one and the same time. Now clearly “time” must be equivocal in the previous sentence, for how could it be different times at one and the same time if “time” had a univocal meaning? Furthermore, Kupperman’s question explodes the idea that any one of them is anything other than conventional, since off the Earth’s surface … and hence, anywhere, even on the Earth’s surface … “it” may not be any time at all! 

All of these considerations come to a head for me when my country returns to Standard Time in the fall. For I have adopted the practice – or non-practice – of leaving my clocks at Daylight Saving Time year-round. My original motivation was to extend (or maintain) my hiking hours in the afternoons instead of finding them cut short by suddenly earlier darkness. Since adopting the practice I have discovered other advantages and hardly any downsides. But my point now is that I was also provided with a beautiful analogy of the scheme I have put forward in this essay. 

For consider that on the first afternoon of resumed Standard Time, “It is 4:00 p.m.” has suddenly taken on different meanings for me versus everybody else in my immediate surroundings. For everyone else it means, or implies, darkness descending … oh what a bummer! But for me it means or implies that I still have another hour left for hiking … oh joy! Furthermore, several hours later my friends will find me wearier at a certain hour in the evening than they are accustomed to seeing me, for when it is 9:00 p.m. in their world, it will be 10:00 p.m. in mine. On the other hand, for the first week of Standard Time they will be wearier than I am for most of the day because of the sort of jet lag one experiences from changing to a different time zone, which is what they, but not I, have in effect done. 

So there are real effects of these alterations of and, more to my point, divergences between temporal conventions, and they keep ramifying indefinitely. This therefore serves as a nice analogy to (or perhaps even literal component of) the difference between worldviews, which are similarly conventional such that none of them in its constituent details corresponds to reality, and yet which are “equally” valid in being sustained by reality. Furthermore, the analogy gives a visceral sense of how different worldviews relate to one another, since coordination between myself and everyone else in my vicinity continues roughly the same during Standard Time as during Daylight Saving Time (when we are all, as it were, in the same time zone), but … not quite. And occasionally there will be dramatic differences or incompatibilities or mutual failures to understand each other and so forth. When everyone else changes their clocks it is as if a storm window is lowered, so that two panes of glass that were perfectly aligned are now slightly misaligned; or it’s like crossing your eyes, so that a single scene becomes two that are the same but slightly offset from each other. 

These are ways of suggesting how I myself feel about the world as such, and in particular the social world of other people. For while we “get along” well enough, there is always a disconnect, for the most part subtle and even missed or ignored by most people, but at times erupting in dramatic moments of shock, dismay, delight, horror, total confusion, etc. So suddenly I or the other person may feel we are dealing with a complete stranger. Interestingly, this is more obvious with people who are less familiar to us. Thus, we expect misunderstanding between a typical American and a typical Chinese; but for me the misunderstanding is merely hidden between one American and another, or one Chinese and another. Again, Kupperman’s familiar weirdness. That is, until civil war breaks out, such as the imminent one in the United States between Democrats and Republicans during the election season of 2020. But for me it all began during the 2000 election, when I realized, suddenly and to my horror, that I lived in a country containing Red States, where most of the people did not believe in evolution and did believe in the Rapture. And then I began to discover that even some close acquaintances did. To me this was almost literally like the revelation of plant people in Jack Finney’s The Body Snatchers. At this point, I submit, there has been a crack in the cosmic egg and we have seen through to a deeper understanding (of our mutual incomprehensibility!), which I have attempted to characterize more literally with the scheme of reality and knowledge laid out in this essay. 

Some additional acknowledgements: Surely the more proximal stimulus of this philosophy was David Morris, my late friend and colleague, who made it his mission in life to inveigh against what he called The One Right Way in all things and thereby, over time, brought to fruition in my mind the seed Kupperman had planted there. Another influence was a rabbi David once interviewed on his radio program, Live the Journey, who kept qualifying his remarks with the phrase, “On the other hand.” This also irresistibly brings to my mind the face of an old friend, Tom Toleno, who had a two-pronged beard, which I can (however fancifully) imagine him stroking, each in turn, as he pondered a question. I must as well accord due precedent to Abe Katz, the editor of an astronomy column I once wrote for The New Haven Register, who once shared with me his insight from a career as a reporter that there is no truth. Beyond my personal acquaintance there is of course Kierkegaard, who paved the way with his Either/Or, and last but certainly not least, Professor Irwin Corey, who would begin his disquisitions with a resounding “However!”

Last word: The philosophy of yes and no comes from a place of despair, I admit, but also from a sense of profound respect for others. Other people just can’t be as crazy, stupid, wrong, mean, evil, etc., as they sometimes appear to me to be. I believe everyone is essentially good, intelligent, sane, knowledgeable, and so forth, and also wish everyone would accord the same respect to me. From this point of view, therefore, the philosophy of yes and no might even be seen as a philosophy of yes and yes, as it affirms everything ("and its opposite").

* The first draft of this essay was completed on September 2, 2020. I keep updating its date of publication in this blog simply to keep it at the head of the posts, as it serves as an introduction to all the rest.