From Metaphysics to Decision Making

By Alexander Mitjashin

In From Metaphysics to Decision Making, Alexander Mitjashin argues that the laws of logic should be regarded as a paraphrase of an ontology – an understanding of “being” – whose components are distinct one from another, no matter how similar we may consider them. This approach allows us to remove antinomies without using any axiomatic method. The bases of that ontology are much easier to understand than the ones of symbolic logic and may enable us to introduce optimal societal decision making in the realm of public policy. Since metaphysics implies no choice in general methods of thought, it should exclude skepticism. Using Emmy Noether’s theorem of physics, in its simplest and most easily understandable form, we can infer that the problem of skeptical doubts of David Hume’s kind are removed.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Academica Press
• Release date: Mar 15, 2024
• ISBN: 9781680533460

Book preview

Introduction

When someone gets started defending capitalism, he sooner or later has to solve a crime. It could seem unnecessary because there are too many crimes and they are widely known and the efforts to reveal more of them never seem to be so hard. But we also know that if the crimes that have been done are made public, they do not decisively convince those who regard the rejection of capitalism – bizarre enough – as something beneficial. Convictions for great numbers of people are made or raise in a different way than convictions of individuals: in fact; they must be sharply different as we shall see below. Hence it is inappropriate to apply one and the same method of convincing people when we converse with those who simply wishes to put matters right or to get correct information and, on the other hand, with those who are under the voluntary influence of the powers. We believe those matters will be better regarded further on. We also hope it will be clear what can be done in trying to evade attempts to undermine societies which enjoy liberal orders and institutions.

However, the book is not devoted to political matters. Rather politics tends to be the consequence of philosophical views concerning empirical and logical suppositions. We advocate that Hume’s problem – skepticism - is not really a philosophical problem but is merely a physical phenomenon. You cannot regard the problem of Hume’s skepticism as a problem of philosophy which demonstrates that philosophy could not really cope with but it constitutes a phenomenon of empirical character which should just be studied by ordinary physics. The physical world is such that there is no question of the implausibility of repeating instances of physical laws. We have no reason to reject using deductive logic concerning physical laws and replace it by inductive logic which is not that iron-clad, and we need not assert that empirical hypotheses should be ahead of any empirical data. So, we could remove our doubts about the logical justifiability of our empirical research, about a sort of discrepancy between our logic and experience. We also assert that while selecting appropriate axioms in order to remove logical antinomies is not a plausible way to do that; they nevertheless appear in the form of undecidable propositions. The proposed way of avoiding antinomies might seem straightforward, but it looks like equaling, in a sense, the paradoxes of logic and undecidable propositions. One can make up an antinomy if one takes on this way to resolve them. Again, we can get of more confidence in our ability to keep within our reason. And we emphasize several times that the concept of the regularities whose iterating instances are justified by physics and mathematics and the concept of avoiding antinomies, to put it simply, through thoroughly distinguishing the iteration and what is iterated – those two concepts – lay as the basis to other concepts put forward in the book; the concepts like competition in the broad sense of the word and others.

The crime in question is the old crime of rejecting or neglecting the division of powers. It seems commonplace in our world that political parties take over the role of state’s apparatus. That is, a party organized as an executive institution is not what a legislative body ought to be. This simple conclusion is not what can guarantee future political and economic freedom, but it is something which could help to clear the path to it.

However, in order to explain what we wish to achieve by adjusting the legal system this way, we begin from metaphysics. This ontology is merely a paraphrase of the laws of logic with much simpler primitives than any logical system could possess. The ontology says that entities must be distinct one from another no matter how similar or indistinguishable they might seem. This allows us to know the way antinomies might be made. Meanwhile we can exclude any explanation of the appearance of the instances of physical regularities except for those which can be deductively inferred from the laws, which can be regarded as that which removes the skeptical predicament and makes the tenet of the ontology look more valid. The primitives of the ontology are able to construct numbers and sets. Some other themes are regarded too.

Hume’s Problem

Hume’s problem might be regarded as one of the concepts of the philosophy of modern times which put forward the ideas stating the limitations of human knowledge. Thus, after that the discussions of realism and nominalism ended, and existence was supposed to be the Cartesian thought. This entity was deemed to be the most reliable existence, for the existence of the outer world could not be proven; all of what post medieval, modern philosophy was concerned with, it seems, is to find out the limits of our knowledge. Thus, we cannot say that there is an essence of things; all we can know of a thing are all kinds of properties of the thing; all knowledge of the world is concentrated in our perception – the world is only in our senses. Hume’s problem concerns the reliability of scientific knowledge. If we see that an event repeats itself, then we conclude that it is a general law because we have not seen an event which contradicts the event we observe: any particles with like charges repel one another; the acceleration of any free falling body is the same and so on. We trust in this chain of events, and we call it a law; and we do not expect the appearance of other events in between them. Hume says that we cannot be sure that events should continue to appear if they have appeared before. Even if we state a law, which has not failed, we have no guarantee it cannot fail further on. If events repeat themselves, it does not mean that they do not cease to appear at any moment. This idea undermines the reliability of natural laws, and it even undermines the very reliability of our experience. No law, no regularity can be trusted because any moment it can cease even if the regularity was always present and is present now. We live in a world of regularities but we have no guarantee that this world will continue to exist. Iteration of events does not guarantee further iteration. The particular cannot be inferred from the particular. If we see iterating events and we base some ideas on our observations, we cannot guarantee our ideas to be true just because iterations cannot be guaranteed, not because of the falsity of the ideas proper.

We may say that we know something if we can predict it. If we predict events, we know the law that describes those events. But if there is no guarantee that the appearance those events will hold, then our picture of the world is undermined. We have the picture of our world as a set of such-and-such laws and regularities, but we can speak about them as of those which are able to describe the world only in so far as the events have happened, the phenomena that have completed. As it seems, we cannot predict the future world, that is, literally in fact the world is unpredictable. We may observe events to appear and their appearance has never failed, but we have no logical inference to assert that if something has happened it should happen once more, even if it has always happened and never ceased. We cannot say that having real events repeat themselves we might be sure of their further appearance despite that knowing their appearance is prompted by reality. We cannot recognize induction – we cannot recognize that the general can be inferred from the particular – and, on the other hand, we cannot reject the reality which prompts us the iterating events, the events without which we cannot even imagine the existence of our world; we have not seen any other world. And it is not just the theoretical concepts which should be put in doubt if further iteration of events is put in doubt. We cannot live without reckoning on the further iteration of events to appear. If we perceive something or if we do something, we are reckoning on its repetition. We could not even get out of bed and go to work if we were not sure of events and actions. And at the same time, we have no logical basis for the iterations to continue. Induction, as logical inference, is not as iron-clad as deduction is. If we assert something general, we may presuppose what kind of singular or particular things it can contain. But if we have a thing or a number of things or even an infinite number of things with the same characteristic, we have no ground to say that some other things are to have the same characteristic. Of course, we cannot have such logic despite the fact that experience constantly (or continually) provides us with phenomena which iterate.

Hume discovered this discrepancy and his answer was that this is a custom. We are just accustomed to regard previous events as the basis for appearing future events in spite of the fact that there is no logical ground for this belief. Experience gives iterations of events and we follow those iterations. We consider them; form them as natural laws, but our mind and our logic do not really dispose something that may guarantee that from given events may follow further similar events. Inductive inference is described but we cannot conclude that the inductive inferences make their conclusions necessary. Before any exploration of inductive logic, Hume states that the trust in natural laws can be nothing but a custom. This might mean that the real world, the physical world, and the mental world, the world of logic, are two different worlds. But one could hardly believe that what is correct and reliable in one world (incessant iteration of events which should be regarded as sufficient to infer further iteration) is not reliable in the other world – induction cannot be used as the inference that describes phenomena of experience, one cannot infer the existence of an event from the existence of other similar events.

But it is not necessary to insist that particular events that appear in experience can be justified as those which can be inferred only from the previous events. K. Popper (1963, 1959) put forward the concept that the instances of the laws of experience are really inferred from general concepts. First, we know or invent hypotheses concerning phenomena of experience and events, instances of these hypotheses may match these hypotheses or not.

That is, we could see physical events that had iterated and we concluded that they must iterate further on. Thus, we have natural laws that are not sufficiently grounded because we cannot infer the general from the particular. Hence, we might call the conclusion a custom, like Hume does. But we could also see a natural law as something from which we could infer its instances, events of experience. If we pose natural laws, hypotheses first, then we can get rid of the predicament of induction. First, we put forward a hypothesis, and then we see whether or not the events match the hypothesis; whether or not the hypothesis is true. K. Popper gives the explanation using his famous examples of swans. If we meet only white swans, we infer that all swans are white. This is our hypothesis. All swans we have met are white; so, the hypothesis is true. But once we meet a black swan, this hypothesis is refuted, it is false. All hypotheses must be such that its refutation must not be excluded, that is, they must be falsifiable; otherwise, the statements of a hypothesis are not scientific -they are metaphysical.

Thus, we take similar events of experience and we have to infer that they constitute some general concept, the concept from which we can infer those events. Or we take a general concept (as we can see, any concept) and this concept happens to be the one from which a certain kind of events should be inferred. It seems that if we accept the concept of falsifiability we just stride over a step. We see some kind of similar events and assert that we have a concept that covers this kind of events, that is, we just take a concept for the one that is general to the events which are singular or particular in respect to the concept. But to know that the concept is general toward the events having appeared, we should first, trivially, know these events, just the events having appeared. We could not know or invent the concept which is general to these very events until this kind of events really appears. Obviously, it is impossible to guess what events are to appear before they really appear. Otherwise, we could build the outer world in our imagination. Of course, there are theories which do not openly demonstrate facts from which we could infer that the theories are corroborated (or from which we could infer their existence); nonetheless we may say that such theories are based on facts that are observable in any way or of which we could assert that their existence is proven in some way. Anyway, we could not have an imagination that could guess about hypotheses of experience; we could not predict and predict correctly that with whose help we can predict. That is, natural laws, regularities of experience, are what describe different series of events. Similar events, a certain kind of events are designated by a natural law, a regularity of experience. A natural law means some series of events. Knowing a law, we know the events to follow. We can predict future events. But if we accept falsifiability theory, if we accept that we should first know (or guess) a natural law (before the events the law describes), then we really try to predict that itself which makes us (or allows us to) predict. We suppose – according to falsifiability theory – that we are able to find out what allows us to predict and then – for that reason – we are able to predict events of experience. Explaining to us how we are able to predict, to discover, that which makes us be able to predict, falsifiability theory refers to the innovativeness of human mind, to its ability to put forward different ideas, among which some of them turn out to match our experience.

Meanwhile to predict, to discover concepts that make predict events, and, on the other hand, to predict events, are different things. We can predict events only when we know what there are to be predicted. If we see some series of events, we can see what we can predict. We can also infer the existence of some kind of events from the fact of existence of some other events. If we say that first we should know a theory or hypothesis, we either mean nothing concrete or we mean that after observing a series of events we generalize events asserting that these series are that which can be regarded as the instances of a theory.

However, iterations are an entity that obviously gives us a way to cognition. When we conduct an experiment, we are never satisfied with the results when we have conducted it only once. We always test the results again. Without iterating the results of experiments, we do not recognize these results. We do not try to justify this. We take for granted that data must iterate otherwise their existence cannot be established. And we do not require any basis for that. This is really something very similar to a custom.

But if we accept iterations without even knowing their logical basis (or regarding it very doubtful or problematic), we might suppose that iterations ought to be inherent to reality, to the physical world. Our exploration of the world includes the concept of iterations. Suppose we do an experiment. We repeat the experiment. If we yield the same results, the results we may have expected, then we are made sure that, at least, we are on the right path; we know that iterations point out that we are able to generalize the empirical data or to be sure of our conjectures about the empirical data (which, we must say, are based on other empirical data). But suppose we conduct the same experiment but the results are not the same as they were in the previous times. In that case we do not put in doubt our cognition, but rather we really express confidence in our cognition, for when the iterated trial of an experiment does not match the initial trial, we infer that the same phenomenon might appear in different conditions; or we may infer that certain conditions should yield only one kind of phenomenon. In other words, we always suspect that if iterations do not appear, then the circumstances cease to be the same. If we do not observe an event along with other similar events, we always infer from that that the circumstances when the event failed to appear were different from the ones when other events have appeared. When a chemical material has a different property than it ought to have, we conclude that its composites is not pure, that is, it is really another material but it is not a failure in cognition; and if we observe only white swans and then there appears a black swan we start to look for the reason for it is black, we do not put doubt on the fact itself that the sequence of events has no justification.

We really have no logical justification for the empirical sequence of events. Induction cannot satisfy us because we know that we cannot infer from an event the existence of another similar event (or anything), we cannot infer something singular, or something general, from something singular. If we do not use induction, we have to generalize an event (to invent a hypothesis, as falsifiability theory would assert) and then look for those events which do not match the generalized one. Our imagination can be based only on reality, either on real events or not immediately on real events but still on real events.

We even rely on iterations when we observe them or are trying to produce iterations – if iterations cease to appear, we construe it as breaking of the natural law based on this kind of iterations and we start looking for circumstances that make the law break and we try to find out whether there is some other natural law behind that. It looks like iterations are not a predicament or a problem but a necessity which we cannot avoid. In that case we should regard iterations as something intrinsic to experience.

In order to check whether or not iterations guide our empirical knowledge acquisition we should show how properly our empirical knowledge is acquired. Whatever we get to know, we have to get it through a signal. Data are obtained by us if they are transferred by some matter, some material, say, within the electromagnetic field. And data are transferred not faster than with the speed of this signal, that is, with the speed of light. All we know has come to us not faster than with this speed; to be more exact, we have only data to have been obtained within the speed interval from 0 to c (speed of light). Data properly are information which is obtained within this interval. There are no other data.

We know well what kind of signal it is. There is no other signal than the one which is equal or less to c (approximately 300 000 m/s). And we cannot overcome this limit of speed. Thus, suppose we have a rocket which is moving with a speed possible within this interval. On the front end of the rocket there is a source of light. As we know, the speed of the source of light could not change, no matter how fast the rocket may go: it may go with any speed less than c, but it does not add to the speed of light that the source has. The speed c (or the speed less than c), the speed of the rocket, plus the speed c, the speed of the source, is equal to c, to the speed of light. c + c is c. This is the way the signal by which we obtain data exists. Any speed must be less than or equal to c in any frame of reference. No matter which way we try to make measurements, we cannot do it with a speed higher than the speed of light. We know how the speed is kept constant. The characteristics of physical bodies, such as dimensions, change when the speed gets higher according to the corresponding formulas of special relativity. Thus, speed gets higher, time runs slower, distances get shorter and so forth in accordance with well known formulas of special relativity.

We have an interval; the close interval of a line. It contains an infinite continuous number of points. The interval is [ 0; c ]. All characteristics of any physical body immediately depend on the points of this interval. Literally: a body moved from a point to the next point is another body. It might seem not important even for physicists: they often neglect these details and they use to consider the speeds only when they need to describe objects near the speed c, relativistic ones. This interval is the speed values interval. The interval contains all speeds existing in nature. We cannot find any speed value existing outside of the interval. A physical body may have theoretically any of these speed values. And the characteristics of a body strictly depend on the place in the interval in accordance with the formulas of special relativity. That is, the way the physical bodies are distinguished one from another is connected to the speed values interval through the formulas of special relativity. If we want to distinguish one physical body from another, one event from another event, we must necessarily consider the speed values interval; for we cannot state any property, any characteristic of a body or an event without considering the speed values interval and the place of the body or event in the speed values interval, for we know the way the characteristics change. They change in accordance with the formulas of special relativity; and we know that from experience. We know that because the experiments show us that the speed of light, the speed of the signal through which we explore the world, has the single upper limit in all frames of reference. We may say that we are able to distinguish objects one from another if we consider the speed values interval, a set of points on the straight line. We cannot describe the physical world without the concept of the speed values interval; we cannot even distinguish bodies of the world; because bodies’ or events’ characteristics are dependent on the points of the speed values interval. And if we regard physical properties which cannot be immediately described by the formulas of special relativity (like charge), we nevertheless cannot avoid first describing the body’s characteristics which depend on the formulas – for instance, we should know which bodies are with a charge.

But since we cannot represent the world without the speed values interval, we should regard the speed values interval. This interval is the close interval where, zero speed and the biggest speed, the speed of light, are included. It is continuous; there is always a point between any two points no matter how close to each other they are. Equations of special relativity must be defined on that continuous set. But if so, we may apply the Brouwer fixed point theorem for the closed interval. The theorem says that for any continuous function on the closed interval there is a point (at least one) which is equal to the function whose argument is this point. If the function is f, its argument is x (the function with the argument is fx), then fx = x. That is, we may say that no matter which properties of a body or which interconnections of bodies in events take place, there is always a value on the speed values interval that is turned into itself by these interconnections or property.