Stories & Soliloquies

Philosopher Fridays is back this week. This series is not designed to give anything close to a comprehensive view on any philosopher in particular, but to explore what I find most interesting about different philosophical figures. I tend to focus on narrative, myth, metaphysics, and epistemology. This week, I’ll be continuing where I left off on Wednesday in my post on Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s controversial remarks on philosophy, as well as in the comments section of SelfAwarePatterns’ excellent post on the topic.

RUSSELL: Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) was a British philosopher who you’ll also find listed as a political activist, a mathematician, an historian, and several other things. But what he’s most famous for is his role in founding what we now call “analytic philosophy”, the primary style of philosophy done in anglophone countries and which prioritizes developing logical clarity in discrete problems and arguments.

Russell’s The Problems of Philosophy is one of my favorite texts to teach to my undergraduate students, and is a fairly popular choice for an introductory class. And since it’s first chapter focuses heavily on the ontological status of a table, I’m guessing it’s the source of Neil deGrasse Tyson’s frustration with philosophy. Today I hope to show why Russell thinks we should all have time for deep – and sometimes seemingly pointless – questions.

The question sounds silly: what is the reality of a table?

The most obvious answer is that the “real” table is the physical object in the room. It then seems easy to say that the way we know that physical object we call a table is in fact a table is because we can see it and touch it.

But this isn’t actually all that simple. Ask any two people to describe the same object exactly as they see it, and you’ll get two very different descriptions. Similar, sure, but no matter what, their image will be limited by their perspective. They would see it from different angles, with different parts visible, different shadows, and different distributions of light.

But if I were to ask what shape the table top was, most people would unthinkingly say: rectangle. Except if you look at a table (unless you’re strapped to the ceiling directly above it) you’ll likely seeing some variation of a parallelogram or a trapezoid. Which then is the “real” table: the rectangle you think of in your mind, or the trapezoid it appears to be?

If I were to ask what color the table was, it would depend on the lighting in the room, the time of day, the reach of the shadows – but still, we’d all probably abstract from those differences to come up with a picture in our minds of the “real” color, regardless of whether there’s a dark shadow on one side and a bright light shining on the other. The table in your mind is something different from what is immediately available; immediate knowledge is impossible, because there’s no way to put the table into your mind – it has to be converted.

So what’s real? Is it the physical object outside of you, the sensory impression you get, or the rationalized version abstracted and reconstructed from those sensory impressions? Do we have to choose?

This gets even more complicated when we radically change our perception – if I were to ask what the texture of the table was, the most common answer would be: smooth. Except if you view the table top under a microscope, it would appear rough. Under an even more powerful microscope, it wouldn’t even look solid.

Sure, none of this really matters when it comes to discussing things as mundane as a table, but the assumptions that come out of this line questioning really do matter when making scientific observations. It’s really easy to figure out the answers when we’re observing a table, but that actually makes the table specially suited for exposing ways we might be limiting our powers of observation, and what we might need to do get a full picture. You tackle silly questions like “what is a table” so that you have an awareness of all the variables and difficulties you’ll run into when you tackle the unknown.

Feynman gives a great example of something similar in his commencement address at Caltech in 1974 called “Cargo Cult Science” (found in The Pleasure of Finding Things Out). He speaks of a 1937 experiment where a scientist named Young attempted to see if he could train rats to go through a specific door in a corridor of many, regardless of where the food was. But he had no luck – the rats always went to the door where the food was on the previous run.

So he started to fuss with the experiment, and in doing so, he found a whole slew of experimental variables that had up unto that point been ignored. Young fiddled with the lighting in the lab, the sound of the floors, the texture of the doors, and finally, he was able to account for everything and fool the rats into going into the door of his choosing. According to Feynman:

Now from a scientific standpoint, that is an A-Number-1 experiment. That is the experiment that makes rat-running experiments sensible, because it uncovered the clues that the rat is really using – not what you think it’s using.

But no one ever followed up on Young’s findings, because they didn’t seem important – they seemed mundane. They had nothing to do with rats, after all, just the furniture.

They just went right on running rats in the same old way, and paid no attention to the great discoveries of Mr. Young, and his papers are not referred to, because he didn’t discover anything about the rats. In fact, he discovered all the things you have to do to discover something about rats.

But if you ignore all that mundane stuff, any answer you get will be faulty, and from it others will build to faulty conclusions. I think the same is true about the silly question about the table. You might not learn much about tables, but you might learn how to look at things critically and openly – though to be fully honest, Feynman did elsewhere say that he found academic philosophy pointless, and cited a long conversation about the nature of substance in a brick.

I’ll leave you with Russell’s own words:

Such questions are bewildering, and it is difficult to know that even the strangest hypothesis may not be true. Thus out familiar table, which as roused but the slightest thoughts in us hitherto, has become a problem full of surprising possibilities. The one thing we know about it is that it is not what it seems. Beyond this modest result, so far, we have the most complete liberty of conjecture. Leibniz tells us it is a community of souls; Berkeley tells us it is an idea in the mind of God; sober science, scarcely less wonderful, tells us it is a vast collection of electric charges in violent motion.

Among these surprising possibilities, doubt suggests that perhaps there is no table at all. Philosophy, if it cannot answer so many questions as we could wish, has at least the power of asking questions which increase the interest of the world, and show the strangeness and wonder lying just below the surface even in the commonest things of daily life.

And you can always dig another layer deeper.