I appreciate your kind words, and I will try to live up to them. In that spirit, I will start here:
I have more to say about the legitimacy of how I’m presenting my position, but I do admit that I have stated my position more bluntly than I might. @ProfessorX made a similar point, and I was dismissive of it.
I also think it’s fair to point to “psychological factors”. I agree it is often used dismissively, but it’s important to notice our own motivations and take care that they are not leading us astray. And on reflection I notice that my tone in this conversation has at times been intentionally blunt, with less nuance and fewer caveats than I might have included in other contexts.
I started this thread in response to the blunt claim that “Ghosts exist”, and my initial claim that “there are no ghosts” is no blunter – though, as a topic title, it is rage-bait-y (and that was probably intentional), which is not ideal.
My more recent posts were motivated by ProfessorX coming in hot (understandably, c.f. rage-bait title). I admit got ruffled and some of my replies were unproductive, but I think our subsequent conversation moved toward nuance, and I thought they touched on interesting philosophical ideas, some of which I hope to continue below.
On reflection, I would soften some of my bluntness, but I also understand where it’s coming from, and not entirely unphilosophical/unscientific.
Stepping back, there seem to be three interconnected levels in the conversation since the recent reopening of this thread:
- Ontology – do ghosts exist?
- Epistemology – can we know that ghosts exist?
- Rhetoric – how should we talk about ghosts’ existence?
I intended to start an ontological conversation and still think it’s worth discussing, but I also understand why you wouldn’t be interested in that conversation.
Your disinterest supports your points in the rhetorical conversation: maybe you would have been interested in discussing whether or not ghosts exist if I hadn’t framed that conversation so bluntly. That’s something for me to keep in mind, especially on topics like this where prior experience makes it easy to be dismissive and hard to be sincere.
But granting that, it doesn’t commit me to conceding the epistemic conversation: Even where it’s not persuasive or productive to say so, it can be true and defensible to claim knowledge. I still think the latter is the case here: I think “there are no ghosts” is as epistemically defensible as many other uncontroversial knowledge claims.
I’m a bit surprised by what I take to be your and ProfessorX’s position on that, and I thought that disagreement was the most interesting part of my exchange with ProfessorX, and I’d be interested to hear more from you about it.
It seems like we make this kind of claim all the time, even in philosophical contexts. Some of the ontological arguments you do make imply knowledge of a similar sort, though I note that, unlike ProfessorX, none of your claims assert knowledge of the non-existence of a thing. Is that the relevant distinction? Do you think those examples are as epistemically flawed as my claim? Specifically claims like, ‘there is no luminiferous ether’, or ‘there is no phlogiston’.
These claims are simpler, but they do not seem different in kind: observations do not fit a hypothesis A, and fit a different hypothesis B much better, eventually we have so much evidence of hypothesis B that we ‘know’ that hypothesis A is false.
An important difference is that ghosts are a plural phenomenon: proving that one ghost is a sheet doesn’t prove that all ghosts are sheets.
Maybe a better parallel is a claim like, ‘there are no living plesiosaurs’, because proving that one carcass is a basking shark doesn’t prove that all the carcasses are basking sharks. But that claim doesn’t seem to be unscientific either, and most plesiosaur scientists would seem to agree with it. Better still is a claim like ‘there are no living Tasmanian tigers’ is a better example – my line for what I’m willing to say I ‘know’ is somewhere around that claim (though my reticence stems in large part from my knowledge that they did exist within living memory).
Are either of those claims epistemological overreach?
Another relevant type of claim, also offered by ProfessorX, is claims like ‘there are no 1000 foot tall elephants’, or my earlier example, ‘there are no square circles’. These claims we can know purely by reasoning from other knowledge.
I see a claim like ‘there are no ghosts’ as sharing elements of claims like ‘there is no phlogiston’, ‘there are no living plesiosaurs tigers’, and ‘there are no 1000 foot tall elephants’. Like with phlogiston, knowledge would depend on measurement and testing, and the development of alternative hypotheses. Like with plesiosaurs, knowledge would depend on that alternative explaining some critical mass of observations. And like with the 1000 foot tall elephants, knowledge would depend on what possibilities our other knowledge forecloses.
It seems like all of these ways of establishing knowledge are scientifically and philosophically legitimate, and we use them all the time. It doesn’t seem like combining them violates any epistemological principles – in some cases it may increase uncertainty, but there’s no reason why it couldn’t establish knowledge in principle.
So what makes the claim that “there are no ghosts” different?
I don’t see it, and it’s a big part of why I am rhetorically blunt in this conversation. It seems like special pleading, or an isolated demand for rigor. People regularly claim to know that any number of things don’t exist, but a claim that this particular thing doesn’t exist is not only wrong, it’s a kind of philosophical malpractice. That feels… unfair.
I’m not making a claim of opinion or of faith. I really am as confident as my claim to knowledge suggests. I acknowledge that I am fallible, that expert consensus is fallible, that there is still a lot about the world that we don’t know. But in light of that uncertainty, we regularly make and accept similar knowledge claims, and so it is epistemically sound to make this knowledge claim.
What am I missing?
I can relate to this. These kinds of discussion – particularly on our ontological disagreements – are more important during the development of the neocortex, and become less useful and less interesting as it becomes more fixed, and we settle into patterns of thought and the beliefs that flow from them.
When I engage on the ontological dimension of conversations like this one, I often ask myself what it would take to change my mind, and it’s usually quite a lot. But after several decades of learning about the world and refining a model that accounts for it, in some sense it should be hard to imagine how it could change. And even if I did, it would have less of a downstream effect on who I am and what I do.
Still, it’s a muscle worth exercising, and maybe as I get less from them I need them more.
(I also kinda feel the same way about experiential learning…)