Science, Knowledge, and the "Epistemic Horizon"
David Klinghoffer
National Review Online's Kevin Williamson has sometimes rubbed me the wrong way, but in the 24 hours or so since Neil deGrasse Tyson shot off his "#Rationalia" tweet, Williamson composed an essay in response that can only be called profound. Tyson, the "dumbest smart person on Twitter," proposed a "virtual country," with a "one-line Constitution: All policy shall be based on the weight of evidence." In reply, Williamson offers the image of a limit to knowledge, an "epistemtic horizon" like the "event horizon" of a black hole.
Read it all for yourself, but this is the conclusion and upshot:
The epistemic horizon is not very broad. We do not, in fact, know what the results of various kinds of economic policies or social policies will be, and there isn't any evidence that can tell us with any degree of certainty. The housing projects that mar our cities weren't supposed to turn out like that; neither was the federal push to encourage home-ownership or to encourage the substitution of carbohydrates for fats and proteins in our diets. A truly rational policy of the sort that Tyson imagines must take into account not only how little we know about the future but how little we can know about the future, even if we consult the smartest, saintliest, and most disinterested experts among us.
That is part of the case for limited government and free markets. Government can do some things, such as guard borders (though ours chooses not to) and fight off foreign invaders. There are things that it cannot do, even in principle, such as impose a "rational" order on the nation's energy markets, deciding that x share of our electricity supply shall come from solar, y share from wind, z share from natural gas, all calculated to economic and environmental ideals. That is simply beyond its ken, even if all the best people -- including Tyson, from time to time -- pretend that it is otherwise. Free markets go about solving social problems in the opposite way: Dozens, or thousands, or millions, or even billions of people, firms, organizations, investors, and business managers trying dozens or thousands of approaches to solving social problems....
There isn't a road to Rationalia. There are billions of them, negotiated by individuals and institutions dozens or hundreds of times a day, every time they make a significant choice. Government programs are, by their nature, centralized, unitary, and static attempts to impose a rational order on complexity beyond the understanding of the people who would claim to manage it....
It isn't ideology that imposes a relatively narrow circle on what government planners can do. And, with all due respect to the genius of F. A. Hayek ("The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design"), it isn't only economics, either. The limitations on human knowledge are real, and they are consequential. As men like him have done for ages, Tyson dreams of a world of self-evident choices, overseen by men of reason such as himself who occupy a position that we cannot help but notice is godlike. It's nice to imagine ruling from an Olympus of Reason, with men and nations arrayed before one as on a chessboard.
Down here on Earth, the view is rather different, and the lines of sight inside the epistemic horizon are not nearly so long as our would-be rulers imagine.
I would add -- and this he doesn't say -- that the idea of a limit or horizon to knowledge goes far beyond politics, economics, urban planning, the issues that seem to animate Kevin Williamson. It includes faith, notwithstanding the certainty of the New Atheists and some religious spokesmen as well. In this context, I think of the Talmud's interesting gnomic statement warning of four boundaries of reality beyond which we are better off not seeking to gaze -- "what is above, what is below, what was before, and what will be after."
The idea of an epistemic horizon definitely includes science, especially historical scientific theories that seek to lay bare biological origins. Everyone who speaks about science in public should be reminded of this.
I don't mean we can never have an informed opinion on how life arose, became complex and diverse. That's exactly what we talk about when we talk about intelligent design. But the horizon should be kept in view when we hear Darwinian evolution asserted as "fact" -- "as much a fact as gravity or erosion," in a typical formulation. No, that is wrong.
ID advocates don't talk that way -- ID as "fact," rather than a tentative inference. And good for them. That modesty is a point in favor of the design argument.
David Klinghoffer
National Review Online's Kevin Williamson has sometimes rubbed me the wrong way, but in the 24 hours or so since Neil deGrasse Tyson shot off his "#Rationalia" tweet, Williamson composed an essay in response that can only be called profound. Tyson, the "dumbest smart person on Twitter," proposed a "virtual country," with a "one-line Constitution: All policy shall be based on the weight of evidence." In reply, Williamson offers the image of a limit to knowledge, an "epistemtic horizon" like the "event horizon" of a black hole.
Read it all for yourself, but this is the conclusion and upshot:
The epistemic horizon is not very broad. We do not, in fact, know what the results of various kinds of economic policies or social policies will be, and there isn't any evidence that can tell us with any degree of certainty. The housing projects that mar our cities weren't supposed to turn out like that; neither was the federal push to encourage home-ownership or to encourage the substitution of carbohydrates for fats and proteins in our diets. A truly rational policy of the sort that Tyson imagines must take into account not only how little we know about the future but how little we can know about the future, even if we consult the smartest, saintliest, and most disinterested experts among us.
That is part of the case for limited government and free markets. Government can do some things, such as guard borders (though ours chooses not to) and fight off foreign invaders. There are things that it cannot do, even in principle, such as impose a "rational" order on the nation's energy markets, deciding that x share of our electricity supply shall come from solar, y share from wind, z share from natural gas, all calculated to economic and environmental ideals. That is simply beyond its ken, even if all the best people -- including Tyson, from time to time -- pretend that it is otherwise. Free markets go about solving social problems in the opposite way: Dozens, or thousands, or millions, or even billions of people, firms, organizations, investors, and business managers trying dozens or thousands of approaches to solving social problems....
There isn't a road to Rationalia. There are billions of them, negotiated by individuals and institutions dozens or hundreds of times a day, every time they make a significant choice. Government programs are, by their nature, centralized, unitary, and static attempts to impose a rational order on complexity beyond the understanding of the people who would claim to manage it....
It isn't ideology that imposes a relatively narrow circle on what government planners can do. And, with all due respect to the genius of F. A. Hayek ("The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design"), it isn't only economics, either. The limitations on human knowledge are real, and they are consequential. As men like him have done for ages, Tyson dreams of a world of self-evident choices, overseen by men of reason such as himself who occupy a position that we cannot help but notice is godlike. It's nice to imagine ruling from an Olympus of Reason, with men and nations arrayed before one as on a chessboard.
Down here on Earth, the view is rather different, and the lines of sight inside the epistemic horizon are not nearly so long as our would-be rulers imagine.
I would add -- and this he doesn't say -- that the idea of a limit or horizon to knowledge goes far beyond politics, economics, urban planning, the issues that seem to animate Kevin Williamson. It includes faith, notwithstanding the certainty of the New Atheists and some religious spokesmen as well. In this context, I think of the Talmud's interesting gnomic statement warning of four boundaries of reality beyond which we are better off not seeking to gaze -- "what is above, what is below, what was before, and what will be after."
The idea of an epistemic horizon definitely includes science, especially historical scientific theories that seek to lay bare biological origins. Everyone who speaks about science in public should be reminded of this.
I don't mean we can never have an informed opinion on how life arose, became complex and diverse. That's exactly what we talk about when we talk about intelligent design. But the horizon should be kept in view when we hear Darwinian evolution asserted as "fact" -- "as much a fact as gravity or erosion," in a typical formulation. No, that is wrong.
ID advocates don't talk that way -- ID as "fact," rather than a tentative inference. And good for them. That modesty is a point in favor of the design argument.
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