Evidentialism according to Evid3nc3

A person self-appelled ”Evid3nc3”, has produced a video in which he purports to produce a logical path which shows definitively that the only justifiable beliefs are those possessing (a) personal experience for primary justification, and (b) physical evidence as a remote and suspect secondary justification.

In his first video, the author claims that there are no a priori truths which exist without a basis in the physical world. Yet he also claims that he subscribes to the Cogito of Descartes, which accepts his thought as adequate proof of his own existence, even without any physical basis due to being voluntarily disembodied at the point of discovery.

He proceeds by claiming five unjustified axioms, and promises to justify them, but does not get to that. He leaves the first video with that unresolved non-coherence, and several logical fallacies. But it is actually the second video which is more interesting, and there is where I will focus this article.

The second video is a response video. Apparently he got called out a lot on his logical failures, and the second video is intended to patch things up.

In the second video he attacks “coherentism”, specifically Islam, Christianity, and Hinduism. He claims that all three can be made to appear internally consistent, yet they contradict each other, so internal coherence is insufficient. He invokes the “Isolation Objection”: Not all can be true. OK, everyone knows that. But that doesn’t mean that all three are false, of course. He cites this principle:

“Coherence is necessary but not sufficient for a justified belief.”

No problem there; there are several logical considerations to validation of deductive processes. Coherence is one of those.

He then claims that the idea of universal consistency, while based on physical evidence, is an assumption and not self-evident or a priori truth; this doesn’t seem to follow, and he offers no proof for this claim, but he concludes:

Rationalists are making “some assumptions” just like the author does.

Tu Quoque.

The he labels it “dangerous” to unconsciously make an assumption, than to consciously make one, as he did. He can return to his assumptions for validation later. Does he ever do that? Not that I have found.

His ideas of Evidentialism expressed in his first video are apparently accused of self-refutation, and internal inconsistency. In response, the author now claims that in his first video, he implicitly excluded his first five claims from the requirement of evidence. (He is now sliding down his own slippery slope.)

He now claims that the first two claims cannot be proved, which seems to correspond to his critic’s claims against him. (6:56)

[And he inexplicably says that the Cogito assumes an “I” which can think. But it does not do that, it purports to prove that I exist, by virtue of knowing that thinking exists. There is no reason to suppose that “I” precedes thought, under this analysis. And there is no apparent reason to make this claim.]

So his first five claims now “are provisional hypotheses” which are open to future refutation or revision.” (7:04)

But if these five hypotheses can’t be proven, evidentially, how will he prove evidentialism based on them? He starts by scrapping the last three of the five, and making this declaration as #3:

“Physical evidence is a valid way of justifying beliefs.”

Aside from the tacit admission that his first video was wrong in this regard, this is a huge jump to conclusion. He might have said, that physical evidence “might” be a valid way of justifying beliefs, but he actually argued against that in his first video, where he claimed that personal experience was the valid method of justifying beliefs, and that evidence obtained through the body's sensors can be suspect and error prone.

At (7:49) he elevates a new revision to a full argument status (what was it before?) and claims that it is:

“OK, because even Rationalists agree that physical evidence is a valid form of justification”.

Well, no. Physical Evidence might or might not be valid, depending upon how it is acquired and perceived. It might be fraudulent, It might be ephemeral, it might be garbled in acquisition, etc. as the author himself pointed out in his first video. His original claim was that only personal experience could justify beliefs. That was then.

His argument now is this:

“ALL justified beliefs are justified by physical evidence” (!) (7:49)

Really. He makes this universal rule in part justified by his evidentiarily unproven “hypotheses” and in part as a reaction to criticism from Rationalists. If this is a justified belief, then where is the physical evidence which covers “ALL” possible beliefs which might in fact be true? Where is the physical evidence to support this universal claim? Now a belief is justified because someone else believes it?

What he seems to be doing at this point is to create a definition of “justified” to suit his own personal taste. The term “justified” has no metric attached to it, so it is a good wiggle word to put into one’s truth statement if one needs room to squirm. And he no longer seems to care to use the term “true”, as in “justified true beliefs”. Maybe he is off into something else now. Let’s continue and see.

Next he attacks that idea that mathematics is truth without physical proof. (Note 1) The author claims that “sets” cannot be extracted from anything except physical evidence. He presents no proof that no other source is possible. He is making a habit of associating a single possibility with the impossibility of any other answer, and declaring his single possibility as the sole truth. Yet he provides no actual physical proof that no other reason could have occurred for comprehending mathematical concepts. His solution is truth by assuming, not by any sort of proof.

He goes off into set theory, which he applies to all sorts of mathematics. Mathematics is abstractions of abstractions of abstractions, all of which are based on sets, he says. Abstracting from physical evidence (which he claims as probable, but provides no actual physical evidence for support) all derives from the physical universe. So apparently he is designating the physical universe as his axiom upon which all mathematics is conceived, and therefore no mathematics outside the universe would be valid, while our mathematics is justified by set theory, which could not have happened purely mentally. Has he proven that? Or has he merely provided a Just So Story to explain and keep his mental process intact? Is it even feasible that mathematics is confined to our universe?

He has not provided any physical evidence that math was actually derived by set theorists, or physical evidence that counting and naming numbers was only possible with physical objects and not otherwise. Nor has he provided evidence that pure mathematics is not supported completely by abstract axioms. (Note 1, again).

He is providing Just So Stories without any physical evidence, a process which should be anathema to him since he now absolutely requires physical evidence in order to hold a justified belief.

At 11:40 he demonstrates that math is useful for physical things, such as engineering applications. We all know that. His point is what? He doesn’t make a point: he jumps away quickly to:

Logic:
The deductive process of Modus Ponens is claimed to be “ubiquitous” in physical experience: but did physical experience cause Logic? Or as Locke claimed, is logic and rational thought a built-in organic function, a human intellectual faculty, an innate ability to categorize and axiomize and abstract? Did humans create categories, or did categories create themselves for humans to discover? Does Non-Contradiction exist as a physical entity, or is it a relationship discovered analytically by human intellect?

The author claims that logic is an illusion of self-evidence, and that our use of logic now doesn’t require the knowledge that physical evidence was used in the creation of logic. His presumption that the creation of logic absolutely required physical evidence is now, for him, a law, a truth yet completely and totally without any physical evidence for its support.

At 13:10 he claims that presenting the logic (in symbol form no less) to children will prove that the process is not self-evident. This is particularly unconvincing. Children understand cause and effect and if/then quite well.

But do they understand based only on physical evidence? Can consequences not be understood without lining up objects, as the author wants us to believe? He provides no physical evidence that this claim must be the case; he merely assumes that it is true without physical evidence that it actually is.

Now he jumps clear to a purely embodied mind, after originally claiming that his existence was dependent only on his disembodied mind, in concert with Descartes’ claim and not dependent upon his body or any physical existence. This has now changed to a physical dependency without any explanation other than that it just seems obvious to him.

He has lost the integrity of whatever his argument is or might have become. He starts with disembodied mind, and now claims the necessity of embodied mind with no logical if/then steps in between to justify that, much less does he demonstrate with physical evidence that there can absolutely be no mind without the body.

He has fallen into the Philosophical Materialism trap of claiming physical truths with no hope of any physical evidence to prove his claims. The universal claims which he now makes without physical evidence are actually blatant presuppositions which are necessary beliefs acquired after having concluded that Philosophical Materialism must be defended.

He is no longer following an argument to its actual conclusion, he is forcing the conclusion by contradicting his own earlier claims, and by making claims that are unsupported by his own evidentiary requirements. He is rationalizing.

He goes on to pursue the Lakoff/Nunez concept (Note 2) that mathematics doesn’t exist except in human brains. (14:01) While it is abstracted from material evidence, only, it really only exists in the minds of humans. If this is confusing, consider the response to the Lakoff/Nunez theory from actual mathematicians.

Here he now contradicts his earlier insistence that all mathematics derives specifically from direct material evidence, as when objects are pushed together in his example. It was all justified by physical objects. Now he endorses the idea that mathematics is a purely mental construct with no material component, except at the very beginning, somehow.

He then claims that Rationalists will not teach anything but memorization of “truths” while evidentialists will give examples (the example the author gives is not a physical example, by the way).

This complaint is necessarily incorrect. Rationalists will be more likely to teach the logical derivation of concepts, starting with axioms. The fact that the concepts might be easily demonstrated with physical analogs does not mean that the concepts came from the analogs and are wholly dependent upon them. That presumption is not proven nor is it provable using physical evidence.

Then he attacks “bad teachers” and uses the teaching process as a guide to the historical physical source of logic, mathematics and justified beliefs. He attacks Rationalism in teaching as the use of pure memorization rather than physical examples. This seems completely unjustified, yet it is the basis for his claim that his future videos can show that learning requires physical evidence. Undoubtedly learning is aided by physical examples; but as actual mathematicians know, math is not dependent on them for its existence.

Rationalism, he claims is due to a laziness about abstractions, leaving the job half done, by labeling some of the abstractions as a priori truths, rather than having a physical basis. Perhaps he will now psychoanalyze Peano, Frege, and all the explorers and practitioners of pure mathematics who claim otherwise, to determine why they disagree, as he did with Descartes.

He proceeds with the following obvious cop out: The evidentialist will at least have the

“intellectual honesty to admit when the job of justification is not yet finished”.

Not finished? Or is it that it actually does not exist under Philosophical Materialism? This is another way of stating the basis for Scientism:

I have faith that all justification will be provided with physical evidence, even though it currently cannot be done.

It is a religious faith statement, and a pompous, self-righteous, accusation against Rationalism.

It seems that the author is not actually familiar with the history of mathematical development, including the axioms of Peano, and the definitions of Frege. (Note 1)

His philosophy is another run at Logical Positivism? No, it’s not, he says.
Really? Looks like, sounds like, has the same principles as… why is it not? He doesn’t say.

His actual response is this: Prove it: The Burden of Rebuttal suddenly exists! The accuser must prove that this is actually Logical Positivism. Well, if all the elements of Set A correspond with all the elements of Set B, then Set A = Set B.

For his next video he wants to apply the physical evidentiary requirement to God. A whole video based on Category Error? Hm.

Note 1:
Refer to Bertrand Russell’s “Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy” and his “The Principles of Mathematics” as well as “A History of Mathematics”, by Carl B. Bover. It is recognized that numbers and subsequent math derived in prehistory with base 5 as long ago as 30,000 years. According to Bover, anthropological studies suggest that counting was developed as ordinals by religious considerations in relating creation stories and their sequences, not by the need to count stones, or objects.

But mathematics was “untethered” from sensory considerations by Peano’s axioms, and Frege’s principles of "number" upon which modern mathematics is based. Today mathematics is completely abstract and without any material, physical input, starting with its axioms as the basis.

Russell:
“Thanks to the progress of symbolic logic, especially as treated by Professor Peano, that part of Kantian philosophy is now capable of a final and irrevocable refutation. By the help of ten principles of deduction and ten other premisses of a general logical nature (e.g. “implication is a relation), all mathematics can be strictly and formally deduced; and all the entities tht occur in mathematics can be defined in terms of those that occur in the above twenty premisses.

…

“All propositions as to what actually exists, like the space we live in, belong to experimental or empirical science, not to mathematics; when they belong to applied mathematics, they arise from giving to one or more of the variables in a proposition of pure mathematics some constant value satisfying the hypothesis, and thus enabling us, for that value of the variable, actually to assert both hypothesis and consequent instead of merely asserting the implication.”

From Russell, “The Principles of Mathematics”,Merchant Books, 1903, pgs 4, 5.

Note 2:
Wiki has some objections to Lakoff/Nunez by actual mathematicians.

One observation was this:

"When Paul Dirac's equations describing electrons produced more than one solution, he surmised that nature must possess other particles, now known as antimatter. But scientists did not discover such particles until after Dirac's math told him they must exist. If math is a human invention, nature seems to know what was going to be invented."

Indeed, the math preceded the observation, not the other way around. That frequently is how scientific hypotheses work, with the physical experimental data confirming the mathematics, not generating it. Einstein's abstract thought experiment produced Relativity, and was confirmed much later by experimental observation.

Also, Lakoff/Nunez appear not to know much about the history of mathematics including pertinent junctures provided by Peano and others.

Lakoff and Nunez reply that Mathematicians who are not cognitive experts cannot discuss their approach to mathematics; Yet, neither Lakoff nor Nunez is a mathematician and still they pretend to understand the primitives of mathematics.