Create on your computer desktop a folder. Name it SF, for “Self-Referential” (though you can name it whatever you want—or nothing at all). Next, drop down the drop-down menu for it. In front of your eyes should be the icon for the folder “SF” and its drop-down menu. Now drag the icon SF into the drop-down menu. What happens? Try it again, and again. It won’t go in.
Before writing this, I asked a computer geek if there was any way to get the icon into its own drop-down menu.
“Yes,” he said, “but only if the software was corrupted.”
Only if the software was corrupted? If the logic and reasoning behind the processes were working correctly, then the folder SF could never go into itself, because it’s impossible to put one thing into the other when what you want to put in it is the same as what you want to put it in.
Try this analogy: Can a scale weigh itself when it, itself, is doing the weighing?
The icon experiment is an object lesson in epistemology, the study of knowledge; not of what we know (astronomy, biology, math, theology, literary criticism, etc.), but what we mean when we say that we know something about astronomy, biology, math, literary criticism, etc. How valid are the tools and methods we use to arrive at whatever we know—or think we know—about these topics, or about anything?
If you wanted, for instance, to study tea-leaf reading in order to learn if tea-leaf reading can predict the future, you would use things such as statistics, science, reason, and empiricism to analyze it. But what you would not do is analyze the validity of tea-leaf reading by the methods, presuppositions, and techniques of tea-leaf reading, because the methods, presuppositions, and techniques of tea-leaf reading are the very things being questioned to begin with.
Tea-leaf reading is one thing. How, though, does one study logic and reason, the basic tools of knowledge themselves? How do we study the tools of knowledge when what we use to study them is precisely what we are questioning? How can we step back from logic and reason and view them objectively? And even if we could, whatever conclusions we would draw about our logic and reason would, of necessity, entail logic and reason.
Which takes us back to our central problem: logic and reason are what we want to study to begin with. Just as you can’t seriously study tea-leaf reading by appealing to tea-leaf reading, how can we study logic and reason by appealing to logic and reason?
But if we can’t use logic and reason, what can we use?
It’s a conundrum, something that shows the outer limits of human knowledge. Thomas Nagel, who has written extensively about our quest for objective truth, framed the problem like this: “One possibility is that some things can’t be explained because they have to enter into every explanation”(The Last Word, p. 76). That is, you can’t explain logic and reason because logic and reason are needed in every explanation.
We run into similar limitations with language. How do you define the concept of “words” when you need words themselves to define the concept? You’re assuming a priori the validity of what you are questioning. How do we get past language in order to understand language? Metalinguistics has been an attempt to create some sort of linguistic field in which one could step out of language and examine it. The only problem is that any metalanguage created would still be a language, so we are back, if not in the same place where we started, still close enough.
The bottom line? In all that we know, even that which we are certain of, a level of contingency exists. Not that reality itself is contingent; it’s just that our knowledge of reality is. Which means that whatever we know—or think we know—must be taken, to a certain degree, by faith.
Is that a reasonable conclusion? Yes. But because reason is what we’ve been questioning to begin with, we’re back where we started, fruitlessly trying to put the SF icon into its own folder.
_________
Clifford Goldstein is editor of the Adult Sabbath School Bible Study Guide. His latest book, Shadow Men, was recently published by Signs Publishing in Australia. This article was published April 19, 2012.
