Hitchens has a Razor Apparently

   

Christopher Hitchens had no qualms expressing contempt for people and things he disliked so I am sure he would appreciate my candor in saying that, as a man who endorsed Rudy Giuliani in 2008 and defended the genocide of indigenous Americans, I think him a scurvy fellow. I say that as one pugilist to another knowing him to be a man who relished an exchange of insults in the fine British literary tradition. Now that the initial un-pleasantries are out of the way, however, let me give him a spot of credit. Hitchens has a fan base of people who lament him and complain of how the world has gone grey with his untimely passing. This, I suppose, is because he wrote well. I myself would forgive a man a great deal for writing well. I have long ago forgiven Kipling and Claudel, as Auden counselled, and indeed much worse men than they. Someday I may even forgive Hitchens for the sake of his admirable writing on Lord Nelson. Before that reconciliation takes place however, I have one more bone to pick. This concerns what seems to me an attempt to canonize Hitchens as a philosopher by making him the author of a ‘principle’.  Not even in his rarest moments of sobriety would I ever call Hitchens a philosopher and if he is being touted as one that requires an intervention by people who are, though this would be an intervention very different from the sort that might have saved Hitchens’ writing and, for that matter, his life. 

At any rate, the principle in question is the ancient adage: “quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur”.  This translates as: what is asserted gratuitously can be denied gratuitously. It sometimes appears in English as: “what is asserted without argument can be denied without argument”. This principle has been credited to Euclid though no doubt it goes back further. What Hitchens is being credited for is altering this phrase to: “what is asserted without evidence can be denied without evidence”. This, I will argue, is not equivalent to the previous phrasing. Argument is a broader category than evidence as some argument is not evidential but pragmatic or moral in character. Secondly, this rephrasing is not an improvement of the original principle nor is it a useful or necessary addendum to it. This is because there are many contexts, like early education, where it is simply not true. Plus, it is FAR easier to say what constitutes an argument than it is to say what constitutes evidence or, for that matter, how much evidence justifies a particular act of assent. Hitchens’ razor fails as a general principle though, as with other such principles, it may be relevant to a particular conversation. If we want to be logical (and I know Hitchens’ fans want above all things to be logical) we have here a fallacy of hasty generalization. We have a principle, like Occam’s more famous razor, that seems excellent in the abstract but cannot always be particularized successfully. Occam’s principle suffers from the fact that it can be challenging to state when exactly someone is violating it. This is even more true of Hitchens’ principle as well I will proceed to demonstrate. 

Some things sound so logical in the abstract that it is surprising to find how they fail in the particular. Occam’s notorious principle is one of these. In the middle ages his principle of parsimony clashed with a principle of plentitude. Medieval thinkers clashed over the question of whether God’s absolute power was consistent with the richly layered, hierarchical universe inherited from late pagan Platonism. Most in the high gothic period accepted the latter at least to some degree. Aquinas says, for instance, that God fills every gap in reality with some form of entity because he is super abundantly generous and leaves no good possibility unfulfilled where the chain of being is concerned. Though God MIGHT act as the direct cause of all effects he allows secondary causes in nature to operate by their own exigency AND allows free agency to humans. Out of his generosity God permits the dignity of causality to creatures thus we should look to find more kinds of thing rather than less. How does Occam’s principle (that causes are not to be multiplied without necessity) apply to this claim? Are there as many things as can be because God is good or as few as can be because God is parsimonious?  Which author has violated the more fundamental principle and why? If there is an answer to this question it is not an easy or obvious one. Occam’s principle, useful in many contexts, may not apply in all rather as certain laws of physics may not apply in the event horizons of black holes. Its application may be limited by the application of rival principles.  What is clear and necessary in the kingdom of abstract ideas may fail when applied to a particular conversation at a particular point in time. Here, the logical principle cannot be separated from the metaphysical and theological commitments that accompany it.  

Of course, if I don’t give an argument my opponent is not required to give one either. That is simple enough as a point of intellectual etiquette. However, does the same apply to evidence? It is impossible to avoid the conclusion that a principle such as this applies only in a context free vacuum. There may be a conversation where someone makes a purely gratuitous assertion which can be met by another purely gratuitous negation but, frankly, this is rare in my experience. This is because we are constantly, and indeed necessarily, pushing claims on imperfectly rationalized evidence or for non-evidential reasons or motivations. This kind of evidence may not conform to an ideal of apodictic scientific discourse but may be quite sufficient to ensure my consent to a particular proposition. It may not, however, be sufficient to secure YOUR assent because uncertainly, doubt and hesitation remain.  Thus, we must often press claims for which our evidence is partial and incomplete. Secondly, and even more problematically, evidence comes in irreducibly different kinds and a kind of evidence probative for one person may not be probative for another.  Some claims may be what we call ‘judgment calls’ with which others might rationally disagree (as when two experts disagree on the authenticity of a painting or the provenance of an arrowhead). Other competing claims may appeal to incommensurate forms of evidence as when I, based on direct sensation, tell my dentist I am in pain and he, based on his general knowledge of the effects of anesthesia, insists I am not (I was a child in an age where dentistry was not so sensitive as it is now). Finally, as we shall see, there are pedagogic contexts where the giving of evidence is simply not relevant and Hitchens’ razor cannot be applied because it has no use. If I am sitting in introductory Greek or Spanish the evidence for how to conjugate a verb is my teacher’s say so, or, if not that, the textbook I am using. Plus, if I am introducing a logic class to the principle of the excluded middle what kind of evidence am I supposed to offer for it?

Hitchens, so the fan boys tell me, really had religion in mind when he formulated this principle not logic though why a logical principle should apply to a discussion of religion and nowhere else is a bit of a mystery. His operating assumption seems to be that religious claims are inherently non-evidential though that is not really true. The problem is that ‘evidence’ is not a word with a clear or ‘self-evident’ meaning.  What exactly is and is not evidence is frequently the very thing under dispute as was the case between me and my dentist. An example is string theory which is defended by those who accept theoretical coherence as a criterion of truth and denied by those who only accept observational data as evidential. This is not a debate within a common epistemological framework but a debate about the epistemological framework. The same thing occurs in discussions of religion. Suppose I ask a Christian or a Sikh why she believes the things she does. In some ideal, logical situation she might well assert ‘for no reason at all I simply assert it”. In that situation I might answer in kind if she challenged me about my beliefs.  This however, rarely happens in my experience. Depending on how articulate the individual is I will usually receive some kind of explanation for that individual’s beliefs. This is unlikely to be a ‘scientific’ justification but something more akin to a judgment of prudence such as is employed in many informal contexts. This account will in all likelihood consist of a web of motivations and arguments many of which will be experiential or pragmatic in character. All this will seem to be ‘evidence’ to the individual in question though it may not be compelling for me. In the specific context of, say, a scientific journal it may not be a probative kind of evidence. In the context of ordinary life, it is often enough all we have. Certainly, the use of this kind of informal judgment seems no worse in the sphere of religion than it is in the sphere of catching the next bus. 

One might respond, rightly, that for a decision so important one should exercise especial care and look for an exceptionally strong chain of evidence before making a life altering decision. This is true but then, what sort of evidence are we to look for? The problem is that evidence comes in all types and all shades. Testimony is a form of evidence.  So is scientific experiment and it seems on its face a better form of evidence. Yet, alas, scientific experiments all depend on some form of subjective testimony or reportage at the end of the day. Some science is not experimental at all, as in those disciplines that rely on field notes or speculative reconstruction of the meaning of artefacts. Deductive reasoning is evidence (it resolves into what we might call ‘self’ evidence). Indeed, deduction is used in formulating a scientific hypothesis. But what if deductive argument conflicts with sensory evidence, as in the case of Zeno’s paradoxes? Is sensation evidence? It is if we trust our senses yet skeptics have argued for millennia that sensation is a source and principle of error. Yet how much science assumes the validity of sense knowledge? Worse for our present case, evidence comes in kinds that barely seem commensurate if we consider multiple domains of knowledge. What resemblance does a scientific experiment have to the techniques of textual criticism or literary theory? Beyond their common use as a way to settle an argument by some form of inference not much.  And this, by the way, is barely a fraction of the contexts in which people use arguments of every sort to settle on conclusions. What kind of ‘evidence’ do we appeal to in moral or aesthetic disputes? Am I appealing to evidence if I appeal to someone’s conscience or taste? Clearly a large part of learning to think is learning what sorts of evidence and argument, what sort of appeals and exhortations are germane to what kind of discussion. 

Imagine a scenario where a group of philosophers are arguing a proposition, x. One philosopher may affirm x on the ground of a priori argument. Another will reject x on the ground of empirical data or lack thereof. A third, accepting pragmatic criteria as a kind of evidence, will appeal to its practical or political effects. A fourth person might appeal to some sort of higher intuition or transcendent state of consciousness. Finally, as all of us carry around a stock of maxims and observations we have collected over the years, another person might appeal to experience and practice. Does Hitchens’ razor help us in this scenario? Not a bit. Each of these disputants will claim at some point that her rivals lack evidence for their claims for they are pointing at the wrong kind of thing to support their assertions. This will not be a scenario where someone appeals to evidence and someone does not, however, as the nature and weight of this or that form of evidence is just what is in dispute! The fan boys may, of course, think that there is one kind of evidence, scientific evidence, that trumps all others and that one is not appealing to evidence if one is not appealing to THAT. This, as we have already noted with string theory, is simply wrong. Science uses all kinds of differing evidence just as other pursuits do and these forms of evidence may clash landing us right at square one. One could imagine a scenario, for instance, where one person appeals to research that violates ethical guidelines while another person refuses to. Evidence is not simply evidence if it is gathered by Nazi scientists in concentration camps or from cruel experiments on African slaves.   

The only thing one can say to the fan boys then is that a person is probably wrong to base their religious (or anti-religious) beliefs on a kind of evidence inappropriate to the domain of religion. When ordinary people try to articulate why they believe certain things (which by the way is often not an easy thing to do) they may indeed promiscuously mix forms of reason and evidence that would be better distinguished. This, though, is an entirely different matter than the question of whether they are appealing to evidence or not. Plus, judging when one has enough evidence of the right kind to be justified in believing something is itself one of those prudential questions without a formulaic answer and is in part a matter of taste, discipline and practice. I, for instance, believe I have enough evidence to say Shakespeare wrote Titus Andronicus though there will certainly be people who differ on not inconsiderable grounds. This might come down to different standards we apply in attributions of authorship. On these grounds then I don’t think Hitchens’ has earned the right to his ‘razor’. Fan boys and You Tube Atheists need to kick their habit of amateur philosophizing because, in all other contexts, they defend the rights of expertise and authority. If we are obligated to listen to epidemiologists might we, in some contexts at least, be obligated to listen to philosophers too?