This blog post is now a chapter in my book The Apple of Knowledge.
Today I would like to introduce two related concepts: experimental philosophy, and external contradictions.
Many philosophers claim to want to introduce the "scientific method" into philosophy. Hume said this. So did Kant. But philosophers have been notoriously lazy in terms of actually using science in philosophy. The scientific method begins with a belief, theory, assumption, premise, hypothesis or postulate, and then looks at experience, usually in the form of empirical data from tests and experiments, and science asks: "is our experiences exactly what we would have expected them to be if our theory was correct?" If not, throw out the theory and try a new one. If it is confirmed, always be looking for more verification from other new tests.
What would experimental philosophy look like? Well, if Kantian subjectivism is true and the mind creates the experience of space and time, then you could jump out a window and your mind could alter your experience of the noumena so that your phenomena of space would look like you were flying. Kantians who are unwilling to test this hypothesis are intellectually insincere.
Or, if Hume's skepticism were true, one would expect the sun not to rise tomorrow. If you possess knowledge that the sun will rise tomorrow, and this knowledge is confirmed, then it can't have been true that you did not know anything. But Hume believes that we could not know for certain that the sun will rise tomorrow.
A related concept involving the use of empirical data in philosophy is external contradiction. Every great philosopher claims to have a "coherent" philosophy, that is, one which is internally consistent and has no internal contradictions. The only problem with these claims is that it is incredibly easy to think up a theory which is internally consistent. Hume's philosophy is. So is Kant's. So is Ayn Rand's, and so are most other great thinkers'. Perhaps the only example I can think of a famous theory with an internal contradiction is Christianity, namely that God is loving but evil exists, or that God is the only power but the Devil is powerful.
The far more difficult, but more important, task of a theory is to not have external contradictions, in other words, not to conflict with what our experiences teach us. For Rand, the idea, as one objectivist recently wrote in a reply to a Liberty article of mine, the idea that "emotions are robots" is internally consistent with her philosophy. Indeed, Rand seems to have believed that Nathaniel Branden and Barbara Branden could program their emotions like robots, to make NB love Rand and to make BB love NB. But experience proved that emotions are not robots and love comes from chemistry as well as logic, and the whole Branden-Rand sex affair explosion happened, disproving the "emotions are robots" hypothesis. But history seems to indicate that Rand clung to her theory instead of rejecting it when she faced the external contradiction. This is not a scientific attitude to have. If being scientific is a desirable trait, then we must challenge, and be ready to discard, any belief which is exposed as having an external contradiction.
