Why sensation is not an epistemology

Empiricism walks up to the Knowledge Club door holding one chip. Sensation. A color. A pressure. A sound. That is the whole stake. Not revelation added later when the argument gets lonely. Not logic smuggled in as a house rule. If the starting point is sensation, the starting point is sensation. Think about that for three seconds. If sensation is the starting point, then that is all the starting point is. Anything that shows up in the conclusion and was not in that chip is a void. Not a hunch. Not “it feels solid.” A missing license.

A newcomer can get lost in the word epistemology. Forget the word for a second. A starting point for knowledge has one job. It has to license the first claim. A claim, here, is a sentence that can be true or false. “This is a mountain.” “The cup is on the table.” “I am sensing.” Those have a thing, and something said about the thing. A color event does not. It happens. The ticket booth at the door wants a sentence for the ticket to be valid. The chip is a patch of gray. Already the transaction looks funny. The booth attendant holds it up: “Where’s the sentence? This happens. It doesn’t say anything.”

People hear this and reach for the lights coming on, the cup where the hand expected, the plane that landed. Those are great stories about feelings of confidence. They are not evidence. A long streak of confident feelings is still a streak of feelings. Confidence and feelings are not subjects and predicates; they are not invisible premises of true or false. The question is whether the sensation contains the conclusion. It does not. The logical voids are still there. I will be using “logical void” and “hole” as the same.

Logical Void One: a sensation cannot justify a sensation

Vincent Cheung puts the knife in with a plain question (Sermonettes, Vol. 1: Questions for Empiricists), the kind a newcomer can ask without a philosophy degree. If information comes from sensation, how do you know you are having a sensation? Do you sense the sensation? Then do you sense the sensation that senses the sensation? If the answer is always another sensation, the stack never lands. This is a true definition of being circular or begging the question. You are looking for the bottom of a pile of mirrors and calling it a foundation. Cute. If the answer is not another sensation, you have already left the foundation of empiricism to certify empiricism with a different foundation. You stepped outside the sensation to stamp the sensation as valid. When this is done, sensation is no longer a starting point.

Try it in the kitchen. The light is on. You want to know that you are seeing the light. If seeing is the only way to know, then you need a seeing of the seeing. Then a seeing of that. The light itself never said, “You are seeing me.” That sentence was extra. You do not even get to name the method. “Sensation” is a word. A word is not a color. Naming the method was a non-sensation doing the work the sensation was supposed to do.

The absence is worse, and this is the part that gets ridiculous. Do you ever not have a sensation? How do you know that? A lack of sensation is not a sensation. The report “I am not sensing that” is a non-sensation licensing a claim about sensation. You cannot sense “not doctored,” “not an atom,” “not a second moon,” or “I do not know this.” There is no color of absence. There is no pressure shaped like “not.” The moment you know an absence, is the moment sensation stopped being foundation.

That is begging the question in the strict sense. Not the loose sense of “I don’t like your tone.” The thing to be proved — that sensation can justify — is assumed in the attempt, or dropped the moment the proof needs a non-sensation. Sensation cannot pay for its own admission. It cannot pay for the sentence “this is a sensation.” A start has one job: make knowledge possible. This one cannot even introduce itself. The chip looks for the bottom of a pile of mirrors and still gets bounced at the window.

Calling the sensation patch “data” is the same loan, taken out early, with a nicer font. Data means something that counts, that differs from noise, that can be read. A color event does not contain “this is data or information.” The word already imported intelligibility, difference, and “this one counts.” The patch never issued those. If you need a non-sensation to know that you are sensing, the sensing was never the start.

Logical Void Two: the categories are not in the patch

Suppose, for the sake of argument, the first hole is ignored and a patch is simply had. Be generous. Hand the empiricist the gray slope and do not ask how he knows he has it. Knowledge still does not start. Knowledge is a premise that can be true or false. A subject, a predicate, a copula. “This is a mountain.” A sensation is an event. Events are not true or false. They happen. Rain happens. A sentence about rain can be wrong or true. Knowledge about the event is not the event itself. Not the same categories. The sentence is invisible. The look is not invisible. One is incorporeal, the other is corporeal. One is non-data, the other is data. One has meaning and the other has no meaning.

The gray slope in the eyes is not the mountain. This is the copy problem, and it is not a trick. What you have is the sensation; a momentary transient non-data patch. The mountain, if there is one, is a different item. Sameness between picture and object is a relation. No shade of gray is that relation. Dream-slope and valley-slope can wear the same colors. A heat haze can wear them too. Nothing in the colors stamps one of them “real” and the other “nice try.” If the patch is all you have, the patch does not tell you which world you are in. The booth wants a sentence that can be true or false. Your gray patch is just an event. Rain happens. “This is rain” is a different category the chip never issued.

Two slopes in a row are not “the same mountain.” Blink. A cloud passes. New shade of gray. Each moment is a new event. Nothing in the new event is stamped “still the mountain from five seconds ago.” That is not data; an event is not data. That is meaning; sensation is not meaning. Continuity is added. You brought the idea of one persistent thing. The colors did not sell it to you. Slope, then moving leaves, is not “the wind caused it.” You got order. You did not get production. The “makes it happen” is not a color and not a sound. Ball touches ball, second ball rolls. The push-power is not in the picture. One is not knowledge, the other is. One has no meaning, the other does.

This slope is not “mountain” as a kind, and not “all mountains.” One occurrence does not contain the unseen cases. A universal is not a very large particular. No pile of patches, however tall, contains the “all.” Some is not all. Grace is not works, and works are not grace. And the slope is not the law that a thing is what it is, or that it cannot both be and not be a mountain. Turn the light off and the colors go. Those relations do not go with them. They were never in the patch. Cheung’s question lands here too. How did you sense the law of contradiction? If you used it to keep sensations from being nonsense before you “learned” it, it was not learned from them. You were already using it to keep the patch from meaning everything at once.

So the order is this, and a newcomer can keep it on a napkin. First the standard fails on its own ground. Sensation cannot justify a sensation, and cannot justify the lack of one, without a non-sensation. Then, even granting the non-data patch, identity, difference, cause, motion, sameness over time, and a subject and predicate that can be true or false are different categories not in the non-data patch. They have to come out of the “sensation gave me this” column before a knowledge claim is possible. After both removals, what remains is a non-data patch. A patch is not a premise. Without a premise there is no knowledge, only an event somebody later narrates with tools the event did not contain. No ticket. No entry.

“Reliable enough” is not a middle

The soft exit sounds modest, which is how a lot of fake tickets get past the ticket booth. Sensation does not have to be certain. It is reliable enough. It predicts. The cup is where the sensation said it was. So it gives knowledge, or close enough that mentioning the difference is rude. Handing over a sticky note that says “usually works” is not a valid ticket.

Modest is not a license. If the senses are less than infallible, you need a standard that cannot fail, to judge each instance. You cannot know by sensation which sensation is the correct one, or how reliable this one is. A mirage is a perfectly ordinary visual event. A stick in water looks bent, and the bent look is a perfectly ordinary visual event. “Usually right” is a story about other days. It does not label today. The non-data haze does not come with a flag that gives the data “this is one of the bad ones.”

Cheung’s line is the sharp one, and it is worth hearing slowly. Even if seeing a mirage is “properly basic,” it is properly useless unless you can know by sensation that it is a mirage. Properly basic reliability is not enough. The empiricist needs properly basic infallibility. He does not have the weaker thing either, because he cannot know by the sensation how reliable the non-data patch is.

Any degree of dependence on empiricism on that issue drops you into agnosticism about it. Not a softer knowledge. A blank. If a non-sensory standard stamps this instance “good,” then you accepted this new non-sensation standard as your new starting point. You did not accept the sensation as the source. There is no humble middle. Either the standard can fail, and you do not know whether this case is a hit, or it cannot fail, and the infallible item is doing the knowing. The booth does not do soft exits. Your percentage is a confident feeling wearing a number, hoping no one asks to see the receipt.

The twin question is just as empty, and newcomers skip it. How do you know that you do not know? A miss is not labeled inside the non-data patch. The same sensation that cannot certify a hit cannot certify a miss. A percentage you cannot audit is not knowledge with the edges sanded off.

For knowledge to be possible, you need to know what is true or false. If the standard does not give an infallible way to know what is true or false, then you don’t know what is true or false, and you fall into an agnosticism and skepticism that denies the law of contradiction. Some might argue with rhetoric like, “Only true or hard skepticism is a denial of the law of contradiction.” This is misleading. If the topic is your starting point of knowledge, then without the infallible standard it is skepticism and skepticism denies the law of contradiction. When knowledge never starts, you don’t have it. The starting point is not a small side issue about knowledge; it is the issue. If knowledge never started, then you don’t have the knowledge to say you have knowledge, and you don’t have the knowledge to say that you don’t have knowledge. Those are violations of identity and contradiction.

The fraction that was never finished

In Paul and the Philosophers, Cheung catches the rescue in the act. A theory that cannot be proved true gets called “probably true.” Sounds humble. Sounds numerical. Probability is a fraction. Favorable cases on top. All possible cases on the bottom. You must know both. Before you have knowledge you cannot know the denominator, the complete set of relevant possibilities. Without it you cannot calculate a probability at all. To have the denominator you would already need the knowledge the experiment was supposed to deliver, and you would have no need for the experiment.

Picture a chicken coop you have never seen. And Johnny says to you this afternoon, “I picked up six eggs this morning, therefore I have half of the eggs for today.” Half of what? If you do not know how many eggs there are, “six” is not a fraction. It is a story about six. Observation gives you the hits you happened to have. It does not give you every way the thing can go, including the failures you have not met, including the cases nobody has sensed. Particulars do not contain the “all.” That is the same logical void as “this slope is not all mountains,” wearing a lab coat. Probability without the full coop is like waving a half-stamped chip and saying “probably good enough for the VIP section.” Booth: “Show me the denominator or get out. Felt confidence isn’t a ticket.”

What people actually have is a feeling of confidence, or a pattern their minds have supposedly recognized, dressed in the language of numbers. Cheung’s line is the one to keep. Probability without a true denominator is psychology disguised as epistemology. A feeling that the next slice will be there is not the fraction.

Inside a closed toy — a die you have defined as six faces — someone can divide hits by the faces they stipulated. That is arithmetic inside an assumed box. Useful for board games. It is not a probability that corresponds to reality, and it is not a measurement of how reliable sensation is. The real denominator would include every unseen case and every way the non-data patch can fail. Observation never delivers that set. So no one has completed the reliability fraction. “Decently reliable” was never calculated. It was felt, then named. The badge was never issued.

If it is not the start, it is not the epistemology

Put the logical voids next to sensation and the starting-point claim collapses in plain sight. A starting point has to pay for the first claim. This one cannot pay for its own admission, cannot pay for the categories inside the claim, and cannot pay for the stamp that says this instance is one of the good ones. That is not an epistemology. An epistemology is an account of how you know. An account that cannot license a single premise is a mood of confident feelings; what it is not, is knowledge about anything.

Confident emotions are why people still talk this way. The cup was where the hand expected. The emotion of success got promoted into a theory of knowledge. When the claim on the table is “this is how knowing starts,” the streak is irrelevant. Success at finding the cup is not a proof that the patch contained “cup,” “same cup,” and “true.”

“Part of the process” is a retreat, and it should be treated as one. Even if that concession is granted — that sensation is part of the process — part of the process is not the same as the start. The start is whatever licenses the first premise. If sensation is not that, empiricism is not the theory of knowledge. Sensation is, at most, an occasion somebody else has to interpret with knowledge, meaning, logic, and tools sensation cannot supply. The later steps inherit the bankruptcy. They do not cure it.

The dismissal makes sense only if the attack is heard as “you do not have eyes.” That is not the attack. Eyes are not an epistemology. If someone offers sensation as the starting point, it deserves the question any starting point deserves. Does this actually give knowledge? Is it possible? Looking at the non-data sensation, no. There is no route from the event to the premise that does not spend money the event never had.

They already attacked a starting point

Here is the part that gets called weird, and it is the most ordinary move in the room. A scientist says the earth cannot be that young, so if the Bible says otherwise you should not believe the Bible. That is an attack on a starting point. Reliance on the text, they say, means you do not have knowledge. They treated your start as an epistemology and checked its ticket. Fine. That is allowed. In fact, as Christians we prefer to take the debate to the starting point level. If they attack our start, we are allowed to attack their start.

Science, if it claims knowledge, has a starting point too. Whatever it does later — instruments, models, long runs, very serious faces — it still has to get a premise from observation. Observation is sensation. If sensation never issued a premise, the later steps have nothing to inherit. Length of experiment does not mint a denominator the start never had. A hundred trials are a hundred patches. A thousand are a thousand patches. None of them is “all possible outcomes,” and none of them is “this premise is true.” Doing a bankrupt thing for a long time does not make it solvent. They checked the Bible ticket and said no knowledge. Cool. Now the sensation chip gets the same check at the same booth. Long runs of patches don’t mint a premise. Plane lands — utility is great. Knowledge is different. They crossed the line first.

Attacking sensation is not a dodge around the lab. It is the parallel question. They asked whether a claimed start, in our case the Bible, gives knowledge. Sensation is the start they have to defend. Showing that it does not give knowledge is the same kind of check.

Utility can stay on the table. This is the distinction that keeps the argument honest. The plane can land. The bulb can come on. Pragmatic utility is great and we use it; but it is not knowledge. Something can be pragmatically repeatable and still be a false claim against reality; thus it is not knowledge. The cup can be where the hand expected. Pragmatic success is a different claim from knowledge. They are the ones who crossed that line, when they said reliance on the Bible means you do not know. Turning around and checking their necessary start is not unjust, and it is not a change of subject. It is the ticket check they already ran on us, but now pointed at their own.

If sensation is not the starting point, then knowledge never starts for the scientist. If knowledge never started, then there is no knowledge for any point for the scientist. The booth stays closed. Meanwhile, God’s revelation doesn’t need a chip; He stamps the ticket Himself and opens the door. Only the Bible ticket clears it, because the God who issues it causes the mind to know it. Everything else is a void, a missing license, a bankrupt chip.