Alternative Medicine: Does Belief Exonerate? Philosophy of Science for Beginners

Right from the start of this blog, purveyors and proponents of alternative medicine have posted comments or sent us emails explaining why we are wrong in thinking alternative medicine is dangerous and that we have no right to say it is deceptive.

These are their main arguments:

• Most alternative healers, if not all of them, genuinely believe in what they are saying. The sincerity of their belief deserves respect and it also means they cannot be called frauds, because fraud implies being deliberately disingenuous.
• When someone passionately believes something, there has to be some truth in it. Likewise, the fact that a belief is shared by many people, in itself also constitutes some kind of evidence and the challenge lies with the skeptics to prove the believers wrong.
• Who is to say what is true and what is not? After all, many theories were dismissed as untrue at first, only to be accepted later (see: Galileo!), so the fact that there is no evidence for a theory does not mean it cannot be true.
• True knowledge or “wisdom” exceeds the boundaries of science and is therefore superior to it. However, true knowlegde is attainable only for those who are capable of thinking “outside the box” – box being the “mainstream  paradigm of  science.” Faith is a prerequisite for being able to think outside the box, a thing scientists are not very good at, given their deplorable attachment to the rigorous boundaries of the scientific paradigm.

Believing something even when all evidence points against it is not considered a fault, and the more people believe something, the likelier it is considered to be true. It seems that as long as someone seems to act in good faith and has a compelling story to tell, they are not expected to provide any evidence underpinning their belief: the belief as such is accepted as evidence.

In the minds of many people, belief simply equals knowledge. Belief and knowledge are not seen as two separate concepts and belief, having the best cards in the minds of many people, is seen continuously transgressing the boundaries of knowledge.

I think this way of thinking presents a serious problem, which I will discuss in this post.

What is knowledge anyway?

According to the traditional definition, knowledge is: justified true belief.

Ah, our friends would say when reading this: We are right! Belief is knowledge! Well… not quite. Belief, justification and truth are considered necessary conditions for knowledge (1).

Belief

While it is true that knowledge entails belief, belief in itself is not enough or adequate for knowledge.

For example: If you don’t believe that your nanna has just moved into a care home, you don’t know that she has, and consequently you will not visit her. For why would anyone visit their nanna when they don’t believe she is there in the first place? Nobody would. Poor nanna!

In order for you to have genuine knowledge, your belief must be correct – it must be true - for you cannot know something which is false. You may believe that your nanna lives in a nursing home, but you can only know it when you have made sure that she actually is.

Truth

“What is truth?” is one of the favourite birthday party questions when everyone has had a few glasses of wine and really feel like saying intelligent things about deep philosophical conundrums, which you can ponder on for any length of time without ever finding an answer.

That’s not what I want, so we’ll make the matter a little bit more tangible by finding out what conditions a belief must satisfy to be true.

Does this mean then that when you have established a belief to be true, by definition you have knowledge? Alas, but no: true belief is in itself not sufficient for having knowledge.

Justification

For a true belief to be knowledge, it must also have justification. This means that a belief must not only be true, but it must also have good reasons – justification, or evidence – to be able to regard it as true.

An example: If you just spontaneously form the belief that your nanna, who is nowhere near you, is currently taking a stroll, and this belief just happens to be true, you cannot merely because of this say that you know that your nanna is taking a stroll; because your belief was formed purely by chance, it lacks supporting reasons and is therefore not knowledge.

However, justification in itself is also not enough, for even if knowledge requires justification, a justified belief can still be false.

A well-known justified false belief was the theory of geocentrism, in which it is claimed that the earth lies at the centre of the universe with the sun and the planets revolving around it. Although this belief was wrong, there seemed to be justifying supporting reasons for it, but because the evidence was misleading, it was not knowledge, but justified false belief.

Allowing for fallibility

“Allowing for fallibility” means that we must always seriously consider the possibility that we may be wrong.

As we have seen, justification can cease to be justifying when you acquire new facts that refine or undermine your current justification. This is called fallibilism. Stephen Jay Gould said: theories are “structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts” and only by accepting that our theories are not infallible certainties can we ensure our knowledge to be refined, developed and expanded.

Can we believe anything that science tells us?

One would think, reading all this, that we can never know anything at all. Popperians for example state that science is no more than hypotheses that have survived attempts to falsify them. This is an intellectual way of saying that genuine knowledge is “capable of being tested by experience”. It means that we must never stop asking difficult questions, especially those that have the power to undermine our theories, in order to test, double-test and re-test them.

We can design all kinds of things that work the way we want them to – planes, bridges, space telescopes, medical treatments and so forth – because the specific predictions deduced from the theory have withstood continuous testing. Thus, they have enabled us to make correct predictions over a long period of time and therfore we may expect them to continue to do so.

Science provides explanations that enable us to make correct predictions and it’s precisely these powers of explanation and prediction that make the ultimate litmus test of all knowledge.

The ethics of belief, or: what’s the harm?

Can a person’s sincere belief exonerate him when something goes wrong due to the consequences of his belief? Is it excusable to do harmful things as long as you believe you are doing the right thing?

In order to be able to answer this question, we should never forget that belief is a motivator for action: people do things because they believe they should.

Tullio Simoncini believes cancer is a fungus which can only be cured with baking soda; proponents of the German New Medicine believe cancer patients can only be cured by solving their psychological traumas; homeopaths believe their pills and waters will cure all manner of ailment, even when there often is not a single molecule of the active ingredient left in them – and they all act upon their belief.

But since they are so sincere in their belief, is there anything they can be held accountable for?

William K Clifford

No matter how sincere they are, they can be held accountable for not having investigated thoroughly enough whether the justifications that support their belief are true. We can hold them accountable for not having asked the relevant questions, the most important one being: what would happen if my belief were false?

Because belief drives people into action, it is never non-committal: belief always has consequences.

This is explained beautifully in an essay by William Clifford, entitled: The Ethics of Belief. In his essay, Clifford argues that we have a duty to believe carefully, in the light of reason alone. Clifford writes about the “harm which is done by credulity:”

The credulous man is father to the liar and the cheat; he lives in the bosom of this his family, and it is no marvel if he should become even as they are. So closely are our duties knit together, that whoso shall keep the whole law, and yet offend in one point, he is guilty of all.

To sum up: it is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.

If a man, holding a belief which he was taught in childhood or persuaded of afterwards, keeps down and pushes away any doubts which arise about it in his mind, purposely avoids the reading of books and the company of men that call into question or discuss it, and regards as impious those questions which cannot easily be asked without disturbing it – the life of that man is one long sin against mankind.

I think Clifford is right: there are standards, there are ethics of belief.

In regard, then, to the sacred tradition of humanity, we learn that it consists, not in propostions or statements which are to be accepted and believed on the authoritiy of the tradition, but in questions rightly asked, in conceptions which enable us to ask further questions, and in methods of answering questions. The value of all these things depends on their being tested day by day.

A few things in relation to knowledge should matter most to us: truth, reason, objectivity and confidence in the scientific method. I think these are virtues which are the mark of reason, and they should be held up if we want to understand anything about the world we live in.

_________
1) Edmund Gettier showed that although these three conditions are necessary, they are not in all cases sufficient for knowledge. This is called the Gettier problem. Interesting and important though it is, discussing the Gettier problem would take matters a bit too far in this context.

See also:

The Skeptic’s Dictionary on Science
Science denial is on the rise
Alternative Medicine and the Deadly Dangers of Magical Thinking
Stephen Law: The Will to Believe

REFERENCES
- The Ethics of Belief Debate, ed. Gerald D. McCarthy, Altlanta: Scholars Press, 1986
- Michael Williams, Problems of Knowledge, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001

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