Before Evidence: What Must a System Take for Granted?

COM 958 Revisited, Six Years Later

Six years ago, in Jeffrey Hall’s COM 958 seminar at KU, I spent a semester reading philosophy of social science. We read Popper, Kuhn, D. C. Phillips, James Anderson, and others; Descartes, Kant, and the Galileo–Bellarmine dispute sat somewhere in the background. Most of the details have faded, but one question did not: What has to be true before evidence can count as evidence?

I was not trying to solve epistemology. I was trying to understand why researchers working in different traditions could look at the same world and disagree not only about the answer, but about what would count as an answer in the first place. Somewhere along the way, I arrived at a simple thought: no system starts from zero.

A Game Needs Rules

A game makes the point easiest. Suppose I kick a ball between two posts and say, “I scored.” Why? Because the ball went between the posts. But why does that count as a score? Because we agreed, before the kick, to play a game in which it does. Without rules, there is no goal, foul, offside, winner, or loser. You cannot play the match first and then use the final score to prove the rules. The rules are what make the score possible.

Mathematics has the same problem in a less obvious form. Mathematics is built on proof, but proof does not descend forever. At some point we reach axioms and rules of inference, and from them we prove other things. If every premise required another proof, and every proof required another premise, nothing would ever begin. This does not make mathematics weak. It makes mathematics possible.

Religion makes the structure easy to see as well. If “God exists” is a basic commitment, then scripture, revelation, sin, salvation, and divine command can take on a particular meaning within that system. Reject the starting point and much of the structure changes with it. The interesting part is not that games, mathematics, and religion are the same. They obviously are not. The interesting part is that none can generate all of its own starting conditions from inside itself.

Before Evidence

Science is where the problem becomes more interesting. We often say that religion rests on faith while science rests on evidence. That sounds sensible until we ask a smaller question: Why does evidence count as evidence?

Suppose I run an experiment. My instrument gives me a result. I repeat it tomorrow. Another laboratory repeats it next month. The results agree. Fine. But I have already assumed quite a lot. I assume that something exists beyond my immediate wishes. I assume that the world is stable enough for repetition to mean something. I assume that my instrument bears some relation to what it measures. I assume that the other laboratory is not merely part of an elaborate hallucination. Those assumptions are not normally tested at the start of an experiment. They are what allow an experiment to become a test.

Consider a ridiculous possibility. Imagine that a four-dimensional being placed a device in your mind before you were born. Everything you experience is generated by it: your desk, your parents, Kansas, the laboratory, the thermometer, the article you are reading now. The being is very good at its job. It gives you a perfectly regular world. You heat water, and it gives you boiling water. You repeat the experiment, and it repeats the result. You ask another scientist to replicate it, and the being supplies another scientist who reports a successful replication. You predict an eclipse twenty years from now, and twenty years later it gives you the eclipse.

Now use science to prove that the being does not exist. You say, “I measured the world.” I say, “The measurement was generated.” You say, “Other people confirmed it.” I say, “They were generated too.” You say, “But the theory made a successful prediction.” I say, “So did the device.”

I do not believe that a four-dimensional creature is running the universe. The point is much smaller. Science cannot use an experiment conducted inside experience to prove, from absolute zero, that experience itself is not a perfectly coordinated deception. At some point science has to begin, and when it begins, some things are already standing.

This is why I have always liked the Christian phrase 因信称义—justification by faith. I am borrowing the phrase, not the theology. My use is simpler: justification begins after commitment. A game needs rules before there can be a legal move. Mathematics needs starting assumptions before there can be a proof. Science needs some confidence in reality, regularity, and inquiry before an observation can function as evidence. Religion begins from commitments that make its later claims intelligible. These are not the same kind of commitment, but they share one feature: none begins from nowhere.

What a Paradigm Does

This was what bothered me about paradigms when I first encountered Kuhn. A paradigm does more than supply answers. It helps decide which questions are worth asking, which methods make sense, what counts as evidence, and what a successful explanation should look like. If two researchers disagree only about an answer, more evidence may settle the dispute. If they disagree about what counts as evidence, the disagreement has moved one level down. If they disagree about what sort of thing exists to be studied at all, it has moved down again. At that point, demanding “more data” may miss the problem. The argument is partly about why those data should have authority in the first place.

The readings in COM 958 gave me different ways into the same problem. Popper gave me a language for empirical risk. Kuhn made me think about the rules under which inquiry proceeds. Phillips forced social scientists to take objectivity, relativism, and naturalism seriously rather than use them as slogans. Anderson brought ontology and epistemology directly into communication theory. Descartes supplied the nightmare: what if the whole thing is a deception? Kant asked what must already be in place for experience and knowledge to be possible. The Galileo–Bellarmine dispute offered a concrete reminder that seeing something and deciding what that observation proves about reality are not the same act.

I did not put these pieces together because I had a grand philosophical theory. I simply found it hard to believe that evidence could arrive without assumptions.

The Hinge I Found Later

Years later, I discovered that I had wandered into a neighborhood with much more famous residents. Near the end of his life, Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote the notes later published as On Certainty. One of the images associated with that work is the hinge. Doubt, inquiry, and justification can move because some things remain fixed in the background. A door turns because its hinges do not turn with the door. That line of thought later developed into what is now called hinge epistemology.

Finding this was reassuring. I had not invented a new branch of philosophy. I had, however, independently worried my way toward a problem that philosophers had already spent decades making precise. Apparently I was not completely making things up on the internet.

The point still seems simple to me. We often tell people not to take things for granted: question your assumptions, demand evidence, challenge received wisdom. Good advice, up to a point. But we cannot question everything at once. Inquiry requires some things to remain in place while others are examined. We cannot validate every standard by appealing to another standard forever.

So the interesting question is not whether we can eliminate all assumptions. We cannot. The better question is the one that stayed with me after COM 958:

What must we take for granted before anything else can be justified?

For years I have summarized my answer to myself in four Chinese characters: 因信称义.

Justification by faith—not as theology, but as a reminder. Before proof, there is a starting point. Before evidence can speak, something has already made evidence possible.

Nothing reasons from nowhere.