Assumptions

“Karl Jaspers (psychiatrist/philosopher) . . . argued that the worst attitude toward philosophy is to pretend that we do not need it because then we simply use and enact our philosophical assumptions without realizing that we are doing so and without analyzing the limits and weaknesses of our assumptions.”  (JAACAP 46:6, June 2007, p. 786)

Once upon a time, it was assumed that illness was due to an imbalance of the four main bodily humors—black bile, yellow bile, phlegm, and blood.  That was the philosophic basis for medical practice 2,000 years ago, and the rationale for practitioners to bleed their sick patients, a practice that unfortunately persisted well into the 1800’s. To the modern mind, it sounds a bit . . . humorous.

For more than 2,000 years, Euclidian geometry was supposed to be the pinnacle of reasoned Truth, with a capital T.  Euclidian geometry was constructed upon five postulates that were assumed to be true.  That is, until Russian mathematician Nikolai Lobachevsky (1792--1856) determined that proof of Euclid’s fifth postulate is impossible.  Subsequently, by challenging one assumption and changing one postulate, Lobachevsky constructed an entirely sound, but very different, geometry. Today, Euclidian geometry is only one among several geometries.

When I trained to be a Child Psychiatrist it was assumed that autism was caused by cold, rejecting parents, especially cold and rejecting mothers.  The investigators who first described autism observed that there was often a distant relationship between the child and the parent.  In an era still dominated by Freudian theory, it was assumed that autism was a child’s response to parental rejection.  Decades of research, writing, and treatment were based upon this premise. The result was the cruel and needless recrimination of parents, for a condition we now assume is genetic.

The edifice of science is constructed upon a foundation of premises. Scientists assume that there is an objective reality that can be discovered by systematic observation and experimentation, and that reality is governed by laws that are orderly and comprehensible.  Scientists assume that every event has a preceding and determining cause.  All phenomena, even those which today are not fully understood, are consistent with the natural laws, principles, and formulas of Physics.  Scientists assume that our world, ourselves included, can be reduced to matter and energy only.  However, assumptions can be challenged and occasionally changed. Science, as we know it today, may or not resemble science as it will be known in a hundred or a thousand years.

Geometry has it postulates, science it’s premises, and each of us has our own internal set of assumptions, upon which we construct our personal truths and upon which we interpret the world around us. Our assumptions are not based in Truth, as much as they’re based in plausibility.  We live with incomplete and changing information, and so we must be prepared from time-to-time to examine our assumptions and occasionally alter and amend them.  That which we believe is true today, may or may not be true tomorrow. . . I assume.