Retroduction – Why Ken’s Wrong – Ken Wheeler is Wrong

Retroduction is one of Ken Wheeler’s buzzwords. Find out how he uses this term constantly but incorrectly and also why his underlying argument is fundamentally flawed.

Retroduction is an unfamiliar word to most of us, so let’s start by defining it. It literally means “leading back or bringing back.”

In logic, philosopher C.S. Peirce defined retroduction as, “The passage of the mind from something observed or attentively considered to the representation of a state of things that may explain it.”

In other words, we start from what we know now and work backwards to find the cause. Doctors do this all the time when they start from our symptoms and work back to which diseases may be causing them.

Start From What We Know Know and Work Backwards

Detectives do the same thing. They arrive at the crime scene, gather all the information they can and then work backwards to try to explain what happened and how.

The important thing to understand about retroduction is that it doesn’t usually lead to a definitive conclusion. As Peirce explains, “Its conclusion is usually regarded as a more or less likely conjecture.”

Our doctors usually ask us to have some tests done to narrow down the correct diagnosis. Our detective will probably think of more than one explanation for the crime scene and start investigating each of them.

Less Reliable and Less Useful than Deduction or Induction

So retroduction can give us one or more hypotheses or working theories to investigate further. However, unlike deduction and induction, it can’t provide a definitive solution to a problem.

That makes it less reliable and therefore less useful. That’s why most of us haven’t heard of it, although Ken Wheeler attributes this to a conspiracy among academics and teachers.

Contradicting conventional logic, the Angry Photographer insists that retroduction is superior to induction or deduction. For example, he occasionally turns up his nose at Sherlock Holmes, cherry-picking Dr. Watson’s catch phrase, “Brilliant deduction, Holmes!”

Dismisses Sherlock Holmes for Relying on Deduction

First of all, if Kentucky Ken was the logician he claims to be, he’d know Watson’s signature line is usually a misnomer. Strictly speaking, Watson should use the word “induction” for most of Holmes’s reasoning, although only philosophers notice these distinctions.

More to the point, if Ken Wheeler had ever read the works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, he’d have come across this more famous passage. “Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.”

This is probably the best known quotation from Sherlock Holmes. Conan Doyle’s archetypal detective skillfully applied the process of elimination, along with deduction, induction and retroduction, in every story.

Opportunity to Sound Profound and Stretch the Truth

The Angry Photographer is very fond of the word retroduction, apparently because so few people have heard the term before. That gives him the opportunity to sound profound and stretch the truth at the same time.

As with most of his jargon, the Theoria Apophasis creator has made up his own pet meaning for the word “retroduction.” He says that retroduction is a “methodology for transcendence,” so we can assume it’s a vital concept, at least to him.

Even so, it’s hard to find anything in the Angry Photographer’s work that clearly defines retroduction. This passage is about as close as it gets.

Ken Confuses Retroduction with Negation

“All retroduction of course is actualization. Objective negation leads to subjective synthesis.” Once again, the choice of words makes the definition less clear rather than, well, definitive, but the key word here is “negation.”

Ken Wheeler gets mixed up about Sherlock Holmes and several far more important things because he confuses retroduction with the process of elimination. All he’s really saying is that the way to define God, or the soul, or the universe, is by ruling out what these things aren’t (objective negation).

One of his analogies involves the proverbial “needle in a haystack.” As the Angry Photographer puts it, “Just as a fool might, for hundreds of hours, pick thru a pile of straw (phenomena) in search of a needle (atman), the wisest of men, in mere seconds, lights a match to the phenomena (straw) which quickly burns and blows away, leaving before his feet the needle sought; and this is of course part of the expediency as core to the via negativa methodology.”

Burning $100 Worth of Hay to Find a Ten Cent Needle

Kentucky Ken doesn’t seem to know the difference between hay and straw. We also have to wonder why any sane person would destroy a hundred dollars worth of hay to find a ten cent needle.

That’s the trouble with reasoning by analogy, the logical fallacy known as exemplum sunt odiosa (examples are odious). As Ken Wheeler’s hero Plato put it, “Arguments that make their point by means of similarities are impostors, and, unless you are on your guard against them, will quite readily deceive you.”

Retroduction, as philosophers define it, would be useless for finding a lost object. Someone would use retroduction, for example, if they found an object and asked themselves, “How did this get here?”

Negation is Like Sculpture, Not Finding Lost Objects

As for negation, a better analogy would be the work of a sculptor. These artists remove everything from the block that detracts from the intended result.

So, while demanding impossible standards of proof from Sherlock Holmes, Ken Wheeler doesn’t even know what the word retroduction means. He should know better, but that’s a purely semantic argument. There’s a much bigger concern with his arguments around the process of elimination.

The Angry Photographer uses numerous unrelated words as if they were interchangeable. That’s one ingredient in the word salad that makes his videos and writings incoherent and unintelligible.

Ken Wrongly Thinks Retroduction Means Negation

In the case of retroduction, the Theoria Apophasis host incorrectly assumes it’s synonymous with via negativa, a term he lifts without attribution from the fifth century thinker Proclus. Related terms Kentucky Ken spouts include objective negation, theurgy, disobjectivication, neti-neti, negative theology, and apophasis.

Yes, that’s where the title Theoria Apophasis comes from. The Greek word “apophatikon” means negation, which seems strangely apt, given the YouTuber’s negative attitude and contrarian persona.

Speaking of negation, it’s beyond ironic that Kentucky Ken constantly dismisses Albert Einstein as “a wooly-haired crackpot.” Einstein arrived at the basis of his two most successful theories through the process of elimination.

Einstein, Who Ken Rejects, Made Discoveries by Negation

While working on Special Relativity, Einstein reflected on the relationship between the speed of light, distance and time. He came to realize that since the speed of light and distance were constant, the only remaining explanation was that “time is suspect.”

Similarly, focusing on mass, space and gravity, he realized that since neither gravity nor mass can change, the only explanation was that space changes shape. So, Ken Wheeler’s exalted technique of negation led Einstein to the groundbreaking discoveries the Angry Photographer despises.

The Theoria Apophasis creator also cherry-picks the word “theurgy” from a group of ancient philosophers called the neoplatonists. This practice evolved out of folk mysticism in the Ancient World.

Theurgy Involves Magic Spells and Incantations

Theurgy comes from the Greek words theos (god) and ergon (work). Along with typical prayer and theology, theurgy was a third practice involving magic spells and incantations that supposedly invoked gods and spirits.

Ken Wheeler’s hero, Plotinus founded neoplatonism. Although he saw some merit in including a few forms of theurgy, he objected to its magical thinking, instead emphasizing theology, philosophy and meditation as higher paths to wisdom.

Plotinus’s pupil and successor Porphyry further outlined theurgy’s logical fallacies in a letter we still have. One of his numerous objections was the notion that humans can tell gods what to do.

‘Superior Beings are Likewise Commanded Like Inferiors’

As he put it, “It perplexes me greatly to form a conception how they who are invoked as superior beings are likewise commanded like inferiors.” He’s far from the only one who’s felt perplexed by this nonsense over the centuries.

The main source of the Angry Photographer’s attachment to theurgy’s superstitions seems to be an obscure book by a later thinker named Iamblichus, called De Mysteriis. Iamblichus broke with Plotinus and Porphyry, drawing on magic charms and spells from theurgy’s cruder ceremonies.

As classical scholar E.R. Dodds wrote, “De Mysteriis is a manifesto of irrationalism, an assertion that salvation is found not in reason but in ritual.” He goes on to say, “So far as we can judge, the procedures of theurgy were broadly similar to vulgar magic.”

Theurgy Was ‘Broadly Similar to Vulgar Magic’

Typically, Kentucky Ken makes a distinction without a difference between his pet phrase “theurgic rites” and what he calls “objective rites, rituals and practices.” He claims that his theurgic rites differ from vulgar magical practices because they liberate the subjective self from the objective mind, body and material world around us.

Taken in by Iamblichus, the Theoria Apophasis host has naively embraced yet another fake expert. Sheltering his cherished preconceptions, he abandons reason for the comfort of magical thinking, declaring, “You can’t think your way out of a thinking box.”

Not surprisingly, the Theoria Apophasis creator claims to practice the highest level of Iamblichus’s theurgy. The spells and charms at this top tier move beyond changing the weather or summoning the gods and strive to achieve unity directly with the One.

Naive Embrace of Theurgy’s Superstitions

This naive embrace of theurgy’s superstitions is another of Ken Wheeler’s grandiose delusions. He supposedly receives wisdom from the One, deriving most of his odd and demonstrably false notions from this arcane process, while dismissing similar magical thinking as “occult nonsense”.

According to the Angry Photographer, the key to proximity to the One is proximity to our own soul or higher Self. In his mind, our soul gets diluted within our psycho-physical mind, brain and body.

Supposedly, we can reverse this dilution and pull ourselves together by applying the opposite process, which is concentration (subjective synthesis). Kentucky Ken claims this is what ancient mystics meant by concentration rather than our conventional idea of meditation.

Logical Contradiction: Soul Outside Body, Yet Diluted in Body

Unfortunately, the Theoria Apophasis host also insists that the soul is like a radio signal that never descends into the receiver of our physical body. Assuming that’s true, it couldn’t become diluted within our psycho-physical existence, any more than a radio receiver could dilute a broadcast signal.

It follows that we couldn’t concentrate or synthesize our true selves from there. These mutual contradictions make his arguments about theurgic concentration and the diluted soul invalid.

We can also summarily dismiss Ken Wheeler’s claim to be applying theurgy because platonists reject enlightenment through independent study. Plato himself taught that when students rely on random books instead of skilled teachers, “They will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.” He couldn’t have described Ken Wheeler more accurately.

Mashes Up Theurgy with Negative Theology

Ken Wheeler then mashes up theurgy with what some Christian mystics call negative theology. That’s the belief that we can gain some grasp of the nature of God by dismissing all the things that aren’t God.

A somewhat similar idea is neti-neti in Hindu philosophy. Neti-neti means “not this, not that.” It’s a method of finding ourselves by recognizing things that are “not self,” such as our thoughts or our feelings.

Of course, there’s another logical fallacy with negation when we misapply it to reasoning or rhetoric like Ken Wheeler. Saying I’m not a tree and also not a car doesn’t say anything about me, and it certainly doesn’t prove I exist.

Uses Negative Theology as a Cheap Debating Trick

To be fair, mystics don’t use negative theology in Ken Wheeler’s bizarre and misguided way. They view it as one small step on a path toward deeper understanding, not a cheap debating trick to impress the naive.

For example, back around 600 CE, the neoplatonist philosopher Dionysius the Areopagite explained why negation can’t reveal the Absolute. He writes that the First Cause “transcends all negation by the pre-eminence of Its simple and absolute nature – free from every limitation and beyond them all.”

Listing off a bunch of attributes that something lacks doesn’t somehow bring it into existence. The one-eyed, one-horned, flying, purple people-eater isn’t two-eyed, or hornless, or burrowing, or green, or vegan but that doesn’t make him real.

Negatio Probat Nihil – Negation Proves Nothing

The Theoria Apophasis creator is very fond of ancient languages and mottos. Yet, he seems unfamiliar with the Latin phrase “negatio probat nihil” – “negation proves nothing.”

So, on retroduction, Ken Wheeler is wrong in six different ways.

He doesn’t know what the word means.
He doesn’t grasp that proof by negation is a logical fallacy.
He reasons by analogy.
He’s unwittingly embraced discredited sources.
He relies on magical thinking.
He thinks he’s mastered metaphysics by loitering in the library.

However there’s something we can conclude through negation. Ken Wheeler is not educated, not astute, not credible, not honest, not rational and not objective. So it’s safe to conclude he’s not worth watching or reading.