Yesterday I highlighted—and criticized—New Republic editor Leon Wieseltier’s attack on Steve Pinker’s recently-published defense of scientism. Pinker’s piece, which I thought was mild and reasonable, has apparently deeply upset many in the humanities.
Now, over on Edge, Dan Dennett has also published a short but spirited defense of Pinker, along with an introduction by John Brockman.
I’ll let you savor Dan’s invective yourself, but here’s a taste (my highlight):
Pomposity can be amusing, but pomposity sitting like an oversized hat on top of fear is hilarious. Wieseltier is afraid that the humanities are being overrun by thinkers from outside, who dare to tackle their precious problems—or “problematics” to use the, um, technical term favored by many in the humanities. He is right to be afraid. It is true that there is a crowd of often overconfident scientists impatiently addressing the big questions with scant appreciation of the subtleties unearthed by philosophers and others in the humanities, but the way to deal constructively with this awkward influx is to join forces and educate them, not declare them out of bounds. The best of the “scientizers” (and Pinker is one of them) know more philosophy, and argue more cogently and carefully, than many of the humanities professors who dismiss them and their methods on territorial grounds. You can’t defend the humanities by declaring it off limits to amateurs. The best way for the humanities to get back their mojo is to learn from the invaders and re-acquire the respect for truth that they used to share with the sciences.
I love the top hat image. And the statement about not defending the humanities by declaring it off limits to amateurs goes for every discipline, including philosophy.
There is no room for sectarianism within science. Regardless whoever proposes a hypothesis, its truthvalue solely depends on its merits and not on those of whom it happens to propose the hypothesis.
“It doesn’t make a difference how beautiful your guess is. It doesn’t make a difference how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is. If it disagrees with experiment, it’s wrong.”
― Richard P. Feynman, The Feynman Lectures on Physics: The New Millennium Edition
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This, of course, is not really true. Sometimes the experiment is wrong.
But Feynman didn’t say “an experiment”.
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Right. I think it’s pretty clear that in this context, “experiment” means “the accumulation of experimental evidence”.
And don’t forget theology, this is one of the theologians favourite tactics.
It’s the same tired old drum that “Tim” has been beating on in that other thread. “Some random bullet point for elementary teachers says that science is scared of the supernatural, so you should be, too!”
Yawn.
b&
Not bad, coming as it does from a philosopher!
D D has a foot in both camps and knows of what he speaks.
Perhaps the problem is thinking in terms of “camps” in the first place. The archaic meaning of science is “knowledge of any kind” [NOAD]: It should be all encompassing! 😉
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Yes!
Demanding that territories of permissible inquiry be based on traditional demarcations is ridiculous.
What works to advance understanding should be the primary metric.
I didn’t read all of Dennett’s piece, but I got a lot out of Brockman. He linked back to a short article of his from 1990, where he describes “the third culture” of scientists [and media, I think] as they now inform on science directly for the web.*
No longer any stratified “intellectuals” managing the flow of information and ideas, and no longer “two cultures”. I think it is the demise of “cultures” that makes Wieseltier butt hurt.
Oh, and perhaps that the average scientist have an all around literacy including humanities, while the average humanities student and intellectual is illiterate in science. Wieseltier certainly has shown himself to be. [As shown by Coel’s post linked to back in the old thread.]
*An important update would be that the source science from raw data to peer review has started to be put thusly as well.
Oh, and to be clear, the only reason I didn’t read Dennett through was because Jerry’s piece had covered the ground so well.
The issue is not whether Steven Pinker had a “right” to philosophize. No one is suggesting he trespassed on the humanities. People are objecting to his attempt to corral enlightenment philosophers into the fold of evolutionary psychology; rightly so.
Dennett can bluster all he likes. He ignores the more serious issue in defending his friend. It is the embrace of science as the engine of progress that is of greater concern.
In Pinker’s essay he would have you believe that science is the reason why we have democracy and freedom. Why we have our current level of economic complexity and wealth.
Our present civilization was built on something far more basic than the discoveries of scientists – or enlightenment philosophers. It was not intellectual activity that moved Europeans to conquer and colonize the New World. It was not scientists (or philosophers) who developed textile, lumbering, mining, or fossil fuel industries.
These were the activities of aggressive eco-busting cultures. The global “civilization” we have today, for all the wonderful helpful discoveries that are being made in medicine, astronomy, evolutionary biology, and so on, is still a huge, aggressive, eco-busting culture.
Ideologies like religions, including scientism, are rationalization of the activities that people engage in within a culture. The mythology of progress falls into this category.
We do not know anything with absolute certainty, but as the activities of many of the world’s scientists are showing, our current civilization, far from taking us to the moon and beyond, is still eco-busting. And it is doing so on a planetary scale.
Scientism is not going to help us avoid the consequences of that.
I think you are simply wrong. Science is the only hope we have for finding a ways out of eco-busting situations we find ourselves in.
I’m more worried with the myth of the non-existence of progress. It leaves one incapable of making positive change. What is the alternative strategy you recommend? We should all pray harder?
I don’t think appeals to imaginary supernatural entities – or aliens – are going to help. No.
I agree, we all need to be more scientifically literate; certainly it would be a useful thing to have more elected leaders who understood the the scientific method and the exponential function.
I don’t think there IS a myth that there is no “progress”. Where is such a myth to be found? I do think the idea of progress is firmly entrenched however.
One of the ways you can tell it is firmly entrenched is to look at current economic theory, where economic growth indexes are the main measure of the “health” of an economy.
Another way you can tell is to look at how people in subsistence economies are characterized. They used to be “Third World” economies. Now they are variously “under-developed”, “developing” or “emerging”… which give the impression that they are still in the process of hatching out of an egg or something. Not fully functional adult chickens like us in the industrial world, huh?
This reminds me of the very earliest models about the history of humans. These go back to the earliest philosophers, but they were adopted by anthropologists in late Victorian times. Even up to the middle of the last century there were people talking about a progression – the upscaled harnessing of energy, leading to and more complex social organization.
The societies with the simplest way of life did not even produce food from domestic plants and animals, and lived in a kind of small communal “band”. Then, the next “stage” was assorted forms of farming and pastoralism, which “passed through” a stage of “primitive” slash and burn before “advanced” techniques of intensive cultivation were developed, using animal traction and/or irrigation. These led to the first “civilizations”, in places like Mesopotamia, Egypt, and in the Indus valley.
All of these were seen as the outcome of inventions and human ingenuity… like a series of bright bulbs lighting up throughout history to help humans live better lives.
There are serious flows in this model. And it is scientific research that highlights these flaws. To be continued…
I don’t know if it is comforting or sad to hear that Anthropologist still organize the discipline using Elman Service’s typology. It was one of the things we were drilled on when I was in graduate school in Anthro all those many decades ago in the ’70’s.
Nor is the idea that “progress is a myth” particularly new. My dad, an anthropologist from an earlier generation, wrote a book in 1973 on the subject, titled The Death of Progress. He had a colleague at the time who pointed out that the real issue was the dearth of progress. I think his colleague had it right.
There is an old romantic tradition among anthropologists. It traces back to the fantasies of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. I guess it still holds among some in the discipline. If only we could live the happy life of the simple egalitarian band-dwellers. Life was simple. All that leisure time. Nobody gets fat eating too much sugar. No pesticides!
But we know this to be myth. Life in band society is not a life of bliss. And pretending that the woes of the world are going to be solved by the having 7 billion people living as hunters and gatherers with tool kits designed 70,000 years ago.
Are we doomed by our success? Perhaps. And perhaps not. We do know that becoming a species that relies on hunting and gathering economies is not in the cards. If we find a way out of the problems we currently confront, the solutions will be based on understanding how the world works as best we can. And that means having the best possible scientific understanding of our world as we can get. What progresses is our understanding of how the universe works.
I applaud learning about the variety of ways humans have lived their lives. Knowledge can only be a benefit. But wishful thinking and nostalgia for lives in band societies ain’t gonna help a whole lot.
Anthropologists do NOT use that old Service system of Elman Service’s typology. that went out in the 1960s.
Nor do they follow the romances of Rousseux. I doubt they ever did..
NOR was I suggestion that we go “back” to hunting and gathering!
However, if life in a band society was not bliss, it was certainly not a life of suffering either. There is a lot of leisure time, since the work of food getting by both sexes rarely exceeds 28 hours a week in many groups. People had more than enough to eat – all the weighing and measuring and sending stuff off for nutritional analysis confirmed this.
I am not nostalgic about the forager way of life. I salute it and found it remarkable in it’s security and fullness of family life. But there were deaths that need not have happened, and the normal turmoil of intense social life, involving people falling love, getting betrayed, having arguments and reunions, visiting friends and relatives seen only once of twice a year, and a lot of walking all over the place.
There were the constant attempts to keep balance between keeping their ethnic boundary while, in the summer, they were clipping close to the neighbouring Bantu tribes and doing piece work on skins and baskets, and occasional season work during the sorghum harvest, which permitted the people to camp near their traditional water points despite presence of farmers in the area since the boreholes had been drilled a few years before.
Only, it was not a nasty life, or a brutish one, nor was it nasty.
I meant to say,at the end, “NOR WAS IT SHORT”. OOPS.
Blanket statements like “Only, it was not a nasty life, or a brutish one, nor was it nasty.” to describe hundreds of thousands of years of human hunting and gathering life is, frankly, a bit absurd. That’s a lot of time, a lot of people, and a lot of circumstances. No doubt for some of our ancestors it wasn’t. For others it most certainly was. Common sense and the archaeological record attests to it.
In any case, perhaps I was mistaken. I thought you had offered us a rather traditional old-fashioned Service-style mini-lecture on the evolution of human society and it read a tad condescending. Your point seemed to be that life was oh fine until we sad Westerners fell for the mistaken notion that it is possible to make progress in our lives. That view is romantic nonsense as far as I’m concerned.
You can define-away progress if you like but I don’t see how it makes a squirrel’s-rump bit of difference in how we confront real problems on our little rock in space. If your objection is to some sort of deified concept of “Progress” with a capital “P”, then I think you’re attacking a straw guy. If you are suggesting, as I think you are, that the eco-mess we’re in is going to be fixed by emulating hunters and gathers then I think you are not serious.
What the archaeological record shows, consistently, is that there was a decline in the health, more malnutrition, and more violence, once a population transitioned from hunting and gathering to farming. The average adult height declined, brain size decreased, tooth decay and loss became common, and bones show evidence of periods of acute starvation.
This situation was not generalized, since the record also indicates that social stratification seems to have appeared at some point in most post-Neolithic populations, which was associated with differential access to food and the risks of famine. Evidence of warfare became generalized after the first few thousand years of sedentary villages appearing.
It appears that a number of infectious diseases transferred from newly domesticated animals to humans during this time, giving rise to periodic epidemics. Swine and chicken flu are just the latest manifestation of this.
Anyway all of this was already known 25 years ago.
Yes, nothing I’ve seen in this discussion is novel, which is why this conversation produces such déjà vu.
The obvious un-addressed question is why people would give up the life of ease and bliss of hunting and gathering for the woes of settled life and eco-mess. After all, there were no invaders from Mars to force the transition. It can only have happened, because the day-to-day choices made by self-interested people led inexorably toward settlements, larger populations, and relatively more stable lives. The old ways were less appealing than the newer ones, despite the fact that down the road the population would be carrying an increased load of dental caries.
We’re confronted with choices now that nobody could have anticipated two hundred years ago, much less ten thousand. But we, unlike our ancestors, have a better tool kit than they did. And I see little value in pretending that what we need to do now is turn to stone tools and living in temporary bark covered shelters.
Yeah, we’ve got big problems. But our intellectual and technological tool kits have progressed quite a bit over the last 20,000 years. What is the value of denying that?
Well, yes, we have plenty of evidence that “our present civilization”, the de facto applications of democracy and human rights and freedoms, has had essential contributions from science.
Without medicine the human population would be vastly different than today, and the “2.1 child” goal unreachable.
Conversely, it is all right to say that medicine is just among “wonderful helpful discoveries”, but no one who does so refuse it when the sickness and discomfort meets the body. It isn’t a discovery, it is an essential part of our society, its culture and health (and so as mentioned its population structure).
That is why all non-scientism-ists in actuality are closet scientism-ists.
And “eco-busting”? Claim in need of evidence. (If you try, please start with a recognizable definition.)
Starting with my use of “eco-busting” – indicating that all previous civilizations have degraded soils, cut down forests, devastated local wildlife and fisheries, and dammed rivers. The human population rose, began to recruit more and distant lands into their quest for food and raw materials, and then often fell again to levels that could be sustain under the new conditions. The valley of the Jordan river, for example, has been irrigated and cultivate at various times over the past 13,000 years. It began, according to the pollen evidence, as a heavily forested region swept by seasonal fires that kept open meadows teeming with Fallow deer, wild cattle and sheep. There were wolves, leopards, cheetahs, lions, and bears. Have you seen it lately?
This is not in dispute, surely? If so, I urge interested individuals to take a look at Joseph Tainter’s book (1988. The Collapse of Complex Societies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)or William Catton’s 1980 book: Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980.
Catton points out that our global industrial civilization has grown enormously over the past three hundred “exuberant” years. Today we are in ecological overshoot, sustained by a food production and distribution system based on fossil fuels. And those fuels are finite.
M.King Hubbert plotted oil field production in the 1950s and found a pattern. The peak of discoveries was followed, in any given state of the USA, forty years later, by a peak of production, after which irreversible decline set in. He predicted that the USA production of petroleum would peak in the early 1970s. It happened in 1971, and even with today’s tremendous effort to “frack”, it will still never be independent of exports again.
Hubbert worked in the petroleum industry. So did Colin Campbell, who, in 1995, co-authored a controversial piece in the Scientific American on the possibility that oil field production would go into decline, worldwide, when Hubbert said it would, in the early decades of this century. Mathematicians and petroleum engineers generally have been aware of this and worried about it for a very long time.
Meanwhile, climate scientists were starting to worry about anthropomorphic climate change, as you know, and biologists began to worry about an increasing rate of faunal extinction. Both these phenomena have now been extremely well documented.
Oh, I missed that. “The mythology of progress”.
That is simply totally wrong, and we have known that for decades. Go to Rosling’s TED talks or his Gapminder statistics source and play around.
As Pinker has noted in other circumstances, the statistics tells us of progress across the board. To claim else is absurd. And frankly, totally fact illiterate.
In retrospect I think I broke Jerry’s policy of no personal characterization (“illiterate”), because I wasn’t thinking of it as a classification when I wrote that.
I’m sorry and withdraw that.
Of course.
[What I getting at was pointing out an illustration to my earlier comment on “cultures”.]
I am quite familiar with Hans Rosling’s work. He is accurate, and it is at once exciting to see the way statistics come alive in his presentations and very sad to realize that it is doubtful these trends can continue much longer in the face of the damage being done to the planetary ecosystem.
I never said SCIENCE is useless, only that scientism – “faith” in technological solutions- is not justified. We humans are going to need more than science – we are going to need political and economic change to adjust to the issues that confront us. And this is an especially dangerous time, for all messages from scientists that encourage the continuation of business as usual are readily, even joyously, seized upon, promoted, and funded, whereas the scientists who tell us we have some serious problems looming are generally dismissed or even attacked.
You need only look at the case of James Hanson, and Charles Mann on climate change: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/05/the-hockey-stick-the-most-controversial-chart-in-science-explained/275753/
I am out of time tonight to deal with the life expectancy issue, but I will try to do so soon.
I’m not aware of anybody arguing that science is the alpha and omega of what humanity needs, aside from those putting forward strawman caricatures.
The actual position of Jerry, me, and other like-minded people is that the scientific method is the only reliable method of understanding the world.
So, yes. Of course. If we manage to get out of the mess we’re in, it won’t be solely through technological means. Duh! There’s no question but that we’ll have to restructure our socioeconomic systems. And the American political system is showing unprecedented levels of instability, what with the NSA running far more rampant than Tricky Dick’s goons ever did in the Watergate hotel.
But how else would you propose that we determine our optimal course of action other than by a rational analysis of objective empirical observation?
If you have no alternative, then you are in agreement with me and Jerry and most of the rest of the regulars here.
Cheers,
b&
And of course it matters how one approaches restructuring systems. One might want to check one’s progress in the effort by validating expectations against results. Very scientistic, I suppose. But the alternate approach would be a random walk at best.
…and the random walk is largely how we’ve gotten ourselves into this mess….
b&
I don’t think anyone here has argued that only technology will save us but you do see that attitude in the general public. It’s good to include technological solutions, but I suspect that it’s just a way to make people avoid the issue (someone else with take care of it. Who? I dunno they? They who? Scientists) and absolve themselves of personal responsibility and activity in the changes that are going to save our asses.
My though is that it behooves policy-makers to think in scientifically (broadly-construed) about how to motivate the kind of economic/social change that we need. All else is wishful thinking and magic.
I could not agree more with Diana’s point here if I tried with both hands for a month. I must say, though, that her point here is exactly what I am so worried about.
This “faith” that someone ELSE is going to find something to keep all the plates in the air, so to speak, is going to mean that those with financial “skin in the game” of our present kind of economy, are going to keep on soothing the general public.
We have heard it all before: tobacco is good for you; anthropomorphic global warming is a hoax; the “green revolution” proved the Ehrlichs wrong; there are plenty of fish in the sea; lead is harmless; asbestos is perfect insulation for schools; evolution is just a theory; some banks are too big to fail; Peak Oil is just a conspiracy of dormers…
People who do the research, collect the data, invest themselves in empirical measures of reality, who do the science, who work for years to discover the truth, are run over like so much roadkill by the juggernaut of corporate interests and disinformation.
And there IS some kind of myth of progress. when I talked about it before, I tried to trace it to the early days when models of stages of human social and economic systems were arranged in an order that suggested some kind of evolutionary forces at work. these models are still with us in some sense, otherwise why would some people in this discussion have said we could not “go back” to being hunter-gatherers?
Leaving aside the question of whether I was even advocating such a thing (I do not), has it not occurred to you that there are people on the planet who are hunter-gatherers right now? They are our contemporaries, not our ancestors. They are living in a different kind of economic system. Like substance pastoralists all over the world, and like the horticultural tribal peoples who still inhabit much of Africa, South America and parts of southeast Asia, these are all people in economic systems very different from that of industrialism and intensive commercialized farming.
These other kinds of economic systems are not dominated by market economics.
Are you saying that the life style of a few remnant hunter-gatherer societies surviving in marginal environments is an option for the billions of the rest of us on Planet Earth?
Really?
We will not solve our problems by encouraging faith in the KINDS of science that our governments and corporations approve of and encourage and fund. In the area of climate science there has been an absolutely enormous resistance, as I’m sure all of you know. Can you imagine what the pressures are like, right now, on the people who are still sceptical and resisting the widespread adoption of genetically modified organisms?
How many of you see yourselves on one side on the first issue and on the other side in the second? Yet the cultivation regime of most GMOs is utterly dependent upon the same system of mechanization, monoculture, and use of petroleum based chemicals that creates demand for continued extraction and burning of fossil fuels… which is what is leading to climate change.
The scientists have shown that 90% of the big fish in the sea are gone, but how many nations have outlawed fishing or banned the sale of marine animals for food?
Why?
This has manifested in the way governments control funding to science in Canada and why there have been protests about and will be further protests Sept 16: Researchers stand up for science, plan rallies coast to coast
“To claim else is absurd. And frankly, totally fact illiterate.”
Hmmm, so counter-evidence is not even worth considering?
The issue isn’t so much whether science is the sole origin of “progress” (as you say, lots of other attributes of humans are important to that, along with science), it’s whether science (broadly conceived) is the only route to reliable knowledge, or whether there are “other ways of knowing”.
I did my dissertation after three years in the Kalahari with a group of foragers called the Kua. They also used the scientific method for all questions that could be verified with real observational data. Animal behaviour, plant ecology, the depth of underground water lenses, the ways to predict changes in weather, the ways to use fire to transform material such as wood and stone, were all subject to continuous experiment and discussion.
I once sat through hours of debate on the timing of oestrus in the Kudu that would have done credit to a conference on wildlife biology.
And yet, this was not a “literate” people. They were egalitarian and highly mobile, with few material possessions. I went there to try to understand more about the kind of economy humans originally evolved within. This was the closest thing.
I have subsequently learned that there were human beings living in this same area, using almost the same toolkit, over 70,000 years ago. They even used the same grub for their arrow poisons and had the same kind of bone flutes! And just in case anyone has any doubts, I spoke to them about why they did not just settle – it was too much work! And, besides, they said, someone might get bossy if they knew you could not just walk away.
This is factually incorrect. Trespassing by “scientismists” (or something like that) is precisely what Wieseltier vociferously expounded on in his reply to Pinker’s article.
Evolutionary psychology was barely mentioned in passing by Pinker in his article, or Wieseltier in his response, and not at all by Dennett in his counter response. Also, what do you mean by “corral enlightenment philosophers into the fold?”
In comparison to Wieseltier’s piece it is pretty funny characterizing Dennett’s response as “bluster.” But more to the point, you have done the easy part of making a claim but all of your work is now before you. You seem to be claiming that Dennett and or Pinker claim that science is the only engine of progress, but I have never heard or read that from either of them, and I am quite sure neither of them would agree with it. Please explain how science has not / can not be, or why it should not be, an engine of progress. Also please explain how we could possibly make the changes necessary to prevent “eco-busting” without utilizing science. Probably most importantly, please define what you mean by progress and why you think your concept of progress should be deemed relevant.
I don’t think so. That is not what I read. I think it more likely that your preconceptions and predispositions are affecting your reading comprehension. Would you claim that enlightenment thinking was not a significant contributor to pre and early US history, or the history of other western nations in that same period?
This is precisely the kind of pablum that has helped marginalize the humanities. Again, what do you mean by “progress” and why should your conception of it matter.
You seem to say that asserting that science can be utilized to help solve our eco-busting problems amounts to scientism, a bad thing that is like religion. Please explain how you think it would be possible to solve these problems without utilizing science.
Or even to know that these problems exist without utilizing science.
You seem to have misunderstood me. I did not say we should not use science. I suggested that faith in science, or SCIENTISM, to solve our problems is not a good idea, since sit so heavily invested in the idea of progress and economic growth.
For one thing, it seems to lead to the rejection of the work of those scientists whose work appears to contradict the whole assembled model of scientism+growth=progress.
And so, you see, I fully agree with you that science is our most powerful tool for identifying problems.
Not scientism, SCIENCE. there is a difference.
I think a lot of us misunderstood you. I can see what you were saying in retrospect, and it does not seem so unclear, but at the time it came across to me as something quite different. I suppose the frame of the conversation, Keats, and Aristotle, and the woes of humanities professors set me up to see the comment as something entirely more relativistic and woolly headed than I think you actually meant.
I expect you would find a fair bit of sympathy here for the view that the present structure of our economy can not be sustained. That does not seem an uncommon view even among the scientist and science-fan set. Opinions will likely differ greatly on the odds that there will be a technological fix to some of the more obvious problems: population, resource limits, pollution, global warming, loss of biodiversity, psychic strain of living out of the savannah in global nuclear armed nation states, and on and on. Even so, I’d think you’d still find a good bit of support here for skepticism that a technological fix will always be pulled out of a hat. That kind of faith in progress, that our problems can be solved by just turning the crank a few more times on the magic technology box, well, I think we hope, but I think many of us aren’t so sure it will always work out. I think of that as “faith in technology”, or “faith in capitalism”, more than faith in “science”, and I don’t know what “scientism” means clearly enough to know what faith in it would be. I think there is, of course, a bit of hostility to the idea that there has been no kind progress so far, nothing good that has come out of ten thousand years of “civilization” or the last few hundred of accelerated science. Bach and Koch alone almost makes the pain seem worth it. But the possibility that the kind of progress that we have enjoyed, and sometimes suffered, might be an unsustainable fun rocket ride to nowhere, and so ultimately no lasting progress at all, is something I expect many people here would take seriously. How to get out of this rocket and onto something less precarious, well, that’s the trick, isn’t it? I think negative reaction to your comment comes from the misperception that you were somehow claiming that empirical knowledge will not be useful in that endeavor.
Thank you for this comment. I hope I never said that there were not wonderful achievements in the human adventure so far. What an explosion of music and art and knowledge and FUN we’ve had – especially in the last three hundred years.
I can also see that I sort of put my foot in it at the beginning by not clarifying that I saw a big difference between scientism and science. I apologize if this caused anyone any distress.
Just because those who feel threatened or intimidated by science have created their own myths about it doesn’t make it true. There’s no “whole assembled model of scientism+growth=progress,” no “faith in science, or SCIENTISM,” no grand conspiracy “to solve our problems” that is “so heavily invested in the idea of progress and economic growth.”
All humanities-hurled strawmen.
Sorry, you’ve been sold a bill of goods.
I disagree.
Then can you post a few examples of the conspiracy?
Diane, you asked me to post examples of this – and it is not a conspiracy – I would call it a confluence of ideas that all support each other. There was no link for a reply on your comment. However it bothered me that you would think I simply did not bother to reply. So here is a link:
http://www.truth-out.org/buzzflash/commentary/item/18194-international-scientists-warn-climate-deniers-are-enabling-earth-s-suicide
And WHAT exactly are these scientists fighting? I would like to quote for you a line from this essay that expresses the “confluence” I referred to.
“According to a September 12 article in Rolling Stone, scientists are now regrouping and fighting back against the corporate mass media assumption that there is even a debate about fossil fuel/extraction industry/corporate-caused/automobile guzzling degradation of the climate in which we live — and the deadly impact of such alterations to our earth and atmosphere.
Simply put in the sub-title to the Rolling Stone piece: “Scientists are fighting deniers with irrefutable proof the planet is headed for catastrophe.”
Now I know this is not a peer reviewed scientific article. It is Rolling Stone! But that is just the point – this is an aspect of our popular culture.
Our popular culture has some mythology running through it – and scientism, along with the dis that humans have some kind of destiny and will continue to “progress” toward more and more prosperity and health and democracy etc, is definitely part of that.
Helga, a big part of the pushback you’re getting is due to your use of the word, “scientism.” It’s very poorly defined such that, in practice, it’s generally just used by the superstitious as an insult aimed at rationalists.
You’re making some very valid points that few here (save Gary W) would disagree with. Those points would be better received if you left off the “scientism” label.
Cheers,
b&
Helga, when the comment nesting reaches a certain level here the reply buttons disappear, and we usually do what you do, just keep adding comments at the bottom. If it gets too confusing one could open a new comment thread and leave a link to it here, I guess. (It does get confusing.)
I’m sorry, I don’t see why what you cite serves as an example of the charges you made against science. To my thinking this represents scientists standing up to corporatism, if you will.
Even though the lengthy Wikipedia definition of scientism mostly concerns its pejorative uses:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientism
…it mentions nothing about this progress-democracy-conspiracy you insist upon.
It’s actually pretty ironic that you’re proclaiming that here; “progress” has become almost a dirty word in evolutionary biology.
It is not possible to even know what the problems are without science, much less solve them. Unless one believes the world has an agency that we are thwarting and that if we just take our hand off the wheel Mother Earth will fix it all with her Natural remedies like cholera.
Did you read what he actually said?
Pinker, Steven: “Science is not your Enemy” New Republic (http://www.newrepublic.com/article/114127/science-not-enemy-humanities)
I quote;
“… The great thinkers of the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment were SCIENTISTS. Not only did many of them contribute to mathematics, physics, and physiology, but all of them were avid theorists in the sciences of human nature. They were cognitive neuroscientists, who tried to explain thought and emotion in terms of physical mechanisms of the nervous system. They were EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGISTS, who speculated on life in a state of nature and on animal instincts that are “infused into our bosoms.” And they were social psychologists, who wrote of the moral sentiments that draw us together, the selfish passions that inflame us, and the foibles of shortsightedness that frustrate our best-laid plans.
These thinkers—Descartes, Spinoza, Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Rousseau, Leibniz, Kant, Smith—are all the more remarkable for having crafted their ideas in the ABSENCE of formal theory and empirical data. …”
That is the first paragraph.
I rest my case.
Exactly as I said, barely mentioned in passing. You evidently interpret what he was saying much differently than I do. What I find interesting is that you obviously think there is something very wrong with what Pinker said here. I don’t think you understand what he meant because you don’t understand science, you don’t understand what he meant by calling those people scientists, and you seem to have an ideologically inspired disdain for science. Despite claims to the contrary.
I think helgadorisingeborg has it exactly right on this issue. Since when are Descartes, Spinoza, Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Rousseau, Leibniz, Kant, Smith SCIENTISTS? Last time I checked they were philosophers. And, further, since when was the Enlightenment the work of science itself? This seems historically inaccurate since the Enlightenment was an outgrowth of many people and directly related to philosophers and other intellectuals in addition to work by scientists. While I appreciate some of what Pinker says, this aspect of his article is so unhistorical that it’s hard to believe.
And if you think this is merely the benighted perspective of a humanities person, you can read PZ Myers article on this which makes the same point.
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2013/08/08/repudiating-scientism-rather-than-surrendering-to-it/
Well, though I have read and listened to Pinker a fair bit I certainly would not claim to know without doubt what he meant there. However it does seem pretty clear to me based simply on the context he establishes in the article, and based on my past experience with him.
In short I think you, and anyone who has the same issue with this, is interpreting the word “science” way to literally.
Do you really think that Pinker means that those luminaries from the past were card carrying official scientists working in labs with white lab coats, or whatever approved garb? Or do you think, perhaps that maybe what he means is that these luminaries that he mentioned demonstrated a recognition of the importance of the same concepts that modern science evolved to formally embody? Do you think, perhaps, that he was offering these luminaries as examples of how the humanities enhanced with those same concepts that are embodied by formal science can thereby be empowered? Have you not read a myriad of times, at least if you frequent this website, the term “science broadly construed,” and understand that people discussing these issues often use the word “science” in that way? Or do you know that but just don’t consider it valid?
That was, after all, the general theme of his entire article. While this is no secret to many working in humanities disciplines, there sure as hell are plenty of people like Wieseltier who deny it despite the rather clear evidence of the successes. Let alone individual instances of such successes, there are entire disciplines in the humanities that have become permanently wedded to science. In the formal sense of the word let alone as “broadly construed.”
And though I have admired some of PZs stuff, mostly from years ago, that he holds the same view as you and helgadorisingeborg on this issue bears no weight with me whatsoever.
I have tried to read a few post-modern works before, but so far in none has the meaning eluded me quite as much as in your comment. I have no idea what you mean by a “literal” interpretation of science.
The use of the scientific method is fair straight forward, in my own experience.
As for Steven, I think what he was doing here was having an emotional moment. I think he was feeling such kinship with the enlightenment philosophers, who were such rational thinkers, that he extended to them memberships in his own area of special interest and belonging.
It is like the times my American friends feel so warmly towards me that they say they consider me an honourable American, instead of the lowly Canadian I am.
I am sure it was well intended, especially given that Steven, being a nice Canadian himself, living in the States, might have had this experience.
If I were to say I consider all these enlightenment scholars to be, in fact, anthropologists, or economists, wouldn’t most of you be horrified? Come on, be truthful. Come of you have jumped all over me for saying much less incendiary things.
It takes more than that to horrify me.
I’m not sure exactly what issue we’re discussing, since you’ve put a lot on the table. Let me just say this. I am not myself hostile to science or some parts of what Pinker is saying. I think some of his view is rather reasonable and he is merely trying to call (some!) people in the humanities back to an earlier period where the humanities didn’t see science as opposed to their work. This is entirely commendable (and behind his remarks about Descartes, Hume, etc.). But he could have made this point without trying to rewrite our common categories of “science” and “philosophy” to do this. There is something troubling about being told suddenly by scientists that philosophy is really part of science and having this idea advertized everywhere to the public. How would you like it if philosophers wrote articles for the public and tried to convince everyone that “science is really part of philosophy, broadly defined”? When you think about it the suggestion seems just as legitimate as yours since science historically emerged out of philosophy in the 1500s. But were we to do that I’m sure the scientists around this blog would be completely up in arms. So I think you should consider how this redefinition of science looks to those on the other side. Is that so unreasonable?
Second, I don’t recall anywhere where Weiseltier was hostile to science. I thought he said many supporting things about it. What he’s concerned with is scientific overreach and his perception was that Pinker was overreaching in certain ways. While I noted above that I think Pinker is generally an ally to the humanities, he did phrase some points in unhelpful ways. So I think if he was more cautious we could have avoided all this.
“If I were to say I consider all these enlightenment scholars to be, in fact, anthropologists, or economists, wouldn’t most of you be horrified? Come on, be truthful. Come of you have jumped all over me for saying much less incendiary things.”
Exactly!
(As I also said about “philosophy”.)
I am not so sure of that. Seems like you do. It also seems, from this latest comment, like you understand people sometimes use the word less precisely and can distinquish that by context. Makes me wonder why you take such issue with what Pinker said. But it does support the idea that you have an axe to grind regarding science, or scientists, or people who think the concepts of science can be fruitfully employed whenever there are claims about real world phenomena to be evaluated.
I’m not sure what impression you have of me, but I can honestly say that I most likely wouldn’t respond at all to such a claim, and certainly would not be horrified, or otherwise strongly motivated by it. I might disagree. If I thought you meant something like “these enlightenment scholars did some work that could be considered to be precursor to modern day anthropology or economics,” or that “they sometimes utilized concepts common in those modern fields,” I would probably agree with you. Depending on the specific scholars of course.
“you seem to have an ideologically inspired disdain for science. Despite claims to the contrary”
As opposed to your ideologically pure and unbiased embrace of Scientism, of course. Please, give us a break.
Yes, how dare he intimate that the reason we don’t have smallpox is science. The nerve! The cure clearly came from aggressive eco-busting cultures. Amiright, or amiright Helga? Plastics? Eco-busting cultures. Microchips? Eco-busting cultures. Flight and fast travel? Eco-busting cultures.
Let’s not forget her examples. “It was not scientists (or philosophers) who developed textile, lumbering, mining, or fossil fuel industries”. I suppose that people have always cut down trees and fashioned clothes for themselves and dug stuff up from the ground for various uses. It is only the application of science that has made these things into the industries she refers to. Oil is hardly worth looking for until the likes of James Watt came to understand how to really put it to use.
I think more fundamental is what many have noted here, though, and that is a divergence in definitions. I think most people in science conceive of science as the pursuit of knowledge broadly conceived. If it is reliable knowledge, it is part of science. That would include the knowledge the Romans used to forge swords as well as the knowledge that was used in the Industrial Revolution to construct all of those Satanic Mills, and also the knowledge that lets me communicate now with all these people I’ve never met. I think many critics of science see it only as what happens in certain science laboratories.
I agree with you about the definitions. I also agree with you that it is generally pursuit of knowledge. In fact I think it is more – it the search for systems of explanation about the material, observable and measurable universe that give coherence to many observations of similar systems within that universe.
The fact that such systems of explanation can go beyond the material, observable, and measurable universe – and slop over into the supernatural and the fictional, has confused things quite a bit.
In todays industrial world, we have created ways of observing and measuring that have extended our search for knowledge, and with it, have stretched far far away from the old explanations that confounded human morals and emotions with natural causes – as in the case of beliefs in witchcraft, spirits, and other supernatural agents.
I suppose these are all “ways of knowing” but personally I doubt any healthy child on the planet would NOT want find out more, and eventually arrive at an electron microscope or a Hubble field receiver if they existed. I once brought my microscope out to a village in West Africa, and so was able to show the women the tiny larvae of the guinea worm caught on the water filter in my room. They all began to boil and filter their water. Before, they had not understood what I meant, about it being in the water. One afternoon changed everything.
This does not mean that their culture was disrupted or that they did not still have a different perception of time and life, compared to people i grew up with in Canada. But like the Kua, they sought explanations, and could deal with new data.
“Mythology of progress”? Are you serious?
What is the current life expectancy? What was it 300 years ago?
What is the current infant morality rate? What was it 300 yeas ago?
What would you call the contributions of people like Louis Pasteur, Jonas Salk, or Norman Borlaugh if not progress?
Well, the original comment was vague in its definitions to say the least (which always makes communication tricky), but it may be alluding to the idea that “progress” can be a notoriously subjective notion. It may mean that a return to a pre-scientific culture would be preferable (though impossible with such a huge population), or that all of what is conventionally considered progress isn’t worth much if the society it produces is not sustainable.
I don’t know. I’m just hypothesizing about what “mythology of progress” could mean.
But, again, if environmentalism is to be considered central to our definition of progress (not a terrible idea), then science would appear to be the only way of actually, you know, progressing, since science (broadly construed) is the only reliable way of generating knowledge about the physical reality that we seem to find ourselves “busting”.
Yes.
It might not be possible for humanity to transition to a steady-state society. But the only hints we’ve gotten about how that might happen and what such a society might look like have come from the rational analysis of empirical observations — aka, science.
Cheers,
b&
It is our financial institutions that cannot survive -as they are now- in a steady throughput economy. Credit and loans are all predicated on the idea of economic growth.
Yes, I am serious.
Life expectancy today mainly reflects the decline in infant and childhood mortality. the development of vaccines and antibiotics are directly responsible, as is the improvements in sanitation and hygiene instituted after the germ theory of disease was accepted.
Maximum life spans, however are pretty much the same in most human populations. Even the proportions of people in each decade of life over sixty are remarkably constant for most human populations if calculated after age 15.
This seems to have been the case even before the emergence of Homo sapiens from more archaic Homo sp. See this interesting article – http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/667694#apa)
I must have missed the part of that article that shows that the percentage of the population that reaches 80 or 90 today is the same as the percentage of the population that reached 80 or 90 several hundred years ago.
And yes, average life expectancy has gone up because fewer people die in infancy. You point that out as though it somehow doesn’t represent progress. Why do fewer infants die? Because we’ve gained knowledge that helps us keep them alive.
You can’t seriously be claiming that life expectancy and quality of life is the same as it’s always been.
NO, only that maximal life span and proportions of people in various ages tend to be similar in various human populations. I tried to post more references and examples in an additional post but it has not clear moderation yet. Sorry about that.
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Wieseltier’s latest essay is a sad disappointment to those of us who have long admired his social vision and literary gifts. As I wrote in an earlier post concerning the Wieseltier-Pinker quarrel, W.’s rage–and that’s what it has become–was kindled a couple of years ago when he ‘read’ and briefly noticed Alex Rosenberg’s ‘The Atheist’s Guide to Reality’ in the ‘New Republic.’ R.’s systematic destruction (not ‘deconstruction’)of the humanist’s chief epistemological approach to understanding, introspection and monitoring of consciousness by consciousness, evidently set W. off on a warpath that has led to this latest intellectual blustering, the spittle from which sputter one can almost see flying out of his mouth. As a humanist (literature)with ‘scientistic’ leanings, I am embarrassed for my profession.
Curses. The villagers lighting torches in the town square, gathering to form into a fearful, outraged mob and storm the scientist’s castle outside town, already shouted “Down with Scientism!” long and loudly enough to turn that unnecessary redundancy into a so-called word contained in the dictionary (I just now finally thought to check). If Wiesentier’s essay is read & spread by FOX and the radio talk-jowls, the crowd will soon add “Kill the Scientizer!(sic)” to their chant. Should this occur, that particular unfortunate collection of letters, assembled only to deliberately denigrate those who pursue the goal of comprehension (and thus comprehension itself), may find its way into Dictionary.com before COB Friday.
While you’re at it, be sure to check the Oxford English Dictionary regarding this “so-called word”, and note that it has been in recorded use for nearly a century.
And if you characterize George Bernard Shaw, one of the early users of the term “Scientism”, as an ignorant torch-bearing villager, then you are even more of a blockhead than you appear to be.
*Moderator: Note conditional nature of term “blockhead”, carefully nestled in an “if/then” statement)
To be fair, Wieseltier makes a few fairly sensible points, and doesn’t go quite as over the top as some critics of “scientism” do.
That said, its a very poor article, full of name-calling, snark and straw men. Pretty much self-refuting, in fact.
However, as Diana McPherson said on the previous thread, the people who write articles like this are a self-selected biased sample of humanities people, consisting of precisely those least likely to have anything useful to say.
I’m pretty sure that all the humanities etc people I know would agree more with JAC and DD than with Wieseltier. (Except maybe one).
While Dennett has some tough things to say to Weiseltier’s article, I think it is important for people to recognize that he sympathizes with him on certain central issues. You have to read carefully because Dennett is not simply endorsing everything scientists are doing in the present context and saying the humanities folks are wrong. He thinks there is blustering on both sides.
“It is true that there is a crowd of often overconfident scientists impatiently addressing the big questions with scant appreciation of the subtleties unearthed by philosophers and others in the humanities, but the way to deal constructively with this awkward influx is to join forces and educate them, not declare them out of bounds.”
I wonder who he has in mind? Krauss? Kaku?
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I took it more as a conciliatory nod. The way I read his essay, Dennett is in full support of Pinker. He adds in a couple lines pointing out that the humanities have data/information that it would be wise for scientists to learn. While this is a good point, the way I read it, he says it mostly because he doesn’t want his article to be so lop-sided.
Unlike Couchloc, I do not see this as at all supportive of Weiseltier. W.’s argument is basically that scientists are doing something wrong when they use their techniques (uninvited) on humanities problems.
D.’s nod back to the humanities says that scientists are not doing anything wrong when they do this. That humanities professors should collaborate with them to ensure that when these scientific techniques are used, they take into account the data and research the humanities have already done.
Its the difference between “No scientists welcome” (W.) and “Scientists welcome, wipe your feet before you come in.” (D.)
Here is a good, though somewhat old, example of good collaboration between the humanities and sciences: in the mid-1960s, a historian of Medieval/Renaissance history colloaborated with a geochemist on the possible impact of the element lead (Pb) in history. They ended up suggesting the probable role of lead pipes–used to distribute water from the aqueducts–in the downfall of the Roman Empire. I don’t know the current status of this idea, but it drew on both fields to develop a testable hypothesis.
This is why history (better: historiography) itself can be pursued as a science. One can form hypotheses, find trends or maybe even laws (e.g. what Bunge tentatively calls “Tocqueville’s law”), conduct experiments, etc.
The way I see other fields like philosophy is the “stuff that isn’t yet ready”, which advances with the state of the art in other fields – or should. Philosophers who ignore science and technology risk not using a constraint – a mutual one, I might add – at their peril and ours.
I just reread (for fun) Weyl’s little book on symmetry; a great example of refusing to draw a boundary between science, mathematics, the humanities, etc.
Hmm… I’d read that it was because they used powdered lead as a sweetener in wine… Trying to confirm that now, I also find: “The Roman upper classes boiled their wine in lead-lined pots. This sweetened the wine, and made it resistant to souring by yeast.”
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That reaction all y’all have reading this? Wincing at the thought of using lead to sweeten wine?
That’s the exact same reaction far-distant future generations (if any) will have when they read about what we do today with extracted mineral hydrocarbon deposits.
b&
Yes, they had lead pottery and they mixed their wine (the ancients mixed their wine with water – only an uncivilized person did not mix his wine).
There was also a dying out of the ruling classes (no one has confirmed if lead played a role). Somehow I’m not as convinced by the whole lead argument.
More convincing arguments between ancient history/archaeology & science is working with volcanologist (I really want to spell that vulcanologist). Work with them has impacted dates (Minoan dates have been revised based on data in this field).
You could spell it that way, as “vulcanologist” is also correct, if you mean a person who studies volcanoes.
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Yeah, I wanted to but I kept getting red squiggly lines so I just caved and put it with the O. It makes sense because of Vulcan (as in the god, not the planet/race in Star Trek).
Eric, did you read the same article as me? You write that “D.’s nod back to the humanities says that scientists are not doing anything wrong when they do this.” Not doing anything wrong? Dennett says there is a crowd of scientists addressing certain questions that can be “overconfident,” “impatient,” and they have “scant appreciation” for the legitimate points humanities folks have made. That is not consistent with what you are saying.
Brilliant!
One danger of amateurs entering any philosophy conversation is that they, ignorant of all the obfuscating machinations used to pump up the various claims, often ask simple questions that reveal the Emperor’s new clothes.
A great thing about science is that it usually isn’t hard to sort out the junk if you spend some time. With philosophy it’s harder. Amongst the great works, there is at least an equal measure of pompous oratory spoken with no backing except authority. Science tends to create strata – the casual observer can see the layers of ideas that have replaced the old. With philosophy it seems more like an endless roil – mixing of the old with the new until it all turns to mud.
If people lack an understanding of the important roll of philosophy, perhaps it’s time for philosophers to learn from marketing – don’t blame the customer. Take the time to explain the importance of the discipline using tactics other than condescension or whining.
Dennett explained the role of philosophy in words that I could understand — I think it was at a conference at Stanford of a philosophical society. He said — roughly — that philosophy should devoting itself to asking the right questions. The emphasis was on questions, not answers.
“One danger of amateurs entering any philosophy conversation is that they, ignorant of all the obfuscating machinations used to pump up the various claims, often ask simple questions that reveal the Emperor’s new clothes.”
Excellent!
I loved the hat metaphor; what a great visual! I also really really really really liked this: “to forces and educate them, not declare them out of bounds” because I think there is a lot the sciences and the humanities can learn from each other. I’m a big advocate for silo breaking & increasing cultural literacy. There is blustering (I suspect by vocal minorities on both sides) that try to devalue each other and it’s frankly embarrassing.
In a certain sense, I think Dennett’s call to “join forces” still misses the mark. It actually perpetuates the separate camps notion.
Instead of advocating that, say, art historians and physicists work together, I’d advocate simply that everyone, art historians included, needs to think scientifically. As far as possible test your ideas against reality. Etc.
True…but, at the same time, a great deal can be had from all kinds of interdisciplinary efforts. In your particular example, art historians have benefitted greatly from the work physicists have done with various imaging techniques. And, going the other way, I’m sure there’ve been astronomers who’ve benefitted from the work of art historians.
Cheers,
b&
Oh, I absolutely agree. There is just so much to know these days that specialization and interdisciplinary efforts are required.
I just think that in the context of this argument it would be better to point out that science is a tool available for everyone’s use, rather than implying that to get a scientific perspective in the humanities you have to import scientists and vice versa.
That’s a good way to frame it. Science: not just for those in lab coats.
b&
I actually see this as the root cause for some of the reactions. It appears there is a misunderstanding about a broader sense of science vs the narrow sense of science. It causes an emotional outburst. If you understand where those in the Humanities are coming from, this makes sense. Most people don’t really understand what goes on in the Humanities, make a conclusion that it’s really basket weaving & treat professionals in the Humanities with disdain. So, as soon as they hear any argument, no matter how well reasoned or how non confrontational, they over react. You can see how emotionally charged these pieces have all been.
What’s wrong with basket weaving? Are you trying to pick a fight? 😉
Yeah those basket weavers don’t scare me because they are too relaxed to fight. 🙂
Anyone notice PZ Myers’s recent defense of postmodernism? I think he just hates Pinker, so he has to jump in for the opposition.
Yeah. He seems to be describing something quite different than what I experienced when I tried to make sense out of, for example, Derrida.
I found myself looking for the post-modernism in that piece as well. Criticism of a particular bit of science is not automatically post-modernism. Most criticism of particular bits of science comes from other scientists. And since when has looking at science from a human perspective been something only post-modernism does?
But I think the biggest problem with the piece is PZ’s equating the Sokal hoax with bad science: a bad paper in developmental biology doesn’t indict the whole field, so neither should the acceptance of Alan Sokal’s piece indict post-modernism. But the two are not comparable. Sokal’s paper was unintelligible nonsense. Gobbledygook. That it was accepted does say something about post-modernism.
I wonder if PZ would suggest we rehabilitate religion? After all, there are a couple of good bits.
I saw no defence of post-modernism in PZ Myers’criticism of Pinker’s piece. Wieseltier’s piece is of course dreadful, but I certainly thought PZ had a point. Archaeologists like Colin Renfrew, historians like Richard Evans, art historians like Michael Baxandall, literary critics like Gillian Beer (author of the celebrated ‘Darwin’s Plots’ which I suspect very few people on this thread have read), the various literary critics and anthropologists (Ellen Dissayanake, for instance) who are drawing on Darwin’s theories, and many other people in the ‘humanities’ – these people have been making use of science for years in fruitful ways, and really do not need to have Pinker condescend to them.
PZ has a post titled, “Can we rehabilitate post-modernism, please?”, which seems pretty clearly to be a defense of post-modernism.
I think that is the one pacopicopiedra is referring to.
Sounds like he’s really jumped the shark there.
Oh, boy, has he ever!
The post in question:
http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2013/09/10/can-we-rehabilitate-post-modernism-please/
It’s worth reading for the same reason why you might watch somebody drive an overpriced, oversized SUV into a garage with the bikes still strapped upright to the top.
He lamely argues that the Sokal affair was no more damning of PoMo than Piltdown man was of biology…and then he goes full native.
You know how he thinks that all atheists should have as their prime purpose in life advocating his own Limbaugh-esque parody of liberalism, and how anybody who’s even the tiniest bit out of lock-step with him is a fucking douchenozzle scumbag asshole?
That’s the same thing he’s now proposing for scientists in general.
The money quote: “Science has to be answerable to public interest, and the goals of scientists (and atheists!) should include progressive values.”
Sorry, PZ, but that’s how the Church justified its persecution of Galileo. And, Jerry, if I may? I’d like to offer a hearty, “Fuck you!” to PZ. Reality doesn’t give a damn what sort of “truths” you want it to reveal, and it is the ultimate of anti-scientific authoritarianism to put your own political agenda before and above basic research and to demand that all scientists adopt your personal values.
And, for those who aren’t already familiar, I’m a card-carrying member of the Green Party and would answer the same as PZ on 90%+ of any political spectrum survey’s questions.
PZ gives himself the first post in the comments:
Well, permit me to be the first to mock PZ thusly on WEIT: M[e]yer[e]s[es] is a post-modernist, and I have no more remaining respect for PZ than I do for Social Text.
Cheers,
b&
Thanks, Ben. That’s exactly what I was hoping for with my little fishing expedition of a comment up there. Well done!
Perhaps Ben would like to comment on J. B. S. Haldane’s political beliefs, too. PZ is certainly not advocating the sort of control the RC Church or Stalinist Russia once went in for you (and would do again in the first case, given the opportunity)but rather the kind of ethical frame of mind that led the gifted scientist Burgess Franklin Collins to leave his scientific career after having worked on the Manhattan Project and being appalled by the consequences. He became the artist and poet known as ‘Jess’, and became also the lifelong partner of the poet Robert Duncan.
That theme of his has been annoying me no end for quite a while–he was running it out regularly back when I used to read him and that was a long time ago.
Talk about not even wrong. It especially annoys me since these distinctions (between atheism & personal politics, for one) were being hammered out long before PZ started blowing his horn. There are very important reasons for not conflating politics with science. And for Chrissakes, it’s hard enough to raise the public opinion of atheism without all the baggage he insists upon. PZ, we have other words for your progressive values philosophy, like, oh, say, “progressive values.”
(And hey, I’m a 60’s-era pacifist, feminist, environmentalist, Civil-&-Gay-Rights-activist old-school Liberal myself.)
Sometimes I think PZ’s bully pulpit success has gone to his head.
Sometimes?
When one of you demonstrates that you have even the slightest grasp of what Post-Modernism is, as opposed to Post-Structuralist philosophy, which is what you really mean when you use your favorite sneer word, then your criticisms of it will not elicit laughter from those who do.
And if you really want to take the next step and actually be taken seriously, please demonstrate that you understand what perspectivism is, what skepticism is (hint: It isn’t the point of view that criticizes all epistemologies, except for science), and what relativism is–as well as the fact that they come in many different “strengths” and “flavors”.
You have your assignment.
Al_de_Baran,
I’ve seen a lot of snide and snotty comments on my post, but yours is one of the most arrogant and supercilious I’ve seen.
Thanks so much for asserting your superiority; but if you are this snotty again, I would like you to go elsewhere. Our policy is that we are polite on this site towards other commenters, even if we disagree with them.
So apologize.
Sad to see you so defensive, Tim Harris.
Please remember that Pinker’s response was not targeted at Colin Renfrew, as near as I can tell. And, to my mind at least, Wieseltier very much deserved the “condescension” that Pinker directed his way.
Yes, GBJ, no doubt you are sad. I really do not care. If Pinker would care to name a few names, to provide some evidence in proper scientific fashion, to actually engage with specific targets, then I should have more respect than I do for what he wrote.
I thought “Wieseltier” was a name.
To make things clear: can you, GBJ, point to where, in Pinker’s piece, Wieseltier is named and his ideas taken issue with?
You are correct, Tim Harris. I confused Pinker’s piece with Dennett’s defense of Pinker.
Also, Pinker can hardly have targeted Wieseltier, since the latter’s silly response was just that, a response to what Pinker wrote. It is anyway surely irresponsible to choose a target like Wieseltier to make large generalisations about the whole of the humanities, generalisations that suit the prejudices of certain people.
Still, are you saying that Pinker’s going after a straw guy? Have you not seen attacks on “scientism” flying from the Castle of the Humanities?
Yes, I have, and I have also seen nonsense about the humanities lobbed by people involved with science at what is alleged to be tbe Castle of the Humanities (with capital letters)- I am fed up with both: a plague on both their castles!
I have just read PZ’s thoughtful piece on post-modernism. Michael Berube, whom he quotes, has always struck me as an admirable person and a stimulating writer. He is definitely not an indulgent writer. Perhaps others might think about what PZ and Berube say, too. ‘Post-modernism’ has come to occupy much the same position in the bugbear pantheon among scientists ignorant of the humanities as ‘scientism’ has among those who like to remain ignorant of the sciences.
Gillian Beer’s book (mentioned in my previous comment) is, by the way, subtitled ‘Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction’. Pace Pinker’s gloating jibe about unpublished novelists, in her preface to 1999 second edition of her book, Beer mentions – in addition to all the 19th-century writers she deals with – as novelists, dramatists and poets who have ‘turned to scientific materials for their imaginative work’, A.S. Byatt, Peter Carey, Michael Frayn, Tom Stoppard, Jeanette Winterton, Jorie Graham, Jo Shapcott, Les Murray and Gjertrud Schnackenberg, remarking that they are ‘just the start of the roll-call’. Ignorance does not exist only among those involved in the humanities.
I think the various labels are confounding. Like “scientism”, “post-modernism” is a vague term that people seem to fashion into whatever they want. What is post-modernism that I should be for or against it? Am I to take post-modernism to equate to Kuhn’s monographs, as the quote in the PZ piece seems to suggest? I have a fair bit of respect for Kuhn’s work, though not so much for many of his blinkered fans and interpreters. If that is post-modernism, well, great. Would Kuhn himself accept the mantle of post-modernism? I doubt it. Or is post-modernism, as PZ suggests, merely criticism, skepticism, and social contextualizing? Who can argue with those things? What scientist would not see the value of criticism, skepticism, and looking at the social context of what we do? Or is post-modernism the fun, but highly suspect, idea of Derrida that the text is the only thing, that it is no use asking Rowling what she meant by giving Harry Potter a lightning scar since the text lives alone and the author has no more input than any of the rest of us? That is a fun exercise, but who can take it seriously? Or is it the jargon laden impenetrable mess that anyone who looks into post-modernism inevitably falls into which smells suspiciously like the last retreat for the woo-minded? These are variously good, neutral, and bad ideas under this same fuzzy label. For such ill defined and often pejoratively used terms as “scientism” or “post-modernism” pronouncing on “scientism” or “post-modernism” is probably a bit of a fools errand, the proverbial nailing of jelly to the tree. I think we’ll have more success discussing something more specific.
I think it’s a bit of a mistrake to trust the PoMos to properly define their own field, just as it’s a mistrake to trust a Christian to tell you that Jesus is a god but Adam and Eve and Noah and Abraham and Moses and Satan aren’t gods.
Regardless, it’s quite empirically clear what, exactly, PoMo is: it’s the principle that desires trump realities. PZ’s post that I linked to exemplifies this perfectly, as does the pseudo-Bushism, “Faith-based reality.”
Cheers,
b&
Looking up post modernism on Wikipedia is also confusing. The text as standing on its own could perhaps be post modernism but I tend to agree that in fiction, there may be influences that ultimately don’t matter to the reader since the reader brings his/her experiences to art as well. You often hear artists (lyricists, writers, painters, etc.) surprised and delighted to hear what the consumer of the art says about it.
Probably where things go bad is venturing out of the confines of art and applying this to more universal experiences as “another way of knowing”.
My interpretation above is my own speculation/observation though and hence the trouble with these terms as you suggest.
As someone (maybe it was you) mentioned in a comment elsewhere, there seems often to be a confusion between analysis and appreciation. It’s hard to see how excluding information or arbitrarily limiting scope can benefit analysis of literature or art. Appreciation, on the other hand, comes in a variety of forms (including, sometimes, various kinds of analysis!), and each person may bring to a work their own cloud of perceptions and knowledge and not be affected at all by, say, the author’s intent, or someone else’s perception. Acknowledging the subjective basis of art, including the futility of identifying art from non-art, is surely a reasonable stance. As you say, exporting that kind of relativism to, for example, whether or not the idea that the earth is a spheroid is no more true than the idea that it is a flat rectangle is where one hangs up on reason and retreats into a woo-fog.
On a related note, I think the question of whether or not a particular activity is “science” is sort of problematic as well. A lot of energy has been devoted to this question, I guess because “science” has accrued a good deal of capital and people want to be able to wield that capital wholesale, as though all one needs for legitimacy is to be called “science”, and not to actually be correct about specific claims. Part of what energized people about Kuhn and the lot is that they seemed to question the idea that we could clearly identify one activity, astrology say, as non-science and another, astronomy, as science. This really bothered a lot of people, I think because they falsely equated ambiguity of the question “what is science”, which is partly ambiguous because the terms are ambiguous and also because today’s science rests on a graveyard of failed, but possibly necessary, ideas, with ambiguity about the truth of various specific claims made about the world (e.g. the moon is a rock). We need not even address the question of whether astrology was a kind of proto-science if our interest is what is true about the heavens, we need only address it’s specific claims. This kind of question became particularly acute in the field of psychology in the last century, with debates raging over which of the various approaches to psychology (Freudianism, Jungianism, Behaviorism, Cognitive psychology, etc.) were really science and which were not, as though once that was established the work was done. It is easy to get sucked into such a debate and forget to ask what are the specific claims being made and what is the evidence? While it is of course possible for a whole field to be bullshit, it seems to me that it is easier to figure that out by addressing the specific claims rather than trying to wrestle with a possibly ever-morphing label.
Yep, that was me in reference to Wieseltier’s article.
Agreed – it’s why you see the desperation with the DI trying to get recognition as a science. You see some bias as well when people don’t want to be affiliated with the Humanities even though, from my experience, the Humanities uses scientific methods.
Also, I think there is a lot of misunderstanding about what goes on in Humanities and when one reads preposterous writers like Heffernan, one assumes the entire body of Humanities and thousands of it’s practitioners if not millions of its graduates all think the same way. It’s tantamount to listening to the ID spewing scientists and concluding all scientists feel this way. Perhaps the Humanities need to do a better job at dispelling this stuff as scientists had to. I suspect most Humanities folks are unaware or uninterested in what the crackpots are saying.
its! Crap!
Asking whether or not DI’s efforts (I assume DI means the Discovery Institute) constitute science is exactly to the point. It is easy to get sucked into their game of “Is It Science?”, but that is just not the relevant question. Spending time arguing with them or their supporters whether or not they are science, IMO, misses the point. The point is, whatever you label their efforts, their idea has been shown not to be useful and at odds with observation. Theirs is a failed hypothesis and we shouldn’t teach it in science class for the same reason we don’t teach about balancing humors or about the elements earth, fire, water, and air, or any of the myriad ideas that have been found to either be demonstrably wrong or practically useless. In the U.S., unfortunately, we have been forced to rely on church-state separation and the court’s favorable opinion that ID is religion to keep from polluting science education with this failed hypothesis, but I consider this an unfortunate political reality and worry that making the label “science” the battleground will have lots of negative consequences. Not the least of these is propping up the authoritarian view of knowledge, that whomever wears the science crown dictates what is true. It really shouldn’t matter whether the activities that led to those ideas meet some definition of science or not, whether their advocates were scientists or were motivated by religion or whatever else might come into play. It should only matter whether or not their ideas are true or at least useful.
Can I suggest that the issue of post-modernism is a red herring here. Kuhn is not a post-modernist. Derrida is. They are from entirely different traditions and perspectives. Kuhn had a PhD in physics and left physics for philosophy and history of science and owed much of his insights about the problem of distinguishing between reality and our perceptions of it to the Harvard logician W.V. Quine (who taught mathematical logic). This is about as far away from post-modernism as you can get. Derrida and Lyotard and the postmodernists trace their tradition to French intellectuals, sociologists, philosophers, and writers going back to ultimately to Nietzsche. The two traditions are totally separate and have different concerns. Don’t forget that Dennett himself is a philosopher and trained as such. So is A.C. Grayling and Peter Singer and their ilk. So there’s no reason to link post-modernism with Kuhn or philosophy generally. I think Dennett was just being sloppy and shouldn’t have mentioned post-modernism in his piece since he rejects it, and even Weiseltier was explicit that he rejects it too. Dragging that into the discussion doesn’t touch the issue that divides these two people.
Sure. This little subthread is discussing PZ’s post, not Dennett’s, and PZ’s post did seem to conflate Kuhn with postmodernism. I say “seem” because it seemed a bit muddled to me.
OK, sorry.
And the statement about not defending the humanities by declaring it off limits to amateurs goes for every discipline, including philosophy.
And science?
yes, of course. You don’t need to be a professional (a PhD in a scientific field) to have a decent understanding of a scientific topic and have good or interesting ideas about it. You have to do your homework, so you are not starting from a position of ignorance, but you don’t have to go back to school and earn a degree.
Grand! Just the reply I was hoping for.
Just to make things clear, the first sentence in that last comment is the last sentence in Jerry Coyne’s post.
These self-referential comments work better if you post them as replies to the comment to which they refer.
Yes. I am lost as to which “first sentence” is being referenced.
Thanks and sorry!
Beware Cognitive Cloisterism where credentials become more important than thinking.
The nexxt time I see “scientism” employed in a way that comports with critical thinking and rational objectivity, instead of embodied in a sentence that is a sweeping generalization denigrating both, will be the first time.
I try not to be negative, but I am growing to loathe that term. It seems its sole purpose is to serve misunderstanding.
“The nexxt time I see ‘scientism’ employed in a way that comports with critical thinking and rational objectivity, instead of embodied in a sentence that is a sweeping generalization denigrating both, will be the first time.”
Ditto for Post-Modernism.
Have the roolz been suspended?
Haven’t you heard? We’re playing under Polish Roolz this week.
😉 Got it… my chain mail is out for derustification.
Reblogged this on π's blog.