Category: scientism

A misguided attack on scientism in Quillette

May 12, 2019 • 10:30 am

How many times do I have to criticize attacks on scientism, all of which use various permutations of the same three claims? Here they are:

1.) There are “other ways of knowing” that don’t involve science. These often involve “why” questions, like “Why am I here? (i.e. what is my purpose?)” or “Why is the universe here”?

2.) The scientific method (or rather, the use of empirical analysis and observation, confirmation, testing, making predictions, and so on) cannot be justified a priori by philosophy, and involves untestable or fallacious assumptions.

3.) Science is  trying to take over the humanities, and this unwarranted extension of science to places where it doesn’t belong is true scientism.

The article below that just appeared in Quillette rehashes the same tired old arguments, and I’m tired of refuting them. But I’ll take up the cudgels once again. To see my numerous and previous criticisms of scientism, go here.

Read the article by clicking on the screenshot below. It’s a criticism of an earlier piece by Bo and Ben Winegard (also in Quillette) called “In defense of scientism.”

 

The nice article by the Winegards uses a narrow definition of scientism: “science based social policy” (SBSP) which they say is “the view that social policy should be based on the best available theory and data; in other words, that social policy should be decided using the weight of the evidence. And that is all scientism is—the view that scientific attitudes and methods can enhance all modes of empirical inquiry and should, therefore, be promoted.” Well, some would disagree with that. Others define scientism as “the extension of science beyond its proper bailiwick.” Two such construals of that are 1.) The claim that science devalues nonscientific realms like art and literature, and 2.) Science tries to construct an objective morality, saying that empirical investigation alone can tell us what and what is not desirable and good.

The Winegards address both of these construals, admitting that science can’t replace art and literature, which convey emotion and experience rather than empirical truth. But they also argue—and I agree—that science can helpfully infuse areas like sociology, literary criticism, and other areas that try to make claims about reality. And they agree with me that no, science can’t tell us objectively what is good and moral and desirable, for those are subjective preferences. But once you agree on those preferences—and in morality many of us do adopt similar consequentialist views—then science can tell us how to best achieve them; for how to achieve a desired goal is an empirical matter.

But Aaron Neil, a researcher at the Canadian think tank Cardus, wants to go beyond what the Winegards say, in particular conveying the first two tropes given at the top.  I’ve refuted both of these claims before, most extensively in my book Faith Versus Fact, but I’ll try again, and will also try—and probably fail—to be brief. My refutations of claims 1 and 2 as emitted by Neil are these:

1.) Neil fails to tell us a single bit of knowledge that wasn’t derived by science, though he bloviates at length about how this is possible. If there are “other ways of knowing”, what is the knowledge produced by those ways? If it’s so pervasive, Neil should be able to give us many examples. But he fails miserably, coming up dry.

2.) Indeed, you can’t justify philosophically the use of the empirical method to produce truths about the universe. But the justification is not by philosophy, but by usefulness. In other words, the scientific method works to tell us truths about the universe, and some version of it (the varieties of empirical methods that I call “science construed broadly”) are the only way to find out facts. To paraphrase theology, we justify science by works rather than faith.

Let’s take Neil’s two claims in reverse order (his quotations are indented):

1.) The scientific method can’t be justified by philosophy, and involves untestable (and sometimes failed) assumptions. Here are some of the philosophical attacks on science leveled by Neil:

a. Science is self-refuting in saying that “scientific truth is always provisional.” To wit:

Although the Winegards present an innocuous definition in their essay, they commonly drift into the less benign form of scientism identified by Hayek. The Winegards’ Hayekian scientism manifests itself early in their piece with the claim that “Truth is always provisional.” As they correctly note, scientific “truths” appear to be true so long as they provide “the best available theory” based on the evidence at hand. However, not all truths bear this hypothetical quality. Ironically, the very statement, “Truth is always provisional” is not itself a provisional truth claim. If it is always true that truth is always provisional, this statement is self-refuting. Not all truth claims are theoretical statements that are vulnerable to empirical falsification. Take the proposition, “there are no square circles.” This is not a hypothesis that is true so long as scientists do not discover a square circle. Logically, a circle can never be a square.

Do I need to waste time on this? It’s philosophical pilpul. Instead of saying “truth is always provisional”, let’s restate it as “science doesn’t tell us anything with absolute certainty, but we have degrees of certainty about various things, and are more confident about some scientific truths than others.”  That revision is sufficient to refute Neil’s philosophical twiddling.

b. Science is based on untestable metaphysical assumptions. To wit:

. . . as the greatest critics and advocates of modern science have argued, science is full of extra-scientific assumptions.

Friedrich Nietzsche, for example, saw that far from doing away with faith and metaphysics, the scientific enterprise of the “godless anti-metaphysicians” rested upon its own “metaphysical faith.” In The Gay Science, Nietzsche explains that science depends on dispelling personal convictions and replacing them with provisional hypotheses. However, Nietzsche argues, the scientific attempt to disallow a priori convictions is itself based on “some prior conviction…one that is so commanding and unconditional that it sacrifices all other convictions to itself.” For scientific inquiry to occur, the conviction must “be affirmed in advance” that “‘Nothing is needed more than truth.’” Implicit in the modern “scientific spirit” is the metaphysical belief that “truth is divine.” Therefore, he argues, “there is simply no science ‘without presuppositions.’”

If Nietzsche provides an example of a moral assumption implicit in the scientific method, David Hume, the great skeptic and pioneer of the modern empirical project, provides a philosophical one. For Hume, “all inferences from experience suppose that the future will resemble the past.” To observe that a cause follows from an effect, and to conclude that the same effect will always follow from the same cause, assumes that nature remains the same. This assumption is impossible to prove. “It is impossible,” writes Hume, “that any arguments from experience can prove this resemblance of the past to the future; since all these arguments are founded on the supposition of that resemblance.” In other words, arguing for uniformity in nature based on experiences assumes that uniformity already exists. To prove the consistency of the causal relationship would require stepping outside of empirical experience.

Again, this is easily refuted. First, not all scientists think that the pursuit of truth is the most important thing they do. But as scientists it is our job to pursue truth and that’s all, though many of us do value truth above nearly everything. (For example, many of us would prefer to be told we have a fatal disease than be lied to.) Further, if you are interested in solving problems like “How can we stem global warming?” or “How can we quash this outbreak of measles?”, then science is the only way to go. The so-called a priori assumption that the empirical method is the best way to find truth is not a prior conviction, but the result of centuries of experience of what works and what doesn’t.

As far as Hume is concerned, science does not assume that the future will resemble the past. Indeed, evolutionary biologists assume that the future will NOT resemble the past. The resemblance we do see, and this is not an a priori conviction but also the result of experience, is that the laws of physics appear to remain unalterable in our universe, so in that sense future laws and events (i.e., as instantiated in the evolution of stars) can be assumed to resemble the past laws and events. We use uniformitarianism insofar as our experience tells us this applies. We do not assume it a priori.

It’s a common mistake of people like Neil to think that scientists once sat down and constructed a scientific method, complete with dictums like “value truth above all else”, “assume the future will be like the past”, and “empirical investigation, replication, and so on are the best ways to find empirical truth”. No, those procedures developed from experience when people learned about the best ways to find truth.

2.) There are other ways of knowing. I discuss this at length in Faith Versus Fact, concluding that if you want to know facts about our universe, the scientific procedure (“science construed broadly”) is the only way to proceed. This does not denigrate philosophy or mathematics, both of which are logical systems that are very important in doing science and in thinking hard about what you’re doing. Mathematics does not tell us truths about the universe, but truths about the logical system it comprises. That’s why we can sensibly speak of “proof” in mathematics but not in science. Philosophy, by teaching us how to think clearly and logically, can point out errors in our thinking and lead us to conclusions that aren’t obvious. One of them is the Euthyphro Issue, which teaches us that most religious people get their morality not from religion itself, but from secular and extra-scriptural sources. That is not a truth about the universe, but a logical (and valuable!) truth that comes from reflection and perhaps some observation of how people construe morality (the border between this kind of philosophy and science is very tenuous).

What are the other ways of knowing? Neil discusses two areas.

a. Ways to answer “why” questions. To wit:

A notable example of this scientistic shift from method into metaphysics comes from Richard Dawkins and Peter Atkins who, like Dawkins, is a prolific author as well as a fellow at Lincoln College, Oxford University. During the question and answer period following a discussion of The God Delusion, Dawkins was asked whether science provides the answers to the great existential ‘why’ questions. In his reply, Dawkins declared that questions like “why does the universe exist” are “silly” questions that do not deserve answers. Peter Atkins makes a similar point in a recent article. He argues that questions like “Why are we here?” are “not real questions because they are not based on evidence.” Real questions, according to Atkins, are questions “open to scientific elucidation.”

Unfortunately, for Dawkins and Atkins, the belief that all questions must be open to scientific explanation is a metaphysical commitment, not a scientific one. Science does not say that only scientific questions are worth pursuing. Nor does science say that every aspect of reality can be explained by science. Lurking beneath their rejection of the non-scientific lies a fundamentally extra-scientific worldview. In their dismissal of the deepest questions concerning human existence, Dawkins and Atkins speak not as dispassionate scientists, but as partisans to their own philosophical picture of reality.

This can be dispelled easily when we realize that what Dawkins and Atkins (both scientists) are talking about as “fake questions” are “questions that cannot be answered with any certainty.” They are construing “real questions” as questions that have answers that we can all agree on, and can have some certainty about the answers. And for those kinds of questions, Dawkins and Atkins are correct, for only science can answer questions that have answers like that. Sure, you can say, “I had a vision of Jesus,” but there is no way to verify it. Beyond this kind of subjective “truth”, we must turn to science. If questions like “Why are we here?” do have “correct” answers, or answers that most of us can agree on, then pray tell us what the answers are, Dr. Neil! For religions, which occupy themselves with such questions, cannot agree of any answers.

b. Areas that constitute “other ways of knowing.” Disturbingly, besides philosophy, which I’ve already discussed, the only field mentioned by Neil is theology. (I’m not sure whether he thinks theology can really tell us any truths.):

Science is not the only form of knowledge. There are valid non-scientific ways of approaching reality. In fact, before the empirical science of Isaac Newton and Francis Bacon, science (from the Latin scientia) simply meant “knowledge.” For the ancients, natural philosophy (the rough pre-modern equivalent to modern science) and philosophy were ‘sciences’ because each intellectual discipline contributed towards knowledge of reality. Not only were philosophy and theology considered legitimate ways of knowing, the medievals placed natural philosophy below philosophy and theology. It may be tempting to dismiss the medieval hierarchy as an example of pre-modern ignorance. Before too quickly discounting it, consider first the following explanation behind the ordering provided by Thomas Aquinas, one of the greatest theologian-philosophers of the Middle Ages: “Lower sciences,” Aquinas writes, “presuppose conclusions proved in the higher sciences.”

And that’s about it: philosophy and theology (“natural philosophy” is just another word for “science”). Neil doesn’t mention literature or art or music or any of the other classic but bogus “ways of knowing.” (I’m not denigrating these areas, but claiming, as I did in my book, that they are ways of feeling rather than ways of knowing.)

Again, it’s extremely telling that despite Neil’s repeated claim that “science is not the only form of knowledge,” he cannot give us a single example of “knowledge” that comes from outside science. That alone invalidates this part of his argument.

For further discussion of the fallacious “other ways of knowing” claim, read pp. 185-196 of Faith Versus Fact, and for a longer discussion of the scientism canard, read pages 196-224—a section that goes over many of the issues discussed by Neil as well as the Winegards.

 

Massimo Pigliucci goes after “scientism” for the umpteenth time

February 1, 2019 • 1:15 pm

Here we have philosophy professor Massimo Pigliucci speaking about scientism at last year’s CSIcon in Las Vegas; his title is “The variety of scientisms and the limits of science.” There are several talks recently posted from this meeting, which I think is the successor to Randi’s “The Amazing Meeting”, and I’ll highlight a few of them in the coming days.

Pigliucci has been preoccupied with scientism for a while. I suspect that, in part, it’s because he changed fields from biology to philosophy and wants to defend his turf against scientists who unfairly denigrate philosophy. (His examples of transgressors are Neil deGrasse Tyson, Steven Weinberg, and Lawrence Krauss).

Pigliucci’s examples of scientism include Sam Harris’s claim that science can give us objective answers to moral questions (I agree); that scientists unnecessarily denigrate philosophy when they actually do use philosophy in their work (I agree in part, although academic philosophy is largely useless to scientists); and that evolutionary psychologists commit scientism when they go beyond the bounds of evidence. Here I don’t agree. While I’m a critic of “flabby” evolutionary psychology, unsupported assertions are just that: making up hypothesis that transcend the evidence, a practice that’s not limited to evolutionary psychology but can be found in many areas of biology. Pigliucci also drags in 80-year-old eugenics pamphlets in his effort to show that “science does damage.” Well yes, it surely did, but we don’t do that any more, and you won’t find many scientists urging sterilization of the “feeble-minded.”

Pigliucci is concerned with the “demarcation” problem: not only distinguishing science from pseudoscience, but also from non-science (he considers “scientism” to be the extension of science into realms where it’s inappropriate). And his discussion has value.  But I was put off by the usual Coyne-dissing that Pigliucci commits in discussing scientism: making fun of my claim that plumbers, car mechanics, and electricians are practicing a kind of science when they try to solve empirical problems like “where does this leak come from?” or “why is this red light flashing on the dashboard”? His words:

One of my favorite villains here is my alter ego or archenemy—whatever you want to call him—Jerry Coyne, who actually went so far to say that plumbing is about the same as science. . . . Okay, well then, I can go to the National Science Foundation with my plumber and get some hundreds of millions of dollars to do some research on plumbing. Coyne’s clearly trying to extend the definition of science to anything that has to do with thinking straight about facts.

This isn’t true; that’s not what I’m trying to do.  What I’ve explained, especially in Faith Versus Fact, is that when plumbers or electricians or car mechanics investigate these problems, making and testing hypotheses, they are using tools from the toolkit of science and for all practical purposes, acting like scientists. I am not saying they are scientists, for crying out loud. They are simply using the empirical method that underlies scientific investigations.  Since Pigliucci defines science as “what scientists do,” then by definition plumbers and electricians and car mechanics cannot do science.

Well, fine. I will go along with Pigliucci’s definition, so long as he realizes that my discussion was aimed not at demarcating science from non-science, but in demarcating the empirical method (a method that has succeeded in telling us how the universe works) from “other ways of knowing”—things like literature, art, theology, revelation, and woo—that do not use the empirical method yet still, some say, tell us truths about the universe. I am trying to distinguish real “ways of knowing” from fake “ways of knowing”.

Indeed, later on in the talk, Pigliucci claims that science is a toolbox, a kit of empirical methods. He also asserts that science “grades into or is continuous with other disciplines”, like philosophy, mathematics, and social science. So why doesn’t it grade into some types of plumbing and car mechanics, methods that use tools from the scientific toolbox?

I’m not trying to say that his talk is worthless, but it’s not as valuable as Pigliucci thinks it is, especially because he’s been making these points for decades. Yes, some of what he says needs to be heard, like the claim that “there is no fixed scientific method.” But in the end, after watching this talk, I feel as if I’ve ordered a meal and have been served a Pavlova: a dessert that looks good but lacks substance and stomach-filling ability.

I’m certainly not one of those scientists who think that philosophy is worthless (and yes, I have read philosophy, though in the talk Pigliucci makes fun of scientists who haven’t). But in general I don’t think academic philosophy has affected science much. Surely scientists practice philosophy on their own (think of the arguments between Bohr and Einstein), but have they benefited from the lucubrations of academic philosophers writing for the academy? Not as much as Pigliucci thinks.

I’ve never considered Pigliucci my “archenemy” (I’d reserve that term for creationists like Michael Egnor), and I’m surprised that he sees me as his when we largely agree on most things. Our only difference, I think, is in what we consider “science.” But we’d agree on what methods give us reliable knowledge about the universe and what methods don’t; and that, to me, is the important thing. So I’ll write this off as a form of sexual selection: a male sage grouse puffing up his chest and leaping into the air. The grouse jumps, but the caravan moves on.

Ways of Knowing: my talk in Bangalore

December 28, 2017 • 1:36 am

Here’s the full content of yesterday’s talk in Bangalore, “Ways of Knowing: Science versus Everything Else”, along with the questions at the end. Due to my poor hearing and occasional inability to make out Indian-accented English, I had to ask for some help in translating a few questions.

It was livestreamed but is now on YouTube. It was delivered at the Indian Academy of Sciences as part of an outreach program that has just been initiated by a number of Indian scientists.

I won’t listen to this, as I hate hearing my own talks, but it did create a great deal of discussion among the audience, which continued for an hour at tea after the talk. The older folk were more resistant to the notion that religion was not a way of knowing anything true about the cosmos, but many students came up to me after the talk and expressed sympathy with my viewpoint. By and large, and as in America, it appears that most Indian scientists are nonbelievers.

If it’s a bad talk, please don’t tell me!

Amitabh Joshi, who introduced me, was my host at the Nehru Institute in Bangalore.

Oy! Rebecca Goldstein versus Professor Ceiling Cat (Emeritus)

July 12, 2017 • 10:30 am

I am doubly aggrieved this morning, for even us battle-hardened website bosses can be hurt, especially when it’s by a friend. Or at least I thought philosopher Rebecca Goldstein was a friend, as our relations have always been amiable and I’ve admired her work. So I was hurt when I discovered yesterday, by accident, that she took after me big time for being a prime example of  a “philosophy-jeering scientist.” This was in a piece posted about a year ago at The Big Think, in which Jag Bhalla interviews Goldstein about the purview of philosophy. In the third bit of the interview, “What’s behind a science vs. philosophy fight?“, Goldstein levels some severe criticisms at scientists who diss philosophy, claiming that those scientists don’t even understand philosophy or what its task is. And I’m the prime example of such a jeerer. I’m a bit hurt that she never told me she published this, as it’s my own custom, when I criticize a friend in a piece of writing, to let them know I’ve done it. But let’s leave that aside and get to the arguments.

Now Rebecca does a very good job in explaining what philosophy is good for: she says it’s to “maximize coherence”. By that she means the logic and reason of philosophy is good for dispelling incoherent or inconsistent arguments—a method pioneered by Socrates and now given his name.  She also agrees that philosophy has nothing to say about the truth of the natural world, for that’s not its job.  But, she adds, it can contribute to our understanding of the real world by helping scientists ponder the implications of their theories, as they did when quantum mechanics was being formulated.

I agree with all that! In fact, I’ve said precisely that. My latest take on the value of philosophy, in a critical post about Bill Nye, says pretty much what Goldstein said. My words:

My own view is that philosophy is valuable in adjudicating questions about morality and politics, and has also contributed, though to a lesser degree, to the progress of science. Since philosophy specializes in clear thinking and logic, and examining arguments through “thought experiments,” it’s helped clarify our thinking about moral issues (i.e., the trolley problem, abortion, our duty to those less fortunate), political issues (viz., Mill’s On Liberty and The Subjection of Women), and religious issues (I’ve long maintained that Plato’s Euthyphro argument is one of the best contributions of philosophy to thinking about God).

What about science? Well, some philosophers like Dan Dennett and Phil Kitcher have applied their professional skills to discussions of evolution and sociobiology, and have made very real contributions to scientists’ thinking about those issues. Indeed, both of those men have a strong scientific mindset, a mindset sufficient to criticize scientific ideas in a useful way. Their contributions aren’t all that different from the Gedankenexperimentsmade by Einstein and Niels Bohr, for instance, in their epic battle about the meaning of quantum mechanics. Philosophy plays a substantial role in interpreting quantum mechanics and other issues in modern physics, whether or not physicists like Lawrence Krauss admit it (he’s a big detractor of philosophy). Nye doesn’t touch on any of this; it’s above his pay grade.

I will claim that philosophy by itself cannot tell us anything new about nature. It can help us do that using its powers of logic and analysis, but ultimately it is science—reasoned and testable observations of nature that produce provisional “truth”—that must tell us about the nature of the cosmos. But that’s not philosophy’s bailiwick, for the field involves ways of thinking about problems, not telling us what’s real. And it’s none the worse for that.

Now granted, this was in July 5, nearly a year after Rebecca’s post, but my position has been pretty much the same all along. And given that I expressed it in a small meeting that Rebecca and I went to a few years ago, she should know that (it’s also in Faith versus Fact, published two years ago.) And yes, there are some scientists who don’t seem to appreciate the value of any philosophy, for scientists or anyone else: these seem to include Lawrence Krauss and Neil deGrasse Tyson, and it’s clear that I disagree with them. But in the Big Think article I’m touted as the Prime Miscreant among their ranks.

First comes a supposed demolition of my argument that philosophy, like math, is not a “way of knowing”. I’ve carefully defined what I meant by that, in Faith versus Fact and elsewhere, as “ways of knowing what’s true about the natural world and cosmos.” I’ve argued, for instance, that math tells us a kind of truth, but a truth about the consequences of its assumptions. Goldstein agrees with me, saying this

 Now whatever it is that philosophy is trying to do (and it’s notoriously difficult to make this clear) it isn’t trying to compete with the empirical sciences.  If it were, it would be just as deluded as the philosophy-jeerers say it is.

. . . Mathematics is a prime example of non-empirical knowledge that is, unassailably, knowledge.  But its aprioricity comes at a price—namely its truths are all necessarily true, which means they describes all possible worlds, and therefore don’t give us knowledge about our specific world, the way the sciences do. The sciences use mathematics to express their truths, but the truths themselves are discovered empirically.

Now what is a scientist “philosophy jeerer”? Goldstein explains:

And a good part of the reason why philosophy-jeerers presume that philosophy must be trying to compete with the physical sciences is that they just can’t imagine any useful intellectual work that doesn’t lead to knowledge as they know it, which is knowledge of physical reality achieved by way of the empirical sciences, with a methodology requiring that theories, no matter how abstract, ultimately be subjected to testing so that our wrong-headed intuitions can be corrected.

Whatever that is, it surely isn’t me, and doesn’t resemble anything I said.

And indeed, all I’ve claimed, when saying philosophy isn’t a “way of knowing,” though it’s very useful to ethicists, scientists, and the average person, is that philosophy can’t tell us what’s true about the cosmos. I was simply including philosophy on a list of things that people have claimed are “ways of knowing” that compete with science, and trying to clarify that, like literature, math, and religion, philosophy can’t tell us anything about what’s true in the natural universe.

But Goldstein apparently thinks I’m trying to say something deeper. Here’s part of her conversation with Bhalla:

JB: I’m reminded of David Sloan Wilson’s observation that “philosophy gave birth to the sciences and parental care is still required” and that “it is the job of philosophers to think clearly about concepts.” That’s a yawning chasm from biologist Jerry Coyne’s response to Blachowicz—“Neither philosophy nor poetry are ‘ways of knowing’… it’s not the business of either to find out truth.” And I’m particularly interested in philosophy’s practice of rigorous non-numeric logic. The “highly quantified” thinking that Blachowicz says scientists typically rely on, doesn’t seem to capture all useful truths (they’re not all in “the numbers”). And hard though it may be, can you say more about what philosophers seek to do?

RNG: Well, before going on to say what it is that philosophy does, the kind of intellectual work it performs, I’d like to spend a bit of time with Coyne’s statement, because it so beautifully demonstrates what philosophy-jeering scientists don’t get. I’m surprised that Coyne, who understands his own field, evolutionary biology, so well and gets quite annoyed when outsiders lodge non-sophisticated objections against evolution, would make such a non-sophisticated statement about another field. I suspect it was made in haste, before he’d thought through the implications.

JB: Please, do point out Coyne’s hasty misstep.

RNG: Coyne’s statement would be absolutely correct if it were understood to read: “It’s not the business of either [philosophy or poetry] to find out truths about physical reality.” Coyne would be on safe ground there, damnably safe, because that statement isn’t only true but trivially true. It’s about as informative as saying that it’s not the business of firefighters, qua firefighters, to choreograph ballets (especially with their full gear and boots on).  [JAC: my emphasis]. But if you don’t understand Coyne’s statement to be asserting this trivially true proposition, then what you have is a proposition that’s not only false but self-falsifying, because it is itself a philosophical claim. So if it’s true, then it’s false, which is just about as false as you can get.  Coyne has demonstrated, in only a couple of sentences, the philosophy-jeerer’s tendency to bumble his way into philosophy without realizing it.  And this is because of the difficulty in making clear what it is that philosophy does.

JB: So philosophers know they’re not doing science, but some vocal scientists don’t know they’re doing philosophy! And that brings us back to what it is that philosophy does.

RNG: Perhaps the most effective way to try to say what philosophy does, and how it makes headway, is to simply point to an example of philosophical work.  And we have an example close to hand, because what I was just doing, in going to work on Coyne’s statement, was a paradigmatic philosophical exercise: closely analyzing what a proposition could mean, distinguishing various possible meanings, each with its own corresponding truth-conditions, and then showing that, under the analysis, the proposition collapses into incoherence.

This is what bothers me. First, I am by no means, nor have ever been, a “philosophy jeering scientist.” Second the statement that I made is indeed the one in bold that Goldstein considers “trivially true.” Well, perhaps it is to a practicing philosopher like her, but not to the general public, who thinks that science is only one “way of knowing” what’s true about the universe, and that philosophy, math, literature, and religion are others. Perhaps it’s trivially true to Goldstein, but I think needs “unpacking” for the layperson.

The rest of her argument I don’t quite understand, and perhaps readers can explain it to me—as well as telling me how Goldstein has construed my “trivially true” statement in a new and different way that falsifies it. If I was indeed doing philosophy, and my statement was “true and trivially true”, what’s the beef?

So my second tsouris comes from being misunderstood. Yes, a trained philosopher could parse and interpret my statement so that it “collapses into incoherence,” but I’m not responsible for that parsing.

Enough. Perhaps I seem defensive, but so does Rebecca.  The rest of what she says is, as usual, very good, and I’ll quote her here on the value of philosophy:

The kind of progress philosophy is after isn’t the same as the progress sought by the empirical sciences, namely to discover the nature of physical reality.  And it isn’t the same as the progress sought by mathematics, which aims to discover conceptual truths about abstract structures. Rather, it’s a kind of progress that has to do with us, the complicated reason-giving creatures that we are. Philosophy is trying to maximize our coherence. We are creatures who happily coexist with many inconsistencies, and it’s the business of philosophy to make that coexistence a less happy one.  Philosophers pay careful attention to what’s being asserted, separating out different possible meanings with their associated truth conditions, forcing hidden premises out into the open and probing the arguments and intuitions behind them, laying out the range of possibilities revealed when you’re forced to justify your inferences, which often reveal new possibilities that are worth pursuing in their own right. And sometimes these possibilities feed new scientific research (as philosophical analysis opened the way for interpretations of quantum mechanics beyond the “Copenhagen interpretation” of Niels Bohr) or even mathematical research (the incompleteness theorems of Kurt Gödel are a good example) or they help us to make moral progress, as when our general ethical intuitions concerning the rights and dignity of human beings were philosophically demonstrated to be incompatible with, say, the practices of slavery. Maximizing coherence has been the job description of philosophy ever since Socrates wandered the agora making a general nuisance of himself by subjecting his fellow citizens to the kind of interrogation that revealed their inconsistencies and incoherencies. It’s not surprising that the reductio-ad-absurdum was the form of argument to which Socrates most frequently resorted, and it’s distinctively of that type of reasoning that you call non-numeric logic.  And it’s useful intellectual work to do, this attempt to maximize our coherence, at least if you value truth, as the philosophy-jeerers so clearly do.

 

NY Times hires science disser as op-ed writer

May 4, 2017 • 10:00 am

Late last month, the New York Times hired conservative Bret Stephens as an op-ed writer. Only 43 years old, Stephens had previously worked at the Wall Street Journal, where he won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 2013.

While Stephens isn’t an out-and-out denialist of global warming, he’s always tried to minimize its potential effects on our planet. As Physics Today wrote in 2013:

As recently as November 2011, in a column headlined ‘The great global warming fizzle,’ Stephens described ‘the case of global warming’ as a ‘system of doomsaying prophecy and faith in things unseen’ that, like religion, ‘is susceptible to the earthly temptations of money, power, politics, arrogance and deceit.’

Stephens doesn’t appear to reject outright the data on temperature rise, or even the finding that humans are involved. But he energetically mocks warnings as hysterical alarmism. In a 2008 column he wrote with a smirk:

“What manner the catastrophe might take isn’t yet clear, but the scenarios are grim: The climate crisis is getting worse faster than anticipated; global warming will cause refugee crises and destabilize entire nations…. And so on.”

In December 2009, he published on the incident that he and others framed with the loaded term climategate. He charged that it involved ‘some of the world’s leading climate scientists working in tandem to block freedom of information requests, blackball dissenting scientists, manipulate the peer-review process, and obscure, destroy or massage inconvenient temperature data.’ That column carried the headline ‘Climategate: Follow the money’ and the subhead ‘Climate change researchers must believe in the reality of global warming just as a priest must believe in the existence of God.’

They added that Stephens “has a record of indicting climate scientists through mockery.”

And indeed, in his very first column,”Climate of complete certainty” (April 28), Stephens continues this gambit, mocking not anthropogenic climate change, which he actually admits, but science itself, which, he says, has given us false certainty about the phenomenon. This is a confusing message, for it gives denialist readers some ammunition not just against climate change, but against the science that has ferreted out its existence and cause. Climate scientists, he argues, have, like other scientists with convincing data, “descen[ded] to certitude, and certitude begets hubris.”  In other words, he’s indicting science for being arrogant and giving a false idea of certainty. And just as surely, that gives ammunition and hope to denialists.

First, his admissions:

The science is settled. The threat is clear. Isn’t this one instance, at least, where 100 percent of the truth resides on one side of the argument?

and

None of this is to deny climate change or the possible severity of its consequences.

But then he goes on to undercut both the nature of the threat and the “certainty” of science itself using these arguments (quotes from the article are in quotation marks):

  • Polls and experts were virtually certain that Hillary Clinton would win the election, showing the fallacy of certainty.

    “When Bill Clinton suggested to his wife’s advisers that, considering Brexit, they might be underestimating the strength of the populist tide, the campaign manager, Robby Mook, had a bulletproof answer: The data run counter to your anecdotes.

    That detail comes from “Shattered,” Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes’s compulsively readable account of Clinton’s 2016 train wreck. Mook belonged to a new breed of political technologists with little time for retail campaigning and limitless faith in the power of models and algorithms to minimize uncertainty and all but predict the future.

    There’s a lesson here. We live in a world in which data convey authority. But authority has a way of descending to certitude, and certitude begets hubris. From Robert McNamara to Lehman Brothers to Stronger Together, cautionary tales abound.

We ought to know this by now, but we don’t. Instead, we respond to the inherent uncertainties of data by adding more data without revisiting our assumptions, creating an impression of certainty that can be lulling, misleading and often dangerous. Ask Clinton.

With me so far? Good. Let’s turn to climate change.”

The analogy to Clinton is flawed: scientists don’t take polls, we make testable predictions about climate, our “data” don’t consist of asking people what they’ll do (some of whom have motivations to lie), and the effects of global warming are already clear. Yes, polls can be wrong, and so can science, but that says nothing about whether the data supporting climate change are convincing. They are (see here, for instance). He adduces no evidence against climate change, but simply is telling readers to be deeply suspicious of science, as if science were the equivalent of a political poll.

  • Climate scientists falsely convey an attitude of complete certainty, demonizing opponents as lunatics and moral inferiors.

“Anyone who has read the 2014 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change knows that, while the modest (0.85 degrees Celsius, or about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit) warming of the earth since 1880 is indisputable, as is the human influence on that warming, much else that passes as accepted fact is really a matter of probabilities. That’s especially true of the sophisticated but fallible models and simulations by which scientists attempt to peer into the climate future. To say this isn’t to deny science. It’s to acknowledge it honestly.

By now I can almost hear the heads exploding. They shouldn’t, because there’s another lesson here — this one for anyone who wants to advance the cause of good climate policy. As Revkin wisely noted, hyperbole about climate “not only didn’t fit the science at the time but could even be counterproductive if the hope was to engage a distracted public.”

Let me put it another way. Claiming total certainty about the science traduces the spirit of science and creates openings for doubt whenever a climate claim proves wrong. Demanding abrupt and expensive changes in public policy raises fair questions about ideological intentions. Censoriously asserting one’s moral superiority and treating skeptics as imbeciles and deplorables wins few converts.”

First, no scientist ever says they have the absolute truth. A spirit of openness toward conflicting data is in fact part of the true spirit of science (of course we’re humans, and that’s not the spirit of some scientists!). We always operate on probabilities, making the best inference we can from data. Yes, the data supporting climate change may be wrong, but the likelihood of that is very small. We do not have “total certainty”, but we have enough assurance to begin to take the problem very seriously and try to do something about it. (Stephens cavalierly dismisses climate-change models as “sophisticated and fallible”, as if they are surely wrong.)  But what is the “hyperbole” that Stephens is talking about?

And really, “ideological intentions” underlie our desire to prevent the destruction of our planet? Why would scientists have a bias against finding climate change and an ideology that prompts them to lie about its possible disasterous effects? How would we benefit from that? As for making “few converts”, nearly half of all Americans already accept anthropogenic global warming, not a bad figure given that its disastrous effects aren’t yet clearly visible to the average person.

Further, surely the opposition to global warming is not based on scientists’ supposed “moral superiority”—no more than opposition to evolution (as strong in America as is opposition to climate change) does not rest on evolutionists acting “morally superior.” It’s based on religion; just as climate change is based on secular faith or wish-thinking that “everything’s all right.”

The parallels between Stephens’s attitude and Americans’ denial of evolution becomes clear at the end when he makes his last argument:

  • The “total certainty” evinced by scientists in general degrades their credibility.

“None of this is to deny climate change or the possible severity of its consequences. But ordinary citizens also have a right to be skeptical of an overweening scientism. They know — as all environmentalists should — that history is littered with the human wreckage of scientific errors married to political power.

I’ve taken the epigraph for this column* [JAC: see below] from the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz, who knew something about the evils of certitude. Perhaps if there had been less certitude and more second-guessing in Clinton’s campaign, she’d be president. Perhaps if there were less certitude about our climate future, more Americans would be interested in having a reasoned conversation about it.”

We see here that Stephens’s real objection is not science, but “scientism,” normally taken to be the extension of science into areas where it supposedly doesn’t belong, but to Stephens it’s a form of scientific arrogance.

But there is no scientist who would say that we are absolutely certain about climate change, or about evolution, either. Stephens is tilting at a windmill. The best data available tell us that both pheomena are real, and the probability we are wrong is very, very low. Yes, we could both be wrong, but Stephens is using that very small possibility to do down science as a whole and—let’s face it—to give heart to climate-change denialists.

The Washington Post which is owned by the New York Times, has written a critique of Stephens’s column, as has Slate.  The Post‘s piece in particularly good at pointing out the ambiguities and misstatements in Stephen’s column. They asked the Times’s editorial-page boss James Bennett, responsible for overseeing Stephens’s column, to respond to their critique, and got this response, which they call “Editorial Page Editor’s Boilerplate Kumbaya Response to Public Outrage”:

If all of our columnists and all of our contributors and all of our editorials agreed all of the time, we wouldn’t be promoting the free exchange of ideas, and we wouldn’t be serving our readers very well.

The crux of the matter here is whether the questions Bret’s raising and the positions he’s taking are outside the bounds of reasonable discussion. I don’t think a fair reading of his column remotely supports that conclusion — quite the opposite, actually. He’s capturing and contributing to a vitally important debate, and engaging that debate directly helps each of us clarify what we think. We’re already getting some spirited and constructive responses, and I’m looking forward to reflecting those views in our pages, too.

A “fair reading” of Stephens’s column shows that he’s concluding that science can’t be trusted in general, and perhaps for climate change as well—at least as far as the certainty of the phenomenon is concerned.

In hiring Stephens and allowing him to spew anti-science rhetoric as opinion, the Times is doing the equivalent of publishing an evolution-criticizing piece by a closet creationist. To see that, just rewrite Stephens’s column, but substitute “evolution” for “climate change”. Would such a piece merit inclusion on the paper’s op-ed page?

__________________

*[Column epigraph]

When someone is honestly 55 percent right, that’s very good and there’s no use wrangling. And if someone is 60 percent right, it’s wonderful, it’s great luck, and let him thank God.

But what’s to be said about 75 percent right? Wise people say this is suspicious. Well, and what about 100 percent right? Whoever says he’s 100 percent right is a fanatic, a thug, and the worst kind of rascal.

— An old Jew of Galicia

Two creationists and an anti-“scientism” advocate write in

October 10, 2016 • 9:00 am

This is just a small selection of some recent comments that didn’t make it below the fold, but are being displayed in prime time here. I can either ban the writers (creationists and science-dissers usually get automatic bans), or can moderate them and let you do battle. Remember, though, that the chances they’ll change their minds is exactly ZERO, and I don’t really like the “chew toy” approach to comments.

All comment are reproduced exactly as submitted.

First, we have a comment from reader “Bill” In reply to jaxkayaker on the post “Evolution denialism by Pence“. I put this one first because the comment about bacteria, bananas, and horses is hilarious (my emphasis):

when you say evolution is true what are talking about? You mean all of what some scientists claim is true without a doubt? Yes, bacteria mutates but it is still bacteria. It is not a horse or a banana. You don’t see it changing all you can do is assume or guess but certainly you cannot fault somebody for questioning it or doubting it. I do understand that the fossils we have show from primitive to more recent depending on how far you dig but I do not see how that proves or even implies common ancestry. So some evolution that we observe is obviously true but going back from the beginning of life is a stretch.

Here we have the usual “we have microevolution but not macroevolution”. The response to that, or to the Ray Comfort claim that we need to see macroevolution happening in real time, is that such a claim is fatuous. First, we do see macroevolution in the fossil record and “Bill” admits it (“I do understand that the fossils we have show from primitive to more recent depending on how far you dig”). This is the slam-dunk refutation of the “microevolution happens but not macroevolution” claim. As for seeing a bacteria evolve into a banana in real time, well, that’s just idiotic.

The claim that we can see change from primitive to more recent forms in the fossil record is true: we have such progressions showing early mammal-like reptiles evolving into reptiles, theropod reptiles evolving into birds, and land-dwelling artiodactyls evolving into whales. (There are many more, as you can see in WEIT.) What Bill doesn’t realize is that this progression does gives evidence for common ancestry, for the earlier versions of these transitional forms resemble more strongly the proposed common ancestor. Early feathered dinosaurs evolved into more-feathered, flying dinosaurs (aka birds), and that gives evidence that modern reptiles and birds share a common ancestry. Early hominins are more like arboreal, small-brained primate ancestors than are later hominins. It’s not rocket science to see that the nature of transitional forms over time gives evidence for common ancestry, but I guess Bill isn’t close to being a rocket scientist.

*********

Reader “John” tried to leave this comment on my post “Reflections on the tenth anniversary of The God Delusion“:

Why do you try so hard to disprove God with this far fetched lunacy. We can not have evolved the odds of winning the lottery every week for you life time are more likely.
If you really were as well educated as some of you think you are, you would question the lodgic of this theory.
You are too amazing to have evolved.
Come up with something better.

“You are too amazing to have evolved” would make a nice creationist tee shirt. I can’t resist adding that although this comment needs no refutation, were the reader educated, he or she would be able to write and spell properly.

**********

Reader “Blackstone” tried to leave this comment on my post “Second most popular TED talk of all time, on power posing, disavowed by senior author“:

Enlightenment methodology applied to human psychology, society and spirituality is farcical and worse than useless — it is a weapon of mass destruction.

The universe revealed by science is a bleak wasteland of atoms in a void that offers humanity no hope, no meaning and no guidance. Scientism applied to human beings is leading to mass depression, drug addiction, obesity, techno-idolatry and other symptoms of the massive spiritual void created by the Enlightenment cult. This cult has terrorized mankind long enough; it’s time to reign [sic] them in and end their reign of terror!

Indeed, “Blackstone” is right in one way: the universe itself, as revealed by science, offers humanity no hope, meaning, or guidance—for that kind of guidance can come only from humans themselves, not from the laws of physics. (I’d add, though, that the Universe offers meaning by revealing the working of physical law and its consistency over time and space.) As for scientism causing mass depression, drug addiction, obesity (really??), techno-idolatry and other horrors of secularism, well, that’s just wrong. Scientism is a canard anyway, as even secular countries like Denmark and Sweden aren’t grossly dysfunctional.

But let’s check one claim: that atheistic countries (I take “scientism” as being correlated with “atheism”) tend to be countries with more obese inhabitants. Here are maps from a 2014 survey by the World Health Organization showing the degree of obesity in different countries (first men and then women. The lighter yellow countries are those with few obese people, and obesity increases as one goes from yellow to orange to red:

screen-shot-2015-01-22-at-10-27-46-am

screen-shot-2015-01-22-at-10-27-56-am

Not much data here to show a correlation between scientism and obesity, except insofar as sub-Saharan countries are religious, as we know, and also less obese. But that’s because they don’t have enough food! And look at atheistic China—inhabitants skinny as rails. In contrast, look at the U.S.—the most religious of First World countries—compared to Northern Europe—far more atheistic. Except for the UK (too many chips and beer!), the U.S. and Canada (too much poutine!) are fatter than the inhabitants of nearly every European country! Mexicans, religious as they are, should surely be skinnier than Americans and Canadians, but the women aren’t. And the biggest exception is the Middle East and North Africa. especially for women: deeply religious Muslims and yet still prone to obesity. I had no idea that Saudi, Iraqui, Egyptian, Tunisian, Algerian, Iranian, and Turkish women were that overweight. Remember, too, that women tend to be more religious than men in the same country, and so should be skinnier.

Now I haven’t plotted a correlation between obesity and unbelief among countries, but if one exists, and I doubt it, then it would surely be mediated through poverty: poor countries tend to be more religious, and poor countries tend to have fewer obese people. It’s not the secularism that causes obesity, it’s the higher well-being, which, by and large, is correlated with nonbelief.  The U.S. would be a glaring exception to the “secularism causes obesity rule”, for we’re religious and overweight.

But let’s leave aside the stupid claims about the perfidies of scientism. The US, Canada, Mexico, Australia, Russia, and the Middle East need to slim down. 25% of the population being obese is surely a serious public health problem; but it’s one that “scientism” can help solve!

At last: a rational thinker at “The Stone”

July 18, 2016 • 10:00 am

Over the years I’ve repeatedly documented the wooly thinking, religious apologetics, and general mushbrain-y analysis at “The Stone”, a philosophy blog at the New York Times. But very rarely the editors will deign to let a rationalist or—horrors!—an atheist have a column. And today it’s Duke University philosopher Alex Rosenberg, who is about the most “militant” atheist—and “hardest” determinist—I know. You may have read his 2011 book The Atheist’s Guide to Reality, a defense of scientism that had the honor of being named “the worst book of the year” by Leon Wieseltier. I thought it was a pretty good book, though a bit tendentious, but certainly much better than all the tripe that passes as criticism of “scientism” (Wieseltier has purveyed some of that stomach lining).

Rosenberg’s theme is the fallibility of our thinking that consciousness produces absolutely accurate information about our actions, thoughts, and motivations. He maintains that this is wrong: just as when we exercise our “theory of mind,” imputing beliefs, intentions, or motivations to others, so that faculty is equally fallible when turned upon ourselves. Certainly our feeling of being a free agent consciously willing an action, and thereby bringing it about, is wrong, as many experiments have no shown, and as I’ve discussed endlessly. Rosenberg goes a bit further:

We never have direct access to our thoughts. As Peter Carruthers first argued, self-consciousness is just mind reading turned inward.

How do we know this? Well, Hume would have answered that introspection tells us so. But that won’t wash for experimental scientists. They demand evidence. Some of it comes from the fMRI work that established the existence of a distinct mind-reading module, more from autistic children, whose deficits in explaining and predicting the behavior of others come together with limitations on self-awareness and self-reporting of their own motivations. Patients suffering from schizophrenia manifest deficiencies in both other-mind reading and self-mind reading. If these two capacities were distinct one would expect at least some autistic children and schizophrenics to manifest one of these capacities without the other.

That we read our own minds the same way we read other minds is evident in what cognitive science tells us about consciousness and working memory — the dual imagistic and silent-speech process that we employ to calculate, decide, choose among options “immediately before the mind.”

. . . The upshot of all these discoveries is deeply significant, not just for philosophy, but for us as human beings: There is no first-person point of view.

Our access to our own thoughts is just as indirect and fallible as our access to the thoughts of other people. We have no privileged access to our own minds. If our thoughts give the real meaning of our actions, our words, our lives, then we can’t ever be sure what we say or do, or for that matter, what we think or why we think it.

Philosophers’ claims that by reflecting on itself thought reliably reveals our nature, grounds knowledge, gives us free will, endows our behavior with moral value, are all challenged. And the threat doesn’t stem from some tendentious scientistic worldview. It emerges from the detailed understanding of the mind that cognitive science and neuroscience are providing.

There’s considerable merit in this argument, though I’ll be thinking more about it. But to the extent that Rosenberg is right, it puts the lie to the claim that introspection itself can give us truths as reliable as those obtained by “scientific” methods: empirical observation, prediction, and corroboration by others. Introspection is by definition an uncorroborated process, and if you make a claim about the nature of reality based on introspection alone, there’s no reason to trust it. Even when you say, “I’m hungry”, you may be wrong; the only truth there is that your consciousness tells you that you feel hungry. But of course your eyes could be bigger than your stomach.  One of my favorite quotes, by former pastor Mike Aus, expresses this nicely:

When I was working as a pastor I would often gloss over the clash between the scientific world view and the perspective of religion. I would say that the insights of science were no threat to faith because science and religion are “different ways of knowing” and are not in conflict because they are trying to answer different questions. Science focuses on “how” the world came to be, and religion addresses the question of “why” we are here. I was dead wrong. There are not different ways of knowing. There is knowing and not knowing, and those are the only two options in this world.