So Larry has responded. Go read it. I’ll wait….
Back? Good. Let me address some of the points there. Not all of them, because most of them I have already addressed in previous posts. I’ll link them at the end of this one. But the most important ones.
The first and most important one is that Larry agrees with me about “begging the question”. This is good. It means we are both prescriptivists with respect to technical terminology and that gives us a common foundation. It also means Larry has impeccable sensibilities.
He says that he is unaware of any scientist who argues that philosophy is to be rejected or denigrated because it isn’t scientific. And yet, in a case of apparent self-unawareness, that is exactly the view he has been pushing for some time, and it is also the view that Mlodinow and Hawking, Krauss and other scientists have also been pushing for a while now. I think of it, and we can call it, the Feynman Position (“philosophers are to science as ornithologists are to birds”). It is inherent in the books by Victor Stenger (The God Hypothesis) and Dawkins’ own books. Philosophy is fine if it agrees that religion is irrational or something not to be taken seriously. But when it dares to suggest that we might consider a view, like guided evolution by God, in order to determine whether or not a theist must of necessity be anti-Darwinian (and that given that Darwinian evolution is a fact we have thereby discredited theism), as Elliot Sober has done, then that is the idiocy and arrogance of philosophy!
I have argued exactly along the lines Sober (and Ruse, and many others) have done: there is a conceptual coherence between at least one kind of providentialism and Darwinian evolution. Am I therefore arrogant? None of these philosophers – exactly none of them – have ever argued that facts are open to negotiation by religious or conceptual worldview. They are all very much pro-science. Sober has even written many books defending the inferential and conceptual coherence of Darwinian evolution, especially of natural selection. So if they think facts are facts, and that evolution occurs, what harm is there in considering whether someone who is religious might be able to hold theism and Darwinian evolution with all its accidents and contingencies simultaneously?
There is only one real reason why this might arouse Larry’s and the others’ ire: theism is false and so arguments that show someone might be a good scientist and religious are pernicious. In short, this is about accommodationism, which Larry has often railed against before. Religion and science are simply not, he says, compatible in any fashion. If a philosopher who is not religious, like Michael Ruse or Elliot Sober or Massimo Pigliucci, or someone as innocuous as me holds that they might be, we are anti science at heart. We are arrogant. We are foolish.
But a philosopher must proceed on what has come to be known as the Principle of Charity, and to argue with others as if they were at least trying to be reasonable. We cannot presume ab initio that our preferred view is right. Maybe religion and science are not only compatible, but even need each other. I don’t think so, but I can’t begin an argument on that presumption. To do so would undercut the very idea of reasoned discourse. The principle of charity requires us to reconstruct our interlocutor’s position and argument in the best possible fashion on the assumption they are honest and intelligent, and to argue against that (or be convinced, if it turns out the argument succeeds). Neither Larry nor Coyne seem to do this when considering the religious view.
I am not, I repeat not, arguing for there being “different ways of knowledge” here, although that is an interesting topic in its own right. Larry’s constant repetition of this claim is a red herring. I am not trying to produce knowledge, nor, to my best awareness, have I ever done so, except accidentally and then as a historian of ideas, not as a philosopher. Philosophy does not produce knowledge; that is the job of science. Philosophy examines ways knowledge is claimed to be produced, and the implications of what that knowledge might be for other views we hold. For example, we do not show that free will exists or not. If there is a neurobiological cause of all our actions, then that is the scientific result, and there’s an end to it (until some other science is done that refutes or refines that claim). What the philosopher does with that is try to figure out what, of our prior views on free will, must be abandoned in the light of these results, and what can be retained or revised. It might turn out that, for example, freedom of the will is simply a legal concept, and so we do not need to base it upon causal indeterminacy (my view, by the way). That is not knowledge. That is an argument from knowledge.
I do not know any nonreligious philosophers who argue that religion produces knowledge of a different kind. There may very well be some; not much would surprise me about people’s positions whether they are philosophers or not. But it is hardly the default view in analytic or even in continental philosophy. What philosophy does with such claims is examine them for coherence, ambiguities, and implications. “Suppose”, the atheist philosopher might say, “God reveals himself one way on a Wednesday and another way on a Sunday. Would you still count revelation as knowledge?” The theist philosopher would then have to defend against that point. The atheist philosopher raising the mere possibility is hardly arrogance or denigrating science.
And should that philosopher conclude that the theist’s position is not in contradiction to science or reason, that is not the same thing as advocating that position, any more than a medical finding that a virus causes Coxsackie disease is a claim that it should. If religion is compatible with science (or at any rate some varieties of religion are) then the arguments based on the claim that they aren’t should cease. It doesn’t mean that the philosopher wants religion to continue or that science should be somehow “reconciled” with religion. If religion and knowledge contradict each other, so much the worse for religion. The “accommodation” here is all on the side of religion (and historically, that is how it has played out, only over longer periods than a single lifetime usually. Religion always has to bow to the best available knowledge claims of the day, and has for at least the last 1000 years).
Larry is correct about one thing: the feature of scientists not entertaining contrary views seriously is a general human feature. It is hardly restricted to scientists. However, entertaining contrary views is a fundamental aim of philosophy, whether or not scientists like doing that, or artists, or plumbers, or politicians. Scientists will do this, but usually not from a desire to explore all issues (there are honourable exceptions). Science considers competing views only when they are viable competitors, and rarely extends beyond that. And my point: that is what science does. It can do no other (es kann nicht anders for the theologically informed). That is its nature. We need science to do only this or science would not generally get done.
But we need philosophy to consider views that science thinks are false or foolish, both as counterfactual hypotheticals and as possibly correct views. Also, ideas like “God” strongly test the coherence of our general conceptual equipment at the limit, as it were. Einstein did this, for example, as much as Putnam: what would God see or do. Einstein once wrote:
What I am really interested in, is knowing whether God could have created the world in a different way; in other words, whether the requirement of logical simplicity admits a margin of freedom. (Albert Einstein, quoted in Jammer 1999: 124)
Did this mean Einstein thought God existed or was necessary for science? Not at all, so if it’s okay for Einstein, why not for Sober? Is it because science has changed its attitude to philosophy rather than the other way around? I think so, and have said so before. Philosophy does what it always did: stress test ideas. Scientists now think that is not needed, in part because they are whiggish, in part because they are triumphalist, and in part because they simply do not care (possibly an indictment of our educational curricula).
Finally, because I have some work to get done that I am not paid for, methodological naturalism. Larry thinks, and I quote, “As far as I can tell, philosophers just made this up without ever thinking seriously about the evidence of how scientific thinking actually works outside in the real world.” Really? Methodological naturalism has been the ruling view of science since Thales of Miletus in the 6th century BCE. It is the view that we cannot investigate through natural means what does not follow rules. It is the idea that the sensible world, at any rate, is ruled by laws and regularities. It is the invention of “nature” as an idea.
To reject methodological naturalism is to in effect reject science as a possibility. It is not the claim that there is nothing else, nor is it the claim that science must be restricted to the physical world (at various times scientists have thought the paranormal, the spiritual, and even the theological were amenable to scientific investigation). If Larry thinks that he can scientifically investigate something that has no empirical evidence, I invite him to demonstrate that. In the meantime, any claim that is, as I have often called it, “empirically inoculated” is beyond the scope of science to investigate.
That doesn’t mean that we must accept it as a reasonable claim to hold though. There is a difference between saying “science does not disprove x” and saying “science proves x”. That we cannot show there is no divine hand in evolution is no reason to think there is. Even the most enthusiastic* of theistic evolutionists would concede that. So why is Larry concerned about methodological naturalism? Is it because he wants all knowledge claims to be restricted to scientific claims, and therefore needs to argue that no claim is beyond the scope of scientific investigation? And is that not scientism?**
*The word comes from “in-godded” in a late Greekism.
** Larry can avail himself of many rhetorical questions in an attempt to make me set out his claims so that he can accuse me of setting up straw man. I return the favour.
Links:
- Larry’s first post, with links to Jerry Coyne’s post, and one of Larry’s prior posts about Sober.
- My response.
- His response that I am here responding to.
- My previous attack on anti philosophy by scientists.
- Cat videos.
There are various formulations of religious ideas, like strict deism, which can in principle be made so that they don’t intersect with science. Louis
Deism holds that a Creator made the universe and set it in motion before letting it loose. It isn’t any less incompatible with science than religions that includes the first idea but holds that God’s intention underlies its continued operation. In Deism, the universe operates by God’s motivation, running by God’s rules automatically, in the second case, God continues to operate the universe, as it were. If you don’t like the idea of a universe created by a Creator that controls its operation, you don’t really like deism anymore than anything else.
This idea of “intersection” between science and religion is an example of how constructing geometric representations of situations can be extremely misleading. Especially in this kind of Venn diagram scheme.
Science, by intention and mutual agreement is supposed to exclude anything that can’t be shown to be relevant to the physical character of phenomena. Almost always, today, it is religion that is the subject of exclusion that is discussed, endlessly. What’s odd is that religion is the ONE area of human thought that has been successfully excluded from science, entirely. Economic and class interest are one of the least successfully excluded, though related issues of racism, sexism, political ideology, materialist ideology… those pervade many of the things called “science” today.
Most odd about the Venn conception of non touching circles is that the rules of Religion don’t keep religious people and even formal religious sects from accepting every, single thing science legitimately tells us about the physical universe. And almost every single religious person accepts some of science, many accept that it provides the most reliable knowledge we have about the physical universe. Some accept way too much that gets called science, especially in the psych-soc-fMRI stuff.
If you’ve got to have some physical symbolism, a room with a swinging door that only opens out is a better one. Science can’t accept information that doesn’t get through the rather narrow door it sets up to limit the content it processes, though anything it says about that narrow range of phenomena is, at times, of enormous use to life outside of that room. Though no one really lives in that room marked “Science”. Scientists have their minds full of stuff that would never get through that door.
Great post!
What I would like is for philosophers to make explicit exactly what kind of religion is compatible with science.
“Scientists will do this [entertaining contrary views], but usually not from a desire to explore all issues (there are honourable exceptions).”
Toning down noted and appreciated, but this is still completely false, at least in my experience. People go into science specifically _because_ of a desire to explore all issues. Technically minded people who lack that desire go and earn higher salaries elsewhere. On what, exactly, are you basing these claims/accusations?
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“[Methodological naturalism] is the view that we cannot investigate through natural means what does not follow rules. It is the idea that the sensible world, at any rate, is ruled by laws and regularities. It is the invention of “nature” as an idea.”
Any one of those three definitions would be ok (well, the last needs to be supplemented by telling us what you understand under “‘nature’ as an idea”). But please pick _one_.
———-
“If Larry thinks that he can scientifically investigate something that has no empirical evidence, I invite him to demonstrate that.”
Er, wow. Just wow. How do you think phenomena are discovered?
The most well-publicised recent example would be the Higgs boson. We had no empirical evidence, we looked for it, we found it. It is now generally acknowledged to exist.
Then there’s paranormal research. We looked for decades and found no empirical evidence – in situations where _the evidence should have been there_ if commonly hypothesized paranormal hypotheses existed. These phenomena are now generally acknowledged _not_ to exist.
It is often argued that many theistic claims fall in the latter category.
Would the Higgs boson be looked for if other confirmation in the chain of theory that led to it hadn’t been discovered first? It was a rather large and expensive undertaking, I don’t believe it would have been financed without some empirical evidence that it was possibly there. Not to mention the theory would never have been arrived at out of nothing.
I’m always interested in how many arguments entirely out of ignorance and based entirely on prejudice are made by the champions of empirical evidence every day on the blogs. I think the science blogs might turn out to be the greatest contribution to intellectual decadence in history.
Sure there was evidence for the _chain of theory_, but no direct empirical evidence – the Higgs boson was studied for decades before direct empirical evidence of its existence was obtained. It’s an example of scientific investigation of a _hypothesized_ phenomenon – it was a _hypothesis_ well supported by theory but not supported by direct empirical evidence. Telepathy is an example of scientific investigation of a hypothesis that was well supported by anecdotal evidence, but not supported by reproducable empirical evidence.
If you want more examples, just think of the first time _any_ phenomenon was discovered – black holes, electricity, magnetism, you name it. Some phenomena or non-phenomena (Higgs boson, telepathy) are hypothesized before empirical evidence for their existence is discovered (or found to be absent). Some (X-rays) are completely unexpected at the time they are discovered. Either way, when they are discovered it is via scientific investigation.
Oh, and rather than imply (baselessly) that my argument was made “entirely out of ignorance and based entirely on prejudice”, at least say so directly.
Well, Konrad, that would constitute empirical evidence that supported the idea that the theory might be right. I would like to know what the results would have been if they’d proposed looking for something with absolutely no evidence and that governments should spend billions of dollars looking for it.
As for the rest of it, I think you need to do a literature search before you make rash statements. I know you can get away with that stuff on science blogs but I’d hate to think that you can get away with that level of unfounded statement on a philosophical blog.
See Wilkins supporter at http://canadianatheist.com/2012/09/02/recommended-reading-philosophy-versus-science/#comment-13844
Remind’s me of a debate over territory that took place in Bristol in the 80′s concerning women and dogs. St Werburgh’s women’s community center asked the question, should male dogs be allowed on the premises?
The conclusion they reached was yes as long as they were castrated.
I love the way you put the whole brains in a vat thing with the term “empirically inoculated” and also this quote:
“Philosophy does not produce knowledge; that is the job of science.”
I also have no qualms with the Principal of Charity, but do you think the above are views are actually held by many (any?) believing Theistic Evolutionists? My experience is that there is at least some idea of “knowing” that the claims are true and arguments that observation of the natural world in some sense supports it. If the only claims of theistic evolutionists were “I have developed an empirically inoculated and knowledge free view that I believe to be the case” would anyone care?
I am not defending theists or anyone who thinks philosophy or religion (or art, moral reasoning, or Hollywood) does produce knowledge. It is my view that it doesn’t. Anyone who thinks it does has either misunderstood what it is they are doing (experimental philosophy, for example, is experimental when it isn’t philosophy, and is philosophy when it isn’t experimental) or doesn’t understand what knowledge is.
Of course the teaching of philosophy or the doing of logic, conceptual analysis, etc., gives us knowledge of philosophy/logic/etc.; but in my view that is knowledge of convention, not the world. I took “knowledge” here to be about the world, as in “knowing what obtains”. Let us refine my bald assertion to the claim that “philosophy does not generate natural knowledge”. I can live with that.
In reading the arguments here and at Larry Morans, I think philosophy does produce knowledge of what constitutes a bad argument and bad evidence and the difference between what you like and what is true. Which is not a negligible difference in how you think and live your life.
Science, which is hardly the sole means of knowing something, is only as dependable in so far as people know that difference and believe it really matters. I wonder how much of what you can read at Retraction Watch blog is due to a lack of training in making those distinctions. And that’s not to mention the morality of lying, something that science can’t touch at all.
I think that as scientists disdain philosophy and remain confident in their ignorance of what it can do for someone’s thinking, their inability to make those distinctions grows increasingly problematic. Leaving it to a matter of personality, disposition and a fear of getting caught cut corners and lying doesn’t seem to keep science on an even track.
I should add that a knowledge of philosophy might also help scientists to understand the basis of their own branch of intellectual activity. I’ve met stunned shock and outraged rejection when stating such simple ideas such as science is a human invention and that it was made for the sole purpose of finding knowledge of the PHYSICAL UNIVERSE of enhanced reliability by ignoring aspects of wider human experience that aren’t of known relevance to that narrow purpose.
I’ve found that scientists, especially those whose faith is scientism, believe that they can force other parts of human experience into a scientific form, even if it means chopping off or distorting the wider parts of human experience to the point they are not the same thing. They believe that calling their dismembered object by the same name makes it the same thing, even when nothing else like it has ever been found in nature. I’ve found that kind of thing all through the so-called behavioral sciences and even in real biology.
I think one of the biggest problems among scientists is the inability to identify what can’t be treated with the legitimate methodology and tools of science and that sometimes those things are handled better with other branches of intellectual activity. I’ve noted in a recent series of arguments that history can generate knowledge that is absolute in its reliability, something can be known to be absolutely true with the methods of history. You can absolutely know that someone said something in a book or with an audio recording, you can know if they repeatedly said the same thing or endorsed an idea by someone else. Some of the knowledge you can have through history or journalism or the law is of an absolute reliability that much of what is included in science can’t possibly achieve. And quite often that knowledge is every much as important as the most important findings of science.
I think more scientists would be able to understand points like those instead of imitating an enraged and sputtering TV aristocrat who thinks that their due respect has been violated by an insolent commoner when those realities are pointed out, if their understanding of science had been informed by what philosophy could tell them.
I have serious issues with experimental philosophy. It often drives me nuts reading it and if its in an issue that interests me I will repeatedly think, why do it like this when anthropology or history can cover the same ground empirically.
Dennet’s argument concerning trees for example drives me round the twist, as I suspect his perspective on a certain religious group has lead to him presenting in this manner.
I think my perspective says more about me and the way I have been educated than it does about philosophy.
I certainly don’t disagree with some of what Dennet has to say but I see no reason to believe all of it or suggest that experimental philosophy is a disreputable subject on the basis of my emotional reaction to part of what he has to say that I strongly disagree with.
As John has pointed out from time to time, the claim that science is the sole producer of reliable knowledge is not a scientific claim. One is not simply saying, after all, that the scientific method is what scientists do, but that it is what they ought to do. The claim is normative, not descriptive. I guess that means that we can’t have knowledge about what science should be since, to quote John, that would be “knowledge of convention, not the world” and he is willing to restrict knowledge, in the strict sense, anyhow, to knowledge about the world where the world is a big room with things in it.
I don’t care about names. If you want to insist that only something like chemistry produces knowledge, that’s OK with me, though it reduces the argument of this thread to begging the question. What matters to me is whether a particular form of social cognitive activity is rational, by which I mean useful to argue about. It’s the possibility of cogent arguments that matters whether you want to call a subject knowledge or not. Ethics or any other normative topic like scientific methodology doesn’t come down to making true statements about existing objects; but, or so I claim, it isn’t vain to argue about such subjects because there are better and worse things to say about them.
The funny thing is the way in which folks who promote the universal empire of science don’t do very much justice to the internal heterogeneity of the sciences themselves. A survey of what scientists do shows that they aren’t obviously always doing the same thing. Do the same methodological principles underlie the investigation of natural laws like quantum mechanics govern determining facts like the history of the Earth? What about the metatheoretical work that physicists do when they define the space of possible theories of gravitation? What counts as legitimate science is in perpetual dispute. Larry Moran writes “The scientific way of knowing involves evidence, rationalism, and healthy skepticism.” How is this statement more specific than saying that morality comes down to doing the right thing? So far from legislating what will count as knowledge, Moran is merely listing some necessary conditions for doing science or perhaps any enterprise of rational inquiry. To get to sufficient conditions, it seems to me that it would be necessary to follow Wittgenstein’s advice to look and see. The trouble with scientism is that it isn’t empirical, and it isn’t just familiarity with nonscientific human activities that is missing.
“and it isn’t just familiarity with nonscientific human activities that is missing.”
Yes that’s true but I cant help thinking that way I trained in people related issues, but I think it’s familiarity that’s the problem I look at the issues here the bits of the argument I don’t like and at the end of the day the frustration lies in the fact I make the same mistakes myself with my own thought. We learn slowly and with great difficulty and all fall into similar traps and snares as we play the great game.
I don’t think I am alone on this one, error is more common than many admit and I think the way we learn is to make mistakes, no shame or dishonor here unless you are playing some institutional reputation game and such things are fictive and manipulated for public consumption.
I cant help thinking that at its core a large slice of this is simply a people problem and one of perspective.
“One cannot play chess if one becomes aware of the pieces as living souls and of the fact that the Whites and the Blacks have more in common with each other than with the players. Suddenly one loses all interest in who will be champion.”
Rather than declare philosophy dead perhaps this group of people making this claim could modify it and start with the claim we can do the philosophy here better than philosophers.
Extreme positions are useful experimental tools in debate, they have a value,place and function in the ever shifting sands of thought that will sweep over us all and serve as dust and cover to our bones.