Category Archives: General Science

by | February 17, 2013

Drama, journalism and science

Recently the Jonah Lehrer scandal was raised again when he was paid $20,000 to speak on his journalistic dishonesty by the Knight Foundation. I cynically noted on Twitter that being honest and as accurate as I could be netted me exactly nothing in the way of honoraria (I think I got a bottle of scotch once, for which I was very grateful). The best discussion of the Lehrer affair is this one by Christopher Chabris, professor of psychology at Union College, in which he notes

When the allegations of plagiarism and fabrication came out, the story became one of “greatest science writer of his generation makes unthinkable mistakes,” and the analysis was mostly psychoanalysis of Lehrer’s motives or of the media culture. Entirely lost was the fact that Jonah Lehrer was never a very good science writer. He seemed not to fully understand the science he was trying to explain; his explanations were inaccurate, overblown, and often just plain wrong, usually in the direction of giving his readers counterintuitive thrills and challenging their settled beliefs.

The Sun Life on Mars

Entirely lost in such criticisms, though, is that this is not only a failure of the entire field of science reporting, whether on blogs or in published outlets (or both), but of the very field and profession of journalism itself. What you read in the successful mass media is not factual, nor complete, but a story, a narrative. And narratives have to have conflict. They need to have drama, or they will not be published, and if they are, they will not be read.

This is why the “view from nowhere” so criticised by Jay Rosen developed. If you simply report the facts, people’s attention will wander and you will not sell advertising. So if there is no drama, create some. Find an “opposing” view to report, even if it means giving equal weight to the ignorant, the foolish or the simply insane, and if you can’t find a credible enough counteridiot, interview another journalist. Every time a journalist interviews a journalist, you are being offered theatre, not reportage.

There are a few, a precious few, science journalists who rise above this dramatic license, but even they are constrained by the medium. And let us understand the nature of the medium. Mass media are not, contrary to myth, designed to pass on information. They are designed to modify attitudes. This is because they must sell advertising, or, if they are publicly funded, they must compete for audience share with the media that are not so funded, and you don’t get audience share by deliver facts. You get it by engaging the audience. Humans are narrative driven, so facts take at best second place to a story.

Daily Express: Aspirin

The media have at most about a dozen narrative frames. In the field of science, these include The Breakthrough, The Imminent Danger, The Founder, and The Fraudster. Each of these is dramatic, and engaging, and lead to fear or the release of fear (which has usually been constructed in the first instance by previous frames). But anyone who actually works in the field of science, or more generally in an academic or professional field, knows that most of what is reported, even if it is accurate, is the ephemera or epiphenomena of science. The work that scientists actually do is much less dramatic, but by the same token it is far more important than the drama. To understand it takes effort, and to understand the importance of it takes analysis and care, and avoids the view from nowhere. And it is almost never reported. It is not dramatic enough.

Onion Science is hard

For this reason, when you actually study a field, there is little to no narrative. Of course the sciences themselves are not free of narrativity; every textbook tells a story (usually wrong or misleading) that purports to tell students how we got to the point the textbook relates. Historians then spend a lot of time trying to uncover the actual sequence and developments. Popular histories, though, are just another form of journalism, even if they are written by a Bill Bryson or a Dava Sobel, and they often mislead as to facts. This is unsurprising; they are there to tell you stories.

The field of science communication attempts to remedy these lacks by emphasising the need for accuracy and objectivity, but if the very domain in which science communication takes place is corrupt, and I regard it and all journalism as corrupt from its inception, this is papering over the cracks. Science communication is not the solution to the problem of the public misunderstanding of science. Education is. Scientists are not, and should not be, journalists, nor even historians (unless they turn to history of science as a profession, in which case they can often, with some training, be very good at it). They should do science, and the task of communicating their results to the lay public should be handed to those who can really get an understanding out of those willing to make the effort: teachers. Training scientists to be science communicators, as some insist we should do, merely makes them less active scientists, and they will remain unable to communicate science unless they, too, fall into the drama trap and modify attitudes. Facts are not dramatic. All the actual drama is in how people respond to facts, and that is no longer science, nor even science policy, but simple politics.

This has a number of implications. The most obvious is that we should not expect journalism nor popular publishing to do much to actually educate the lay public. The reason why textbooks and monographs are dry is that they do attempt to cover facts, and the different (actual) ideas and approaches, in order to initiate a critical analysis in the reader. You don’t do this with a breathless Dan Brown style of writing. So if we want a better informed populace, and it is vital that we have one, there is only one way to do it: teach the science to students in a non-partisan fashion, and stop making up drama, which is to say, conflict, where there is none. Evolution is not controversial in science, nor global warming, tobacco causing cancer, and the overuse of pesticides and fertilisers causing massive ecological damage. These are facts in any sense of the word, philosophical debates about factitude notwithstanding. All else is obfuscation for political drama.

Governments should therefore take all educational decisions out of the hands of politicians and pundits. That there should be a public debate is not at issue: this can go on and should do in the public sphere. But unless and until the scientific community is convinced that the objections raised in public are correct, scientifically rather than politically, no amount of noise in the media should have the slightest effect on what is taught.

Mark Twain, to whom all good bons mot not otherwise ascribed to Churchill or Wilde are ascribed, once said (it is claimed):

It seems to me that just in the ratio that our newspapers increase, our morals decay. The more newspapers the worse morals. Where we have one newspaper that does good, I think we have fifty that do harm. We ought to look upon the establishment of a newspaper of the average pattern in a virtuous village as a calamity.
- “License of the Press,” speech, 31 March 1873

I have said before that I think the greatest disaster for modern society was the invention of public relations and marketing. I include the invention of that particular PR called journalism. As Twain also rightly noted:

It has become a sarcastic proverb that a thing must be true if you saw it in a newspaper. That is the opinion intelligent people have of that lying vehicle in a nutshell. But the trouble is that the stupid people — who constitute the grand overwhelming majority of this and all other nations — do believe and are moulded and convinced by what they get out of a newspaper, and there is where the harm lies.

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Filed under Education, General Science, Journalism, Politics, Pop culture, Rant, Truisms

by | December 24, 2012

Classification and the DSM

More from my forthcoming book with Malte Ebach. Last post for the year, folks.

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders

This text, known by its acronym the DSM (-I, -II-, III or -IV, and -V due in 2013), is the main standard classification of mental illness and disorders used across the world, although it is primarily the production of the American Psychiatric Association (APA). It is not the sole classification, there being also International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems (ICD), produced by the World Health Organization. Both systems are widely used in the context of drug prescription, medical insurance and administration, government statistics, and medical education.

The original system that the DSM-I codified was based upon psychoanalysis categories.[1] DSM-I evolved out of the pre-war “Statistical Manual for the Use of Institutions for the Insane” after the second world war, in 1952, relying strongly upon military terminology and practice during the war, especially the Navy’s. Over the years it was revised extensively, and by DSM-III the APA abandoned the goal of earlier editors and authors to find an etiology for the diseases classified. Since very little in the way of etiologies for the diseases had been uncovered, it was seen that the role of the DSM was to provide practitioners with a way to efficiently and effectively diagnose conditions, and prescribe drug treatments and other treatments.

This meant that the DSM was not a nosology the way classifications of diseases were in medicine. Although medical science might not know what the etiologies of diseases were, the aim and project of medical research and classification was to move from phenomenology to etiology, and when a disease was finally explained in a way that might break it up into several distinct or more general conditions, medical science had little trouble doing so. Psychiatry, on the other hand seemed to move in the opposite direction. Instead of explaining and revising categories based on a knowledge of causal substrate, psychiatry revised based on “general concepts” of mental illness, some of which were in fact lay notions, and upon the availability of drugs to prescribe. What etiological research there was tended to be done by neuro-psychologists and neurologists instead.

The DSM is a case of a classification that is moving away from Theory rather than to it, largely because it is not an attempt at a natural system, but one of convention and operational use. However, the majority of those who employ it seem to think it is a natural scheme. This may retard the progress of psychiatry, as Dom Murphy thinks:

… classification can draw on causal discrimination in the absence of causal understanding. And it can use causal discrimination as a source of hypotheses. If we have good reason to believe [through this classification] that two syndromes depend on different pathologies, then we can orient research around finding out what they are. … The system of classification in the DSM is incoherent, heterogeneous, and provincial. It is incoherent in that it rests on a theory about the taxa of interest that requires symptoms to be expressions of underlying causes whilst at the same time it prohibits mention of these underlying causes in the taxonomy. It is heterogeneous in that it does not classify like with like at appropriate levels of explanation. And it is provincial in that it is cut off from much relevant inquiry. These complaints … reflect worries about the current state of biological psychiatry as a whole, since DSM-IV-TR is its flagship. [2]

With the approval of the DSM-V in 2012, critics noted in review that it was an amalgam of convenience and in some cases putative special interests. [3]

Apart from a connection with the available treatments, not all of which are clinically or epidemiologically tested, there is a minimal change of emphasis upon etiology in refining the categories of the manual. Nevertheless, the mere having of a systematic classification generates substantial research programs, and the results of neurobiological research has input much of what etiology there is in psychiatry. [4]

1. This is based upon the comprehensive research and discussion in Murphy 2006. Although Murphy’s theoretical discussion of classification in chapters 9 and 10 is consonant with ours, we arrived at similar ideas independently and in distinct domains.

2. 2006: 323.

3. For example, the Canadian Medical Association Journal editorial, 10 December 2012. Child psychiatrist Claudia Gold refers to DSM-V as a “care rationing document”.

4. Kupfer and Regier 2011, Regier, et al. 2009.

References

Kupfer, David J., and Darrel A. Regier. 2011. Neuroscience, Clinical Evidence, and the Future of Psychiatric Classification in DSM-5. American Journal of Psychiatry 168 (7):672-674.

Murphy, Dominic. 2006. Psychiatry in the scientific image. Cambridge, MA; London: MIT Press.

Regier, Darrel A., William E. Narrow, Emily A. Kuhl, and David J. Kupfer. 2009. The Conceptual Development of DSM-V. Am J Psychiatry 166 (6):645-650.

Thanks to Dom for providing me with a copy of his wonderful book.

 

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Filed under Epistemology, General Science, History, Natural Classification

by | December 19, 2012

Classification and the periodic table

It might be thought that classification in the special and historical sciences is occasionally atheoretical, but that in the general sciences, physics and chemistry, it is derived from Theory. But in fact one of the most exemplary cases of empirical classification that led to Theory is in these sciences: the periodic table.

According to a study by Eric Scerri (2007), the standard textbook story of the periodic table is wrong, unsurprisingly since most such textbook narratives are. The idea of a table of elements did not derive from Dalton’s revival of atomism, but from increasingly refined laboratory techniques for ascertaining the atomic weight of elements. The notion of atoms, of course, did derive from Dalton but these developments did not seemingly rely much upon it. Because samples of element include what we now understand are isotopes, atomic weights are not perfectly correlated with atomic numbers. Consequently while it was apparent from the experimental data as the atomic weights of elements were refined that there was some sort of pattern, e.g., by Stanislao Cannizarro and Alfred Naquet who both arranged these weights in a table, early attempts tended instead to rely on a kind of platonist numerology, Johann Döbereiner’s “theory of triads” in which patterns of elemental properties fell into threefold relations. These were not unlike the affinities of systematics, and indeed the term “affinity” was used by chemists. However, there were too many exceptions for triads to be the basis for a table of elements (although something like it later returned briefly).

Mendeleev's first published table, 1869

Until Dmitri Mendeleev’s table was published in 1869, the best previous version was that of Julius Lothar Meyer,[1] who, like Mendeleev had arranged elements in a series based on their atomic weights. What Mendeleev did that was better than Lothar Meyer and other precursors was to employ his vaster knowledge of the empirical properties of chemical elements, and to make an arrangement based on weights and properties, in a kind of family resemblance (Scerri 2007: 125, 150). He refined it over many years, again based on the experimental results. The term “experimental” here is a little bit misleading, in our terms, because while there was intervention to refine and purify the samples used, this was not intervention to experimentally modify the samples along some independent variable to test a hypothesis. In our terms, it was simple empirical research.[2]

Mendeleev even expressly noted that he was taking a Lockean or even operationalist approach:

. .  . by  investigating  and  describing  what  is visible  and  open  to  direct  observation  by  the organs of the senses, we may hope to arrive, first at hypotheses,  and afterwards at theories, of what has now to be taken as the basis of our investigations. (quoted in Kultgen 1958: 180)

Subsequent to the adoption of the table by chemists, there arose a program to improve and explain the “periodic law”. As Scerri says, once scientists have a classification, they seek an underlying cause of the regularities (as Darwin did).

Following on from the adoption of atomic theory and the discovery of electrons by Thompson in 1897, and the nuclear structure of the atom proposed by Rutherford, Bohr’s introduction of the quantum to the structure of the atom led to an explanation of valency, which was originally discovered by Edward Frankland and Friedrich Kerkule in the 1860s. Eventually, Rutherford and Antonius van den Broek proposed around 1911 that each atom had an integer number that gave it its weight. About the same time, the discovery of isotopes by Frederick Soddy explained why atomic weights varied: different samples had varying admixtures of the isotopes, whose weights varied.

In short, the periodic table is a mixed case of empirical research guiding theory development. It is not a simple example, because there was prior Theory, and also because much of atomic theory derived from other sources and cases, especially in the study of radioactivity, but nevertheless classification plays a key role in this most central of physical scientific domains.

1. Scerri gives notice of at least four later “precursors”, Emile Beguyer De Chancourtois, Gustavus Hinrichs, John Newlands and William Odling, who proposed some of the features later credited to Mendeleev.
2. Scerri 2012 has argued that Weisberg 2007 is wrong to think Mendeleev was producing, inadvertently or otherwise, a model. He proposes that classification is a kind of “sideways explanations”. This need not affect Weisberg’s view of the importance of models (since he allowed that Mendeleev was not actually making models, but gave a hypothetical interpretation in which he was), but it is indicative of the lack of philosophical attention generally given to what he calls mere classifications.
 

References

Kultgen, J. H. 1958. Philosophic Conceptions in Mendeleev’s Principles of Chemistry. Philosophy of Science 25 (3):177-183.

Scerri, Eric R. 2007. The Periodic Table: Its Story and Its Significance. New York: Oxford University Press.

Scerri, Eric R. 2012. A critique of Weisberg’s view on the periodic table and some speculations on the nature of classifications. Foundations of Chemistry.

Weisberg, Michael. 2007. Who is a Modeler? British Journal for the History of Philosophy 58:207–233.

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Filed under General Science, History, Natural Classification, Philosophy, Science

by | September 9, 2012

Scientism and methodological naturalism

So I’ve been busy with work, and finding a flat and preparing to move. Larry’s been busy tearing strips off those who argue that the ENCODE data shows the genome is mostly functional (only if you think that doing anything happens to be functional). But I hadn’t forgotten his latest claim that methodological naturalism is an undue restriction on science, nor his tweets that “scientism” is just an insult. I owe him a reply.

Let’s begin with the term “scientism”. I take it to be a descriptive term, roughly meaning someone who thinks that all conceptual legitimacy must derive from science. It is usually pejorative. So is “conservatism” when used by those who think it is a false political ideology. However, I use that term to denote a number of political attitudes and ideas (with which, as it happens, I mostly disagree); I don’t mean to use it as an insult; nor do I with “scientism” or any other philosophical position.

Yes, you read that rightly – scientism is a philosophical position. It is better given its historical name: positivism. In the early 19th century August Comte wanted to replace traditional theistic religions with a secular religion, because he thought (as many still do) that religions made for better communities. So he called the kind of scientific religion he wanted positivism, because it was a kind of positive knowledge. He claimed to have discovered a “great fundamental law” of human knowledge, that it passes through three stages:

The law is this :—that each of our leading conceptions—each branch of our knowledge-passes successively through three different theoretical condititions: the Theological, or fictitious; the Metaphysical, or abstract; and the Scientific, or positive. In other words, the human mind, by its nature, employs in its progress three methods of philosophizing, the character of which is essentially different, and even radically opposed: viz., the theological method, the metaphysical, and the positive. [Harriet Martineau’s 1868 translation.]

What makes something positive knowledge?

In the final, the positive state, the mind has given over the vain search after Absolute notions, the origin and destination of the universe, and the causes of phenomena, and applies itself to the study of their laws—that is, their invariable relations of succession and resemblance. Reasoning and observation, duly combined, are the means of this knowledge. What is now understood when we speak of an explanation of facts is simply the establishment of a connection between single phenomena and some general facts, the number of which continually diminishes with the progress of science.

In short, science replaces theology and philosophy, and nothing that is not reasoning and observation is knowledge. This is exactly what Larry and those who attack philosophy think. In the early 20th century, a version of this known as logical positivism was the ruling philosophical view among Anglophones; replaced only when it was shown by philosophical argument that it was self-defeating. Positivists thought that metaphysical claims – any claim not based on observation and reasoning – were literally meaningless nonsense. They may as well have been noises. The claim that “metaphysical claims are nonsense” (let’s call that sentence M), however, has not been observed, nor is it a reasoned inference from any observations (you cannot observe metaphysical claims). So the core claim of positivism, M, is nonsense, by their own lights. [In philosophy this is called a tu quoque, or “you too”, argument.]

There are various versions of this but they all have one thing in common: whatever M is in a positivist perspective is not itself positive knowledge. It’s like the famous passage in Hume’s Enquiry:

When we run over libraries, persuaded of these principles, what havoc must we make? If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion. [Enquiry Sect XII, Part II, Para 132]

And yet Hume’s own work contains neither mathematics nor experimental reasoning. He must have been aware of the irony. The positivist/scientistic tradition seems oblivious to the irony, however.

Now I am not saying that if somebody thinks that science is the best way to gather knowledge they are a positivist. I think that, for example, and I am no positivist. Nor is it the claim that all knowledge is like science, which I also think. Instead it is this: the view that one can rule out any nonscientific claim out of court. You do not even need to consider it. If it is nonscientific, it is nonsense. Philosophy, as I understand it and define it, is nonscientific (that is, it is not done the way science is done; it is not necessarily in contradiction to science, although much of it can be). It is therefore nonsense, to be replaced by science. This is how recent scientists have treated philosophy –

Traditionally, these are questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead. Philosophy has not kept up with modern developments in science, particularly physics. Scientists have become the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge. [The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking, and Leonard Mlodinow, page 5]

The physicist philosophers who I know would be surprised to find that (i) they had not kept up with modern physics, despite their many publications on it, and (ii) that they ever held the torch of discovery, or any philosophers in the modern era. But let’s leave this silliness to one side and consider what it indicates about this scientism: it is profoundly positivistic. It presumes something like the claim that only science matters when considering issues. Science most certainly matters. But is it all that matters? Asking that very question is not a scientific question. QED.

Now let’s consider methodological naturalism.

The term has been around for a long while; if you have the notion of naturalism, it’s no great stretch to add adjectives like “methodological”, but in the sense used here it is fairly recent. The project of naturalising epistemology, which is to say to make the gathering of knowledge a purely natural (biological?) process rather than a Cartesian special outcome of logic and observation, hit its stride in the latter half of the century, especially as Quine baptised it in a chapter so entitled.

But the current use– that science is restricted to observing, explaining and describing only natural things and events – is fairly recent. It took off largely from 1990, when Philip E. Johnson, the lawyer who promoted intelligent design, published his book Darwin on Trial. Johnson wanted to contrast methodological naturalism to metaphysical naturalism, and argued that science is committed to neither. Now there was a perfectly good series of terms for the latter: materialism until the 20th century, and physicalism during it (not everything in physics is material, as most educated school kids could tell you these days. Most stuff is energy or fields). And “methodological naturalism” as Johnson and those who took it up meant it also had a name: scientific method.

I’ve often noted that there is no such single thing as “scientific method”, a view that has been a consensus in philosophy of science since at least the mid 70s when Feyerabend forcefully put that case (but which had been put before him, of course; all good ideas have been put before). But there are several things that science does that are worthy of the name: the use of observational evidence, the use of abductive and inductive reasoning to generalise and explain, and the use of deductive reasoning to winkle out the implications of the foregoing. Terms like “theory construction”, “disciplinary matrix” and “research program” are fancier ways to say just this, and what Larry rightly notes as many do, this is what we do when we do something else that is much wider than science and which also has a pre-existing name: learning. Scientists learn just like the rest of us do, from experience, only they are much more careful about doing it, and try not to mix in their own expectations, and they report in often excruciating detail to others so that the rest of us don’t have to learn the way they did. It works, bitches. But what scientists do is what anyone does when they learn by experience, in spades.

Calling it “methodological naturalism” is like calling driving “vehicular autonomic control”; it adds nothing but the illusion there is something strange going on. Science is not constrained by methodological naturalism. Science just is methodological naturalism. Anything scientists can observe reliably and intersubjectively, and which behaves in a regular enough fashion, is investigable. Anything that can’t be or doesn’t, isn’t. So if God or art or poetry can be investigated that way – if we can learn about it by experience – then science can investigate it.

The problem is not that science is somehow forbidden to do this. The problem is that moral and theological questions often (not always) are not investigable by their nature. Either there’s nothing to observe (like moral prescriptions or obligations), or they fail to behave in a regular fashion (a reason why I doubt there will ever be a true science of economics). Those parts of theology and ethics that can be investigated scientifically, should be (but again, there’s a principle that cannot be!). We can disprove many claims of non-natural beliefs. Religions that think the world is 6000 years old or extends only to the sphere of Saturn, or moral systems (like libertarianism) that predict empirical outcomes that are contrary-to-fact are falsified when investigated (by science or just by someone who is learning less formally). But there remains a residual and indefinitely large number of beliefs that are, as I have previously called them, “empirically inoculated”. The facts do not fix all the solutions.

So when a philosopher considers a case like Sober’s target, whether a god could intervene in evolution without leaving an empirical trace, this is not to support theism but to, as I said, stress test ideas. If it turns out that the concept is neither logically nor empirically contradictory, then you may not like the idea, but you cannot say with justification that science disproves it.

The argument is not all about disproof, though. Larry and others (like Victor Stenger) argue that science gives us no reason to think these ideas are true. This is right. Science gives no reason to think that there is a God, contrary to the asseverations of many theologically inclined science writers and popular philosophers. However, neither does science give us any reason to think that only what science gives us reason to think should be thought. These are outside methodological naturalism and enter into the vast, crafty and occasionally surreal halls and dungeons of philosophy. You don’t need to enter those places of the mind. But I don’t see how you are justified in attacking those who do, so long as they don’t deny fact or logic.

I’ll end this with a quote from Cicero that I saw on Twitter, from Tim Dean:

“If the man lives who would belittle the study of philosophy, I quite fail to see what in the world he would see fit to praise.”

I don’t know if it is truly his saying, but I have to say I think it right.

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Filed under Education, Epistemology, Ethics and Moral Philosophy, Evolution, General Science, Logic and philosophy, Metaphysics, Philosophy, Religion, Science, Sermon, Theories, Truisms

by | September 2, 2012

Does philosophy generate knowledge?

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:

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by | September 1, 2012

Begging questions about philosophy, science and everything else

Those who know me well take great care not to say (at least when I am in earshot) “That begs the question…” and mean by that “That raises the question…”, or else they will get a dissertation delivered for a period on the right use of that phrase. That’s right, folks, I am a prescriptivist, at least about technical terms in philosophy. In fact it’s hard not to find prescriptivists in technical fields. Ask any random biologist about “gene” sometime.

So begging the question is something I feel strongly about. It means, technically, to use in your premises what you conclude in the argument. That is, you assume the truth of what it is you are arguing for in order to argue for it. Consider this classical gem:

The Bible is God’s Word, and God would not lie.
The Bible says God exists.
Therefore God exists.

Since the existence of God is what is at issue, presuming that the Bible is God’s word (therefore reliable on the matter) is circular reasoning. It “begs” the very question it addresses. The Latin phrase, for I greatly love Latin phrases to show how erudite I can pretend to be, is petitio principii, or assuming the beginning point [at issue]. It is widely thought to be a fallacy of reasoning, which I think it is in most, but not all, circumstances.

Suppose you encounter this argument: Science is worthless and a waste of time and resources, because science does not deliver beauty. Only art delivers beauty, and so only art should be given the resources and time that science now is. Why would you take that argument seriously? The unstated assumption in that line of reasoning is that only beauty is worthwhile striving for. Artists of course think that (or they would not be artists), but need we allow only the search for beauty? What about truth? What about meaning? What about chocolate?

A similar argument is apocryphally ascribed to the second Kalif, Omar: He is supposed (by a Christian 300 years after the fact) to have said of the Library of Alexandria’s holdings that ”they will either contradict the Koran, in which case they are heresy, or they will agree with it, so they are superfluous.” This myth indicates how religious authorities will often beg the question, even if in this case it didn’t actually happen (most of the Library was destroyed centuries before Omar’s army arrived).

But we expect better of the educated and cosmopolitan. It comes, therefore, as a continuing pain to me that scientists will often offer this piece of question beggary:

Science finds out things
Philosophy does not find out things the scientific way
Therefore philosophy is a waste of time and effort

The begged premise here is that only knowing things the scientific way is knowledge, or if the philosopher in question doesn’t say that knowledge is what philosophy offers, that only knowing things the scientific way is worthwhile. Some may even hint that only science delivers beauty, too.

Ever since I started doing philosophy I have been told, and have believed both on authority and on my own reflections, that the goal of philosophy is to make people think and to deliver clarity where before there was just confusion. Sometimes clarity means showing that confusion is inevitable, but I never thought, and most philosophers do not think, that philosophy delivers scientific knowledge. Instead they hope for insight, understanding, clarity and charity towards the ideas of others.

Generally, scientists do not. I know this sounds harsh, but it is true. Scientists want straightforward answers based on data, and will argue over meanings, interpretations and concepts only when they must, either to present or to defend a view. They want just so much clarity and understanding as they need to convince others their hypothesis, results or explanations are correct. Often, this is not, itself, very scientific. Having seen scientists argue over theories and doctrines of different research programs, I can say they use rhetorical and sophistical arguments as much as any political party when it suits them. Usually, though, scientists care very much about the truth of their claims. What they don’t care about is either history or interpretation.

Scientists live in a kind of self-contained hermeneutic bubble. They simply cannot usually see the point of any view other than their own. If they think science disproves religious beliefs, then so far as they are concerned, any person – scientist or not – who takes religion seriously is simply stupid. Anyone who grants, even for argument’s sake, that there might be pathways of knowing other than the mythical (since no such beast actually exists) “scientific method”, is a mental defective, a liar, or a self serving individual trying to get money out of someone. In other words, for that kind of scientist, they treat religion, philosophy and any non-scientific activity exactly the same way that some religious and science deniers treat science they do not like: as an act of faith that is simply false.

Now is this a criticism of those scientists? Yes, and no. Yes in that this approach simply abandons the canons of civil discourse that have been accepted in the western tradition for over 2500 years as being the best and most “rational” (i.e., requiring reasons for your claims, and not prejudging the debate one might have about those reasons). This is simply a matter of what used to be called “positivism”, a view that was invented by August Comte in the early 19th century. Science is al there is, and nothing else has worth unless it can be made scientific.

But on the other hand, if one thought there was something better than science, one might not be a scientist at all. Science is hard. It takes years to become a professional, and the return on investment is small. Few scientists end up wealthy; many end up doing something else. Almost none are ever remembered. So one cannot fault scientists for not being philosophers, another profession that takes most of your formative years to become competent in (contrary to many popular writers’ apparent belief), and which ends up with little to no remuneration (again, contrary to many popular writers’ experiences).

But still the begging of that question bugs me. When scientists try to extend science to cover all human activity, when they deny that other people who might disagree on the specific views they think are true (but which are not scientifically verifiable, like the value of art) have any standing or sense to them, when they simply denigrate anything that isn’t what they do personally, yes, that really is scientism.

This post is inspired by, and illustrated by, scientists Larry Moran’s and Jerry Coyne’s posts attacking philosophers Massimo Pigliucci and Elliot Sober. Because the latter attend to questions of clarity of concepts, logic and meaning, and do not deliver “knowledge” (and what is knowledge one might philosophically ask?), Larry and Jerry accuse the philosophers of “arrogance” and “denigrating science”, neither of which seem to me correct. Moreover, arrogance seems to be inherent in the broad dismissal of a profession simply because it doesn’t do what the accuser’s profession does. Yes, Larry, that really is scientism. It is treating science as if it were a belief system that supersedes and excludes, by some sort of divine right, all other human activities.

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Filed under General Science, Logic and philosophy, Philosophy, Rant, Science

by | July 31, 2012

On birds, and ornithologists, and mutual respect

Some time back I had dinner with Pete Richerson, a well known ornithologist and biological theorist. He told me and the rest of the table an anecdote about hooded crows. It seems that in order to capture one to band, the ornithologists must sneak in the dead of night to set their traps, and if they make any noise, they have to go elsewhere as the birds will immediately leave. After many months, Pete’s team finally caught one, and banded it, and took it out of the sack they held it in to photograph it. The birds looked hard at each of those in the room and thereafter whenever one of them was in the field, even if they were in the midst of a crowd of tourists, they would be attacked by that bird. Moreover, all the other birds in the flock learned which individuals were being targeted, and they would also attack them. In the end, Pete’s team had to replace the students in the capture attempts.

There is no doubt that Pete respected hooded crows. They are wicked smart. In the attacking, I think there is a sense of respect by the birds, too. They respected what the ornithologists could do, and took action. It seems that a similar sense of “respect” is being given these days by a different bird.

Late last year I had a snarky post against a claim made by Mark Perakh, a well-known physicist and rationalist who shares several lists I read and with whom I have interacted, that the sole justification for the philosophy of science was its entertainment value. He was responding to Michael Ruse’s work on trying to make sense of the relation between science and religion. Perakh said

I dare to claim that the sole value of philosophy of science is its entertaining ability. I doubt that all the multiple opuses debating various aspects of the philosophy of science have ever produced even a minute amount of anything that could be helpful for a scientist, be he/she physicist, biologist, geologist, you name it. It can, though, be harmful, as the case of Ruse seems to illustrate.

Perakh is clearly not being novel about this. A comment ascribed (but nowhere to be found in any of his written words) to Feynman is

Philosophy of science is as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds

I have blogged about this before [see here and here]; in fact I think the quote is due to Weinberg, and in any case is a reworking of a comment by Barnett Newman in 1952:

In a session with the philosopher Susanne Langer, Newman attacks professional aestheticians, saying: “I feel that even if aesthetics is established as a science, it doesn’t affect me as an artist. I’ve done quite a bit of work in ornithology; I have never met an ornithologist who ever thought that ornithology was for the birds.” He would later hone this remark into the famous quip, “Aesthetics is for the artist as ornithology is for the birds.” [Thanks to reader MKR for spotting that]

What gets my gander is that Perakh, or more recently Lawrence Krauss, Hawking and Molodinow, and a steady stream of physicists, seem to think that while their own discipline is noble, authoritative and has extensive conceptual ramifications (that we should really call philosophical), my discipline is just “entertainment value”. In a rejoinder to me and others just posted, Perakh tries hard to back down from this, but it’s pretty clear that he, and his entire field, has a set against philosophy. Why is this?

It cannot be because they think philosophical issues and debates are unnecessary. Physicists since time immemorial (i.e., before 1900) have written philosophical tomes, both under the rubric of philosophy and under the rubric of physics. Give theoretical physicists ten minutes, and they will end up discussing philosophical questions. The problem is, they don’t want to discuss it philosophically: they want there to be a single correct answer (their own, of course). What irks them about philosophy, and in particular philosophy of science, is that we give initial credence to answers they don’t like. Not answers they have shown to be false, mind you, just answers they don’t think are true.

Consider Ruse’s argument that we should think about whether creationism should be treated educationally on a par with science (given the special conditions of American educational democracy and the Wall of Separation). Ruse ends up concluding well enough that the science is science and no religious view should be taught as science, but this is not enough for the physicists. He must also declare that science shows that religion and science are incompatible (a priori; another philosophical question), and that belief in Gods is irrational unless one happens to be a physicist like Paul Davies or Einstein who can use the term “God” to mean something else. Does anyone but me see the question begging in this?

So why do physicists among all scientists seem to fear philosophy of science so much they must attack it outright and deny it any intellectual standing? Why do they think philosophy is empty and physics has answered all the philosophical questions that matter (another philosophical question)? Reflect on Richerson’s hooded crows. Crows do not hate being studied – they simply have no idea they are being studied. They respond to ornithologists as if they were predators or competitors for resources. Scientists often respond to philosophers as if they were trying to compete for something, possibly scientific authority, which they think should be theirs alone.

Now some philosophy is silly. There is no doubt about that. Some of it isn’t worth the paper it is printed on. Of course, some science is likewise silly, and worth less than the cost of printing it too. Also art, politics, etc. One might even make an inductive projection (a philosophical concept) that all human activities consist of mostly silly things (or, as science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon once noted in defense of his genre, “90% of everything is crap”). A recent paper on medical research noted that most research cannot be replicated and suffers from bad statistics. So it is not a critique of philosophy that there are postmodern philosophers. Nor is it a critique of the authority of science that there is bad science (another philosophical argument). But if philosophers of science in the Dark Ages (before around 1970) tried to tell scientists what to do, it doesn’t follow that either we are trying to rein the horses, or that we are trying to do that now. That isn’t what we do. We don’t need to advocate for science, although I would expect that any serious philosopher of science takes the content of science to be exemplary knowledge most or at least some of the time. As Locke wrote, philosophy’s duty is to clear the undergrowth for science, not to do it.

If one wants to wear both the mantle of rationality and the authority of knowledge, however, one cannot make simple assertions without considering all sides of the debate, which is what Ruse is doing. You can’t just say “Science tells us this so it is true” when it is an open question whether or not science actually does tell us that (a philosophical question). Authority in rational debates comes from giving argument and not merely making assertions. And that means that the arguments must be permitted to be made without simply calling anyone who considers them “irrational:. They are the very opposite of irrational. What is irrational is the a priori assumption that a view is false without considering arguments for and against.

I note that Perakh does a little bit of smelly fish dragging by saying that he has been called names before by the ID crowd. The implicit argument here is that IDevotees called him names, philosophers called him names, so philosophers must be like IDevotees in other respects. The number and range of fallacies involved in that little bit of rhetoric are extensive. And this raises what I think is the point about this whole schemozzle. Sophistry.

It’s yet another philosophical point. Sorry about this, but it seems that philosophy keeps creeping into our discussion. Since Plato wrote The Sophist and Aristotle followed it up with his On Rhetoric and Posterior Analytics, we have made a distinction between reasoned argument and the use of rhetorical tricks to gain assent. If somebody asserts that science has disproven religion but blocks any further discussion of what it is to disprove a hypothesis – the meat and drink of the philosophy of science – one has to suspect what is going on is sophistry not reasoning. The fact that many of those who do this in the name of science do it under the title of “rationality” (another term for reason) is itself a rhetorical trick.

Perhaps philosophy of science has contributed nothing to the doing of science. It’s a possible claim, although I think it is empirically and historically false. Suppose it were true. Does that mean we can dismiss philosophy as “empty” (Hawking and Mlodinow) or “noise” (Krauss) or “entertainment” (Perakh)? Suppose I say that philosophy is how the important, nontrivial questions are resolved, and that physics, for all its practical value, is just something that people do for “diversion”? Is that warranted without further discussion? Of course not, and it would be massively disrespectful of a venerable field of interest and investigation.

There is something going on here, but it isn’t the vapidity of philosophy, or scientists would not try, constantly and persistently, to make philosophical claims. It looks, for all the world, like the physicists don’t want anyone to actually test their arguments and ideas. They look like they want the authority, but without much in the way of accountability, of philosophy. So all we philosophers (and fellow travellers like the occasional historian of science) are asking for is a bit of respect. We’ve earned it. We have studied not only the content of our target sciences, but the history and sociology of those sciences. We have learned three distinct fields to some degree of competence, in order to make our arguments. You might think we are trying to supplant you but by and large we aren’t, you know. In fact, if anything it is scientists who keep moving into the philosophy of science (and at least one of those, Massimo Pigliucci, an evolutionary biologist turned philosopher, has attacked this know-nothingness of the physicists).

A friend of mine is Kristian Camilleri, a philosopher of physics, and he recently argued in a talk I attended that there was once a time when physicists thought it their professional duty to discuss philosophy with the philosophers (Einstein, Bohr and others being exemplary cases), but that after the war, and with the professionalisation of philosophy this receded. I don’t know to what extent this is a reaction to the strictures of Popper (something we philosophers of science have had a few words to say about also), or whether this is simply a matter of territorial expansion and pissing around the perimeter. But surely the justification for the philosophy of science is no more about what contribution it makes to the practice of science any more than the justification for ornithology (and indeed any science, including physics) is the contribution it makes to what it studies.

A philosopher of science, demanding respect in a civil fashion.

I think they call this “flipping the bird.”

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