Category Archives: Rant

When something really gets up my nose.

by | February 21, 2013

Education, Journalism and Science

My last rant was perhaps somewhat intemperate. Carl Zimmer, who along with Ed Yong I really respect as a science journalist, tweeted it with the line:

@carlzimmer: Man, @john_s_wilkins does not like newspapers. 

This is not quite true. I like some newspapers. I do not like the newspaper industry. I worked in various media positions for thirty years. In that time I have seen the best and the worst of journalism (and Carl and Ed are the best). The point of the Twain quote in the last post was that only one in fifty “newspapers of the average pattern” was a virtue. The standard justification for a free press is that they are mostly okay. They mostly aren’t.

But this does not detract from the very good work done on occasion or by good magazines like National Geographic. It is possible to report science without dumbing down or misrepresenting. Carl once interviewed me about a subject I spent ten years working on, species concepts, and his piece in Scientific American (a patchy magazine sometimes) covered the territory well and without distortion.

So what was I getting at? Very simply this: if you want an informed population, put not your faith in the mass media, but in education. No amount of good or ordinary science journalism will improve the public understanding of science. This is hardly a novel view, and it is largely the consensus view in science communication studies.

But let us first ask what legitimate functions science journalism does play, and how it can be done well. First of all, what is meant by the phrase “science journalism”? This covers, in my view, everything from garish front page stories about the latest “breakthrough” in cancer research and “genes for” this or that, through to well written books like Brian Switek’s Written in Stone, or Richard Conniff’s The Species Seekers, to name two recent excellent books. Carl himself has one or two excellent books, including his recent Evolution or A Planet of Viruses (still waiting for the review copy ;-) ). What differentiates bad from good science journalism?

In my mind, the difference lies between “gee whiz” and “this is why”. Science is not a list of discoveries or results; it is a process of discovery and getting results. There is reasoning and work involved, and if you don’t understand the principles behind the reports, you don’t really understand the reports. Any book that just says “scientists have discovered that…” is bad journalism. It tells you something, of course, but doesn’t give you understanding. Good journalism (in science or any other field) tells you why things are what they are and how they came to be that way. It involves narratives, of course, and I never said that narratives, where they are called for, are bad. But good journalists tell narratives where they are required, and not merely for the sake of having a narrative.

For example, there is a narrative, beginning with Arrhenius in the late 19th century, about how we got to understand global warming. But if the goal is to provide understanding of global warming, all that history and personal development is simply drama for its own sake. If you want to understand climate and the reasons why we think the earth is warming, instead focus on the models of energy sinks and sources, ocean transport, the hydrological cycle, etc. The story merely gets in the way. A good journalist will tell only so much of the story as is needed to explain these facts and inferences. A bad journalist will ignore the facts and inferences for the story and personalities, simplifying down to stupidity the actual science, or even just dropping it altogether. As Einstein once wrote:

Anyone who has ever tried to present a rather abstract scientific subject in a popular manner knows the great difficulties of such an attempt. Either he succeeds in being intelligible by concealing the core of the problem and by offering the reader only superficial aspects or vague allusions, thus deceiving the reader by arousing in him the deceptive illusion of comprehension; or else he gives an expert account of the problem, but in such a fashion that the untrained reader is unable to follow the exposition and becomes discouraged from reading any further. If these two categories are omitted from today’s popular scientific literature, surprising little remains. [Quoted in Fahnestock  1986: 276, from 1948]

So what must a good science journalist do? If they are not to write an academic tome, they must select and report what they think is relevant and important, but whatever else they do, they absolutely must report facts. There is no need to make them dramatic if they aren’t. The reader can be asked to do a bit of work. As Terry Pratchett once said, education is Lying to Children, simplifying and paring away complexity, and then adding it back later as the students advance. A science journalist must Lie to the Reader to an extent, but not by adducing opinions from the ignorant in order to maintain interest, nor by lazily using tropes like “gene for”, but by fairly and clearly reporting on the, you know, science.

The industry doesn’t support that. Few are able to make a living like Carl or Ed, researching, talking to the scientists carefully and extensively and not merely a ten minute chat to get some pull quotes to fit a story they already have written in their head, nor just topping and tailing press releases (often written by ex-journalists now posing as university public relations experts) and putting a byline on them.

How does education get around this set of limitations? In an ideal world, by building on increasing understanding of the processes – the methods and reasoning styles – of the actual science. Instead I see evidence that too many pre-university curricula are based around passing exams, which is to say, focussing on the results. However, we know how to educate, even if we don’t do it properly a lot of the time. Educators do not need my advice, but they do need me and everyone else who gives the policy makers their marching orders to support extra funds and resources to do it.

And there’s the problem right there. We have been so acculturated into expecting the media to educate us in an entertaining fashion that we have increasingly defunded and removed opportunities for good science education, and moved to “infotainment” and high technology in schools. We do not know how ignorant we are, and so we do not ask the policy makers to support education properly. Instead we think that by adding another computer based technique we can solve the problem amusingly, with drama, to pique interest.

Another rant I shall make one day is on the industrial nature of education today (shades of Illich!), but the point now is that we are misled by media to think media is the solution, when it is the problem. How to do this better? Stop thinking that communication is the solution to the misunderstanding of science. Start teaching better.

Next, I shall issue a solution to world peace…

Reference

Fahnestock, Jeanne. 1986. Accommodating Science: The Rhetorical Life of Scientific Facts. Written Communication 3 (3):275-296.

14 Comments

Filed under Education, Epistemology, Journalism, Rant

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.

23 Comments

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

by | January 26, 2013

More on reductionism

I am presently teaching in a history subject dealing with ideas of nature, and I notice that the historians we are using often refer to a distinction between reductionism and holism. The former is the Bad Old Science (“we murder to dissect”) and the latter is the New Improved Science. This is something often stated as if the issue were obviously resolvable. And it is, in my view, a complete myth.

In biological science, people often suggest that reductionism is more than a mistake: it is in fact a morally dangerous position. Genetic reductionism is supposed to be the explanation of everything including behaviour in terms of genes. Many people have attacked it, including critics of sociobiology. And it must be said that genes function as a magic molecule in many people’s minds. But the problem is not that we give reductionist accounts of traits, but that we do so in terms of single genes. The error here is single cause explanations, not that we look for the properties of causal parts.

To reduce a domain to another, in this case behaviour to biology, is a virtue in science. Nearly all progress in biology has been made by identifying what causes observed properties of organisms and ecologies in terms of the parts of the systems being investigated. Cell theory in the 19th century, genetics in the 20th, and biochemistry throughout have shown us why organisms develop, react and adapt the way they do. The problem is not that we look for explanations in the parts of organisms, but that we do it hamfistedly.

Reductionism is supposed to look only at the parts, according to proponents of “holism”, when according to them we should look at the entire system and how it interacts. But I am hard pressed to find any reductionist who ever denied this. Instead we get methodological decisions to break systems into parts for the purposes of tractability. You simply cannot identify all the variables in a complex system, so scientists in general will attempt to model systems in ways that deal with a few aspects of the system, in order to see how much can be explained that way.

Reductionists believe several things: one of the more important is that the behaviour of a whole is explicable in terms of the properties of the parts that comprise it. Without this we would not have physics, chemistry, cell biology, or any other general science. But focusing on the properties of the parts has never made sense unless we consider how the parts interact. If you know that a cell produces a protein, to understand how it functions in the organism and its environment, you need to consider how that protein is distributed, and how other cells take it up and process it.

Likewise, in general, a reductionist account has to consider the interactions of the parts with each other. The properties of a single electron, for example, can be stated on their own, but how electrons interact with other subatomic particles depends on the properties of those particles, and so a “holistic” approach is implicit in the modelling of the electron itself.

So I get very tired of the general charge that reductionism is unable to understand the system-level properties of the parts. This is simply a rhetorical trick.

I gave my view of “pizza reductionism” before.

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Filed under Biology, Epistemology, Evolution, Philosophy, Rant, Science

by | December 15, 2012

Thoughts on gun control

There had been the Weapons Law, for a start. Weapons were involved in so many crimes that, Swing reasoned, reducing the number of weapons *had* to reduce the crime rate.

Vimes wondered if he’d sat up in bed in the middle of the night and hugged himself when he’d dreamed *that* one up. Confiscate all weapons, and crime would go down. it made sense. it would have worked, too, if only there had been enough coppers–say, three per citizen. Amazingly, quite a few weapons were handed in. The flaw, though, was one that had somehow managed to escape Swing, and it was this: criminals don’t obey the law. It’s more or less a requirement for the job. They had no particular interest in making the streets safer for anyone except themselves. And they couldn’t believe what was happening. It was like Hogswatch every day. [Night Watch by Terry Pratchett]

The Law of Unintended Consequences, aka Sod’s Law, rules supreme. An argument often made about controlling the availability of weapons is that if the law regulates weapons, only criminals will have weapons. Loathe as I am to disagree with one of my favourite literary characters, there are other reasons to regulate weapons. The disaster in Connecticut today illustrates one of them.

Generally, I believe, criminals do not shoot civilians (except in extreme situations like gang wars). The people who kill children and innocent adults tend not to be career criminals, but disturbed and occasionally just evil people who have access to weapons. Reducing and regulating weapons in a civilised society alleviates that. If Adam Lanza had not had easy access to guns, which are, let us recall, designed for the single purpose of seriously injuring and killing people, his mental issues need not have resulted in the deaths of 20 children and 7 adults.

And in any case the availability of guns to noncriminals does not result in them being safer. If anything, the deaths caused by civilian gun use exceed the cases in which people are able to “take down” criminals. I gather in one case that more people were shot by bystanders than by a gunman (but I cannot recall the case, so cavil at that if you like).

I live in a country that regulates weapons. No, it hasn’t made much dent on criminals having guns, largely because there was such a high number of weapons in the community when the laws were introduced that it can be expected to take time to have effect, but recent reports of criminals trying to import weapons or steal them from the military indicate that it is getting harder. But we have reduced the number of mad-gun attacks, and I feel things are better for the laws. Mind you, I would be happier if the police, who are responsible for an uncomfortable number of shootings, did not have them, or Tasers either. If you have a tool, you reach for it in every case. 

27 Comments

Filed under Pop culture, Rant

by | October 26, 2012

What is critical thinking

I’m typing away the pain tonight so I aim to be a bit crappy and annoyed.

I often read on various websites, blogs, mailing lists and other propaganda (yes, this blog is propaganda: look it up) that this or that person or organisation is devoted to “critical thinking” and “rational thinking”. Obviously these are noble goals and imply that their views are the result of critical thinking and rationality. It’s often a trick, though. What they seem to mean by that is that they have a set of views that are baptised as critical and rational. As Lincoln once said, calling a tail a leg doesn’t make it one. Just naming a view critical and rational doesn’t make it one if it actually isn’t. That’s a fallacy.

What then is it to be critical and rational? We get all kinds of definitions in the literature and around the web. Here’s a couple, with key terms bolded:

From the Hong Kong Critical Thinking Web:

Critical thinking is the ability to think clearly and rationally. It includes the ability to engage in reflective and independent thinking. Someone with critical thinking skills is able to do the following :

  • understand the logical connections between ideas
  • identify, construct and evaluate arguments
  • detect inconsistencies and common mistakes in reasoning
  • solve problems systematically
  • identify the relevance and importance of ideas
  • reflect on the justification of one’s own beliefs and values
From The Critical Thinking Co.™:

Critical thinking is the identification and evaluation of evidence to guide decision making. A critical thinker uses broad in-depth analysis of evidence to make decisions and communicate his/her beliefs clearly and accurately.

From the fellow that started the current critical thinking trend in education (Robert H. Ennis, 1987.):

Reasonable reflective thinking that is focused on deciding what to believe or do.  In addition to 12 CT abilities, CT also includes 14 dispositions. Namely: to seek a clear statement of the thesis or question; to seek reasons; to try to be well informed; to use credible sources and mention them; to take into account the total situation; to try to remain relevant to the main point; to keep in mind the original or basic concern; to look for alternatives; to be open-minded; to take a position when the evidence and reasons are sufficient to do so; to seek as much precision as the subject permits; to deal in an orderly manner with the parts of a complex whole; to use one’s CT abilities; to be sensitive to feelings, level of knowledge, and degree of sophistication of others.

From the standard definition in education (Facione 1990):

 … purposeful, self-regulatory judgment which results in interpretation, analysis, evaluation, and inference, as well as explanation of the evidential, conceptual, methodological, criteriological, or contextual considerations upon which judgment is based.

Everything but the kitchen sink! I think these are either too vague, too heterogeneous, or simply false. I would rather say this:

Critical thinking is the application of careful analysis and rational reconstruction to arguments, so that the correctness of the reasoning and the truth of the premises can be evaluated and the support for the conclusion determined.

Rational thinking is the assent of the reasoner to any conclusion that is both correctly reasoned and founded on known to be [added: see comments] true, or likely to be true, premises.

In short, a critical and rational thinker is one who accepts the conclusions of good arguments.

If you are rational and presented with a good argument, no matter how objectionable, then you must accept the conclusion. Even if that means accepting that God exists (or not, depending on what you find objectionable), abortion is right (or wrong), or some political or scientific proposition is correct. If the premises are known to be [edit] true and the reasoning is strong and you don’t accept the conclusion, then you are, by definition, irrational, no matter how your favoured community or ideology views you and your beliefs. If you analyse an argument and find no errors or strong objections, but nevertheless fail to assent to the conclusion, then you are not a critical thinker.

At once, the notion of objections comes into the picture, and this shows us how the game plays out a bit. An objection is an argument for a conclusion that is contrary to or inconsistent with one of the premises or the conclusion of another argument. It is an argument in its own right. If you have an argument for the existence of God, and I have a stronger argument against it, I am not required to assent to the existence of God because I cannot fault the pro-argument. Now I weigh the rational likelihoods and accept (assent to) the stronger conclusion. That is also rational.

Okay, with that machinery and definitional apparatus in place, let’s contrast this with what is sometimes called sophistry, after the target of Plato’s and Aristotle’s attacks, the Sophists. Another term for this is rhetoric, although that isn’t necessarily bad on its own. Sophistry is the attempt to gain assent without good arguments, usually through emotional and linguistic tricks. We call these “fallacies”, but that’s just a fancy way to say “mistake of reasoning”, which is how these are often taught these days. I call it “marketing” or “public relations”, or better: “spin”.

These tricks aim to change attitudes by misleading or manipulating the audience. They make a presumption about those who hear them, that they are not adults, nor rational. Rhetoric is fundamentally an end run around the critical faculty. If it is linked to critical thinking, then rhetoric becomes a useful communication tool. When it is unlinked, and even antithetical to reasoning and critical thinking, then it becomes sophistry. Reasoned arguments treat the audience as responsible, thinking, adults. They are respectful, not patronising the way sophistry is.

So let us think somewhat about how some of the so-called skeptics behave. Most people – I would say everyone, including myself, just on first principles – have beliefs they hold dear and which they did not arrive at through rational or critical reflection. Sometimes these turn out to be reasoned ideas. But what is arrived at uncritically will be defended uncritically, and this is, on average, a recipe for irrational beliefs. Here’s one: nuclear power is always a bad thing. In fact bad engineering is a bad thing, and not balancing risks against benefits is a bad thing. Nuclear power is often a very good thing. I would personally like to see a lot more, even if there are risks, to counterbalanced the many actual deaths from coal generation and hydroelectric environmental damage, and so-called renewables won’t cut it. But you cannot argue that with many “skeptical thinkers”.

Here’s another: religion poisons everything. The evidence is against that, and it can only be supported by cherry picking the data like Bjorn Lomborg cherry picks ecological data. But to challenge it is to commit an act of ideological impurity, and the so-called skeptic often won’t even discuss it; just attack. I can multiply the examples without effort, although I won’t, because this is about reasoning, not these specific cases.

Of course those who these “skeptics” attack also commit many failures of reasoning. One well known fallacy is the false dichotomy; I am not suggesting that if one side makes mistakes the other side is correct. Everybody makes mistakes. And mistakes are relatively evenly distributed across all groups, so long as the groups aren’t gerrymandered.

Ennis, R.H. 1987. A taxonomy of critical thinking dispositions and abilities. In Teaching thinking skills: Theory and practice., edited by J. B. Baron and R. J. Sternberg. New York, NY: W H Freeman/Times Books/ Henry Holt & Co: 9-26.

Facione, Peter A. 1990. Critical Thinking: A Statement of Expert Consensus for Purposes of Educational Assessment and Instruction. Research Findings and Recommendations (“The Delphi Report”). Millbrae, CA: American Philosophical Association.

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Filed under Logic and philosophy, Rant, Sermon

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.

42 Comments

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

by | August 19, 2012

Urkkkh!

If words were water, I would be paddling hard up to my ears being nibbled by piranha as an alligator came for me. So I haven’t said much here for a while. There’s this paper, this book, this contract, this report and this tendency for me to post comments elsewhere. So I recommend you all read these posts:

How I Unwittingly Infiltrated the Boy’s Club & Why It’s Time for a New Wave of Atheism

and this post

The campaign against Amy Davis Roth

on sexism in the skeptical and atheist movements. I reproduce my comment to the latter post below, but note the extensive expressions of support at the first post. Also, they asked for a new term for an inclusive atheist movement. I suggested Affirmative Atheism as I have before, but now I think the right term is

Affirmatism

This is a movement that affirms rights, equality, humanistic values, liberty, and general good taste. I hereby declare it started.

Here’s what I said at the latter post, edited slightly:

This is why one should not try to make a movement out of negative views, views that are contrary to some other views. Inevitably the movement becomes about position and status, and defending those positions and statuses against perceived threats. Skeptical movements around the world, and most certainly here in Australia, tend to have a small circle of those who run them who are concerned that newcomers don’t get too strong influential.

Since most such movements were set up either in societies that are male dominated (including, I am afraid to say, many scientifically oriented subcultures) they tend towards the standard male chauvinism of the eras and contexts in which they began individually. It’s not surprising that they treat skeptical women like this: they treat all women like this.

There are other sidelined and marginalised groups too; ethnic, social, and personality types are also treated like this. The result is that the movements will start well in a cultural context but then slowly denature like molecules DNA left in a test tube over time.

For a movement to be both a positive force and adapt to changing cultural values such as egalitarianism for different or new groups than the ones that started it, the movement must have a positive set of values. Humanisms of various stripes do, but basically we demonstrate in this the fact about religion that we cannot emulate and which explains its successes: to be really successful, you have to exploit some primate cognitive biases, and set up arbitrary totems around which to dance to establish loyalties. If you can’t do that (and from principle skeptical and atheist movements cannot consistently do that), then your target audience (the human primates) will not stay true to the aims of the movement.

IMHO

Now back to wrestling with Microsoft Word, which insists on writing my papers differently to me and then losing an hour’s work.

“Oh editors don’t let your authors use Microsoft
Don’t let ‘em peck keyboards and drive them PCs…
Let ‘em use Pages, or LaTeX for free”…

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