Category Archives: Truisms

Obvious truths. No, really.

by John S. Wilkins | 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.

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 They need to have drama, or they will not be published, and if they are, they will not be read.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.

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.

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 John S. Wilkins | December 4, 2012

Eww, I stepped in some evolutionary psychology and other crap

*Sigh*

I try and try to stay out of the muck, but they keep pulling me back in! I saw what I thought was a careful and rather overly-documented critique by Edward Clint of a talk by Rebecca Watson against evolutionary psychology (EP). It was full of references and arguments, devoid of ad hominem, and well defended. So I linked to it on Twitter. I got these responses:

Very BAD post. Surprised you’d recommend it.RT @john_s_wilkins @lippard @DuaeQuartunciae not recommending the individual, but that one post.
@pzmyers

@pzmyers @john_s_wilkins @lippard @DuaeQuartunciae Looked decent to me PZ, at a glance – has anyone done a response/take-down then?
@mjrobbins

Nope. not well done most of the time & premises are false. RT @john_s_wilkins @pzmyers @lippard @DuaeQuartunciae EP is not a priori false.
@pzmyers

EEA is shockingly bad. RT @lippard @john_s_wilkins @DuaeQuartunciae massive modularity of mind? Environment of evolutionary adaptedness?
@pzmyers

And off it went. There were some response articles by Stephanie Zvan (which PZ called a GOOD response), James Croft (the most measured response so far) and Greg Laden, but the raw nerves were on fire. Clint was accused of being an “MRA” (men’s rights activist – a term of abuse apparently, and one I hadn’t come across) and having evil motives against Rebecca. Others said that because evolutionary psychology was bad science, a post defending it must be wrong (I suspect that might be PZ’s underlying enthymeme) no matter what the arguments made were.

I also discovered that while I had linked to one post, I disagreed with Clint on his treatment of agnosticism (1 and 2). I am not recommending him as an Authority, but then I don’t do that.

I am not shocked (any more) that this has descended into partisan personalities. I have come to expect this. But I am interested in the arguments made. Stephanie’s post is not bad, but in the end Croft effectively says “It’s okay to equivocate and cherry pick if it’s for popular purposes”, and that I do not agree with. If it’s bad science, and we can attack antivaccinationists, homeopaths and creationists for popular bad science, then the wheel turns against us skeptics too.

Clint’s defence of EP as potentially good science and not at all to be attacked because of the bad examples and bad reportage is solid, I think. The problem is that EP has its defenders who will ignore all counter evidence and counterarguments, while the opponents will ignore all evidence and arguments in its favour. I want to do something here, which I have previously alluded to: announce my being a born-again sociobiologist - EP is a form of sociobiology.

The criticism of sociobiology and EP is largely cultural. It tends to privilege the power structures of the people doing the research. Henrich’s, Heine’s and Norenzayan’s recent essay on psychology focusing on WEIRD students (western educated industrialised rich democratic, if memory serves) points out that all psychology and social science tends to do this, by default. But we should try to remove that bias as much as possible in all science, so it is fair criticism of EP also.

But what some people, including (I know from personal contact) PZ and Larry Moran, object to about EP is what Gould called “panadaptationism” and “Just-So” storification. Here is where there is interesting and philosophical issue, and so here is where I am most compelled to comment. Forgive me in advance.

First of all, there is the issue of when it is appropriate to use adaptationist explanations. Clint cites the leading philosopher on natural selection, Elliot Sober. Now I often disagree with Sober, especially in the assumption of optimisation studies (and of course classification), but Clint is right to cite Sober here:

Adaptationism is first and foremost a research program. Its core claims will receive support if specific adaptationist hypotheses turn out to be well confirmed. If such explanations fail time after time, eventually scientists will begin to suspect that its core assumptions are defective. Phrenology waxed and waned according to the same dynamic (Section 2.1). Only time and hard work will tell whether adaptationism deserves the same fate ( Mitchell and Valone 1990).

Opponents, largely following Gould and Lewontin’s 1979 attack, tend to assert (often without consideration of the particular attempts to give adaptive explanations) that any and all adaptive hypotheses are cheap and to be avoided. This has the effect of basically eliminating natural selective accounts of anything. But we know that selection is the only process that results in complexity over any time, and the fact there are complex traits among organisms leads to the inevitable conclusion that we should be able to give selective explanations from time to time. I have argued before that we should think of adaptation as a viable hypothesis at all times; but being viable doesn’t make it true. The problem is not that EP or sociobiology makes adaptive hypotheses. They should. It is that they often make them without testing them.

This is no longer the case, at least not universally. Desmond Morris is long gone from the forefront of panadaptationist thinking, and we can start to deal with the more serious claims and studies made. As Clint says

Although there are always going to be some flawed studies, researchers weeded out failed hypotheses and refined methodologies. The influence of evolutionary psychology has steadily grown. Evolutionary psychology theories once controversial are now accepted by mainstream psychology.

Mind, that isn’t a high bar to leap. A lot of psychology is still fairly simplistic (but not most, by any means). If there’s a field that is really well grounded in my subjective assessment, it is comparative psychology, which is cross-specific at comparing human cognitive development and our nearest relatives, the primates. And that gives us a constraint upon EP-style adaptationism. If it is shared across all primates, then it can’t be an adaptation to an ancestral environment not shared by all primates (not unless some massively unparsimonious evolution has occurred, in which case we can’t say squat about evolutionary history).

But something must have happened in our lineage to give us the traits we now have and it simply is not sufficient to say it could have been evolution by accident. Accident is an admission we cannot explain things. It is the background assumption of anything. And let us not forget that accident is the raw material of selection. Accident proposes, selection disposes. Accidental variation is the origin of things, not the reason why things are retained and built upon, at least, not always. If something can be acquired by accident, and spread through a population via drift, then it can be lost the same way. Nobody sensible would go so far as to say that there is no evolution by accident. But neither should anyone sensible suggest there is no evolution by selection either. The question, as the wit said to the society woman, is how much.

So sociobiology as a hypothesis is acceptable. It need not lead to Nazism, racism, sexism or US exceptionalism. So long as there is empirical data, testing the particular hypothesis at hand, it is and can be good science. It is not the final word. And as Twain said, I wouldn’t hang a dog on a newspaper report. EP like anything else can be misrepresented by various interests, just as evolution always has been.

This brings us to the formal and informal fallacies this whole subject seems to attract like things that are attracted to bad metaphors. If PZ is saying Clint’s post was bad because it asserts and defends something he knows without argument to be false, then that is question begging and displays massive confirmation bias. This is not a good trait in scientists. If, similarly, he approves of Zvan’s piece because it agrees with his belief that EP is false, then that too is confirmation bias. If he dismisses Clint’s defence because Clint is an MRA or has “issues with Rebecca”, that is obviously a fallacy of ad hominem, and a genetic fallacy to boot. His argument stands or falls on the merits of the case made (even if, and I can’t stress this highly enough, he is massively wrong about agnosticism!).

And no, ~~Stephanie~~ (see comments) James, it is not sufficient to accept a bit of exaggeration or cherry picking or equivocation when we do it because it’s entertaining or fun. It is false argument. If it’s wrong to do it when you are anti vaccination, then it’s wrong to do it when you are “skeptical”. This is called tu quoque in reasoning. Rebecca equivocates between a field and reportage or misuse of a field. She is clearly trying to poison the well. Similarly, Dawkins does the same thing with religion in The God Delusion. It’s simply dishonest argument, no matter how entertaining.

In the past I have been challenged by PZ and Larry Moran for saying “we are all subject to our own biases”. I know I am (and because they are mine I am not sure what they are, although in the case of chocolate I have suspicions), but Larry once said to me that I should show him his. Well he’s not engaged on this topic for now, but here is me showing some cognitive biases of some skeptics.

I initially thought Clint’s piece was overkill. Now I see that it will never be enough for some. No matter what his history or motives.

Late note: PZ has a post here and a promise of more to come.

Later note: The first of his ?EP series is here.

This series:

References

Gould, Stephen Jay, and Richard C. Lewontin. 1979. The spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian paradigm: a critique of the adaptationist programme. Proc R Soc Lond B 205:581–598.

Henrich, Joseph, Steven J. Heine, and Ara Norenzayan. 2010. The weirdest people in the world? Behavioral and Brain Sciences 33 (2-3):61-83.

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Filed under Cognition, Epistemology, Evolution, Journalism, Logic and philosophy, Philosophy, Social evolution, Truisms

by John S. Wilkins | November 24, 2012

Why is Darwin’s theory so controversial?

So asks this essay and gets the whole thing wrong.

Darwin’s theories (plural) are not controversial because they imply that species are mutable. This was a widely held view by preachers, moralists, Aristotelians, naturalists, breeders, formalists, folk biology, and even biblical translators.

Darwin was not controversial because he implied racist ideas about humans. He never did and the racism that is sometimes associated with his ideas preceded him by centuries (and were good Christian virtues) and were mediated by those who disagreed with him.

Darwin was not controversial because he thought the age of the earth was large. This preceded him also, and was settled in the late eighteenth century, although the present value wasn’t finalised until the 1960s.

Darwin was not controversial because his account of humans being animals contradicted the Bible. Linnaeus knew humans were animals a century earlier, and indeed the only issue was whether humans were animals with souls (or if all animals had souls), which Darwin never implied anything to the contrary.

Moreover, it was Christians who rejected the literal interpretation of the Bible, long before Darwin (beginning with the Alexandrian school in the second century), and those who realised that the global Flood was a myth (or an allegory) were Christian geologists a half century at least in advance of Darwin.

No, the reason why Darwin was controversial is very, very simple. Darwin argued that complex designs could arise without a mind to guide it. In short, his controversial idea was natural selection (and sexual selection, but even that preceded Darwin). Almost from the day it was published, critics attacked the implication that the living world was not all that special, and that it lacked a Plan or Meaning. Theologians, moralists and even scientists objected to this, and while even most of the Catholic Church accepted common descent and modification of species, it was natural selection they hated.

All the supposed “controversies” of Darwinism (or that phantom, “neo-Darwinism”) are post hoc attacks based on the prior objection to the lack of a guiding hand in biology. Don’t like natural selection? Attack Darwin by calling him a racist or blaming him for the Holocaust. Say he is antiessentialist. Say he is anti-religion. No matter how much evidence one puts forward that these are deliberate lies manufactured by those who hate Darwin for natural selection, it won’t stop the prevarication industry.

Sensible philosophical critics of Darwin focus on selection for that reason. It undercuts our prior belief that We Are Special. Human mentation, cognition, language, morality, religion or economics is somehow privileged in the universe. Bullshit. We are an animal and we arose without the universe seeking us (although, as I have argued, a deity might choose this universe because we evolve in it). The human exceptionalism which critics like Fodor, Fuller, Plantinga and the rest presume but do not argue for unfairly places the onus on Darwinians. It is time to stop taking them seriously.

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Filed under Biology, Creationism and Intelligent Design, Epistemology, Ethics and Moral Philosophy, Evolution, History, Logic and philosophy, Metaphysics, Philosophy, Race and politics, Social evolution, Truisms

by John S. Wilkins | 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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by John S. Wilkins | January 21, 2012

A philosophical apology from 1919 for not being pro-war

Leiter posted the PDF of this on his site. I can’t help but reproduce some of the choicer quotes:

“DEAR FRIEND: Your letter gently but un-mistakably intimates that I am a slacker, a slacker in peace as well as in war; that when the World war was raging bitterly I dawdled my time with subjects like symbolic logic, and that now when the issues of reconstructing a bleeding world demand the efforts of all who care for the future of the human race, I am shirking my responsibility and wasting my time with Plato and Cicero. Your sweetly veiled charge is true, but I do not feel ashamed of it. On the contrary, when I look upon my professional colleagues who enlisted their philosophies in the war, who added their shrill voices to the roar of the cannons and their little drops of venom to the torrents of national hatreds, I feel that it is they who should write apologies for their course. For philosophers, I take it, are ordained as priests to keep alive the sacred fires in the altar of impartial truth, and I have but faithfully endeavored to keep my oath of office as well as the circumstances would permit.

…

I believe in the division of labor. I am a priest or philosopher, not a soldier or propagandist. I yield to none in my admiration for the brave fellows who gave their all on the bloody fields of Flanders, but I have no respect for the bigots who cannot realize that “there are many mansions in my Father’s house,” and that it would be a poor world if there were no diversity of function to suit the diversity of natural aptitudes. And when people begin to admonish me that if everyone did as I did, etc., I answer that humanity would probably perish from cold if everyone produced food, and would certainly starve if everyone made clothes or built houses. I admit the desperate need of men to defend the existence of our country, but I cannot ignore the need of men to maintain even in war the things which make the country worth defending. Purely theoretic studies seem to me to be of those fine flowers which relieve the drabness of our existence and help to make the human scene worth while.

…

If I had your persuasive talent, dear friend, and cared to exalt one human interest above others, I would contend that the really important issue before the American people today is not economic or political but moral and vital—the issue of Puritanism. It is the Puritanic feeling of responsibility which has blighted our art and philosophy and has made us as a people unskilled in the art of enjoying life.

…

The great philosophers, like the great artists, scientists and religious teachers have all, in large measure, ignored their contemporary social problems. Aristotle, Leonardo da Vinci, Shakespeare, Newton, Buddha, Jesus of Nazareth and others who have done so much to heighten the quality of human life, have very little to say about the actual international, economic and political readjustments which were as pressing in their day as in ours. The great service of Socrates to humanity was surely not in his somewhat superficial criticism of the Athenian electoral machinery of his day, but rather in developing certain intellectual methods, and suggesting to Plato certain doctrines as to the nature of the soul and ideas,—doctrines which in spite of all their impracticality have served for over two thousand years to raise men above the grovelling, clawing existence in which so much of our life is sunk.”

From the New Republic, December 5, 1919. As such it is now out of copyright, despite what TNR says.

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Filed under History, Logic and philosophy, Philosophy, Politics, Quotes, Sermon, Social evolution, Truisms

by John S. Wilkins | January 15, 2012

Notes on Novelty 8: Conclusion – Post evo-devo

Notes on Novelty series:
1. Introduction
2. Historical considerations – before and after evolution
3: The meaning of evolutionary novelty
4: Examples – the beetle’s horns and the turtle’s shell
5: Evolutionary radiations and individuation
6: Levels of description
7: Surprise!
8: Conclusion – Post evo-devo

With the growth of developmental genetics, it is possible to see beyond the view of homologies working at the level of whole organs. The mechanisms that define the ordinate axes of structures, the genetic circuits that pattern them, and the cell types with which organs are formed can be considered. The more that researchers look, the more they will find that the same tools have been used to build a great variety of structures long thought to have independent histories. Discerning what has been conserved and what is novel in the origins of organs and body plans will be possible only with more comparative data, experiments on non-model animals, and targeted fossil discoveries from crucial nodes in the tree of life. (Shubin et al. 2009: 822)

My conclusion is that we find novelty in a subjective sense, based upon what we think we should find in the data. Further knowledge of the underlying or overlaying mechanisms should reduce the surprisal of the trait appearing either in the paleontological record or in a distinct taxonomic group. Only when it doesn’t and in cases where it should, should we start to seek non-Darwinian mechanisms. Much of the debate over novelty in evolution has centred implicitly around what the researchers themselves find interesting, surprising or contrary to the conventional interpretations. Another factor lies in a topic I haven’t discussed here: what counts as “suitably dissimilar”, so a few words on this.

Similarity and its converse, dissimilarity, is often applied to the issues of novelty. Stephen Jay Gould attempted, for example, to apply it in the case of the Cambrian explosion (1990); some fossils’ bodyplans were too dissimilar (using the consistency index of cladistic analyses, C) to put them into existing taxonomic categories (“phyla”); subsequent work did precisely that (Briggs and Fortey 2005). Relying upon morphology – that is, description at a certain grain (indeed, the only grain available to palaeontologists most of the time; cytological data is rare and molecular data nonexistent) – Gould found some traits and overall phenotypes too weird to fit into our classifications. Briggs and Fortey showed over several decades of work summarised in their paper that they could be seen as instances of stem groups of our present clade-based phyla (that is, phyla that have been made monophyletic).

What is similarity in taxonomy? It is true that rarely does this get any kind of analytic or quantitative analysis, especially in palaeontology, but that doesn’t mean there is no analysis underlying it of which the authors are not conscious (or think it too obvious to state). The best analysis of the recognition of similarity in the literature is that of Amos Tversky, who argued that the similarity of one thing to another is the overlap of features minus the unique features to each object, out of a “feature set” (1978). This is now called “Tversky Similarity”:

[TS]

What is crucial to understanding similarity like this, which was developed for a generic psychological account and not just for science, is that the choice of features to evaluate (which may be entirely unconscious, or a cultural convention, or even biologically imposed) determines what counts as similarity in each case. With a different feature set, different similarity indices might arise, and indeed the history of science has been one of finding the “right” feature set (for example, in the case of elements and the periodic table, Scerri 2008).

The alternative to using apparent similarity, especially at a given grain of description (the gross morphology of the organism) is to use homology. Instead of treating the relations between organisms and specimens as a matter of what they “look like”, identify homologs and organise your groupings on that basis – this is the reason for cladistics. Homologies, not similarities in the eyes of the beholders, set up a baseline for assessing how novel a trait may be, and if we can find the developmental, physiological, molecular and environmental reasons for the novelties thus uncovered, so much the better. All I am criticising is the idea that somehow, in ways we can’t even properly articulate, we need to “go beyond” or “extend” the Darwinian approach. In one sense of course we do; Darwin did not know everything. In this case, we do not; Darwin has been validated again and again regarding novelty.

I am not dismissing the idea that there can be an evolutionary explosion from some novelty or node in an evolutionary tree, although these are more often the result of subjective assessments (the Cambrian explosion has, for example, become less and less of an explosion and more and more of an evolutionary diversification of the ordinary kind, as paleontological evidence has come in). What I am dismissing is the notion that there is some objective sense in which evolutionary novelties are natural kinds. Radiations occur all the time – some clades are speciose and others are sparse. If there is a general principle why this occurs, it is not yet obvious. Maybe some kinds of developmental modularities do cause clades to be more radiative. Maybe, however, is not an explanation.

Science progresses best when it eliminates subjectivity from its categories; anthropomorphism has ever been the bugbear of good science (unless anthropoi are the objects of study, and even there we tend to project ourselves on our subjects, as any anthropologist can tell you). It has taken us over a century to begin to recognise that what Darwin started requires this in biology as in the other physical sciences. So I would like to leave the last word to somebody of a certain weight in evolutionary biology, and who seems to be on the right side of the debate on many issues, Sewall Wright:

“Creative” and “emergent” evolution

The present discussion has dealt with the problem of evolution as one depending wholly on mechanism and chance. In recent years, there has been some tendency to revert to more or less mystical conceptions revolving about such phrases as “emergent evolution” and “creative evolution.” The writer must confess to a certain sympathy with such viewpoints philosophically but feels that they can have no place in an attempt at scientific analysis of the problem. One may recognize that the only reality directly experienced is that of mind, including choice, that mechanism is merely a term for regular behavior, and that there can be no ultimate explanation in terms of mechanism—merely an analytic description. Such a description, however, is the essential task of science and because of these very considerations, objective and subjective terms cannot be used in the same description without danger of something like 100 percent duplication. Whatever incompleteness is involved in scientific analysis applies to the simplest problems of mechanics as well as to evolution. It is present in most aggravated form, perhaps, in the development and behavior of individual organisms, but even here there seems to be no necessary limit (short of quantum phenomena) to the extent to which mechanistic analysis may be carried. An organism appears to be a system, linked up in such a way, through chains of trigger mechanisms, that a high degree of freedom of behavior as a whole merely requires departures from regularity of behavior among the ultimate parts, of the order of infinitesimals raised to powers as high as the lengths of the above chains. This view implies considerable limitations in the synthetic phases of science, but in any case it seems to have reached the point of demonstration in the field of quantum physics that prediction can be expressed only in terms of probabilities, decreasing with the period of time. As to evolution, its entities, species and ecologic systems, are much less closely knit than individual organisms. One may conceive of the process as involving freedom, most readily traceable in the factor called here individual adaptability. This, however, is a subjective interpretation and can have no place in the objective scientific analysis of the problem. [Wright 1931: 159]

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Filed under Epistemology, Evolution, General Science, Logic and philosophy, Metaphysics, Natural Classification, Philosophy, Science, Species and systematics, Truisms

by John S. Wilkins | September 6, 2011

The principle of charity, qualia, and philosophy

I’ve hurt my back, so I aim to rant a little.

When I teach critical reasoning just about the first thing I teach is the principle of charity. It has many formulations:

This policy calls on us to fit our own propositions (or our own sentences) to the other person’s words and attitudes in such a way as to render their speech and other behavior intelligible. This necessarily requires us to see others as much like ourselves in point of overall coherence and correctness—that we see them as more or less rational creatures mentally inhabiting a world much like our own. [Donald Davidson]

In its simplest form, it holds that (other things being equal) one’s interpretation of another speaker’s words should minimize the ascription of false beliefs to that speaker. [The Oxford Companion to Philosophy]

This [P of C] says that if interpreting as reasoning a passage which is not obviously reasoning yields only bad arguments, assume it is not reasoning. (The rationale for this approach is that we are interested in finding out the truth about things rather than in scoring points off people.) [Alec Fisher]

There are many other quotations, for which I am indebted to Neil Thomason. However, the general point is that, when arguing with somebody, and they say something that seems on the face of it silly, try to reframe the statement so it makes the maximum amount of reasonable sense – that is, if the person’s statement can be reasonably interpreted in a coherent manner, do so.

We often interpret people as saying something that is truly silly in order to deprecate the arguments they make (this is called erecting a straw man, on the grounds that it is easy to knock a straw man down*). Consider what that implies about you: you do not use reason to find out try things, you use it to win arguments and reassure yourself. It isn’t knowledge that you seek but comfort and smugness.

Argument is supposed to give you a true conclusion if the premises are true and the argument is valid (technically, this is called a sound argument – but the term “sound” has, like so many other good terms, been hijacked by propagandists for rhetorical rather than rational purposes). This means that it is a way to work out what believing in true statements commits you to further believing, if you are a reasonable person. When you take the premises of observation that biological things vary more or less randomly in heritable ways, for example, it is a short but sound argument to the conclusion that, unless something intervenes to prevent it, all populations of living things are evolving. A rational person should believe that conclusion, because if the facts are true, the conclusion must be.

But if you try to leap onto missing premises or steps in the argument (an argument missing parts that are implied of assumed and which would be needed to make it truly sound or valid, is called an enthymeme, a term used by Aristotle, of course), just to score a point, you are not seeking truth, nor wanting to be rational.

What triggered this elementary introduction to reasoning is the way some (well meaning) commenters on this blog addressed my claim that there are no qualia. A quale, in philosophy of mind, is a feeling or experience, the “what it is to be like”, that cannot be reduced to a physical description. For example, Thomas Nagel’s famous paper “What it is like to be a bat” argues that we can know everything about the sensorium of bats, but not what it is like to be a bat with sonar. Likewise, Frank Jackson’s paper “Epiphenomenal Qualia” argues that a super scientist Mary in her room, which does not have any red light or colour, can know everything there is to know about light, vision and neurology associated with seeing red, and yet, when she is finally released and sees red for the first time, she experiences something she did not know.

This amounts to the claim that there is an ontological difference between the objective world, and the subjective world, a view that has deep roots, but is mostly associated with Kant and his heirs and successors. The term qualia (the plural of quale) indicates that we have experiential or phenomenological properties that are simply not reducible to factual statements (usually of physics, but you can take it in other ways, so long as the facts are objective).

For someone who thinks the world comprises one domain of being like me (I am an out and out physicalist), this presents a problem. David Chalmers dubbed this (inadvertently, I think) the Hard Problem (as opposed to the hard problems of building or simulating brains): how to account for consciousness in a physical universe. Qualia, phenomena, self-awareness, and so forth form a cluster of concepts that a monist/physicalist like me has to account for. They are assumed by many as truisms. Jackson and others give what I consider are question begging arguments for them, but at least they give arguments.

So, when I deny the existence of qualia and/or consciousness/the self, how should I be read? Assume I am not an idiot, just for argument’s sake. How might you read my claim? Well you might apply the Principle of Charity here and try to figure out what I am doing. You might ask “Where does Wilkins do a logical dance to get to this conclusion?” instead of saying “Wilkins is an idiot and a fool to deny what we all know to be true.” What we all know is in general terms a very good indicator to what is false.

You might think: “Wilkins must either have an argument that experience does not lead to the conclusion there are qualia or there is a self, or he must deny the premises that there are raw feels, or both”. And you would be right. I do both. On the one hand I assert that contrary to the widely held view, there is only a purely verbal existence of raw experience. In short, we have these words “feeling”, “experience” and “awareness”, and so we just sort of assume there are feelings, experiences and awareness in these special ways. Instead, I think that we can use the words without committing ourselves to the folk ontology† as we do things that “feel”, “experience” and “aware” refer to. These are, of course, objective processes, even if we can’t directly inspect them without killing the subject.

On the other hand I deny that having an experience is itself a reason to believe in qualia/consciousness. Instead I think we are all P-zombies anyway. Remember, a P-Zombie is just like you and me in every physical and behavioural respect, only without qualia or consciousness. You cannot tell, nor can they, that they lack these. They report pain and every other experience under the right circumstances.

So qualia are not objective, right enough. Now suppose that it happens that in this world, we are all P-zombies, but do not know it. Instead we all only think we have qualia (why? because language often leads us to think things that aren’t true, as Wittgenstein often said). We cannot tell that we do not. This is a thought experiment, but it has a sting: I am not merely giving it as a hypothetical, I am saying that we have no reason not to think it is the case.

Everybody has experiences, and because everybody is in a unique situation, both bodily, location wise, and circumstances, every experience is unique to the timeline of that individual. So I must assert that experiences are unique. There is only a “what it is like to be Wilkins” available to Wilkins, except in terms of general classes of experience (suffering pain from pulled lower backs comes immediate to mind right now), which are quite addressable as objective phenomena.

But this doesn’t license the ontological claim of the separate reality of the subjective. To be a subject in my view of the world is just to have a perspective, as I argued before. It is to be this thing, here, now. I’m not denying that you have these experiences, only that they mean there is a subjective world separate from and irreducible to the physical objective measurable world.

To return for a second to the Principle of Charity, one commentator exhibited a common response, often seen when scientists criticise philosophy: attacking the fact that there is a term of art in philosophy that means what the non-philosopher thinks is contrary to intuition or “common knowledge”. Qualia was defined as a term of philosophy to mean irreducible experience. By denying that experience is irreducible I must, perforce, deny that qualia exist. I could redefine it to mean “experience” but we already have a word for that: “experience”.

Philosophers often seem to the outside as if they are quibbling over meanings and splitting hairs. Meanings, of course, matter, and calling something “mere semantics” to a linguist will get you a well deserved rap on the knuckles, but philosophers do a fair bit more than that. They also reconstruct the arguments necessary to make usages of words rational, or try to show that the arguments fail to do this. We do it in the name of truth, even if a certain number just enjoy playing the game the way a tennis star plays tennis, by stretching the rules as far as they will go for competitive advantage.

And finally, here’s a thing: scientists, skeptics, religious believers, politicians, economists and every other group of people also do precisely this, although they usually do it poorly. Consider how bad reasoning led to the Iraq invasion. Imagine how much better the world would be, if the intelligence analysts to a person had used good reasoning skills. Deprecate philosophy at your peril, oh smug ones!

Okay, the pain killers have kicked in and my back is no longer driving my expression of bile and bitterness, so I will sign off for now. As Craig Ferguson says, I look forward to your letters.

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