Blogroll!

I think the following blog entires are really important:

The first is a very recent entry from The Renaissance Mathematicus:

How Not To Report The History of Science

These myths about Galileo perniciously contribute to the very standard and very wrong "science vs. religion" version of early scientific history. The average intellectual or thoughtful person has yet to assimilate these kinds of observations into their thought, and the effect of such a general assimilation might be seismic.

An alternative to this standard history is being cobbled together by people like Humphrey Clarke over at Quodlibeta:

What Has Theology Ever Done For Science?

While the sciences do not currently engage with religious thought, they certainly used to, and this relationship was productive in certain important respects.

Finally, over at UnderstandingSociety, an extremely important primer on two dominant and oppositional styles of sociological thought, the "empiricist" and the "critical":

Demystifying Social Knowledge

While most of us continue to bash away at the interminable intellectual issues of our day, people like Daniel Little are squarely facing the elephant in the room: our total lack of a coherent and powerful theory of society and culture. He shows us that we need not cling to simplistic, ideologically-motivated theories like the utterly sophomoric neo-darwinian "memetics" in order to remain empiricists about society. In other words, while the task is exceedingly difficult, we can hope for a science of society, whatever that turns out to mean.

Philosophical Intuitions

One of the most banal and unsophisticated maneuvers one can encounter in a modern philosophical discussion is the denial that a theory has to conform to "our intuitions".

"Yeah," someone says, "my theory has results that don't match common intuitions. So what? Who says that I have to cater to your intuitions?"

This move was born out of a certain frustration with mid-20th century "thought experiments" in philosophy, which purported to demonstrate the truth or falsity of some thory by reference to an outlandish thought experiment and to what "we" would "say" about it in light of the theory. To many, it became increasingly clear that this sort of strategy accomplished very little.

Yet, a destructive project must be accompanied by a constructive one. Once one starts to wonder what sorts of judgments can ground our answers to philosophical questions, one is struck by the absolute necessity of some kind of non-inferential "seemings" as foundations for all inquiry. One is also struck by the incredible diversity of these mental experiences, by the poverty of using a single word--intuition--to refer to them all.

Current debates over what intuitions are (Contingent, empirically acquired beliefs? Perceptions of necessary truths?) ignore this diversity, and therefore begin to look an awful lot like discussions about how many legs tables have.

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Off the top of my head...

Logical Intuitions: These are perhaps among the most forceful inuitions we have. That a thing is identical to itself or that a contradiction cannot be true are intuitions that I simply cannot imagine to be incorrect. Yet, this form of intuition is purely formal, and does not contain any specific content. Rather, purports to provide the proper relations between propositions, sentences or ideas which do have content.

Perceptual Intuition: When we are moved to assert that "the apple is red", we are experiencing a basic form of perceptual intuition, a basic kind of seeming which involves the ascription of properties to objects. Ideally, the content of a perceptual intuition will be caused by an actual property of a real object, and not a priori reflection of any kind.

Conceptual Intuitions: What is a "cause"? What is a "person"? What is "free action"? These are concepts we all use yet rarely reflect upon. Reflection here is a priori, and the content of the intuition is delivered only by this kind of reflection. However, these intuitions need not be universally shared, and are arguably even sensitive to such factors as culture, class and gender. For example, it can seem to you that causality is partly defined by a sort of necessity: if A caused B in situation C, then all past and future instances of A in situation C will cause B. Yet, reading a skeptical philosopher (most prominently, Hume) can change these intuitions.

Emotive Intuitions: In response to actual or imagined situations, we may feel strong emotions which move us to make certain judgments. For example, a situation or action may provoke horror, disgust or frustration. These intuitions form the bulk of our ethical thought by stimulating us towards reflection on goodness and badness. (Kantian or rationlist ethicists might object here, saying that emotive responses are not properly ethical, but what they are simply doing is denying the importance of emotive intuitions and asserting that practical life should be governed by logical and conceptual intuition).

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It should now be obvious that philosophical intuitions are highly diverse, differing in their sources, in the type of content they convey, in the purposes they serve and in their universality. These features, in turn, dictate how they may be used in philosophy.

It is clear that a universally held a priori intuition is a basically unassailable argument-stopper. This is why logical intuitions are so powerful: they are the bedrock of discussion itself. When someone's position is shown to embody a straightfoward contradiction, it is patently ridiculous for them to continue to hold to it because "well, you hold that a contradiction is bad, but that's just your intuition".

So, all philosophers are committed to recognizing the importance and power of some intuitions. The real work lies in developing some basic guidelines for their use. When are they supposed to count?

By delineating different types as I just have, some of this work is already accomplished. When someone tells you that their apple is red because it seems red to them, they are reporting a perceptual intuition which ought to give you evidence to believe that the apple is actually red (assuming you believe they are sincere). If, however, they told you that it feels red to them (in the emotive sense) you are justified in taking this intuition to be irrelevent.

It should be clear by now that the "well, that's just your intuition" move is of limited value to us. If an ethical theory of yours implies that the right thing for me to do in a given situation is to shoot my own child dead, you cannot simply dismiss my revulsion as irrelevent for your theory, because it is utterly implausible that emotions are irrelevent to ethics (no ethical theory has ever really asserted this).

Similarly, if your metaphysic implies that causality is unreal or that there are no objects, you have better have something to say to me about the fact that these assertions seem to be patently false. My intuitions are not irrelevent, because the same type of intuition is almost certainly playing a role in your metaphysic. However, none of this implies that my conceptual inuition disproves your theory, rather, it simply requires a response.

However, if I argued against you because the nonexistence of causality was revolting or disgusting to me, you can rightly argue that emotive intuitions are irrelevent to the current discussion.

To get anywhere, we all have to start somewhere. If you and I are going to talk at all, this implies that we need shared guidelines on where we can start. Otherwise, any philosophical discussion is basically pointless.

Children, Aging, Meaning

Is there no change of death in paradise?
Does ripe fruit never fall?

-Wallace Stevens

Would you take an "elixir of life"? The assumption that immortality would be a good thing rests on the assumption that a life can be both (1) indefinitely long and (2) worth living. Given some basic facts about human psychology and about lives worth living, there are good reasons to believe that these two conditions are in deep tension, and even to believe that they cannot jointly be satisfied. This result, if true, leads us to question why we so often ignore children as sources of enduring meaning and value in the world.

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One of the decade's most powerful films is the dystopian Children of Men(2006), based on a novel by P.D. James. In it, we are treated to a horrifying glimpse of the human race gone infertile. Alongside the more predictable images of international war, catastrophe and moral disintegration, director Alfonso Cuarón masterfully portrays the widespread sense of dread, horror and meaninglessness that permeates the age.

"What's left to hope for?" asks the lead character, rhetorically. In a world without children's voices, people have grown almost universally sullen, dark, almost animal. The audience shares this mood, each viewer drawn irresistibly towards it.

But why? Individual couples choose to go childless all the time. Most people don't see "leaving children behind" as the sole foundational source of meaning in their lives. And, most importantly, many people believe that when they die, their consciousness will be snuffed out forever. Lucretius would surely chastise us all--not without reason--for fearing anything that we cannot experience. So why is Children of Men so horrifying?

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The blogs are alive with the sound of aging research. A Nobel Prize in Physiology/Medicine has just been awarded to an American team who has discovered how to protect chromosomes from degenerating, a key feature of the aging process. People are speculating all over the web about various exciting possibilities. And, over at In Search of Enlightenment, Colin Farrelly, political science professor at Queen's University, has posted several long essays in which he argues that slowing down aging is the single most important priority for the human race, more important than combating global warming.

It is easy to see where the impetus for this kind of position comes from, for the human race has never been this old. As birth rates drop all over the world (Africa, as always, is the exception) a disproportionate lump of the population is moving steadily towards the octogenarian's life. Given that these are voters people, surely their interests are important, and the fact that all lifeforms wither and die shouldn't deter us from extending lifespans if we can.

The singularity people have picked up on this sort of reasoning and argued that the true and proper fate of humanity is not biological longevity, but digital immortality.

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It doesn't really take long to figure out why Children of Men is initially terrifying. Adolescent Nietzschean or Randian rhetoric be damned: our lives do not have much sense outside of a social context. It's therefore terrifying to consider the immanent destruction of that context, to think that in a very short time nothing we do now will matter to anyone.

Yet, aging research should be of some comfort here, no? Surely, given massive, co-ordinated international effort, there would surely be some hope of extending the human lifespan into the extremely distant future. What's the problem?

We should note, of course, that just because your chromosomes have been enhanced doesn't mean you can't be hit by a train. Furthermore, it seems to me that anyone who's had any experience with modern computing technology would be positively mad to agree to "upload" their consciousness on to anything resembling a modern computer. We're all familiar with Microsoft's "blue screen of death", and the horrors of actually being that screen truly outstrip my imaginative capacities. There is no such thing as guaranteed physical immortality, digital or analog[1].

Yet, the Children of Men problem can be solved, can it not? Society lives on, social context lives on, in the artificially preserved lives of childless near-immortals.

It is not so simple, and each of us knows that it is not. The value of a child's action and experience lies in the fact that almost everything is, for them, genuinely new. They learn, they suffer, they rail against existence, they discover unexpected joys and excitedly encounter the various themes of human life long recorded by scholars and mythmakers. What's more, as parents, relatives and caregivers we feel faint, nostalgic echoes of that sublime sense of discovery by watching and helping them cope. We remember: I was there, too. This sort of connection with our past, with our collective progeny, and with the universal features of human existence cannot be replicated via any other means. It would almost certainly vanish in a society of immortals, for whom action and experience would become a sort of perpetual deja vu.

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In order to understand why immortality may become intolerable in this way, we have to help ourselves to a general idea of what it means for a life to be worth living. From a secular perspective, a meaningful life is structured by worldly psychological elements: core desires, projects and commitments.

These core elements will be deeply embedded in both our psychological features and in fact about the world around us. I, for example, am an academic, and I am thus laden with all kinds of distinct cognitive architecture, memories, dispositions, values, desires and attachments. I also have some fairly necessary external conditions: access to information, a school, an academic community. This embededness helps to explain why such an overall project makes my life meaningful: in a very real sense, it is my life, and removing all of its features would make me a totally different person[2].

Yet, this is not enough, for a life spent doing (basically) the same things over and over in the service of one's core projects and commitments would (for almost anyone with any reflective capacities whatsoever) become intolerable. In order for human beings to enjoy the pursuit of their goals, their actions and experiences must in some sense be novel to them. This does not mean that each experience or action must be wildly different, but just that the person must avoid the feeling of pointlessness which comes with the realization that one has "done all of this before".

A casual, unimaginative supporter of infinite (or very extended) life may simply point to the sheer number of things that a person can do, which is indeed nearly infinite. But a meaningful life cannot consist in doing just anything. In fact, it follows from what I have just said that the field of meaningful action is very restricted indeed: what we do must conform, in some way, to what makes us particular individuals, and it must do so in some novel fashion.

"So what?" asks the immortalist. "Surely your core values and goals will change over time, and as they change you can embrace new actions, new projects, and new possibilities in this vast universe of ours." The idea seems to be that in 3009, a person will exist in your body whose values, projects, commitments, desires, attachments and social/external conditions are radically different from yours. This, indeed, is a precondition for that person having both novel and meaningful experience as we have defined it. But how could any of us possibly identify with that person? It seems far more natural to say that I have ceased to exist and that another (related but different) person has come into being.

So, we do not actually have immortality on the table: we have the slow death of persons and their replacement by newer ones. At this point we may rightly ask why we are marshaling technology to facilitate the birth of new persons when there is a fairly popular, more traditional way to do this.

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Some support aging research for purely egoistic reasons. Others support it on moral, altruistic grounds, citing demographic curves, economic productivity and the rights of human persons. I do not oppose such research, but I do oppose it when it is not accompanied by sufficient reflection on the conditions under which life is worth living. We should remember that there is probably such a thing as living too long.


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[1] The only necessarily immortal substance must therefore be non-material, and it this is why it is doubtful that the modern drive towards immortality can ever escape its religious overtones.
[2] Note that a meaningful life is not necessarily the same as a pleasurable or a happy one. Rigorous, sustained pursuit of projects and commitments in the face of unexpected situations can be downright stressful. Yet, we should not commit the old error of assuming that pleasure or a kind of inactive contentment constitutes the highest good for human beings.

Punishment, Personal Identity, Polanski

I have to note that the answer to the question of Roman Polanski's prosecution and punishment depends largely on the answer to a long-discussed philosophical question: that of personal identity and its relation to moral responsibility.

It has been notoriously difficult to say what makes a person the same person over time, especially given then enormous physical and psychological changes that a person undergoes. In the span of a decade, a person can completely reform their beliefs, their values, and their patterns of action, and can even suffer total memory loss. It seems natural to say, as Derek Parfit does, that they are not really "the same person", but rather they are connected to that past person, only insofar as they share that past person's psychology. They are thus (say) 25% connected, and that former person survives only to this small degree.

Let's assume that Polanski is significantly different in this way: that he is no longer Polanski1973, that person's youthful immorality and disregard has been completely wiped out and replaced with kindness and thoughtfulness. The former criminal only survives to some small extent (say, 25%, though the number doesn't really matter).

As Bernard Williams quickly pointed out, even under these questionable assumptions, there is something seemingly absurd in attempting to apply this result to the question of his responsibility for a 30 year-old rape. Parfit's theoretical model has absurd practical implications: that Polanski only ought to be sentenced to 25% of the normal jail time, for example. It is just as absurd to suggest that a person who owes you $10000 should only pay $2500 if she undergoes the same kind of change over time, or that you are no longer married to someone if Alzheimer's decimates their mind.

Yet, the task remains: how do we ground this unwavering identity over time? What does it consist in? Without an answer, our practices of prosecution and punishment (which I generally support, especially in this case) can start to look downright strange. For if there is not much of Polanski left to punish, then who the hell are we going after?

There is another problem here, one which emerges when we consider Polanski1973's victim. A person who is traumatized is a person whose memory and personality is irrevocably fixed, a person who does not have the bourgeois luxury of flitting off to another country and re-inventing his personality. Trauma has a way of permanently determining a person's memories, values and general outlook, and under Parfit's model this has the diquieting implication that the less fortunate--the victimized, impoverished and downtrodden people of the world--are somehow chained to lifelong moral responsibility in a way that richer, freer, more fortunate people are not.

We need not commit fully to Marxism or to Critical theory, but we should become concerned when a popular philosophical theory mirrors and supports certain economic stratifications.

Pseudoscience II: Observations From the Front

"How does it happen that a properly endowed natural scientist comes to concern himself with epistemology? Is there no more valuable work in his specialty? I hear many of my colleagues saying, and I sense it from many more, that they feel this way. I cannot share this sentiment. When I think about the ablest students whom I have encountered in my teaching, that is, those who distinguish themselves by their independence of judgment and not merely their quick-wittedness, I can affirm that they had a vigorous interest in epistemology. They happily began discussions about the goals and methods of science, and they showed unequivocally, through their tenacity in defending their views, that the subject seemed important to them.

-Albert Einstein

"Fix reason firmly in her seat... Error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is free to combat it."

-Thomas Jefferson

Imagine what it must have been like for US soldiers in Iraq when they began to hear some of the criticisms that were being leveled at their country’s military strategy. Soldiers who had fought tooth-and-nail for the objectives supplied to them by their leaders, who had suffered, bled and watched comrades die to achieve those objectives, were suddenly being told that those very objectives were pointless or badly misguided. This must have been, as it has been for all soldiers in such situations, a crushing experience.

This is why I can understand the—let’s put this mildly—heated response to my article, “Science, Pseudoscience, and Bollocks”. People who see themselves as engaged at the front-lines of an important battle don’t like it when a relatively uninvolved civilian parachutes into the front and starts lecturing them about strategy.

My argument was essentially this: a valid demarcation of “science” from other fields (“non-“ and “pseudo-science”) must provide necessary and jointly sufficient criteria for “science”. That is to say, we must know which features all sciences must have, and those features must make them a science. Just as we know that all squares have four equal sides meeting at ninety degrees. {Edit: This position has been significantly refined... see the comments for details. The refinement does not affect the force of the main position at all.}

After 150 years, we have no such list of criteria, yet we are still (in both common discourse and legal proceedings) using the concept “science” to exclude certain people (ie ID-creationists) from social and political power. My argument was simple: if you are gong to do something this important with the concept, you need to know what “science” is, not just have a rough, “ballpark” characterization of it. You are denying human beings the right to have their opinions count or be heard, and this is incredibly serious in a supposedly democratic country.

I concluded with an obvious truism, one that even most IDers would support: scientific practices, as diverse and indefinable as they may be, seem to deliver truths about the world. This is what is important about them. The alleged “pseudosciences” (astrology, ID-creationism) do not deliver such truths. We should only teach children truths. Therefore, we should teach them about the sciences, and pass over astrology and creationism in silence. We do not need the demarcation project, we should abandon the search for a definitive “scientific method”, and we should recover the older idea that the value of the sciences lies is the value of truth.

It is clear that there are a lot of people out there who are very attached to deploying the word “pseudoscience” as an exclusionary tactic. They have leveled several criticisms against my argument, but I am persuaded by none of them. I will list them here in an attempt to show why. This piece is only as long as it is, I am sorry to say, because there has been so very much to respond to.

1. You do not need to define science in order to define pseudoscience (Richard Hoppe, John Pieret). I have come to accept that we shouldn’t dwell on the semantics of the prefix “pseudo”, here, but rather that we should just ask ourselves how we would feel if we were the target of this kind of accusation. That is to say, what if someone walked up to you and accused you of being a “pseudo-person”. You would immediately want to know why. Suppose they respond by saying that you have brown hair, and this indicates that you are a pseudo-person. You would obviously argue that having brown hair does not make you any less of a person. In short, you would come to understand that person is in sore need of definition.

Now, suppose they responded by saying: “Oh, I’m not interested in telling you what persons are or why brown hair matters. I am simply using this term pseudo-person as I need to use it.” I take it that the obvious absurdity of this response is enough, here. It is of course possible to use the term “pseudoscience” without a prior understanding of science, but no human being can reasonably be expected to accept the label “pseudo-scientist” when it is applied by a person who cannot define “science” as well

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2. Science and pseudoscience are categorically different things. An essential feature of science is that its assertions are empirically refutable, and ID-creationism is not refutable or testable. The only parts of ID that are refutable are its assertions about evolution, and thus when we refute them we are only testing evolution, not ID (Nick Matzke). Luckily, I’ve written papers on William Dembski’s version of ID-creationism, and I can easily show how his theory is empirically refutable. The first and most crucial claim in his book (The Design Inference) is that three forms of explanation--design, chance, and natural law--constitute a mutually exclusive and exhaustive list of types of explanation. That is to say, for any given phenomena, we can only say that it is brought about by design, by random chance, or by some natural, scientific law. Never two of those, and certainly never all three: that’s what “mutually exclusive” means, and it is crucial for Dembski’s later argument.

Yet, we observe species of fruit flies changing over time in labs. How do we explain this? Why, by a combination of chance and natural law: by natural selection! Dembski’s principle is refuted by a coherent explanation of an empirical phenomenon: it is refuted empirically.

This point is of enormous importance for this larger debate. It shows that ID and the sciences can be compared on the same sorts of scales, and that ID comes out the loser. How could two categorically different types of theories be compared? The very notion is absurd. Rather, they must share some crucial features, and this is why we should be skeptical of the categorical distinction itself.

3. Of course you can distinguish science from pseudoscience. Courts regularly do it, in fact, they do it all the time (Nick Matzke). This kind of response can only come from a front-line soldier. This sort of person has sat in on court proceedings, worked on cases, or at least followed them very closely. He or she has seen the demarcation performed, and takes this to be a definitive point against my argument. Yet, the absurdity of this move should be evident to anyone who thinks about it. I am perfectly aware that courts think they are rationally separating science and pseudoscience, but the question at hand is clearly whether they are actually doing so. A person who simply cites a legal case at this point is a person who has lost the ability to step away from his or her involvement in this particular battle and examine it objectively.

4. In a legal context, we don’t need a set of necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for “science”. All we need is a rough, “ballpark” characterization in order to rule out ID-creationism. Methodological Naturalism (MN, the principle that commands us to never invoke supernatural causation) characterizes science in this way, and rules out ID-creationism (Roger Pennock). This response concedes that we do need to know things about “Science” in order to responsibly use the label “pseudoscience”. However, it is still largely confused. As I explicitly argued in my initial post, MN turns on the definition of “supernatural”, which itself turns on the definition of “natural”, and both terms are hopelessly obscure.

The closest Pennock (2009) comes to defining “supernatural” is by a reference to the “immaterial”, and this is extremely unwise: for most of the history of the modern sciences, we have accepted that the force of gravity does not act through any material medium: it is a case of causation at a distance (this problem plagued Newton but was cheerfully ignored by just about everyone else who followed him). Not only can science clearly speak of “immaterial” causation, certain modern scientists (I’m thinking of certain subatomic physicists) prefer to remain totally agnostic on the “material” status of the causes they speak of.

In short, I would challenge anyone to come up with a noncircular and accurate definition of “natural” which rules out ID but does not rule out established sciences. It is exceedingly difficult, and we can easily see that we have now just substituted one set of obscure, meaningless terms for another. This is not a way out of the problem.

5. Your division of theories into “true” and “false” is actually the same as the division between “science” and “pseudoscience”. You say that the sciences approach the truth and that astrology does not, and this is all we need for distinguishing science from pseudoscience (Matzke, Pieret). The assertion here, explicitly made by John in particular, is that whatever epistemological system we devise to distinguish truth from falsehood will be science. Science is, therefore, already in possession of epistemology: it has appropriated it from the clutches of philosophers and put it to work in the world.

In a sense, I am perfectly happy with this response, as it concedes my major point: “pseudoscience” is a redundant term, one we do not need for any purposes. All we need are good and bad theories.

In another sense, though, I cannot rest with this idea, for it is not only demonstrably false, but also highly dangerous. It is, in a word, scientism. Scientism is the long-discredited doctrine that science is synonymous with “truth”, and that science is the only activity we need in order to find truths. No-one, not even Richard Dawkins or E.O. Wilson, holds to this view. All accept that there are other, non-scientific activities (such as artistic creation, engagement with literature, first-personal reflection and moral reasoning) which can arrive at truths, truths just as important as scientific ones.

In short, “truth” is a much broader concept, one which participates the methods of the sciences but which also includes with the sorts of things we discover in other inquiry. If science and truth were synonymous, that would make artistic and moral truths scientific, and that is clearly absurd.

6. Epistemology, or the task of finding general methods with which to arrive at genuine knowledge, is just as difficult (hopeless?) as the task of defining “Science”. You say we have no criteria for “Science”, but after centuries of effort we also have no criteria for “truth”, so you’ve just pushed the debate back a step into even murkier territory (John, Namit Arora).

I did a large amount of research in preparation for my initial essay, reading anthologies on ancient and modern science, poring over natural philosophy, and delving into 150 years of the demarcation debate. The first thing I would say to anyone who is tempted to make this response is: don’t make it out of ignorance. Epistemology may be a daunting field, but if a fledgling philosopher can get up off his arse and read Newton, Bacon, Kepler, Mill, Comte, Darwin, Bohr, Einstein, Popper, Lakatos, Feyerabend, Laudan and Gould in order to say something about science, then a scientist can get off his arse and read epistemology before he claims that truth is not definable.

More substantially, skepticism about epistemology is totally inconsistent with what we might call the general scientific attitude. Practicing scientists, so far as I can tell, do not think that “truth” is indefinable or inaccessible. They think that they are in the process of discovering and engaging with truths all the time, and they are correct to think this. To be skeptical about epistemology is to be skeptical about this very attitude, this justified confidence. While I do not claim to have a fully developed theory of why their confidence is justified, many other philosophers do, and we cannot accept this criticism until we have been shown that their projects fail.

I doubt that this kind of work will be done by the front-liners. Very few of them are interested in examining the philosophical underpinnings of their favoured field. As Gould himself noted (with the utmost respect) in his final opus (2003), “most of my scientific colleagues would not even dream of reading scholarly work in other fields, even when those fields are clearly related to their own."

7. You keep using this word "Science". But you say science is indefinable! How can you keep using it?(John) I believe, as everyone basically does, that words can be used even if they can't be perfectly defined. I said this in my original post at 3QD. However, there is a difference between using a word casually or loosely and using a word in order to exclude certain people and ideas from public life. The former kind of use is acceptable and relatively innocuous, while the latter can be downright dangerous. It is reasonable to demand that the latter kind of political use of a word be backed up by a complete definition of the word, so that we don't end up making massive practical mistakes, excluding good ideas and including bad ones. In fact, this is just what has happened: popular definitions of "science" actually include all kinds of wacky theories and exclude important research programmes which don't fit with the standard definitions.

8. You're overestimating creationists. They will not accept your epistemology, and they are totally insensitive to arguments which show their views to be false. This new strategy will not work (John, Matzke, Penner). It is important to note that the goal here is not to wipe ID off the intellectual map (right?), but to keep it out of schools. It is therefore not the IDers we must convince, but judges. Judges are supposed to represent an impartial, objective perspective on things: their considered opinion is supposed to count as the most reasonable. I cannot believe that a supreme court judge in America could fail to see the logic of don't teach false things in schools. no-one has said why we need more than this, or why judges would be so diverted by constitutional issues surrounding freedom of religion. If the country's legal system has really degenerated that far, then there are far worse problems to be dealt with than little Sally learning that her ancestors hunted Stegosaurus.

Yet, it is not this point I wish to end with, but another. Suppose we establish, in a sort of Machiavellian realpolitik mood, that our anti-ID strategy is irrational, that it cannot be defended, but that it will work? That since the ends justify the means, we should just go on using the label "pseudoscience" even if it has no real sense? The temptation of this doctrine is obvious when the ends are so clearly valuable. Yet, it is precisely this logic which has driven the the worst forms of totalitarian oppression in human history. The opposite ideal of a modern social democracy, with its associated rights, freedoms, and (above all) reverence for reason, began in the United States of America. It is "means-ends" logic which your founding fathers rejected so forcefully and with such wonderful eloquence, asserting instead that rational and respectful public discourse ought to win the day and determine policy. Are we really so dug into our trenches that we will abandon those ideals in order to snuff out threats?

Even an outsider can see that with Machiavelli comes madness. I am not arguing with anyone about what will "work". I am simply trying to discover what is most rational.

Science, Pseudoscience, Bollocks

Abbas at 3QuarksDaily has been nice enough to post a new article of mine, here:


Science, Pseudoscience and Bollocks


The discussion is heating up and is quite interesting.

Man II

I wrote last week about "Man", a psychological character sketch I wanted to do. While I don't want to get bogged down in theory for this project, I realize that I have to describe the general framework I'll be working with, and perhaps even defend it a little bit.

Psychological inquiry can have descriptive or practical aims. In other words, it can seek to describe the human mind, or it can search for the proper methods by which human minds are to flourish and be healthy. Most models adopt both aims, but implicit in many is an emphasis on either the practical or the descriptive. Neuropsychology, for example, tends to emphasize description, whereas psychotherapy concerns itself primarily with the health of the individual mind.

My model, rough as it is, is not primarily descriptive. That is to say, if it conflicts with current neuroscientific models or with popular theories of mind, I am not overly concerned. Rather, I am concerned with constructing a model which allows individual people to make sense of their subjective experience. The idea is that such a a model will give individuals, in consultation with other people, a chance to heal their own minds, to promote their own psychological flourishing.

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If I may be so brazen as to speak for all of us, I believe that subjective human experience is characterized by fragmentation and conflict. Mental life is dis-unified, made up of many distinct motivational elements which are in conflict with one another. Even the simplest afternoon spent lazing on the couch is full of motivational conflict, with competing desires, habits and inclinations of various strengths competing for supremacy. When we reflect on these motivational elements, we often discover that many of them seem to come in clusters. That is to say, we often find ourselves in what you might call a mood, where a certain cluster of motivational elements has come to dominate us.

Sufficient reflection, I believe, reveals relatively stable and distinct clusters of motivational elements. I shall call these characters, fully aware of the narrative overtones in such a label. According to this model, we can view human minds, human persons, as composed, to a significant extent, of these characters.

I remain agnostic on the question of a free, rational will which can lord over these characters. The Kantians and the Humeans can duke that one out for themselves.

I also remain agnostic on the causes of such characters, or what brings them into existence into our minds. I simply do not know enough about biology, sociology or developmental psychology to speculate, here. However, I don't think this is important for my purposes.

I also recognize that, in addition to motivation, cognition and perception are just as important in our mental lives. However, I maintain that questions concerning a good mental life are dominated by questions about motivation. A good life consists in properly motivated, purposive action. Certain motivational elements are inherently unpleasant and debilitating. Finally, one of the hallmarks of an unhealthy or non-flourishing life is excessive internal conflict between motivational elements.

As we will see, while certain characters (clusters of motivational elements) may not directly impede the flourishing of the person they inhabit, they can be dangerous and harmful to a culture at large, and this gives us all reason to be very concerned with them, even if we do not personally experience them.

We all pursue psychological health, and this involves a reasonably harmonized motivational set which is free of purely negative elements and which coherently directs us towards the achievement of our goals. If we discover within ourselves a character who stands directly in the way of this task, it is our job to examine his sources and to do what we can to eliminate or subdue him. As we will see in the coming weeks, "Man" is just such a character.

Man I

[it is impossible to find] a man who does not swagger and play the daredevil. If there is on such people call him effeminate, which is why we always see men dressed up like soldiers with weapons at their belts, bearded and menacing, and walking in a way they think will frighten everyone. Often they wear gloves of mail and contrive for their weapons to clink under their clothing so people realize they are armed and ready for combat and feel intimidated by them.

Under these trappings of courage and valour hide the souls of rabbits or hunted hares.

- Lucrezia Marinella, The Nobility and Excellence of Women, And the Defects and Vices of Men (1600)

I am a touring rock musician, and I am therefore surrounded by other men most of the time. I have witnessed them at their best and at their worst, at their most noble and at their most vulnerable. This past summer, I began to realize that most of us shared something in common, something very difficult to pin down. It was a set of core character traits which could sometimes burst to the fore and dominate our thoughts and actions. It was ugly and irrational, a ridiculously contradictory beast which nonetheless managed to exercise a huge amount of influence over us.

This was the key, to my new project: the shift from seeing us as men to seeing us as persons inhabited by various characters, one of which is a "man". Man as a psychological entity, not as a whole person.

I realized that I did not want to explore the scientific legitimacy of such a psychological picture. Nor did I want to explore the question of whether "man" is a product of "nature" or "nurture". Rather, I wanted to expose the essence of this character, this little demon that lives inside so many of us, constantly threatening to disrupt our lives, our families, our societies. I wanted to show how his traits were the source of the most terrible evils in our world.

I realized that for those who have not been possessed by him, a truly honest account of this character would be frightening. For me, and hopefully for many others, it would be cathartic to isolate him and see him for what he is.

Most importantly, I wanted to show that he was a contradiction. He is power born out of impotence, apparent strength born out of real fear, independence displayed in order to mask a terrible dependency on others. I wanted to argue that his primary enemy is reflection, that the only way to subvert him is to think, to expose the contradictions in order to release his hold on your mind. To unmask him for what he is and to pursue real strength, real independence, real power.

Finally, I have been trying to do research on this topic, but I have been massively disappointed. The texts and sources on "male psychology" I've encountered are incredibly sophomoric and dull, repeating endless stereotypes and conducting tepid, uncritical studies. Most importantly, they speak of "men" as though they were unified, simple individuals, persons defined by their sex. My conceptual shift will be, I hope, enormously fruitful.

More to come.

Action

Suppose a person wants to start a band. They say to themselves: "Gee, I really like the Violent Femmes. I want to do what they did, musically. I want to imitate them." How might such a person go about achieving this goal?

Well, they might do the obvious thing: assemble three men, who play the bass, drums and acoustic guitar, respectively, and make sure that one of them sings almost exactly like the singer of the Violent Femmes. Then, they might proceed to write a bunch of offbeat, up-tempo, irreverent acoustic punk-folk songs, and have the band perform them. In this way, they would "imitate the Violent Femmes".

Or, they might do something else entirely. They might, say, assemble a three-piece band which features a ukelele instead of a guitar and features songs that are irreverent but in a different sort of way, say, they swear more often. They might get a female singer, and she might rap instead of sing. In short, they might sound entirely different from the Violent Femmes, yet they would nonetheless be imitating them, for they would (under a more general description) be doing exactly what the Femmes did: bringing acoustic instruments together with punky attitude and an envelope-pushing vocal delivery.

We might ask: which of these courses of action would count as "imitating the Violent Femmes"?

The lesson here is this: there is rarely such thing as "an action", period. We already know that two intentional events in the world with the same physical-causal structure can be given vastly different interpretations, depending on the context in which they occur. But as I've shown, it is even more complicated than this: two vastly different intentional events with very different causal-physical structure can fall under exactly the same description, given the context in which they occur. What did the Violent Femmes "do"? There is no determinate answer to this question.

Context is an ineliminable feature of any action, especially the actions to which we want to ascribe significance. For the ascription of significance itself is part of an act of interpretation, and interpretation is precisely what leads to the complexities that I'm alluding to.

I'm not certain what sorts of implications this has, but it does seem to make trouble for a certain kind of ethical objectivism, one which attempts to construct a trans-historical notion of "right action" and "wrong action". For if there is no such thing as action without interpretation, then it's not just that our concepts of rightness and wrongness will be contingent on culture, but that the very idea of particular actions themselves will be subject to a certain a certain indeterminacy.

As an example, think of slavery. What does it mean to enslave someone? Can this word really have a determinate trans-historical meaning so that the concept "wrong" can be unequivocally attached to it? If understanding the idea of "slave labour" necessarily involves interpretation, interpretation that goes beyond the bare physical-causal features of that event, then how can this attachment possibly be achieved?

The Impenetrability of Reason and Science

In a star-studded video-cast over at The Science Network, Steven Pinker, who I am apparently picking on a lot these days, makes the following set of claims:

...the problem with any kind of criticism of science for having promoted findings which we later discover to be false is that it is only the standards of science that show that the earlier science was false, and in a sense, science as a method, as opposed to science as an institution, the particular people who happen to be running the scientific enterprise at any one time, but the standards of science, in a sense you can’t argue against them, because the only way that you could show any of the limitations of the claims to limitations from science are with better science. It is like criticizing rationality, there is something inherently incoherent about it, because it is only by developing a more sophisticated rationality that you could criticize the rationality that is in effect at a given time.

So, here are his two basic proposals, which are supposed to be analogous:

1. Only scientific practice can falsify scientific results.
2. Only reason can falsify rationality.

The gist is that in both cases there is something inherently incoherent about criticizing the method in question, for to do so involves using the standards of that very method, thereby affirming what the critic is attempting to deny.

Now, the idea that critique essentially involves reason is powerful and, as far as I can see, completely true. There is no way to critically evaluate any inquiry at all without using reason. We may criticize various elements of reasoning, but to attempt to call reason itself into question is to already commit oneself to its standards.

This is absolutely not true in the case of science, and the more I think about what Pinker is saying, the more idiotic it appears. Scientific results are perfectly open to rational criticism "from the outside". In fact, this is precisely the achievement for which David Hume is often lauded: a successful, even decisive critique of scientific metaphysics from the perspective of rationality itself. Pinker's ignorance of the most powerful and influential British philosopher to have ever lived is unforgivable.

A larger issue rears its head: the inability (or, more charitably, the unwillingness) of modern pop-science writers to engage responsibly with the philosophy of their own discipline. So-called "Public Intellectuals" should hold themselves to higher standards than this.

History and Human Nature

The task of the humanities is to arrive at a general understanding of humanity. Yet, the cogency of this task is immediately threatened by a skeptical worry: what humanity? If there is nothing essential to humanity, no necessary features of human beings or of the society in which they live, then what is there to study?

This charge has gained enormous power as our knowledge of history has increased. We have become aware of the enormity of the chasms, cultural and psychological, which separate us from various peoples of the past. The temptation to deny human nature, in the face of such information, is almost irresistible.

I had been casually thinking about this problem when I stumbled across Roman historian Cornelius Tacitus, writing in 98 A.D. on his Father-in-law's conquest of Britain:

In order to encourage a truculent population that dwelled in scattered settlements, and was thus only too ready to fall to fighting, to live in a peaceful and inactive manner. He urged these people privately and helped them officially to build temples, public squares with public buildings and private houses. He praised those who responded quickly and severely criticized laggards. In this way, competition for public recognition took the place of compulsion.

Moreover he had the children of the leading Britons educated in the civilized arts and openly placed the natural ability of the Britons above that of the Gauls, however well trained.

The result was that those who had once shunned the Latin language now sought fluency and eloquence in it. Roman dress, too, became popular and the toga was frequently seen... along with assembly rooms, bathing establishments, and smart dinner parties.

In their inexperience the Britons called it civilization when it was really all part of their servitude.

To read a passage like this, from nearly two thousand years ago, is to commune with a spirit who understood what appears to be a near-universal feature of human society, the power of the drive for status or social recognition.

Thus is a trans-historical humanity affirmed in two ways: in those mundane political facts (about status and recognition), and (more interestingly) in an ordinary person's ability to hear the thoughts of those long dead. For if there were no human nature at all, we would not hear those voices. Nonetheless, somehow, we do.

The Stupid View of Human Nature

The contemporary "Nature vs. Nurture" debate is in fact a continuation of an ancient (and in some respects, tired) conversation. No sooner had philosophers emerged from their Milesian womb then they began to speculate on which features of humanity are innate and which features are "tacked on" by society and experience.

The conversation itself is perennially fraught with confusion. Most people assume that its importance derives from our need to discover what is fixed in human nature and what is mutable. Yet, these concepts do not map cleanly to "nature" and "nurture": we might easily change what is "natural" in humanity, and it may be exceedingly difficult to change those things which are bred into us by experience (try putting your hand into a fire without expecting it to burn you).

The contemporary focus on genetics has only served to deepen this confusion. Most people who engage in this debate assume that the gene is some kind of prime mover, a causal agent which somehow creates the resultant traits and behaviour in a human organism. In reality, a genetic code (note: not a "gene") is but one player in a vastly complex arena involving other biological materials (such as proteins and other epigenetic materials), experience, nurturing, communication, et cetera. These forces do not engage in causal combat with one another, despite the modern intellectual's tacit conviction that they do (hence the "vs". in "nature vs. nurture"), they are rather necessary co-partners in a complex process.

Widespread inattention to these problems ensures that much current discussion in this vein is basically irresponsible. A third source of irresponsibility I wish to explore involves the rhetorical assertion that post-enlightenment western intellectual history has been dominated by a "blank slate" model of human nature. I take Steven Pinker's position to be both representative and dominant here, inspiring hordes of quasi-philosophical pundits to attack thinkers such as John Locke, David Hume, GWF Hegel, Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx (and, of course, the ever-unnamed "postmodernists") for their "denial of human nature". In Pinker's description, these thinkers have held to the thesis that "the human mind has no inherent structure" (The Blank Slate, p.2). I shall label this view The Stupid View.

Pinker's accusation suffers from a flaw common to many such accusations: it is blindingly, blisteringly false. None of the thinkers commonly listed has held to The Stupid View. Marx and Hegel shared a robust conception of human consciousness as defined by its natural propensity to shape its environment. Freud posited both innate drives and a natural structure of the human motivational system. And, most glaringly, Locke and Hume did not assert that the human mind has no innate structure. The Stupid View would be, even for the most radical empiricist, entirely untenable. A brief look at (gasp!) the actual philosophy of Locke and Hume will clear this up, pronto.

Here is the passage from Locke's Enquiry that Pinker cites:

Let us then suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas: -- How comes it to be furnished? Whence comes it by that vast store which the busy and boundless fancy of man has painted on it with an almost endless variety? To this I answer, in one word, from EXPERIENCE. (Enquiry, Book I)

Such famously quoted passages are the bane of proper history of philosophy, for they radically misrepresent the true content, subtlety and intellectual force behind major thinkers. Locke indeed believed that the mind was a tabula rasa, but only in respect to content. The Lockean mind is lavishly furnished with innate reflective abilities or "operations" as well as several innate faculties (such as memory):

...such as thinking, doubting, believing, knowing, willing, reasoning, and all the different actions of our minds. (Enquiry, Book II, Sec.1, P.4)

Indeed, how else could the mind possibly arrive at knowledge at all, if not via such active operations and faculties? How could a raw sensory impression possibly give rise to knowledge if it could not be classified, compared with past impressions, related to other present ones, etc.? For precisely the same reasons, Hume was lead to posit a multitude of "natural and original propensities" in the human mind, though he wisely refrained from specifying their source.

The Stupid View is an absurdity, something no major intellectual has held to. In fact, the manifest absurdity of both the Stupid View (and of its opposite logical counterpart, the Idiotic View: all mental objects and activities are innate) guarantees that any passingly cautious thinker will arrive at the correct conclusion: that innate and non-innate forces cooperate in the construction of human individuals.

Yet, The Stupid View remains the target for much contemporary prosletyzing about nature and nurture: why? When absurd intellectual strawmen are swarmed by armies of angry intellectuals, some deeper psycho-cultural phenomenon is at work. As I've already argued, simplicity sells, and combat sells, and no modern trope fits these categories more than "nature versus nurture". Furthermore, might this be the ages-old motivation of sociobiology, the moral drive to posit a fixed human nature in order to justify certain patterns of social behaviour?

Perhaps. Yet, there is another danger here. An excessive focus on how human organisms develop may distract the intellectual class from the corresponding ethical task of constructing a general theory of proper education. In Locke and Hume's day, the intellectual world was flooded with treatises on education and socialization, but the contemporary obsession with the details of human development has dramatically shifted our focus away from this project. This cultural void has, regrettably, been filled by "self-help" parenting manuals and wildly speculative pop-psychologists.

Pinker, along with just about everybody else, urges us to engage in careful, informed socialization of our young in order to create the best form of human life we can. Even in our day there is no disagreement on this basic thesis. So why not, you know, get on with it?