About Rationally Speaking


Rationally Speaking is a blog maintained by Prof. Massimo Pigliucci, a philosopher at the City University of New York. The blog reflects the Enlightenment figure Marquis de Condorcet's idea of what a public intellectual (yes, we know, that's such a bad word) ought to be: someone who devotes himself to "the tracking down of prejudices in the hiding places where priests, the schools, the government, and all long-established institutions had gathered and protected them." You're welcome. Please notice that the contents of this blog can be reprinted under the standard Creative Commons license.

Monday, October 29, 2012

From the naturalism workshop, part III


by Massimo Pigliucci

And we have now arrived at the commentary on the final day of the workshop on “Moving Naturalism forward,” organized by cosmologist Sean Carroll. It was my tun to do an introductory presentation on the relationship between science and philosophy, and on the idea of scientism. (Part I of this commentary is here, part II here.)

I began by pointing out that it doesn’t help anyone if we play semantic games with terms like “science” and “philosophy.”  In particular, “science” cannot be taken to be simply whatever deals with facts, just like “philosophy” isn’t whatever deals with thinking. So for instance, facts about the planets in the solar system are scientific facts, but the observation that I live in Manhattan near the Queensborough Bridge is just a fact, science has nothing to do with it. Similarly, John Rawls’ book A Theory of Justice, to pick an arbitrary example, is real philosophy, while Ron Hubbard’s nonsense about Dianetics isn’t, even though he thought of it as such.

So science becomes a particular type of structured social activity, characterized by empirically driven hypothesis testing about the way the world works, peer review, technical journals, and so on. And philosophy is about deploying logic and general tools of reasoning and argument to reflect on a broad range of subject matters (epistemology, ethics, aesthetics, etc.) and to reflect on other disciplines (“philosophies of”).

Another important thing to get straight: philosophy is not in the business of advancing science. We’ve got science for that, and it works very well. Some philosophy is “continuous” with science, but most is not. Also, philosophy makes progress by exploring logical space, not by making empirical discoveries.

I then brought up the Bad Boy of physics, Richard Feynman, who famously said: “Philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds.” True enough (except when it comes to ornithologists helping out avoiding the extinction of some bird species), but surely that does not imply that ornithology is thereby useless.

Next, I moved to a discussion of scientism. I suggested that in the strong sense this is the view that only scientific claims, or only questions that can be addressed by science, are meaningful. In a weaker sense, it is the view that the methods of the natural sciences can and should be applied to any subject matter. I think the first one is indefensible, and that the second one needs to be qualified and circumscribed. For instance, there are plenty of areas where science has little or nothing interesting to say: mathematics, logic, aesthetics, ethics, literature, just to name a few.

It is, of course, true that a number of philosophers have said, and continue to say, bizarro things about science, or even about philosophy itself (Thomas Nagel and Jerry Fodor come to mind as recent examples). But a pretty good number of scientists are on record has having said bizarro things about philosophy, or even about science itself (Lawrence Krauss, and more recently Freeman Dyson).

What I suggested as a way forward is that we should work toward re-establishing the classical notion of scientia, which means knowledge in the broader sense, including contributions from science, philosophy, math, and logic. There is also an even broader concept of understanding, which is relevant to human affairs. And I think that understanding requires not only scientia, but also other human activities such as art, music, literature, and the broader humanities. As you can see, I was trying to be very ecumenical...

In the end, I submitted that skirmishes between scientists and philosophers are not just badly informed and somewhat silly, they are anti-intellectual, and do not help the common cause of moving society toward a more rational and compassionate state than it finds itself in now.

The discussion that followed was very interesting. Alex Rosenberg did stress that philosophers interested in science need to pay close attention to what goes on in the lab, to which both Sean Carroll and Janna Levin responded that there are very good examples of important conceptual contributions made by philosophers to physics, particularly in the area of interpretations of quantum mechanics. Rosenberg also pointed out that some philosophers — for instance Samir Okasha — have contributed to biology, for instance in the area of debates about levels of selection.

We then talked about the issue of division of intellectual labor, with Dennett stressing the ability (and dangers!) of philosophers to take a bird’s eye view of things that is often unavailable to scientists. This, I commented, is because scientists are justifiably busy with writing grant proposals, doing lab work, and interacting tightly with graduate students. That was my own experience as a practicing evolutionary biologist. As a philosopher, I rarely write grant proposals, I don’t have to run a lab or do field work, and my interactions with graduate students are often in the form of visits to coffee houses and wine bars. All of which affords me the “luxury” (really, it’s my job) to read, think and write more broadly now than what I could do when I was a practicing scientist.

Along similar lines, Sean Carroll remarked — again going back to actual examples from physics — that scientists concern themselves primarily with how to figure things out, postponing the broader question of what those things mean. That’s another area where good philosophy can be helpful. Rebecca Goldstein added that philosophy is hard to do well, and that scientists should be more respectful and less dismissive of what philosophers do. Janna Levin observed that much of the fracas in this area is caused by a few prominent, senior (quasi-senile?) scientists and philosophers, but that in reality most scientists have a healthy degree of respect for philosophy.

At this point Coyne asked a reasonable question: we have talked about contributions that philosophers have made to science, what about the other way around? Several people offered the examples of Einstein, Bell and Feynman (ironically, the same guy of the philosophy-as-ornithology comment mentioned above), the latter for instance on the concept of natural law.

That was it, folks. What did I take from the experience? At the least the following points:

* On naturalism in general: we agreed that there are different shades of philosophical naturalism, and that reasonable people may disagree about the degree of, say, reductionism or determinism that the view entails.

* On determinism: given that even the physicists aren’t sure, yet, whether quantum mechanics is best interpreted deterministically or not (not to mention of the interpretation of any more fundamental theory), the question is open.

* On reductionism: Rosenberg’s extreme reductionism-nihilism was clearly, well, extreme within this group. Most participants agreed that one can, indeed should, still talk about morality and responsibility in meaningful terms.

* On emergence: there was, predictably, disagreement here, even among the physicists. Carroll seemed the most sympathetic to the concept, repeatedly talking, for instance, about the emergence of the Second Law of thermodynamics from statistical mechanics. Even Weinberg agreed that there are emergent phenomena in a robust sense of the term, but of course he preferred a “weak” concept of emergence, according to which the reductionist can write a promissory note that “in principle” things could be explained by a fundamental law. It was unclear what such principle may be, or even why that fundamental law couldn’t itself be considered emergent from something else (the “it’s turtles all the way down” problem).

* On meaning: following Goldstein, most of us agreed that there is meaning in human life, which comes out of the sense that we matter in society and to our fellow human beings. Flanagan’s concept of “eudaimonics” was, I think, most helpful here.

* On free will and moral responsibility: the debate between incompatibilists (Coyne, Rosenberg) and compatibilists (most of the rest, led of course by Dennett) continued. But we agreed that “free will” is far too loaded a concept, with Flanagan’s suggestion that we go back to the ancient Greeks’ categories of voluntary and involuntary action being particularly useful, I think. Even Coyne agreed that there is a Dennett-like sense in which we can think of morally competent vs morally incompetent agents (say, a normal person and one with a brain tumor affecting his behavior), thereby rescuing a societally and legally relevant concept of morality and responsibility.

* Relationship between science and philosophy: people seemed in broad agreement with my presentation (again, including Jerry), from which it follows that science and philosophy are partially continuous and partially independent disciplines, the first one focused on the systematic study of empirical data about the world, the second more concerned with conceptual clarification and meta-analysis (“philosophy of”). We also agreed that there are indeed good examples of philosophers of science playing a constructive role in science, and vice versa of scientists who have contributed to philosophy of science (take that, Krauss and Hawking!).

This, added to the positive effect of meeting one’s intellectual adversaries in person, sharing meals and talking over a beer or a glass of wine, has definitely made a stupendous success of the workshop as a whole. Stay tuned for the full video version on YouTube...

19 comments:

  1. All fairly predictable, but good to get away from town for a while.

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  2. 13+19 = 32 is a fact that falls under mathematics even though it probably isn't as interesting as, say, Pythogoras theorem. You staying at XYZ is fact that conforms to the laws of science as we understand though it mayn't be as interesting as planets revolving around Sun. But still it can be considered a scientific fact. Isn't it? Or am I missing anything? Physical world and it's fact ideally should fall under Science.

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    1. > You staying at XYZ is fact that conforms to the laws of science as we understand though it mayn't be as interesting as planets revolving around Sun. But still it can be considered a scientific fact. Isn't it? <

      No, it's a simple fact, it was not arrived at by the methods of science. Of course it is compatible with the laws of nature, but if we play the game of calling everything fact scientific just because it is a fact, the word loses meaning. And as I said, two can play that game: I can call every thought philosophical, so it turns out everyone is doing philosophy. Silly, no?

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    2. As a comparison with philosophy, thoughts can run wild (constraint only by the imagination capability of the thinker) but physical facts, however trivial, simply exist out there in the world. In that case, where do you put such (trivial) facts about physical world in the schema of naturalism ?

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    3. Infinitesimal,

      > As a comparison with philosophy, thoughts can run wild (constraint only by the imagination capability of the thinker) <

      You are confusing philosophy with literary fiction. Philosophy is constrained by logic, just like math.

      > where do you put such (trivial) facts about physical world in the schema of naturalism? <

      Just as you did: they are trivial facts, direct human experience, no need for science to come in and give it a weight they don't have.

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    4. There's facts even within the world of fiction, Infinitesimal. For example, it's a fact that within the play "Hamlet," the protagonist is prince of Denmark, and that's certainly a fact that's free from science.

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    5. Massimo,
      is it just me, or you always get somewhat defensive anytime a scientist or anyone else is being dismissive of (academic) philosophy.
      The simple fact is that science (broadly defined- I don't just mean the natural, or so-called "hard" sciences; maybe part of the problem you have with such dismissive attitude, is your narrow definition of science) has been enormously useful and successful in building the modern world; in comparison, academic philosophy looks like a midget. Now, that's not to say that studying it is useless: I personally find it bewildering that today we still have something called 'academic philosophy'. It seems to me that most of the subjects normally studied under, say, any philosophy of science, should be part of the curriculum of the respective science, so that being "trained" in the relevant philosophy (say, philosophy of physics) Indeed, to my mind the sort of distinction we have in academia, between philosophy of [subject] and [subject] itself, sounds strange on its face. What we have now is this: on the one hand, scientists who are poorly poised and frequently not careful enough to make all sorts of relevant distinctions in their practice, so one often hears muddled and even nonsensical pronouncement (here L. Krauss comes to mind), while, on the other hand, even more annoyingly, we have academic philosophers, very often offering very little apart from frequent displays of scientific ignorance, idle speculations, thinly disguised intellectual "jerking off" (excuses for the term), chewing over age-old questions with little progress unless science comes along to provide the answer, and hurt reactions at being under-appreciated while adopting an air of intellectual superiority. (And I'm not talking about theistic "philosophers" like Swinburne or 'Crazy' Alvin here)
      As for other areas like morality, epistemology, etc,. I think we should remove them from under the banner of 'philosophy' for purely historical reasons: historically, domains of genuine knowledge have tended to split off, often to become science, as soon as they "grew up", so to speak.

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    6. G,

      it's not a question of being defensive about philosophy, don't forget that I'm also a scientist. I simply find that sort of talk about philosophy to be rooted in ignorance and to display a degree of anti-intellectualism.

      > your narrow definition of science <

      I don't think I use a narrow definition of science. Scientists themselves, sociologists and historian of science, philosophers of science, and even the public, think that biology, chemistry, physics are sciences. Plumbing, or deciding how to get to work by looking at the subway map, isn't.

      > It seems to me that most of the subjects normally studied under, say, any philosophy of science, should be part of the curriculum of the respective science <

      Which hints to me that you actually don't know much about academic philosophy.

      > even more annoyingly, we have academic philosophers, very often offering very little apart from frequent displays of scientific ignorance, idle speculations, thinly disguised intellectual "jerking off" <

      Why would that sort of intellectual jerking off (which I agree takes place) being *more* annoying than the one Krauss engages in? At any rate, it is simply empirically *false* that this happens "very often," or that philosophy offers "very little apart" from it.

      > like Swinburne or 'Crazy' Alvin here <

      Interestingly, you mentioned two theologians, not really philosophers. But there are bona fide philosophers who are culprit as well. Then again, how about the philosophical nonsense uttered by bona fide scientists like Paul Davies, Freeman Dyson or Francis Collins?

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    7. "It's not a question of being defensive about philosophy, don't forget that I'm also a scientist. I simply find that sort of talk about philosophy to be rooted in ignorance and to display a degree of anti-intellectualism."


      Indeed!

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  3. > But we agreed that “free will” is far too loaded a concept, with Flanagan’s suggestion that we go back to the ancient Greeks’ categories of voluntary and involuntary action being particularly useful, I think.
    <

    Loaded concepts aside, I do not see how an action can be voluntary without being freely willed, and vice versa.

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  4. I think you were too kind to Feynman, near the top of this post. Science actually has things to learn from philosophy of science; Stephen Toulmin pointed this out long ago, among others. Otherwise, I agree with you. There's all sorts of facts that I don't need science to explain.

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  5. I'm really looking forward to the video!

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  6. As a competent English language user and observer of my society, I find your concepts of science and philosophy very intuitive and ordinary; they're good definitions descriptively, whether or not they're useful normatively.

    But as an educator and a proponent of reason, I worry that your definitions are unhelpful, even counterproductive. Although I certainly grant that we do currently treat 'science' and 'philosophy' as special domains of elite activity monopolized by professional researchers and scholars, I think it would better serve our aims to single out 'science' and 'philosophy' as individual behaviors, distinct from the 'professional science' and 'professional philosophy' you speak of.

    'Philosophy' and 'science' are useful and established words for very special and valuable, albeit often loosely defined, classes of rational techniques and habits for structuring and revising one's thought. In the case of 'philosophy,' we have no other word for the practice of carefully reasoning about general features of reality, via 'internal' reflection (phenomenology, thought experiments, conceptual analysis, etc.), in a moderately (more than shamanic storytelling, less than math or logic) systematic way. In the case of 'science,' we have no other word for the practice of carefully reasoning about the predictive and transparently ontological significance of empirical data. But both of these concepts are essential to human life. If we can't train laypeople in at least a few of the everyday methods characteristic of individual scientific and philosophical thought, the sort of rational economic and political thought needed for functioning democracies and benign markets is doomed.

    The need for citizen-philosophers and citizen-scientists -- more, the need for us to erode the idea that you can't do philosophy or science in your everyday life, while shopping or making health care decisions or reading the newspaper or debating a politician's merits -- far outweighs the value to be found in continuing to defend the linguistically orthodox academic monopoly on the terms 'science' and 'philosophy.' Even the goal of rooting out pseudoscientists and pseudophilosophers like Hubbard is better served by assessing and evaluating their concrete intellectual activities than by simply noting their lack of credentials or their deviation from current academic social norms and stopping there.

    As historical phenomena, both science and philosophy have their roots in innovators who predate peer-reviewed journals and related institutions. Although my main point is normative and not descriptive, it's an advantage that we can better account for the individual and historical origins of these practices if we focus our attention on the activity itself, allowing that even stranded on a dessert island it makes a big difference whether you think about your internal states and external environment in unphilosophical or unscientific ways.

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    1. The accumulation of knowledge is just rational reflection on empirical findings in various fields.

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    2. How do you think this relates to my above post? I can only accept your claim given a (trivializingly?) rich concept of 'empirical findings' — as 'experiences.' I like the idea that even such knowledge as 'all bachelors are unmarried men' and 'there exists no largest real number' is in some hard-to-articulate sense derived from our experience; but clearly these are not run-of-the-mill scientific models or observations.

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    3. I wouldn't say there are any run of the mill models or trivialities. The rationality applied to explain factual findings requires logic and relevance, and the facts need to be securely identified, and neither of those tasks is trivial.

      I agree with your post generally, but everyman can raise valid objections to anything - even Hume questions any future because we are not blessed with ESP to forsee it - obvious everyman objections to anything. It's an ongoing process.

      The process is guided by deductive self-consistency in logic and facts, and extended by induction into wider theories, but it all remains a theory about the future (Hume again).

      What is derived from experience?, and what is applied by our rationality to experience?, are interesting questions. I would opt for a neat fit for humans as opposed to other animals, so that our rationality fits our experiences of factual realities in the world nicely, thanks to evolved capacities to fit the real world.

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    4. I strongly disagree with the assertion that “As historical phenomena, both science and philosophy have their roots in innovators who predate peer-reviewed journals and related institutions.” It is true that the modern peer-review system is a relatively recent institution, but the system of university degrees for specialists goes back to the high Middle Ages. Dante, for instance had an University degree (Pharmacy.) Galileo studied at the University of Pisa. He studied “Natural Philosophy,” so he was a professional physicist. He was a professor in Pisa and Padua. He was not in any way an outsider. Isaac Newton was a student at a first-class grammar school (King's College) and then a student/teaching assistant at Trinity College in Cambridge. Cassini, arguably the greatest astronomer between Galileo and Newton had a degree from Bologna, also a first-class Italian University. The founders of modern science were highly educated people with academic credentials from the best universities (Pisa, Cambridge, Bologna.)

      In fact, the origin of the university system goes back much further, to the Musaeum of Alexandria and Plato's Academy in Athens. Euclid, Archimedes, Eratosthenes, Hipparchus, etc. were all alumni of the school in Alexandria.

      The role of outsiders is even more limited today, because of the very large amount of technical material that needs to be mastered to produce original results in the natural sciences. Life is too short to seriously consider the work of crackpots like Hubbard. “Citizen” science is a very dangerous phenomenon, with products like creationism and the anti-vaccination hysteria. Basically, science has been advanced by elitist, authoritarian institutions, since classical times. It is hard to believe that it could survive the attack from an empowered, but uneducated populace. Science is not a democracy, but something like an adoptive aristocracy, sort-of like the Catholic Church, where the present rulers select their successors.

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    5. Nonsense, the public should particate widely in science, and if some scientists are incapable of clearly explaining their findings to the public, they should find another job.

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